Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/23

RABELAIS 7 Chateau de Leguge of his patron and friend d'Estissac, where he had his httle chamber for study, Rabelais found it advisable to make a move. The clergy had prevailed on the Parliament of Paris to order rigorous measures against those holding, or suspected of hold- ing, the new doctrines. Clement Marot, accused specifically of eating lard in Lent, and generally of want of faith, was imprisoned in the chatelet, which m one of his poems he describes as a hell, and a very foul one. Bonaventure des Periers was denounced as an atheist by an Abbe Sagon, for words spoken, in chat with other gentlemen, of Marguerite of Navarre, and narrowly escaped. Louis de Berquin, accused by the Sorbonne headed by Beda, in spite of the favour of the king and the vigorous defence of Buda, was condemned as a relapsed heretic, and first strangled in consideration of his noble birth, and then burnt along with his books in the Place de Greve, in 1529. Rabelais went off to Montpellier to pursue his studies in medicine, which he had already by himself carried much further than most doctors of the age, Montpellier being then the most famous medical school in Europe. Thus, a contemporary of Rabelais, Andrew Boorde, writes : " At last I dyd stay at Muntpilior, which is the noblest universite of the world for phisicions and surgeons." (English Text Society; Extra Series, x.) He inscribed him- self on the register, i6th September 1530, being then forty-seven years old, and, on account of the vast knowledge he brought with him, was received bachelor on the ist November following. He lectured to large audiences on Hippocrates and Galen, correcting the Latin version in use by colla-