at twenty-three have produced a
work so finished in its scholarship, so real in its learning, or so wide
in its outlook.

The events of the next few months are obscure, but we know enough to see
how forces, internal and external, were working toward change. In the
second half of 1532 and the earlier half of 1533 Calvin was in Orleans,
studying, teaching, practising the law, and acting in the university as
proctor for the Picard nation; then he went to Noyon, and in October he
was once more in Paris. The capital was agitated; Francis was absent,
and his sister, Margaret of Navarre, held her court there, favoring the
new doctrines, encouraging the preachers, the chief among them being her
own almoner, Gerard Roussel.

Two letters of Calvin to Francis Daniel belong to this date and place;
and in them we find a changed note. One speaks of "the troublous times,"
and the other narrates two events: first, it describes a play "pungent
with gall and vinegar," which the students had performed in the College
of Navarre to satirize the Queen; and secondly, the action of certain
factious theologians who had prohibited Margaret's _Mirror of a Sinful
Soul_. She had complained to the King, and he had intervened. The matter
came before the university, and Nicolas Cop, the rector, had spoken
strongly against the arrogant doctors and in defence of the Queen,
"mother of all the virtues and of all good learning." Le Clerc, a parish
priest, the author of the mischief, defended his performance as a task
to which he had been formally appointed, praising the King, the Queen as
woman and as author, contrasting her book with "such an obscene
production" as _Pantagruel_, and finally saying that the book had been
published without the approval of the faculty and was set aside only as
"liable to suspicion."

Two or three days later, on November 1, 1533, came the famous rectorial
address which Calvin wrote, and Cop revised and delivered, and which
shows how far the humanist had travelled since April 4, 1532, the date
of the _de Clementia_. He is now alive to the religious question, though
he has not carried it to its logical and practical conclusion. Two fresh
influences have evidently come into his life, the New Testament of
Erasmus and certain sermons by Luther. The exordium of the address
reproduces, almost literally, some sentences from Erasmus' _Paraclesis_,
including those which unfold his idea of the _philosophia Christiana_;
while the bod