J. H. Merle D'Aubigné - History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin (Vol. 1-8)

As the number of devout catholics was still pretty large in Geneva, what Bonivard had foreseen came to pass; and the agitation was general. No more services, no more masses, no baptisms, no marriages ... divine worship suspended, the cross hidden, the altars stripped. 140... What was to be done? The chapter was sitting, and several citizens appeared before them in great irritation. ‘It is you,’ they said to the terrified canons, ‘that are the cause of all this.’ ... Nor was this all. The excommunicates of the Savoyard parishes of the diocese used to come every year at the approach of Easter and petition the bishop’s official for letters of consentment , in order that their parish priests might give them the communion . ‘Now of such folks there chanced to be a great number at Geneva. Heyday, they said, it is of no use putting one obstacle aside, when another starts up immediately, all owing to the fault of these episcopal officers!’ ... The exasperated Savoyards united with the Genevans, and the agitated crowd assembled in front of the cathedral gates; the men murmured, the women wept, even priests joined the laity. Loud shouts were heard erelong. The people’s patience was exhausted; they took part against their bishop. ‘To the Rhone,’ cried the devout, ‘to the Rhone with the traitors! the villains who prevent us from receiving our Lord!’ The excommunicated episcopal officers had a narrow escape from drowning. All the diocese fancied itself excommunicated, and accordingly the confusion extended beyond the city. The syndics came up and entreated the citizens to be calm; and then, going to the episcopal council, the bishop being still absent, they said: ‘Release Pécolat, or we cannot protect you against the anger of the people.’ The episcopal officers seeing the bishop and the duke on one side, the metropolitan and the people on the other, and impelled in contrary directions, knew not whom to obey. It was reported to them that all the city was in an uproar, that the most devout catholics wished at any cost to communicate on Easter Sunday, and that looking upon them as the only obstacle which prevented their receiving the host, they had determined to throw them over the bridge. ‘The first of you that comes out shall go over,’ cried the crowd. They were seized with great alarm, and fancying themselves half drowned already, wrote to the governor of Peney to release Pécolat forthwith. The messenger departed, and the friends and relations of the prisoner, not trusting to the episcopal court, accompanied him. During the three-quarters of an hour that the walk occupied, the crowd kept saying:—suppose the governor should refuse to give up his victim; suppose the bastard’s agents have already carried him away—perhaps put him to death? None of these suppositions was realised. Deep in a dungeon of the castle, the poor man, heavily chained, in utter darkness, wrecked both in mind and body, was giving way to the blackest melancholy. Suddenly he hears a noise. He listens; he seems to recognise well-known voices: it was his brothers and his friends arriving noisily under the walls of the castle, and giving utterance to their joy.

Their success was, however, less certain than it appeared to them. Strange things were, in fact, taking place at that moment in Geneva. The bishop and the duke had not been so passive as had been imagined, and at the very instant when the messenger bearing the order from the episcopal court, and accompanied by a body of Genevans, was leaving by the French gate, a courier, with an order from the Roman court, entered by the Savoy gate. The latter went with all speed to the bishop’s representatives, and handed them the pontifical letters which the princes had obtained, and by which the pope annulled the censures of the metropolitan . This Roman messenger brought in addition an order from the bishop forbidding them on their lives to release Pécolat. The bastard had shuddered at the thought that the wretch whom he had so successfully tortured, might escape him: he had moved heaven and earth to keep him in prison. We may imagine the emotion and alarm which fell upon the episcopal councillors when they read the letters handed to them. The coincidence of the moment when these two contradictory orders left Geneva and arrived there is so striking, that we may ask whether these letters from Rome and Turin were not supposed—invented by the episcopal officers themselves; but there is nothing in the narrative to indicate a trick. ‘ Immediately on reading the letters, the episcopal officers with all diligence countermanded the release.’ These words in the ‘Annals’ show the precipitation with which they endeavoured to repair the mistake they had committed. There was not, in fact, a moment to lose, if they wished to keep Pécolat. Several officers got on horseback and set off full gallop.

The bearers of this order were hardly halfway, when they met a numerous jubilant and noisy crowd returning from Peney. The friends of Pécolat, preceded by the official letters addressed to the governor, had appeared before that officer, who, after reading the despatch over and over, had thought it his duty to obey. Pécolat’s friends hurried after the gaoler, who, carrying a bunch of keys in his hand, went to open the cell; they entered with him, shouting release! They broke the prisoner’s chains; and, finding him so weak, carried him in their arms and laid him in the sunshine in the castle yard. Without loss of time they placed him in a peasant’s cart and all started for Geneva. This was the crowd met by the episcopal officers. The Genevans were bringing back their friend with shouts of joy. In vain did the episcopal officers stop this joyous band, and require that the prisoner should be led back to Peney; in vain did they speak of the bishop and even of the pope; all was of no use. Despite the rogations of the pope, the prelate, and the messengers, the people carried Pécolat back in triumph. This resistance offered to the Roman pontiff, at the moment he was lending assistance to the bastard in his oppression of a poor innocent man, was, as it were, an affair of outposts; and the Genevans were thus training themselves for more notable battles. ‘Forward,’ they shouted, ‘to the city! to the city!’ and the crowd, leaving the episcopal officers alone in the middle of the road, hastened to the gates.

At last they approached Geneva, and there the excitement was not less great than on the road. Pécolat’s return was the triumph of right over injustice, of liberty over despotism; and accordingly it was celebrated with enthusiasm. The poor man, dumb (for his wound was not yet healed), shattered by the torture, and wasted away by his long captivity, looked silently on all around him, and experienced an emotion he could hardly contain. After such trials he was returning into the old city amid the joyous cries of the population. However, his friends did not forget the orders of the pope and the bishop; and fearing lest the vidame should again seize the poor fellow, they took him to the convent of the Grey Friars of Rive, an asylum reputed inviolable, and quartered him in the cell of his brother, the monk Yvonnet. There the poor invalid received all the affectionate attendance he required; he remained some time without saying much; but at last he recovered his speech, ‘by the intercession of a saint ,’ said the priests and Pécolat himself, as it would appear. Was it devoutly or jestingly that he spoke of this pretended miraculous cure? We shall not decide. Bonivard, who perhaps no longer believed in the miracles of saints, assigns another reason: ‘The surgeons dressed the wound in his tongue;’ and he adds: ‘He always stuttered a little.’ If Bonivard had doubts about the saints, he believed in the sovereign justice of God: ‘Then came to pass a thing,’ he said, ‘which should not be forgotten; all the judges who condemned Pécolat to be tortured died this year, one after another, which we cannot suppose to have happened except as a divine punishment .’