Note 417 — CX.—To Monsieur de Falais.[417]

On the back: "To my good lord and friend Sire Jacques Le Franc."—James de Bourgogne, Seigneur de Falais and of Breda in Brabant, great-grandson natural of Philip le Bel, Duke of Burgundy. Brought up at the Court of Charles the Fifth, this seigneur adopted, in his youth, the Reformed faith, and under the Spanish rule not being able to avow his profession, by the advice of Calvin he quitted his country, abandoning the whole of his property, which was confiscated by a decree of the Court of Malines. Thenceforth devoted to perpetual exile, he dwelt successively at Cologne, Strasbourg, Basle, Geneva, and maintained an active correspondence with the Reformer, who heaped upon him the tokens of his friendship, and dedicated to him in 1546 his Commentary on the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. These kind relations were unfortunately disturbed at a later period on account of the trial of Jerome Bolsec, in which M. de Falais openly took part against Calvin. The latter keenly resented that act of hostility on the part of a friend, which broke up the friendship, without any after healing, in 1552. The letters of Calvin to M. de Falais have been published in the last century at Amsterdam from the originals long preserved in that town.—Lettres de Calvin à Jacques de Bourgogne, Seigneur de Falais, 1 vol. 8vo. Amsterdam, 1744. We republish them here in more chronological order, revised and corrected from the originals now deposited in the library of Geneva, with some other pieces appended which have not hitherto appeared in print.