Note 403 — CCCVI.—To Monsieur de Falais.[403]

No date. Written evidently about the end of 1552. This letter, the last which Calvin wrote to M. de Falais, throws a great light on the circumstances of their rupture, of which Jerome Bolsec's process was the occasion. Banished from Geneva for his attacks on the doctrine of predestination and his invectives against Calvin, Bolsec had found means to interest in his cause M. de Falais, whose physician he was, and who interceded to no purpose for him with his judges: "Master Jerome is better acquainted with my constitution and what affords me relief than any other doctor that I know.... It is to him after God that I am indebted for my life."—Archives of Geneva. Letters of the 9th and 11th November 1551. These steps undertaken from a feeling of humanity, would certainly not have indisposed Calvin, if M. de Falais had not too openly taken part with Bolsec against the Reformer. Calvin bitterly complained of it, "that M. de Falais should write that he (Bolsec) was not a bad man, and for the sake of an obscure wretch should hold up his reputation as a subject of mockery." Letter to the ministers of Bâle, January 1552. Expelled from Geneva and settled at Thonon, Bolsec contrived to envenom this difference which the recollections of a long friendship should have appeased, and which terminated in a painful rupture. In a vehement letter, Calvin, at that time suffering from bad health, took leave of his old friend, whose name he erased four years afterwards from the preface to his Commentary on the first Epistle to the Corinthians, in order to substitute in its place that of the Marquis de Vico.