Note 364 — CCXCII.—To Madame de Cany.[363]

Who is the personage to whom these words refer, stamped at once by the inflexible spirit of the time and the stern rigour of the Reformer? The historian can only offer conjectures: can it be Jerome Bolsec? But a regular sentence had banished him from Geneva, and Calvin himself does not appear to have called for a more severe judgment against this innovator whom resentment had transformed into a vile pamphleteer. "That fellow, Jerome, is driven out into perpetual exile by a public sentence. Certain revilers have spread abroad the falsehood, that we earnestly desired a much severer punishment, and foolishly, it is believed."—(Calvin to Bullinger, in the month of January 1552.) In that age of inexorable severity against unsound doctrine, Servetus only appeared at Geneva to expire at the stake, and Gentili only escaped the scaffold for a time, by the voluntary retraction of his opinions. To name Gentili, Servetus, Bolsec, is to recall the principal victims of Calvinistic intolerance in the sixteenth century, but not to solve the mystery which attaches to the personage designated in the letter of Calvin to Madame de Cany.