They were, moreover, both of them, opposed to any liberal reform, and devoted, in any case, to absolute power.
Beaucaire de Peguilhem, a contemporary and most Catholic historian,--for he accompanied the Cardinal of Lorraine to the Council of Trent,--calls Duprat "the most vicious of bipeds." Such patrons did not lack hot-headed executants of their policy; friendly relations had not ceased between the Reformers and their adversaries; a Jacobin monk, De Roma by name, was conversing one day at Meaux with Farel and his friends; the Reformers expressed the hopes they had in the propagation of the gospel; De Roma all at once stood up, shouting, "Then I and all the rest of the brotherhood will preach a crusade we will stir up the people; and if the king permits the preaching of your gospel, we will have him expelled by his own subjects from his own kingdom." Fanatical passions were already at work, though the parties were too unequal as yet to come to actual force.
Against such passions the Reformers found Francis I.a very indecisive and very inefficient protector.

"I wish," said he, "to give men of letters special marks of my favor." When deputies from the Sorbonne came and requested him to put down the publication of learned works taxed with heresy, "I do not wish," he replied, "to have those folks meddled with; to persecute those who instruct us would be to keep men of ability from coming to our country." But in spite of his language, orders were given to the bishops to furnish the necessary funds for the prosecution of heretics, and, when the charge of heresy became frequent, Francis I.no longer repudiated it.

"Those people," he said, "do nothing but bring trouble into the state." Troubles, indeed, in otherwise tranquil provinces, where the Catholic faith was in great force, often accompanied the expression of those wishes for reform to which the local clergy themselves considered it necessary to make important concessions.

A serious fire took place at Troyes in 1524.

"It was put down," says M.
Boutiot, a learned and careful historian of that town, "to the account of the new religious notions, as well as to that of the Emperor Charles V.'s friends and the Constable de Bourbon's partisans.