Two years later Peter Ameaux made some very trifling personal remarks about Calvin, for which he was forced to fall on his knees in public and ask pardon.
But opposition only increased.

The party opposing Calvin he called the Libertines--a word then meaning something like "free-thinker" and gradually getting {176} the bad moral connotation it has now, just as the word "miscreant" had formerly done.

[Sidenote: January, 1547] One of these men, James Cruet, posted on the pulpit of St.Peter's church at Geneva a warning to Calvin, in no very civil terms, to leave the city.

He was at once arrested and a house to house search made for his accomplices.

This method failing to reveal anything except that Gruet had written on one of Calvin's tracts the words "all rubbish," his judges put him to the rack twice a day, morning and evening, for a whole month.