Lefevre sent him a greeting in 1519, and in the same year Bude spoke well of him.

His books were at this time approved even by some doctors of the Sorbonne.

But it took a decade of confusion and negation to clarify the situation sufficiently for the French to realize the exact import of the Lutheran movement, which completely transformed the previously existing policy of Lefevre.
The chief sufferer by the growth of Lutheranism was not at first the Catholic church but the party of Catholic reform.

The schism rent the French evangelicals before it seriously affected the church.

Some of them followed the new light and others were forced back into a reactionary attitude.
[Sidenote: Luther's books.] The first emissaries of Luther in France were his books.