Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, page 59 by Various Authors
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onivard pointed to his monastic gown, his prayer-book and his crucifix, and pleaded his deep sense of the sacredness of his office as a reason for having nothing to do with the affair. "Then," says his kinsman, rising in wrath, "I will do the business myself. I'll have Lévrier out of his bed and over in Savoy this very night."--"Do you really mean it, uncle? Give me your hand!"--"Then you consent, after all, to help me in the matter?"--"Oh no, uncle: that isn't it. But I know these Genevese are a hasty sort of folk, and I am just going to raise thirty florins to be spent in saying masses to-morrow for the repose of your soul." Before the evening was over, Bonivard found an opportunity of slipping in disguise over to the house of Lévrier and giving a hint of what was intended: the notes of preparation for resistance that Berthelier and his friends began at once to make wrought upon the excited nerves of the ambassador and his armed retinue to such a point that they were fain to escape from the town by a secret gate before daylight.
The affair of his rescue of Pecolat is another illustration of his character and of the strange, turbulent age in which he lived; and it went far to embitter the hatred of the duke and the bishop against him. This poor fellow was the jester, song-singer and epigrammatist of the madcap patriots who were associated under the title of "Sons of Geneva." Under a trumped-up charge of plotting the death of the bishop he was kidnapped and carried away to one of the castles in the neighborhood, and there tortured until a false confession was wrung from him implicating Berthelier and others. To secure his condemnation to death he was brought back into the city and presented before the court; but the sight of the poor cripple, racked and bruised with recent tortures, and his steadfastness in recanting his late confession, wrought more with the judges than the fear of the duke, and he was acquitted. But the feeble and ferocious bishop, moved partly by malignity and partly, no d