Henry M. Baird · 371 of 379

CHAPTER XII · Jean de Hans.

The preachers were not behind the doctors in the use of seditious language. They attacked the government and its entire policy; and one of their number—Jean de Hans—while delivering Advent discourses in the church of St. Barthélemi, in the very neighborhood of the palace, so distinguished himself for the extravagance of his denunciations, that he was arrested and carried off to the court at St. Germain. Yet such was his well-known popularity with the Parisians, that it was found necessary to effect his capture by a troop of forty armed men; and the powerful intercession made in his behalf induced the government to forget his disrespectful language respecting the princes, and to release him after barely a week's imprisonment.