The time was December, 1602. Duke Charles Emmanuel had secretly crossed the mountains, and established his head-quarters at EtrembiÈres; a sufficient army had been quietly mobilized; there were 800 Savoyards, 1,000 Spaniards, 400 Neapolitans, and 4,000 Piedmontese at Bonne, La Roche, Bonneville, and other places near Geneva. The Duke had also been at pains to allay suspicion by assuring the Genevans, through his agents, that he desired nothing more than to be on friendly terms with them. But at midnight of December 12 he set his troops in motion.

A storming-party of some two hundred men led the way, under the command of M. BerloniÈre, who had extreme unction administered to him ostentatiously before he started. The main body of 4,000 men was to follow under Lieutenant-General d’Albigni. Acting on information received, the storming-party struck the Corraterie rampart at a point where there was no sentinel on the look-out for them. They carried with them faggots and hurdles to help them over the moat, ladders that could be dovetailed together to scale the rampart with, and axes and crowbars for breaking down or forcing gates. A Scotch Jesuit, named Alexander, gave them his benediction as they climbed, and handed to every man an amulet which purported to guarantee him in the first instance against being killed, and in the second instance against being damned eternally if he were killed.

Fortune at first smiled upon their efforts. They succeeded in attaining the rampart unobserved, and kept quiet, waiting for d’Albigni and the dawn. A single sentinel whom they met was slain in silence. But presently a small company of the watch passed by upon its rounds. Upon these, too, the soldiers flung themselves, and most of them were quickly pitched over into the moat. One gun went off, however, and one man managed to escape. He was the drummer, and he ran along the rampart, drumming as he went, as far as the Porte de la Monnaie. It was enough. The alarm was given. The invaders saw that they must fight in the dark, instead of waiting for the dawn. ‘Vive Espagne!’ they shouted. ‘Ville gagnÉe! Tue, Tue!’ and dashed down into the streets, expecting d’Albigni and his 4,000 men to follow them.

But this was what d’Albigni and his 4,000 men could not do. Chance—or the hand of Providence—had interfered to save Geneva. A message to say that the city was as good as captured had already been sent off to the Duke of Savoy at EtrembiÈres; and the Duke was dispatching couriers to announce his victory at all the Courts of Europe. But it happened that the Genevans at the Porte Neuve loaded a cannon to the muzzle with chains, and any other old iron that came to hand, and fired it in a direction parallel with the rampart. Had the aim been bad, Geneva would have fallen that night beyond a doubt. But the aim was good, and the shot broke the ladders into pieces, so that no one could climb by them any more; and there was Lieutenant-General d’Albigni with his army helpless in the moat, while the storming party was caught in a trap within the walls. The citizens snatched up their weapons, and hurried down, half dressed, to give them battle in the dark. Their pastor, Simon Goulart,A who wrote a jubilant description of the episode, declared that he himself would have been delighted to join in the affray if only he had had a coat of mail. A worthy woman, who was making soup for an early breakfast, flung the scalding fluid, saucepan and all, out of window on to the heads of the intruders. Other missiles were showered upon them from other windows; while the number of armed men who faced them in the open steadily increased. In the end, after inflicting upon the Genevans a loss of seventeen killed and twenty wounded, they were swept back into the moat, leaving many dead and thirteen prisoners behind them.

‘MisÉrable butor, vous avez fait une belle cacade’—‘Blockhead, you have made a pretty mess of it’—was Charles Emmanuel’s greeting to d’Albigni when he heard the truth; and with that he mounted his horse and rode away to Turin, without even troubling to hear the fate of his prisoners. These, it should be added, were all beheaded in the course of the next day; while the heads of those who had been killed were collected and spiked, as an ornament to the ramparts and a terror to evil-doers.

M. de BÈze, who was now an old man and very deaf, had slept through the fighting undisturbed, and knew nothing of it until his friends told him the story the next morning. Though he had now retired from the active duties of the pastorate, he dressed himself and went down to the Cathedral of St. Pierre, where he mounted the pulpit stairs and called upon the congregation to sing Psalm cxxiv.—the Psalm which begins:

‘If the Lord Himself had not been on our side, now may Israel say: if the Lord Himself had not been on our side, when men rose up against us.’

The Psalm which ends:

‘Our soul is escaped, even as a bird out of the snare of the fowler: the snare is broken, and we are delivered.

‘Our help standeth in the name of the Lord: who hath made heaven and earth.’

It was the old Reformer’s last public appearance—and a fitting one, giving as it does the last dramatic touch to the most dramatic incident in Genevan annals. He lived until 1605, but he was growing feebler and feebler. He suffered from no actual malady, but it was obvious to all that the light was flickering out. His intellect, however, was clear until the last, and the picture of his last days, drawn by his biographer, Antoine La Faye, recalls Bunyan’s picture of the Christian pilgrims waiting in the Land of Beulah for their summons to cross the river to the shining city.

The Venerable Company of Pastors in conclave resolved that no day should be allowed to pass without at least two of their number paying him a visit. For the rest he found his pleasure in reading grave and pious colloquies and sermons, and particularly in those words of Augustine: ‘Long have I lived; long have I sinned. Blessed be the name of the Lord!’ And, at the last, ‘without pain, and without a struggle, all his senses, as it seemed, failing him simultaneously, in one single instant, he gave back his soul to God, his bodily pilgrimage having lasted eighty-six years, three months, and nine days, and forty of his years having been spent in the holy office of the ministry.’

‘M. de BÈze,’ La Faye continues, ‘was a man of sturdy build, conspicuous beauty, and health so vigorous that he often said that he did not know the meaning of a headache. He displayed high talents, accurate judgment, a tenacious memory, and remarkable eloquence, while in courtesy of manner he was second to no one. In view of the great gifts thus recited, and his great age (though these are things less to be regarded than his learning and his piety), many used to speak of M. de BÈze as the Phoenix of his time.’