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Updated: June 21, 2025
"So? Then you know how he struggled for years to solve the secret of making the enamel he had seen on a Saracen cup. Palissy also made some fine old stained glass, although few people seem to know this. Many another Frenchman tried to discover the Venetian's great secret. They sought to bribe our people to tell the process, but without success.
And if the man who makes watches, or cleans sewers, or even mines coal your especial sore spot does his work well, and is suited to it in temperament, who knows that he does not find it a satisfaction as complete as mine in telling a bit of genuine Palissy ware from an imitation. You, for instance, you'd make a pretty coal-miner, wouldn't you?
Thus passed several years, and it is a marvel how the family contrived to live at all, and madame Palissy had reason for the reproaches and hard words which she heaped on her husband.
He began by breaking three dozen new earthen pots, the pieces of which he covered with different materials which he had compounded, and then took them to a neighbouring glass- furnace to be baked. The results gave him a glimmer of hope. The greater heat of the glass-furnace had melted some of the compounds; but though Palissy searched diligently for the white enamel he could find none.
The news of the capture soon reached Palissy, and we may be sure he had made a study of the best of the pots before they were bought by the king, Francis I., and given away to the ladies of the French court.
We had a charming little room overlooking the Boulevard, furnished with as much looking-glass, crimson-velvet, gilding, and arabesque painting as could be got together within the space of twelve-feet by eight. Our wine came to table in a silver cooler that Cellini might have wrought. Our meats were served upon porcelain that would have driven Palissy to despair.
Alaric's mind was of a different cast; he panted rather for the great than the beautiful; and was inclined to ridicule the growing taste of the day for torsos, Palissy ware, and Assyrian monsters. There was then some mutual confidence between the two young men.
Franklin was entertained by the Duke of Orleans; remembers, at the church of St. Genevieve, that Abelard once lectured on its site; and, gazing on the beautiful ware in one of the cabinets of the Louvre, muses of the holy patience of Palissy. By the handsome quays and bridges of the Seine, he tries to realize that once only an islet covered with mud hovels met the wanderer's view.
The little room was soon filled to overflowing with lawyers, scholars, and, above all, physicians, the celebrated monsieur Ambroise Paré, doctor to the queen-mother, and a Huguenot like himself, at their head. During nine years Palissy continued to deliver these lectures every Lent, working steadily most of the day among his furnaces at the Tuileries.
Palissy did indeed die shortly after, a martyr, though not at the stake. He died in the Bastille, after enduring about a year's imprisonment, there peacefully terminating a life distinguished for heroic labour, extraordinary endurance, inflexible rectitude, and the exhibition of many rare and noble virtues.
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