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Updated: June 12, 2025
The native flowers and shrubs, of a beauty and richness rather Eastern than European, have made the "Flora Montpeliensis," and with it the names of Rondelet and his disciples, famous among botanists; and the strange fish and shells upon its shores afforded Rondelet materials for his immortal work upon the "Animals of the Sea."
That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer the three trades were then combined in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for the cloister, being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of the canons of Maguelonne, near by, had even given him the revenues of a small chapel a job of nepotism which was common enough in those days.
These were Rondelet's palmy days. He had got a theatre of anatomy built at Montpellier, where he himself dissected publicly. He had, says tradition, a little botanic garden, such as were springing up then in several universities, specially in Italy. He had a villa outside the city, whose tower, near the modern railway station, still bears the name of the "Mas de Rondelet."
From thence, after becoming the fellow-pupil and the friend of Rondelet, and probably also of Rabelais and those other luminaries of Montpellier, of whom I spoke in my essay on Rondelet, he returned to Paris to study under old Sylvius, whose real name was Jacques Dubois, alias Jock o' the Wood; and to learn less as he complains himself in an anatomical theatre than a butcher might learn in his shop.
For years afterwards she watched over the pretty young wife and her two girls and three boys the three boys, alas! all died young and over Rondelet himself, who, immersed in books and experiments, was utterly careless about money; and was to them all a mother advising, guiding, managing, and regarded by Rondelet with genuine gratitude as his guardian angel.
The details of his death and last illness were written and published by his cousin Claude Formy; and well worth reading they are to any man who wishes to know how to die. Rondelet would have no tidings of his illness sent to Montpellier. He was happy, he said, in dying away from the tears of his household, and "safe from insult."
Rondelet's letter will amaze no reader of 'The Silence of Dean Maitland. That Mr. Paul Rondelet flew from his penny paper to a Paradise meet for him is a matter of congratulation to all but his creditors. He really is now in the only true Monastery of Thelema, and is simply dressed in an eye-glass and a cincture of pandanus flowers.
A proud day, too, was it for Pellicier and Rondelet, when wandering somewhere in the marshes of the Camargue, a scent of garlic caught the nostrils of the gentle bishop, and in the lovely pink flowers of the water-germander he recognised the Scordium of the ancients.
Scarcely was the scaffolding removed after thirteen years of constructive labour, and the expenditure of sixteen millions of livres, when it became necessary to call in Soufflot's pupil Rondelet, to shore up the walls and strengthen the columns which had proved too weak to sustain the weight of the huge cupola.
Rondelet was in the middle of this crisis a man of transition, while he was one of progress. He reflected the past; he opened and prepared the future. If he commented on Dioscorides, if he remained faithful to the theories of Galen, he founded in his 'History of Fishes' a monument which our century respects.
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