Free Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie Page B

cause, defeating the Catholic general, the count of Tilly, at a place called Breitenfield. Now he was marching his armies rapidly through central Germany and headed in their direction.
    At Würzburg, “the entire College was dissolved within twenty-four hours of unbelievable confusion,” Kircher remembered. “All were shaken by terror as the enemy was now arriving at the city; for they had heard that they would spare not one of the Jesuits. I, too, rolled in this communal whirlwind.” He left the city with others for Mainz, abandoning the pages of a new manuscript.
    After four days of siege in mid-October, Gustavus took Würzburg. He took the city of Hanau a few weeks later, Aschaffenburg a number of days after that, Frankfurt less than a week after that, and Mainz five days before Christmas. Kircher was separated from his friend Schott somewhere along the way, and fled again—back to Speyer, and then out of Germany altogether, leaving behind an entire region (for good) like a devastated home.
    â€œAt Bamberg the bodies lay unburied in the streets, and on both sides of the Rhine there was famine,” C. V. Wedgwood wrote about the eventual aftermath of the Gustavus campaign. “In Bavaria there was neither corn left to grind nor seed to sow for the year to come; plague and famine wiped out whole villages, mad dogs attacked their masters, and the authorities posted men with guns to shoot the raving victims before they could contaminate their fellows; hungry wolves abandoned the woods and mountains to roam through the deserted hamlets, devouring the dying and the dead.”

6
    Beautiful Reports
    S ince all things in Germany had been turned upside down, and since there shone no hope either of remaining or of returning,” Kircher and others were sent to France. They traveled down the Rhône valley to Lyon, where there was a Jesuit school—but also unfortunately where there had been another outbreak of the plague. So he was sent farther south, to Avignon, which must have seemed like a different world.
    France’s own wars of religion were over, for the time being. Although Louis XIII had secretly and then not so secretly allied himself with the Protestants against his Hapsburg enemies in Germany, he and his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, had pretty well driven out the heresy of the French Protestants, the Huguenots, within his own territories. France was Catholic and Avignon itself, where a number of French popes lived during the fourteenth century, was still a papal territory. There were so many bells in so many steeples in Avignon that it was known as
la ville sonnante
, “the ringing town,” and it’s easy to imagine that for Kircher a feeling of security, rather than alarm, began to accompany the sound of their pealing. A new Jesuit college was being built there out of white sandstone, around a large square and gardens, with tall portico archways and large windows above. Many of the buildings in Avignon—the Palais des Papes, Notre Dame des Doms, the Pont d’Avignon—were made out of the same stone, which has a way of taking on the color of the day. During parts of the year the infamous mistral winds blow cold down the Rhône valley on Avignon, but also blow the cloud covering away, leaving crisp air, the warmth of the sun, and the blue, as Kircher described it, of “an Egyptian sky.”
    It’s hard to say how well this twenty-nine-year-old priest from war-torn Germany was received in the south of France. As records from the college at Avignon show, Kircher’s superiors thought his “talent” was “good,” that his “accomplishment in letters” was “great,” and that his “ministry” should be “teaching”—but that he had only “some” “discretion,” and that his “experience of things,” by which they seem to mean his level of maturity, was “not