Alexander Gordon

“ Hotman was a man of pure life, real piety (as his Consolatio shows) and warm domestic virtues. His constant removals were inspired less by fear for himself than by care for his family, and by a temperament averse to the conditions of warfare, and a constitutional desire for peace. ”

“ The fortitude of Anne Dubourg under torture gained his adhesion to the cause of Reform. Giving up a career on which he had entered with high repute, he went in 1547 to Lyons, and thence to Geneva and to Lausanne, where, on the recommendation of Calvin, he was appointed professor of belles-lettres and history, and married Claudine Aubelin, a refugee from Orleans. On the invitation of the magistracy, he lectured at Strassburg on law in 1555, and became professor in 1556, superseding François Baudouin, who had been his colleague in Paris. ”

“ In 1573, after publishing his Franco-Gallia, he left France for ever with his family, and became professor of Roman law at Geneva. On the approach of the duke of Savoy he removed to Basel in 1579. In 1580 he was appointed councillor of state to Henry of Navarre. The plague sent him in 1582 to Montbéliard; here he lost his wife. Returning to Geneva in 1584 he developed a kind of scientific turn, dabbling in alchemy and the research for the philosopher’s stone. In 1589 he made his final retirement to Basel, where he died on the 12th of February 1590, leaving two sons and four daughters ”