At the end of his apprenticeship he spent a journeyman year acquiring fresh knowledge in many parts of France, including Guyenne, Languedoc, Provence, Dauphiné, Burgundy and the Loire.

[1] In Palissy's time pottery covered with beautiful white tin-glaze painted with enamels was manufactured throughout Italy, Spain, Germany and the South of France.

[4] In his work Palissy produced ceramics using a great many ingredients including tin, lead, iron, steel, antimony, sapphire, copper, sand, saltwort, pearlash, and litharge.

At times he and his family were reduced to poverty; he is said to have burned his furniture and the floor boards of his house to feed the fires of his furnaces.

[1] In 1542, a peasant revolt against the "gabelle" salt tax in Saintonge resulted in royal forces, headed by the Duc de Montmorency, arriving near Palissy's home.

[1] Palissy's work there included the construction of wild gardens and ceramic creatures, following a romantic style similar to that of Italian artists Vasari, Cellini, and Michelangelo, and foreshadowing the baroque period.

Despite his conversion to Protestantism in 1546, in a departure from the established Catholic religion, Catherine asked Palissy to construct gardens for her in the Tuileries.

"[1] Palissy was outspoken in his Protestant religious beliefs; he sometimes chastised influential officials by quoting from the prophetic books of the Old Testament.

[3] According to contemporaries, Palissy would criticize traders, judges, or Parliamentary counsellors, and benefices by citing the Book of Ezekiel: "They are accursed, damned, and lost... Woe be to you, shepherds, who eat the fat and clothe you with the wool, and leave my flock scattered upon the mountains.

In addition to continuing rustic figurines, he made a large number of dishes and plaques ornamented with scriptural or mythological subjects in relief.

That and his practical application of Alexandrian theoretical works on hydraulics to the social issue of delivering public water to cities, were far in advance of the general knowledge of his time.

[3] He furthermore argued that scientific knowledge should be derived from observation and practice before classical philosophy: If things conceived in the mind could be executed, [alchemists] would do great things... [We must] confess that practice is the source of theory... By experiment I prove in several places that the theory of several philosophers is false, even of the most renowned and the most ancient.Palissy described systems for acquiring or transporting water, and for insuring its quality, adding that any unable to reproduce his instructions were free to contact him through his publisher.

[3] He elaborated upon a theory of hydrothermal vents, volcanoes and earthquakes, which he attributed to a mixture of volatile substances and combustion beneath the earth surface.

[3] Palissy correctly maintained that fossils were the remains of once living organisms, and contested the prevailing view that they had been produced by the biblical flood, or by astrological influence.

Marcel Proust mentions Palissy in the third volume of Remembrance of Things Past: "...and a fish cooked in a court-bouillon was brought in on a long earthenware platter, on which, standing out in relief on a bed of bluish herbs, intact but still contorted from having been dropped alive into boiling water, surrounded by a ring of satellite shell-fish, of animalcules, crabs, shrimps, and mussels, it had the appearance of a ceramic dish by Bernard Palissy.

[9] Palissy figures as one of nineteen exemplary heroes in a series written by Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga that was first published in 1927 in the popular Argentine weekly Caras y Caretas.