ess the souls of sibyls."

Clement V. departed first. In a vision he saw his palace in flames.
"From that moment," says Baluze, "he became sad and lasted but a short
time."

Seven months later it was Philippe's turn. Some say that he was killed
while bunting, overthrown by a wild boar. Dante is among their number.
"He," said he, "who was seen near the Seine falsifying the coin of the
realm shall die by the tusk of a boar." But Guillaume de Nangis makes
the royal counterfeiter die of a death quite otherwise providential.

"Undermined by a malady unknown to the physicians, Philippe expired,"
said he, "to the great astonishment of everybody, without either his
pulse or his urine revealing the cause of his malady or the imminence of
the danger."

The King of Debauchery, the King of Uproar, Louis X., called the Hutin,
succeeded his father, Philippe le Bel; John XXII. to Clement V.

Avignon then became in truth a second Rome. John XXII. and Clement VI.
anointed her queen of luxury. The manners and customs of the times made
her queen of debauchery and indulgence. In place of her towers, razed by
Romain de Saint-Angelo, Hernandez de Heredi, grand master of Saint-Jean
of Jerusalem, girdled her with a belt of walls. She possessed dissolute
monks, who transformed the blessed precincts of her convents into places
of debauchery and licentiousness; her beautiful courtesans tore the
diamonds from the tiara to make of them bracelets and necklaces; and
finally she possessed the echoes of Vaucluse, which wafted the melodious
strains of Petrarch's songs to her.

This lasted until King Charles V., who was a virtuous and pious prince,
having resolved to put an end to the scandal, sent the Marechal de
Boucicaut to drive out the anti-pope, Benedict XIII., from Avignon. But
at sight of the soldiers of the King of France the latter remembered
that before being pope under the name of Benedict XIII. he had been
captain under the name of Pierre de Luna. For five months he defended
himself, pointing his engines of war with his own hands from the heights
of the chateau walls, engines otherwise far more murderous than his
pontifical bolts. At last forced to flee, he left the city by a
postern, after having ruined a hundred houses and killed four thousand
Avignonese, and fled to Spain, where the King of Aragon offered him
sanctuary.

There each morning, from the summit of a tower, assisted by the two
priests who constituted his sacred college,