nd Rienzi and a whole deputation of Romans.

During the reign of this Pontiff, the Papal Court became one of the
gayest in Christendom. Clement was frankly, joyously voluptuous; and his
life seems one moving pageant in which luxurious banquets, beautiful
women, and ecclesiastical pomps succeeded each other. The lovely
Countess of Turenne sold his preferments and benefices, the immense
treasure of John XXII was his, and he showered such benefits on a
grateful family that of the five Cardinals who accompanied his corpse
from Avignon, one was his brother, one his cousin, and three his
nephews; and that the Huguenots who violated his tomb at La-Chaise-Dieu,
should have used his skull as a wine-cup, seems an horrible, but not an
unfitting mockery. It was in vain that Petrarch hotly wrote, "the Pope
keeps the Church of Jesus Christ in shameful exile." The desire for
return to Rome had passed.

Avignon was not an original nor a plenary possession of the Holy
Fathers, but "the fairest inheritance of the Berengers," and it was from
that family that half of the city had to be wrested--or obtained. Now
the lords of Provence were Kings of Naples and Sicily, and therefore
vassals of the Holy See. For when the Normans took these Southern states
from the Greeks and thereby incurred the jealousy of all Italy, they had
warily placed themselves under the protection of the Pope and agreed to
hold their new possessions as a papal investiture. It happened at this
time that the vassal of the Pope in Naples and in Sicily was the
beauteous "Reino Joanno," the heiress of Provence. What she was no
writer could describe in better words than these, "with extreme beauty,
with youth that does not fade, red hair that holds the sunlight in its
tangles, a sweet voice, poetic gifts, regal peremptoriness, a Gallic
wit, genuine magnanimity, and rhapsodical piety, with strange indecorum
and bluntness of feeling under the extremes of splendour and misery,
just such a lovely, perverse, bewildering woman was she, great
granddaughter of Raymond-Berenger, fourth Count of Provence,--the pupil
of Boccaccio, the friend of Petrarch, the enemy of Saint Catherine of
Siena, the most dangerous and most dazzling woman of the XIV century. So
typically Provencal was this Queen's nature, that had she lived some
centuries later, she might have been Mirabeau's sister. The same
'terrible gift of familiarity,' the same talent of finding favour and
swaying popular assemblages,