n the fulness
of time may come to their glory again; but the greater glories of
Chateauneuf--which belonged to it once because of its Popes, and again
because of its sweet-souled Poet--must be only memories forevermore.

[Illustration: THE ROUMANILLE MONUMENT]

The castles over on the right bank, Montfaucon and Roquemaure, are of
the normal painful sort again. Roquemaure is a crooked, narrow,
up-and-down old dirty town, where old customs and old costumes and old
forms of speech still live on; and, also, its people have a very pretty
taste in the twisting and perverting of historic fact into picturesque
tradition--as is shown by the way in which they have rearranged the
unpleasant details of the death of Pope Clement V. into a bit of
melodramatic moral decoration for their own town. Their ingeniously
compiled legend runs in this wise: Clement's death in the castle of
Roquemaure occurred while he was on his way homeward from the Council of
Vienne; where--keeping with the King the bargain which had won for him
the Papal throne--he had abolished the Order of the Templars and had
condemned their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, to be burned alive. When
that sentence was passed, the Grand Master, in turn, had passed
sentence of death upon the Pope: declaring that within forty days they
should appear together, in the spirit, to try again that cause misjudged
on earth before the Throne of God. And the forty days were near ended
when Pope Clement came to Roquemaure--with the death-grip already so
strong upon him that even the little farther journey to Avignon was
impossible, and he could but lay him down there and die. While yet the
breath scarce was out of his body, his servants fell to fighting over
his belongings with a brutal fierceness: in the midst of which fray a
lighted torch fell among and fired the hangings of the bed whereon lay
the dead Pope--and before any of the pillagers would give the rest an
advantage by stopping in their foul work to extinguish the flames his
body was half-consumed. And so was Clement burned in death even as the
Grand Master had been burned in life; and so was executed upon him the
Grand Master's summons to appear before the Judgment Seat on high!

It is interesting to note that this tradition does very little violence
to the individual facts of the case, and yet rearranges them in such a
fashion that they are at sixes and sevens with the truth as a whole.
When, in my lighter youth, I entered