eyes, and brown hair, whom we shall
meet again later on in our narrative; but we will not divert our
readers' attention, but only tell them that his name was James of
Aragon, that he was Prince of Majorca, and would have been ready to
shed every drop of his blood only to check one single tear that hung
on Joan's eyelids. The queen spoke in an agitated, trembling voice,
stopping from time to time to dry her moist and shining eyes, or to
breathe one of those deep sighs that go straight to the heart. She
told the tale of her husband's death painfully and vividly, painted
truthfully the mad terror that had seized upon her and struck her down
at that frightful time, raised her hands to her brow with the gesture
of despair, as though she would wrest the madness from her brain--and a
shudder of pity and awe passed through the assembled crowd. It is a
fact that at this moment, if her words were false, her anguish was both
sincere and terrible. An angel soiled by crime, she lied like Satan
himself, but like him too she suffered all the agony of remorse and
pride. Thus, when at the end of her speech she burst into tears and
implored help and protection against the usurper of her kingdom, a cry
of general assent drowned her closing words, several hands flew to their
sword-hilts, and the Hungarian ambassadors retired covered with shame
and confusion.

That same evening the sentence, to the great joy of all, was proclaimed,
that Joan was innocent and acquitted of all concern in the assassination
of her husband. But as her conduct after the event and the indifference
she had shown about pursuing the authors of the crime admitted of no
valid excuse, the pope declared that there were plain traces of magic,
and that the wrong-doing attributed to Joan was the result of some
baneful charm cast upon her, which she could by no possible means
resist. At the same time, His Holiness confirmed her marriage with Louis
of Tarentum, and bestowed on him the order of the Rose of Gold and the
title of King of Sicily and Jerusalem. Joan, it is true, had on the eve
of her acquittal sold the town of Avignon to the pope for the sum of
80,000 florins.

While the queen was pleading her cause at the court of Clement VI, a
dreadful epidemic, called the Black Plague--the same that Boccaccio has
described so wonderfully--was ravaging the kingdom of Naples, and indeed
the whole of Italy. According to the calculation of Matteo Villani,
Florence lost three-fift