errible plague. The court
of France suffered particularly from it, and the famous object of
Petrarch's tender sonnets, Laura de Noves, married to Hugh de Sade, fell
a victim to it at Avignon. When the epidemic had well nigh disappeared,
the survivors, men and women, princes and subjects, returned passionately
to their pleasures and their galas; to mortality, says a contemporary
chronicler, succeeded a rage for marriage; and Philip of Valois himself,
now fifty-eight years of age, took for his second wife Blanche of
Navarre, who was only eighteen. She was a sister of that young King of
Navarre, Charles II., who was soon to get the name of Charles the Bad,
and to become so dangerous an enemy for Philip's successors. Seven
months after his marriage, and on the 22d of August, 1350, Philip died at
Nogent-le-Roi in the Haute-Marne, strictly enjoining his son John to
maintain with vigor his well-ascertained right to the crown he wore, and
leaving his people bowed down beneath a weight "of extortions so heavy
that the like had never been seen in the kingdom of France."

Only one happy event distinguished the close of this reign. As early as
1343 Philip had treated, on a monetary basis, with Humbert II., Count and
Dauphin of Vienness, for the cession of that beautiful province to the
crown of France after the death of the then possessor. Humbert, an
adventurous and fantastic prince, plunged, in 1346, into a crusade
against the Turks, from which he returned in the following year without
having obtained any success. Tired of seeking adventures as well as of
reigning, he, on the 16th of July, 1349, before a solemn assembly held at
Lyons, abdicated his principality in favor of Prince Charles of France,
grandson of Philip of Valois, and afterwards Charles V. The new dauphin
took the oath, between the hands of the Bishop of Grenoble, to maintain
the liberties, franchises, and privileges of the Dauphiny; and the
ex-dauphin, after having taken holy orders and passed successively
through the Archbishopric of Rheims and the Bishopric of Paris, both of
which he found equally unpalatable, went to die at Clermont in Auvergne,
in a convent belonging to the order of Dominicans, whose habit he had
donned.

In the same year, on the 18th of April, 1349, Philip of Valois bought of
Jayme of Arragon, the last king of Majorca, for one hundred and twenty
thousand golden crowns, the lordship and town of Montpellier, thus trying
to repair to som