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-fifths of her population, Bologna two-thirds, and nearly all Europe was reduced in some such frightful proportion.  The Neapolitans were already weary of the cruelties and greed of the Hungarians, they were only awaiting some opportunity to revolt against the stranger’s oppression, and to recall their lawful sovereign, whom, for all her ill deeds, they had never ceased to love.  The attraction of youth and beauty was deeply felt by this pleasure-loving people.  Scarcely had the pestilence thrown confusion into the army and town, when loud cursing arose against the tyrant and his executioners.  Louis of Hungary, suddenly threatened by the wrath of Heaven and the people’s vengeance, was terrified both by the plague and by the riots, and disappeared in the middle of the night.  Leaving the government of Naples in the hands of Conrad Lupo, one of his captains, he embarked hastily at Berletta, and left the kingdom in very much the same way as Louis of Tarentum, fleeing from him, had left it a few months before.