This scene, set in the deep shadows of a crossroad in the forest, resembled rather an evocation between magician and demon than an agreement entered upon between king and pope.
Also the coronation of the King, which took place shortly afterward at Lyons, and which began the Church’s captivity, seemed but little agreeable to God. Just as the royal procession was passing, a wall crowded with spectators fell, wounding the King and killing the Duc de Bretagne. The Pope was thrown to the ground, and his tiara rolled in the mud.
Bertrand de Got was elected pope under the name of Clement V.
Clement V. paid all that Bertrand de Got had promised. Philippe was absolved, Holy Communion restored to him and his, the purple again descended upon the shoulders of the Colonna, the Church was obliged to defray the expenses of the war in Flanders and Philippe de Valois’s crusade against the Greek Empire. The memory of Pope Boniface VIII. was, if not destroyed and annulled, at least besmirched; the walls of the Temple were razed, and the Templars burned on the open space of the Pont Neuf.
All these edicts—they were no longer called bulls from the moment the temporal power dictated them—all these edicts were dated at Avignon.
Philippe le Bel was the richest of all the kings of the French monarchy; he possessed an inexhaustible treasury, that is to say, his pope. He had purchased him, he used him, he put him to the press, and as cider flows from apples, so did this crushed pope bleed gold. The pontificate, struck by the Colonna in the person of Boniface VIII., abdicated the empire of the world in the person of Clement V.
We have related the advent of the king of blood and the pope of gold. We know how they ended. Jacques de Molay, from his funeral pyre, adjured them both to appear before God within the year. Ae to geron sithullia, says Aristophanes. “Dying hoary heads possess the souls of sibyls.”
Clement V. departed first. In a vision he saw his palace in flames. “From that moment,” says Baluze, “he became sad and lasted but a short time.”
Seven months later it was Philippe’s turn. Some say that he was killed while hunting, overthrown by a wild boar. Dante is among their number. “He,” said he, “who was seen near the Seine falsifying the coin of the realm shall die by the tusk of a boar.” But Guillaume de Nangis makes the royal counterfeiter die of a death quite otherwise providential.
“Undermined by a malady unknown to the physicians, Philippe expired,” said he, “to the great astonishment of everybody, without either his pulse or his urine revealing the cause of his malady or the imminence of the danger.”