But Peter of Aragon was indifferent to this ecclesiastical bluster, and the Sicilians were desperate. In spite of the blessings and promises of the Pope, Charles encountered only disaster. His fleet was destroyed, his son, Charles of Salerno, was captured; his treasury was exhausted, and the principal nobility of Anjou and Provence had been decimated in the Sicilian vespers. He sank into despondency and died, 1285.
Eventually, at the intercession of King Edward I. of England, the young prince, Charles the Lame, was released. He swore to pay 20,000 marks, and surrender his two sons as hostages till the sum was paid, and allow the claim to the Two Sicilies to drop. But no sooner was he freed than Pope Nicolas IV. annulled the treaty, released Charles of his oaths, and crowned him with his own hands. Charles did not surrender his sons, nor pay his ransom.
“This decree of Nicolas,” says Dean Milman, “was the most monstrous exercise of the absolving power which had ever been advanced in the face of Christendom: it struck at the root of all chivalrous honour, at the faith of all treaties.”
But Charles was fain to content himself with his counties of Provence and Anjou, and not allow himself to be drawn or impelled into wars by the Pope. In Provence he found wounds to staunch, ruins to repair.
It is highly to his credit that he frankly accepted this difficult and not very brilliant part. He avoided war, paid his father’s debts, re-established his finances, and acquired in return the nickname of Charles the Miserly. After a reign of twenty-four years he died in 1309.
Grasse had been in the diocese of Antibes, but in 1243 Pope Innocent IV. transferred the seat of the bishop from Antibes to Grasse, on account of the unhealthiness of the former, and its liability to be plundered by the Moorish corsairs.
The bishops of Grasse were not in general men of great mark. Perhaps the least insignificant of them was Godeau.
Antoine Godeau, born at Dreux in 1605, lived in Paris with a kinsman named Couart; and as he thought he had the poetic afflatus, he composed verses and read them to his kinsman. Couart took the lyrics to some literary friends, and they were appreciated. Godeau went on writing, and a little coterie was formed for listening to his compositions; and this was the nucleus out of which grew the Academie Française. Couart introduced Godeau to Mlle. de Rambouillet, and he became her devoted admirer, and a frequenter of her social gatherings. The lady says, in one of her letters to Voiture: “There is here a man smaller than yourself by a cubit, and, I protest, a thousand times more gallant.” Godeau, who entered holy orders and became an abbé, through his devotion to Mlle. de Rambouillet, obtained the nickname of “Julie’s Dwarf.” Voiture was jealous of him, begrudged the favour of the lady who dispensed the literary reputations of the day, and he addressed a rondeau to Godeau:—
“Quittez l’amour, ce n’est votre métier,
Faites des vers, traduisez le psautier;
Votre façon d’écrire est fort jolie;
Mais gardez-vous de faire folie,
Ou je saurais, ma foi, vous châtier