After months of fighting the King’s troops stormed the fortress, and Pierre de Luna saved himself by means of secret passages and staircases leading to a vault from whence he got to the river side, and escaping across the Rhone, sought refuge under the protection of the King of Spain in his native country. Here, with two vicars, or priests, he kept up the pretence of being still the Pope, and each day from the top of a tower he blessed his distant friends and cursed his enemies. At his death his two followers, both of whom he had made cardinals, met in conclave, and one elected the other “Pope.” The farce of this schism was ended by both of the exiled cardinals being bribed into reconciliation to Rome; one being made Archbishop of Toledo, and the other Archbishop of Seville. It was during this siege that the fire broke out by which the Salle Brulle got its name; but there is another story which attributes the origin of this name to the brutality of one of the Papal Legates, when, inviting a number of the leading citizens of the town to a great feast in the chamber, he left them in the middle of the banquet and blew up the happy party with gunpowder. The reason for this “Gunpowder treason” was, that a near relative of the Legate had been assassinated by some [Illustration: A TYPE of AVIGNON.] citizens for taking liberties with a young maiden of good family belonging to the town. Whichever version is correct, the name has stuck tenaciously to this chamber. There is another tragedy associated with this Palace which is famous for evermore. The massacre, which took place in the Glacière, or Ice Tower, one awful night in the middle of November 1791, at the outbreak of the Revolution, set a fiendish example to the lawless brutality which, in 1793, expressed itself in a similar way in the Abbaye Prison in Paris. Jourdain Coupetête, a fierce revolutionary, had earned his nickname two years previously by decapitating the corpses of the two Body-guards in the Marble Court of the Palace at Versailles, at the “insurrection of women.” In June 1791 he was leading a body of nearly 15,000 men, who called themselves the Brigands of Avignon. Jourdain had dubbed himself “General,” and with his associates was the terror of the Royalists. L’Escuyer, one of the Patriot leaders, accompanied by the crowd, entered the Church of the Cordeliers to hear Mass, or to mock at it. The aristocratic Papists (the Church and Royalist faction) resented this, and their hot southern blood being roused, the two parties came to blows. In the mêlée L’Escuyer was killed, and this roused the Patriots to demand an inquest. Impatient of delay, the Brigands under Jourdain took possession of the Papal Palace, and there imprisoned some hundred and thirty persons--men, women, and children--in the dungeons of the Glacière Tower.