After this, full of gratitude to Heaven for his narrow escape from perdition, Fiacre became a preacher, and renouncing his sword and buckle, his high estate and place, he quitted secretly, in the night, his royal home, among the dark mountains of Lorn, and became a teacher and preacher of the gospels. Visiting France when Clotaire II., son of the infamous and lewd queen Bredegonda, was king, he proceeded throughout all the land, leading the wild Franks to God, and working marvellous miracles by the way. At Toppaia, in Florence, he delivered a certain rich man of a devil which possessed him, but which immediately possessed his wife, who thereupon became frantic, and hanged herself upon an orange-tree. In memory of this riddance--whether of the wife, or the devil, or both, the chronicler doth not say--the rich man founded a chapel in honour of St. Fiacre, and the Dukes of Florence have since endowed and adorned it nobly. The legendary then proceeded to state how St. Fiacre was assailed from time to time by the beautiful spirit of the fountain, which appeared to him, ever and anon, from the waters and wayside wells near which he passed, for he lived in forests and lonely places, subsisting on roots and herbs; and thus he resisted more temptations than ever did honest St. Anthony of old: and now, when his father, king Ewen, died in Lorn, in 622, as Camerarius and Bishop Leslie tell us, St. Fiacre was visited by a train of chiefs and priests from Scotland, summoning him to the throne; but he answered, that 'for the inheritance of an eternal crown, he had renounced all earthly claims,' and, turning away, continued the task at which they found him--covering the roof of his hut with turf. So his brother Ferquhard was chosen, in his place, King of Scotland, a prince who fell into the Pelagian heresy, and fought with his nobles, who threw him into a prison, where he perished miserably by casting himself upon his own sword. Meanwhile, St. Fiacre lived in peace at his solitary cell, in a deep forest at Brieul, in Brie, where a place had been assigned him by St. Fars, Bishop of Meaux. There, with his own hands, the pious prince cleared the ground of its old primeval oaks and sharp briars, and there he built a chapel to the Virgin, where he gave to prayer the hours that were not spent in the cultivation of his little garden, the proceeds of which he gave to the poor. There he died on the 30th of August, the feast of St. Rose, in the year 670, and there he was buried.