For poor Raoul never attained the calm assurance of the established Christianity of his day, nor came near to realizing the monkish ideals of Cluny and Citeaux. His book is full of dreadful visions, such as the one we have already described. He sees the powers of evil lurking and prowling after men, as lions that lie in wait for their prey. No Christian charity is found in him, no tenderness, no hope; only the spirit of revolt, of discontent, of disgust; superstitious fear and hallucinations chasing one another through his tortured mind, until, at last, with despairing appeals to the Divine pity, he falls into nervous crises which paralyse his mental and physical action. Nor was so terrible a state of mind then unnatural to any timid ones, whose temperament forbade them to shelter soul, as well as body, within the safe fold of the church. The events which Raoul himself describes as happening, within his own experience, here, in this district round Tournus, are such as might well wreck all but the strongest minds, or those fortified by an incorruptible faith in the good providence of God. Look at his picture of the famine of 1031, and you will cease to wonder that, in those days, men dreamed strange dreams. "Famine commenced to desolate the universe, and the human race was threatened with imminent destruction. The temperature (seasons) became so contrary that no fitting time was found to sow the land, none favourable to the harvest, chiefly on account of the water with which the fields were flooded. One would have said that the elements, enraged, had declared war on one another, when, they were, in fact, but obeying Divine vengeance in punishing the insolence of men.... This avenging scourge had first begun in the East; after having ravaged Greece, it passed to Italy, spread among the Gauls and spared not even the people of England. All men equally felt its attacks. The great, those of middle estate and the poor, all had their mouths equally famished, the same pallor was upon their foreheads; for even the violence of the great had given way at last to the common dearth. When they had fed on beasts and birds, that resource once exhausted, hunger was no less keenly felt, and, to appease it, men must needs resort to devouring corpses, or even, to escape death, uproot the trees in the woods, pluck the grass in the streams; but all was useless, for against the wrath of God there is no refuge save God Himself. Alas! must we believe it? Fury of hunger renewed those examples of atrocity so rare in history, and men devoured the flesh of men. The traveller, assaulted on the road, succumbed to the blows of his aggressors. His limbs were torn, grilled on the fire, and devoured. Others, flying their country to escape famine, received hospitality on the road, and their hosts slew them in the night that they might furnish food. Others lured children away with the offer of an egg or an apple, and immolated them to their hunger.