The brave old ascetic accepted the challenge, and at the end of eight days decided that things might well remain as they were.[87] The rule of Cluny was more severe than his own. Under the government of St. Hugues, grown old and gray, Cluny had reached the summit of worldly power, and of moral influence; with him, her best days passed. On the 29th April, 1109, the priests, loudly lamenting, were gathered round the body of their dead saint. Clothed in his sacerdotal robes, he lay, for three days, in the church, and a great crowd of lords and ladies, of bourgeois, woodsmen, labourers from field and vineyard, women and children, came to kiss his feet, and lift his raiment to their lips. On the day before, Bernard de Varennes heard Saint Denis the Areopagite announce to him, in a vision, that, if he wished to see again, for the last time, his friend and abbot, Hugues of Cluny, he must haste to the dying man. Bernard obeyed the summons, but, on his arrival, fell sick and remained three days in a lethargy. When he came to himself, he said to the monks around him, "Unhappy man that I am. I had come to salute my abbot, and he is dead before the grace is granted me. But what I might not see with the eyes of the body, I saw with the eyes of the spirit. I saw the dwellers in Heaven descend among men, and the Mother of God, brighter than the morning star, standing in the midst of the monks around the death-bed of Seigneur Hugues. At the moment of the passing of his soul, spirits, armed with arrows, flew to seize upon it, but the Mother of Mercy, raising her hand, struck them with terror, and put them to flight, as the wind scatters the autumn leaves. Martin, the pearl of priests, Benedict the sun of abbots, at the head of the heavenly cohorts, bore the soul of Hugues into a fair and fertile vineyard, that there it might rest awhile. Hugues, perceiving me in this place, addressed me thus: 'Eat, dear friend, these bunches of white grapes, eat and rest with me awhile; not for long am I here. When my feet are freed from the swelling and the dust of a long earthly pilgrimage, I shall pass into the home that God hath prepared for me throughout eternity. Recommend to Pons, my successor, to treasure humility and innocence, to forget his own needs for those of others, and to follow my example of monastic rule.'" Pons did not follow Hugues' example of monastic rule. When his vanity, weakness, and love of pomp had alienated a portion of his following, he resigned his abbacy and retired. His successor, Hugues II. held office only a few months, when the task of presiding over the destinies of Cluny passed to Pierre le Vénérable, the last of the great abbots, a name that already links us in memory with him whose destiny it was, by a return to simplicity, as a source of strength, to rival, and, for a time, to exceed the power of Cluny. I speak of St. Bernard, the champion of the Cistercian order. We shall meet him again at Citeaux and elsewhere.