Erelong another scene was enacted beyond the Alps. The miserable John of Savoy lay at Pignerol on his death-bed. Given during his life to the pleasures of the table and of debauchery, he was now paying the penalty of his misdeeds. He suffered from the gout, he was covered with filthy ulcers, he was little more than skin and bone. He had thought only of enjoying life and oppressing others; he had plotted the ruin of a city of which he should have been the pastor; he now received the wages of his iniquity. Near the bed where this prelate lay languishing stood his coadjutor, who had hastened from Geneva to Pignerol. With eyes fixed upon the dying man, Pierre sought to buoy him up with false hopes; but John was not to be deceived. Soon the dreaded moment approached; an historian, whom Romish writers quote habitually with favour,[303] describes all that was horrible in the end of this great sinner. Hirelings surrounded the dying bishop, and turned their eyes from time to time on him and on the objects they might be able to carry off as soon as he was insensible. Pierre de la Baume contemplated the progress of the disease with ill-dissembled satisfaction, eagerly anticipating the moment when, relieved from his hypocritical cares, he would enter into possession of all that he had coveted for so many years. Jean Portier, the dying man’s secretary, the confidant of his successor, watched that criminal impatience, that sordid cupidity, and that perverse meanness, which he already hoped to turn to his advantage. The shadows of the victims of the expiring man were traced on the walls of the room by an avenging hand, and when at last the priests desired to administer extreme unction, he imagined they were covering him with blood. They presented him the crucifix; he seemed to recognise the features of Berthelier, and asked with a wild look: ‘Who has done that?’ Far from embracing with respect and submission this emblem of eternal salvation, he rejected it with horror, heaping foul abuses on it. Blasphemy and insult mingled with the foam that whitened his trembling lips. Thus wrote an author less Romanist, we perceive, than is imagined.[304] Repentance succeeded despair in the guilty soul of the prelate before his death. Turning a last look on his adopted son, he said to him: ‘I wished to give the principality of Geneva to Savoy ... and to attain my object, I have put many innocent persons to death.’ The blood that he had shed cried in his ears: Navis, Blanchet, and Berthelier rose up before him. Pursued by remorse, weighed down by the fear of a Judge, he would have desired to save La Baume from the faults he had committed himself. ‘If you obtain this bishopric,’ continued he, ‘I entreat you not to tread in my footsteps. On the contrary, defend the franchises of the city.... In the sufferings I endure, I recognise the vengeance of the Almighty.... I pray to God for pardon from the bottom of my heart.... In purgatory ... God will