On his journey Hus was everywhere welcomed heartily and at Biberach even triumphantly. He reached Constance, a beautiful city of fifty thousand inhabitants, on Nov. 3, and found lodgings with Fida, "a second widow of Sarepta," in St. Paul St.,--now Hus St.--near the Schnetz Gate, not far from the abode of Pope John XXIII. On the same day came the historic and notorious safe-conduct of Sigismund--"The honorable Master John Hus we have taken under the protection and guardianship of ourselves and of the Holy Empire. We enjoin upon you to allow him to pass, to stop, to remain and to return, freely and without any hindrance whatever; and you will, as in duty bound, provide for him and for his, whenever it shall be needed, secure and safe conduct, to the honor and dignity of our Majesty." Dated at Speyer, October 18, 1414. [Illustration: HOUSE WITH TABLET WHERE HUS LODGED AND THE SCHNETZ GATE.] John XXIII with piratical pomposity promised the papal protection: "Even if Hus had killed my own brother, he shall be safe in Constance." With the Emperor Sigismund came twenty princes and one hundred and forty counts. The Pope had been a pirate; at Bologna he had plundered and oppressed his people and sold licenses to usurers, gamblers, and prostitutes; his cruelty thinned the population; in the first year as legate at Bologna he outraged two hundred maidens, wives, or widows, and a multitude of nuns; at least so Catholic historians say. With this holy father there came to the Council twenty-nine cardinals, seven patriarchs, over three hundred bishops and archbishops, four thousand priests, two hundred and fifty university professors, besides Greeks and Turks, Armenians and Russians, Africans and Ethiopians, in all from sixty to a hundred thousand strangers, and thirty thousand horses. In order to amuse these godly fathers amid their grave labors there came seventeen hundred artists, dancers, actors, jugglers, musicians and--prostitutes, seven hundred public ones, not counting the private ones. Hus wrote: "Would that you could see this Council, which is called most holy and infallible; truly you would see great wickedness, so that I have been told by Suabians that Constance could not in thirty years be purged of the sins which the Council has committed in the city." These men of sin, who kissed the toe of Pope John XXIII, a man of sin, burned the saintly Hus; no wonder he likened them to the scarlet whore of the Revelation. At one stage of the holy and infallible Council these learned fathers used arguments that strike us as rather striking: a cardinal assaulted an archbishop; a patriarch hit a protonotary; a Spanish prelate hurled an Englishman into the mud; the English were caught in arms to assault Pierre d'Ailly, the Cardinal of Cambray. As members of the Church militant they were certainly fighting a good fight.