It ended in Count Charles’s head being quite turned by the Empress’s flattery; so that he not only begged her to remain his guest for so long as she pleased, but also gave orders for the gates of the castle to be left open so that she might be accessible at all times to her officers, civil and military, that were encamped outside the walls with her army. But the fatuous credulity of Count Charles was soon undeceived. At a late hour of the following night, the gates of the fortress being still open, and its rightful inmates sound asleep for the most part, the foolish old Count was suddenly awakened from his slumbers by the Empress of Constantinople, who, followed by several of her soldiers, entered his room, a dagger in her hand, and, advancing to his couch, seized him by the throat. “O accursed traitor, you are now going to be punished as you deserve!” she cried. And when he begged only mercy for his son—thinking the Empress had in mind to slay them both lest at any time they should conspire against the kingship of her son, Louis of Taranto—and offered to put her in possession of his entire treasury if only she would spare the life of his adored son. But to all his entreaties she answered only that he must prepare to part for ever from his son, whom she had decided to send away to the castle of Malfi; and that as for Count Charles himself, the probability was that he would end his days in the dungeons of that of Saint Agatha of the Goths. Prior to pronouncing these sentences, however, she had compelled him to show her where his immense treasures were concealed behind the wall of his bed-chamber—a veritable Aladdin’s cave of gold in bars and in plate and of precious stones. The chronicler, Domenico Gravina, relates how that, a few days later, Count Charles was found dead in his prison, the lips covered with a bloody froth and the wrists all gnawed away—so we may suppose him to have died either of rage or of some corrosive poison; or, very likely, of both. And not long afterwards, his son Bertrand, in despair, hanged himself from a grating in the vault at Malfi, into which he had been transferred by order of Catherine of Taranto. But retribution as condign as it was merited was about to fall upon the head of that wicked woman.