After that King Louis rode away with all his army from Aversa to Naples, being met on the way by a large deputation of nobles and citizens, of whom he took no notice, refusing to acknowledge their greeting or to ride beneath a canopy they had provided for his entry into the capital. On arriving in Naples the King at once gave himself up to the work of vengeance. The first to die was Donna Cancia, who, ever since the death of the other regicides, had been lying in prison; she was burned alive in the Mercato. Soon after Cancia’s death the King ordered the arrest of the Count of Squillace, Godfrey of Marsano, promising to spare him if he would deliver up one of his relations, a certain Conrad of Catanzaro, accused of having been among those privy to the murder of Andrew. To this infamy Squillace consented, saving his life by betraying Conrad to the Hungarian authorities, who had him broken alive, as is related, upon a wheel studded with razor-blades—but I incline to doubt this for more reasons than one. But instead of assuaging the rage of King Louis, these monstrous executions seem only to have filled him with a further appetite for blood. As during the usurpation of power by Charles of Durazzo after King Andrew’s murder, so now executions multiplied to such an extent that they threatened soon to become the principal medium of government; just as four centuries and a half later, in the time of suppression of 1799, there set in an epidemic of frantic denunciation, the general terror making of society a hot-bed of the basest passions and motives—avarice, cowardice, and hate. And soon the people began to think how they might rid them of the ghastly incubus that had come to prey upon them in the person of the vampire-monarch from Hungary. CHAPTER XIV END OF JOAN’S CAREER In those days of the King of Hungary’s assize in Naples Queen Joan reached her county of Provence and began to travel across it from Nice, where she had landed, towards Avignon. On coming to the town of Aix, however, to her astonishment and perplexity, her journey was interrupted by the townspeople, who, albeit they received her with every mark of respect, yet set a guard about the castle of the place, the Château d’Arnaud, in which she stayed; and refused to let her issue thence until, as they said, they should have had word from Avignon—but in regard to what matter, they would not tell her at once.