For the tale goes that Robert knew better than any other the cause of that sudden illness which carried off his elder brother, Charles Martel, King of Hungary, when, towards the close of their father's life, he came to Naples to arrange for the succession. Stories of mediæval poisonings are to be received with caution. No man who glances round Naples to-day, swept and garnished as it has been by advancing science, will find it hard to understand how swiftly disease may--nay, must have struck in those crowded dirty streets six centuries ago. Yet Robert was believed to have seized the throne by fratricide. This Church of Santa Chiara was his atonement for the crime, and by its high altar he sleeps for ever, robed as a monk and throned as a king, beneath a monument of rare beauty, on which Petrarch wrote the jingling epitaph, "Cernite Robertum, regem virtute refertum." "Chock full of virtue." Such was Petrarch's judgment on King Robert dead, and doubtless he believed it, for the King's Court was splendid, poets and scholars were held in honour, and Florentines especially. Innocent or guilty, Robert ruled with a magnificence which makes his reign the one bright spot in the troubled history of the Anjou sovereigns; and posterity, which has little good to say of any of them, remembers gratefully that he procured the laurel crown for Petrarch, and gave his protection to that rake Boccaccio. Let us go in and see his church. It is rectangular, and has no aisles, while a long range of chapels upon either hand recall irresistibly the quirk recorded of King Robert's son, when his father, proud of the progress which the church was making, brought him in to admire its fair proportions. The graceless lad gazed round, and it struck him that the chapels were not unlike so many mangers. So when the King pressed him for his opinion he remarked airily that the church reminded him of a stable, whereupon the King said angrily, "God grant, my son, that you be not the first to eat in those stalls!" It was a prophetic speech, and one which must have returned many times on the King's memory, for the historian Giannone assures us that the first train of royal mourners who entered the new church were following the coffin of this very lad, King Robert's firstborn, and the hope of the realm.