The viceroyalty of Naples equalled in pomp and extravagance the Court of Madrid, and what wealth was found more than could be used for Naples, was shipped off and transported to Spain, leaving the Neapolitans crushed with poverty, neglected and groaning under the haughty tyranny of the delegated power. Recently the viceroy of the Spanish king, Philip IV., the Duke of Arcos, who wanted more and more funds for carrying on the war with France, had bethought himself of levying a tax on fruit and vegetables. It was but Mazarin’s Toisé over again, ever for Jacques Bonhomme and his Italian equivalent to keep things spinning for the honour and glory of a spendthrift nobility, while they robbed the country of their young men, to draft them as soldiers to Spain. In the course of a century, millions of ducats had been paid from one source alone, into the Spanish treasury. These wrongs were stirring the indignation of the Neapolitans to seething heat, and to the people Aniello spoke aloud and with fiery eloquence of the iniquities. To add fuel to the flame, his young wife—or, as other chroniclers tell, his deaf and dumb sister, living at Portici—had been arrested and cast into prison for having in her possession some contraband flour, and Aniello had been made to pay to obtain her release. A disturbance in the market-place over the sale of a basket of figs, upon which the unfortunate man who had brought them for sale, was finally required to pay the imposts, ignited the smouldering rage of the oppressed people, and at the head of a troop of thousands of men, women and boys, who wrought destruction on every side as they went, Masaniello forced a way into the viceroy’s palace. There with the help and counsel of the Archbishop of Naples, a man popular and respected, the demand for exemption of taxation on all articles of food was accorded. The triumph of Masaniello was complete; but the excitement and the adulation not alone of the people for whose rights he had so successfully striven, but of the viceroy himself, proved too much for him. His mind gave way, he began to act like a maniac; he complained of a sensation like boiling lead in his head. Some of the wretched dregs of the people he had so nobly served, took umbrage at his wild conduct, and the shot from an arquebuse, in the hands of one of the mob thus turned on him, pierced him to the heart. There was nothing left but to regret the heroic man, and he was laid to rest, after his young life’s fitful fever, with great pomp and ceremony in the church of S. Maria del Carmine. [Illustration: S^T. EVREMOND. Né en 1613. Mort en 1703. Aug. S^t Aubin _To face page 112._]