The castles over on the right bank, Montfaucon and Roquemaure, are of the normal painful sort again. Roquemaure is a crooked, narrow, up-and-down old dirty town, where old customs and old costumes and old forms of speech still live on; and, also, its people have a very pretty taste in the twisting and perverting of historic fact into picturesque tradition--as is shown by the way in which they have rearranged the unpleasant details of the death of Pope Clement V. into a bit of melodramatic moral decoration for their own town. Their ingeniously compiled legend runs in this wise: Clement's death in the castle of Roquemaure occurred while he was on his way homeward from the Council of Vienne; where--keeping with the King the bargain which had won for him the Papal throne--he had abolished the Order of the Templars and had condemned their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, to be burned alive. When that sentence was passed, the Grand Master, in turn, had passed sentence of death upon the Pope: declaring that within forty days they should appear together, in the spirit, to try again that cause misjudged on earth before the Throne of God. And the forty days were near ended when Pope Clement came to Roquemaure--with the death-grip already so strong upon him that even the little farther journey to Avignon was impossible, and he could but lay him down there and die. While yet the breath scarce was out of his body, his servants fell to fighting over his belongings with a brutal fierceness: in the midst of which fray a lighted torch fell among and fired the hangings of the bed whereon lay the dead Pope--and before any of the pillagers would give the rest an advantage by stopping in their foul work to extinguish the flames his body was half-consumed. And so was Clement burned in death even as the Grand Master had been burned in life; and so was executed upon him the Grand Master's summons to appear before the Judgment Seat on high! It is interesting to note that this tradition does very little violence to the individual facts of the case, and yet rearranges them in such a fashion that they are at sixes and sevens with the truth as a whole. When, in my lighter youth, I entered upon what I fancied was antiquarian research I was hot for the alluring theory that oral tradition is a surer preserver of historic fact than is written record; and as I was not concerned with antiquities of a sort upon which my pretty borrowed theory could be tested I got along with it very well. But I am glad now to cite this capital instance in controversion of my youthful second-hand belief--because it entirely accords with my more mature conviction that oral tradition, save as a tenacious preserver of place-names, is not to be trusted at all. And as unsupported written record rarely is to be trusted either, it would seem that a certain amount of reason was at the root of King David's hasty generalization as to the untruthfulness of mankind.