sent a letter to Berne and Fribourg requesting that in view of the count's advanced age and many adversities, he should be permitted to repurchase and enjoy his lost principality for the brief remainder of his days. A long memorial from the count accompanied the emperor's letter and announced that with the aid of his new and powerful friends, he would soon be in a position to buy back Gruyere. He ended with an appeal for compassion on his bald head and his white beard. With respectful attention to the august request of of the emperor, Berne and Fribourg replied that no provision had been made for the repurchase of Gruyere, and detailed the conditions by which they had acquired the property. The emperor thereupon declined to renew his recommendations, and after this final defeat, Count Michel, deprived of his last hope of royal or imperial assistance, the neediest and loneliest of adventurers, lived a hand-to-mouth existence with the faithful domestic who had followed him since the day he had departed from Gruyere. Nursing always the same chimera of some day returning triumphant to his lost province, he pursued his peregrinations, finding a final refuge in the Burgundian chateau of Thalemy, belonging to his cousin Francois de Vergy, where he died at last in March of the year 1576. On a day in May a messenger from Burgundy announced his decease to his uncle the protonataire Dom Pierre de Gruyere. With tolling of bells the news was proclaimed, and a month later, before a great throng of people from all parts of the country, a memorial service was held in the church at Gruyere. "_Desolatione magna desolata est Grueria, ploratus et ulleratus auditi sunt in Grueria, et in omnibus finibus eius._" With such a text the last Gruyere prelate celebrated the honors due to the last count of his line. "Desolate with a great desolation," in truth were the people who, bitterly weeping, lamented the loss of their happy independence, preserved through so many long centuries under the kindly rule of their beloved counts. A halo of melancholy romance had gathered through the popular traditions about the figure of Count Michel, so that he has strangely become the typical representative of the beauty, strength and valor of his far worthier predecessors. Conflicting reports about the place of his death and entombment, strange tales of his reappearance, have made him a second Boabdil, unburied, always returning to the beloved home of his youth. An hallucinated exile in life, his ghost, hallucinated, ever returning, haunts his lost and lovely Gruyere. CHAPTER X GRUYERE WITHOUT ITS COUNTS