At this point Andronicus and his companions reached the palace, only to discover that there were no royal troops to defend the throne. In impotent rage Andronicus snatched a bow, and, from one of the towers or balconies of the palace which overlooked the square, sent a few arrows into the crowd, but they burst into the palace, and he returned in haste to his galley. With his twelve-year-old wife and his favourite, Maraptica, he made with all speed for the Black Sea, but his popularity had turned to hatred throughout the Empire, and he was dragged from the ship at the first port and sent in chains to Isaac. His right hand and eye were removed, and he was delivered to the vengeance of the mob, whose savage torture and execution of the adventurous prince must be read in the dead language in which they are described. The young daughter of Louis of France will come again upon the imperial stage at a later date. Already, in her thirteenth year, the widow of two murdered Emperors, she was destined to wed and lose an ambitious soldier, Branas, and for the third time, almost before she reached womanhood, weep over the bloody corpse of a husband. Nor were her sufferings to end here. We shall see that she remained in Constantinople, and it was reserved for her to witness the final tragedy which the chivalry of the West was to bring upon her adopted country. CHAPTER XIV EUPHROSYNE DUCÆNA The new Emperor, whom so extraordinary a chance had raised to the throne, was a worthless and entirely incompetent man of thirty summers, with the courage of a mouse, the vanity of a peacock, and the small cunning of a Byzantine mediocrity. Finlay contemptuously observes that he was “a fair specimen of the Byzantine nobility of his age.” He had accepted the control of an Empire which only a Hercules could save from ruin; and he proceeded to extort money from its distracted citizens for the building of palaces and decoration of churches, to surround himself with a hedge of actors and actresses which shut out the misery of his provinces, to cast the cares of government upon a crowd of praying and feasting monks, and to place his ideal of monarchy in the possession of endless wardrobes and the enjoyment of stupendous banquets.