It can now be understood why he was, even from the time of his first exploits, so fond of pompous titles. After calling himself “Consul of the Widows,” and “Consul of Rome,” he adopted the title of Tribune, which afterwards became “Clement and Severe Tribune,” the contradiction being nothing to him, so long as he could suggest the name of Severinus Boethius, whose arms he had also adopted; and, not long after this (referring, with that kind of play upon words so dear to the insane and to idiots, to his nomination in August), “August Tribune.”[408] We can also comprehend that, stripped of all his power, an exile and a prisoner, he should have turned to the prosaic Emperor Charles IV., telling him his dreams, as we shall see, with complete confidence in their reality. At Rome, after his first fall (which was, perhaps, one cause of the indulgence with which he was treated by the pope), there had been a new outburst of disorder, which a tribune who has remained almost unknown--one Baroncelli--in vain endeavoured to stem. Nor did Rienzi himself meet with any better success on his return, shorn of his ancient _prestige_, and without that youthful audacity which, united to a maniacal erethism, had increased the strength of the poor scholar a hundredfold; and he was overthrown by the populace themselves. For men, whether madmen of genius or complete geniuses, have no power against the natural force of things. Marcel had no success at Paris, though he had far greater forces at his disposal, and was allied with the Jacquerie of the country districts. But Rienzi could not even succeed in realizing the prodigies of insane genius, since he had by this time fallen into true dementia. It appears that in the early stages of his government he was a sober and temperate man, so much so that he had to make an effort to find time to eat. From this he passed to the opposite extreme of continued orgies and actual dipsomania, which he excused by alleging the effects of a poison which he believed to have been administered to him in prison.[409] I believe, on the contrary, that this phenomenon was occasioned by the progress of his malady, since we see that it began in the early months of his first tribunate,[410] and since slow poisons produce emaciation, not obesity, in their victims. “At every hour he was eating dainties and drinking; he observed neither time nor order; he mixed Greek with Flavian wine; he drank new wine at any hour. He used to drink too much.” “Moreover he had now become enormously stout, he had a face like a friar, round and jovial as that of a bonze, a ruddy complexion, and a long beard. His eyes were white, and suddenly he would turn red as blood, and his eyes would become inflamed.”