In the meantime the Directory found it a very difficult matter to dispose of its august prisoner. In its fear and cruelty it strove to induce the Grand Duke to drive the Pope out of his dominions, to which demand the noble sovereign answered that as he had not brought the Pope to Tuscany it was not for him to drive the Holy Father away. This generous resistance was immediately punished by the invasion of Etruria. In the beginning of the year 1799 the Russian and Austrian armies were already menacing Italy; the Directory thereupon found it expedient to transfer their illustrious captive to France. Hence, on April 1st, despite the paralysis of one of his limbs, he was hurried away to Parma, where he could rest only a few days. On the thirteenth the journey was again taken up, although the physicians protested the great danger of proceeding while the Pope remained in so feeble a condition. The commissioner, upon learning the opinions of the physicians, entered the apartment of the Pontiff, and there dragging the coverings from the bed, inspected the limbs, examined the ulcers that had collected, and proclaimed brutally: "The Pope must go on, dead or alive." The journey now led through Northern Italy, and across the Alps. On the evening of July 14th, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the cortege arrived finally at Valence, in France. The Pope was lodged in the citadel, in the governor's apartments, near the convent of the Cordeliers, which served as the prison of thirty-two priests. In this place he died August 29, 1799, in the eighty-first year of his age. CHAPTER III. Opening of the Nineteenth Century.