In the towns, the narrow dark streets gave the assassin his opportunity, whether a mistaken one or not. Readers of Cellini's autobiography will recall his remark that he trained himself to turn corners wide and may have noted it as merely characteristic; but before Cellini's book was in print, we find the French tourist, Payen of Meaux, writing of the Venetians, "Quand ils marchent la nuit, ils ne tournent jamais court pour entrer dans une Rue; mais ils tiennent le milieu, afin d'éviter la rencontre de ceux qui voudroient les attendre." Supposing, however, that a foreigner died in peace, what happened to the money and chattels with him at the moment? According to Zeiler, in Aragon the practice was to notify the authorities at his native place and hold the goods at the disposal of the legal heirs for a year, after which limit unclaimed property was handed to the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Pity to be employed in the redemption of captives. In Rome the custom was for the servant to take the dead master's clothes. In France the State took absolutely everything by the "droit d'aubaine," which was the law wherever feudalism had established itself, though sometimes in abeyance; in Poland it seems to have been completely so.[153] The strictness, on the contrary, with which it was enforced in France is well illustrated by the fate of the library of Sir Kenelm Digby, who died at Paris in 1665. It was forfeited to Louis XIV by the "droit d'aubaine"; he gave it away; the new owner sold it to a relative of the late owner for ten thousand crowns. This right, based as it was on the same "right to pillage" under which the Jews suffered in the Middle Ages,[154] brings out very clearly one fact which was always liable to affect a traveller's finances, namely, that in so far as he was a traveller, he had no legal privileges. Two Dutch gentlemen,[155] for instance, were at Paris at a time when war between Holland and France suddenly became imminent. They found the financial agents forbidden to pay them on bills of exchange or letters of credit, and their goods were temporarily confiscated. It was the ordinary procedure of the time. Here again is obvious the advantage of going in the train of an ambassador; the latter's rights were the fullest protection that an alien could acquire, except mercantile ones at their best. Yet even these ambassadorial rights lacked so much of the fullness and the clearness that they possess to-day that they were not put forward in a modern form, not even in theory, until the treatise of Grotius on the subject published in 1625.[156]