va who remained in their subjugated city. The two despots, the
bishop and the duke, who had seized the unhappy town, combined to crush
the gay and insubordinate spirit out of it. All this time, says
Bonivard, "they imprisoned, they scourged, they tortured, they beheaded,
they hung, so as it is pitiful to tell."

Meanwhile, the influential family friends of Bonivard, some of them high
in court favor, discovering that he was yet alive and in prison,
bestirred themselves to procure his liberation; and not in vain, for the
possession that had made him dangerous, the priory of St. Victor, having
been wrested from him, there was little harm that he could do. His
immediate successor in the priory, good Abbot de Montheron, had not
indeed long enjoyed the benefice. He had gone on business to Rome,
where certain Churchmen who admired his new benefice invited him (so
Bonivard tells the story) to a banquet _more Romano_, and gave him a
dose of the "cardinal powder," which operated so powerfully that it
purged the soul right out of the body. He left a paper behind him in
which, as a sign of remorse for his crime, he resigned all his rights in
the priory back to Bonivard.[9] But the pope, whose natural affection
toward his cousins and nephews overflowed freely in the form of gifts of
what did not belong to him, bestowed the living on a cousin, who
commuted it for an annual revenue of six hundred and forty gold
crowns--a splendid revenue for those days--and poor Bonivard, whose sole
avocation was that of gentleman, found it difficult to carry on that
line of business with neither capital nor income. He came back, some
five years later, into possession of the priory. They were five years of
exciting changes, of fierce terrorism and oppression at Geneva, followed
by a respite, a rallying of the spirit of the people, an actual recovery
of some of the old rights of the city, and, presently, by the beginning
of some signs of religious light coming from the direction of Germany.
And the way in which Bonivard at last got reinstalled into his convent
is curiously illustrative of the strange condition of society in those
times. One May morning in 1527 the little town was all agog with strange
news from Rome. The Eternal City had been taken by storm, sacked,
pillaged, burned! The Roman bishop was prisoner to the Roman emperor, if
indeed he was alive at all. In fact, there was a rumor--dreadful, no
doubt, but attended by vast consolations--that t