There was some danger in supporting such an argument; also Benedict
XI. was pope but eight months. One day a veiled woman, a pretended
lay-sister of Sainte-Petronille at Perugia, came to him while he
was at table, offering him a basket of figs. Did it conceal an
asp like Cleopatra's? The fact is that on the morrow the Holy
See was vacant.

Then Philippe le Bel had a strange idea; so strange that it must,
at first, have seemed an hallucination.

It was to withdraw the papacy from Rome, to install it in France,
to put it in jail, and force it to coin money for his profit.

The reign of Philippe le Bel was the advent of gold. Gold! that
was the sole and unique god of this king who had slapped a pope.
Saint Louis had a priest, the worthy Abbe Suger, for minister;
Philippe le Bel had two bankers, two Florentines, Biscio and
Musiato.

Do you expect, dear reader, that we are about to fall into the
philosophical commonplace of anathematizing gold? You are mistaken.

In the thirteenth century gold meant progress. Until then nothing
was known but the soil. Gold was the soil converted into money,
the soil mobilized, exchangeable, transportable, divisible,
subtilized, spiritualized, as it were.

So long as the soil was not represented by gold, man, like the
god Thermes, that landmark of the fields, had his feet imprisoned