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Rh "This decree of Nicolas," says Dean Milman, "was the most monstrous exercise of the absolving power which had ever been advanced in the face of Christendom: it struck at the root of all chivalrous honour, at the faith of all treaties."

But Charles was fain to content himself with his counties of Provence and Anjou, and not allow himself to be drawn or impelled into wars by the Pope. In Provence he found wounds to staunch, ruins to repair.

It is highly to his credit that he frankly accepted this difficult and not very brilliant part. He avoided war, paid his father's debts, re-established his finances, and acquired in return the nickname of Charles the Miserly. After a reign of twenty-four years he died in 1309.

Grasse had been in the diocese of Antibes, but in 1243 Pope Innocent IV. transferred the seat of the bishop from Antibes to Grasse, on account of the unhealthiness of the former, and its liability to be plundered by the Moorish corsairs. The bishops of Grasse were not in general men of great mark. Perhaps the least insignificant of them was Godeau.

Antoine Godeau, born at Dreux in 1605, lived in Paris with a kinsman named Couart; and as he thought he had the poetic afflatus he composed verses and read them to his kinsman. Couart took the lyrics to some literary friends, and they were appreciated. Godeau went on writing, and a little coterie was formed for listening to his compositions; and this was the nucleus out of which grew the Academic Francaise. Couart introduced Godeau to Mile, de Rambouillet, and he became her devoted admirer, and a frequenter of her social gatherings. The lady says, in one of her