Michelet, in his Histoire de France, notes a strange irony of fate in the year 1398. We then find the Emperor coming solemnly to hold a series of conferences with the King of France concerning the Papacy. The Emperor, Wenceslas, was a confirmed drunkard, and could do no business but quite early in the morning. The King, Charles VI, was seldom sane, but there was most sense in him later in the day when he had eaten and drunken. The Pope (or anti-Pope), sober and sane enough in other ways, was less sane politically, less able to listen to reason where his own power and dignity were concerned, than either the drunkard or the lunatic. For this was that Benedict XIII who finally guttered out like a spent candle 26 years later, cursing and accursed to the very last, in his little Spanish mountain fortress of Peñiscola. This strange colloquy came half-way through the Great Schism; but the same tragi-comic flavour had hung about it from the first. Indeed, if we look at the surface only, history may sometimes seem rather a comedy than a tragedy. When any change has been brewing sufficiently long, the slightest incident, or even the most ridiculous, may revolutionize the world between one day and the next. Icebergs drift southwards, no man knows how long, in the waters which gradually sap their base; until some day, in the twinkling of an eye, the vast mass turns upside down.