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The immediate effect of Savonarola’s teaching was that the citizens of Florence began suddenly to lead lives of strict simplicity, renouncing frivolity, feasting, and gambling, and even dressing with austere plainness, discarding their jewels and ornaments. The carnival of 1497 was celebrated by “a bonfire of the vanities” in the great square of the town. Priceless manuscripts and precious folios were hurled from the windows into the street and collected in carts with other articles by troops of boys dressed in white. A huge pyramid twenty feet high was erected in the Piazza. At the bottom of it were stacked masks and dresses and wigs; on the step above, mirrors, puffs, curling-tongs, hair-pins, powder and paint. Still higher were lutes, mandolines, cards, chessmen, balls, dice; then came drawings and priceless pictures and statues in wood and colored wax of gods and heroes. Towering higher than anything else, on the top a figure of Satan was enthroned, a monstrous puppet, filled with gunpowder and sulphur, with goat’s legs and a hairy skin. At nightfall a great procession accompanied Savonarola to the spot. Four monks with torches set fire to the pyramid, and as it crackled and blazed the people danced and yelled and screamed round it, while drums and trumpets sounded and bells pealed from the church towers. This was the very crude method by which Savonarola sought to abolish the luxury and the vanity which he considered were degrading the lives of the people.