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+Project Gutenberg's The Three Cities Trilogy: Rome, Vol. 2, by Zola
+#24 in our series by Emile Zola
+
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+Title: The Three Cities Trilogy: Rome, Vol. 2
+
+Author: Emile Zola
+
+Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8722]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on August 5, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE CITIES: ROME, VOL. 2 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny [dagnypg@yahoo.com]
+and David Widger [widger@cecomet.net]
+
+
+
+
+                          THE THREE CITIES
+
+
+
+                               ROME
+
+
+
+                                BY
+
+                            EMILE ZOLA
+
+
+
+                TRANSLATED BY ERNEST A. VIZETELLY
+
+
+
+                              PART II
+
+
+
+IV
+
+ON the afternoon of that same day Pierre, having leisure before him, at
+once thought of beginning his peregrinations through Rome by a visit on
+which he had set his heart. Almost immediately after the publication of
+"New Rome" he had been deeply moved and interested by a letter addressed
+to him from the Eternal City by old Count Orlando Prada, the hero of
+Italian independence and reunion, who, although unacquainted with him,
+had written spontaneously after a first hasty perusal of his book. And
+the letter had been a flaming protest, a cry of the patriotic faith still
+young in the heart of that aged man, who accused him of having forgotten
+Italy and claimed Rome, the new Rome, for the country which was at last
+free and united. Correspondence had ensued, and the priest, while
+clinging to his dream of Neo-Catholicism saving the world, had from afar
+grown attached to the man who wrote to him with such glowing love of
+country and freedom. He had eventually informed him of his journey, and
+promised to call upon him. But the hospitality which he had accepted at
+the Boccanera mansion now seemed to him somewhat of an impediment; for
+after Benedetta's kindly, almost affectionate, greeting, he felt that he
+could not, on the very first day and with out warning her, sally forth to
+visit the father of the man from whom she had fled and from whom she now
+asked the Church to part her for ever. Moreover, old Orlando was actually
+living with his son in a little palazzo which the latter had erected at
+the farther end of the Via Venti Settembre.
+
+Before venturing on any step Pierre resolved to confide in the Contessina
+herself; and this seemed the easier as Viscount Philibert de la Choue had
+told him that the young woman still retained a filial feeling, mingled
+with admiration, for the old hero. And indeed, at the very first words
+which he uttered after lunch, Benedetta promptly retorted: "But go,
+Monsieur l'Abbe, go at once! Old Orlando, you know, is one of our
+national glories--you must not be surprised to hear me call him by his
+Christian name. All Italy does so, from pure affection and gratitude. For
+my part I grew up among people who hated him, who likened him to Satan.
+It was only later that I learned to know him, and then I loved him, for
+he is certainly the most just and gentle man in the world."
+
+She had begun to smile, but timid tears were moistening her eyes at the
+recollection, no doubt, of the year of suffering she had spent in her
+husband's house, where her only peaceful hours had been those passed with
+the old man. And in a lower and somewhat tremulous voice she added: "As
+you are going to see him, tell him from me that I still love him, and,
+whatever happens, shall never forget his goodness."
+
+So Pierre set out, and whilst he was driving in a cab towards the Via
+Venti Settembre, he recalled to mind the heroic story of old Orlando's
+life which had been told him in Paris. It was like an epic poem, full of
+faith, bravery, and the disinterestedness of another age.
+
+Born of a noble house of Milan, Count Orlando Prada had learnt to hate
+the foreigner at such an early age that, when scarcely fifteen, he
+already formed part of a secret society, one of the ramifications of the
+antique Carbonarism. This hatred of Austrian domination had been
+transmitted from father to son through long years, from the olden days of
+revolt against servitude, when the conspirators met by stealth in
+abandoned huts, deep in the recesses of the forests; and it was rendered
+the keener by the eternal dream of Italy delivered, restored to herself,
+transformed once more into a great sovereign nation, the worthy daughter
+of those who had conquered and ruled the world. Ah! that land of whilom
+glory, that unhappy, dismembered, parcelled Italy, the prey of a crowd of
+petty tyrants, constantly invaded and appropriated by neighbouring
+nations--how superb and ardent was that dream to free her from such long
+opprobrium! To defeat the foreigner, drive out the despots, awaken the
+people from the base misery of slavery, to proclaim Italy free and Italy
+united--such was the passion which then inflamed the young with
+inextinguishable ardour, which made the youthful Orlando's heart leap
+with enthusiasm. He spent his early years consumed by holy indignation,
+proudly and impatiently longing for an opportunity to give his blood for
+his country, and to die for her if he could not deliver her.
+
+Quivering under the yoke, wasting his time in sterile conspiracies, he
+was living in retirement in the old family residence at Milan, when,
+shortly after his marriage and his twenty-fifth birthday, tidings came to
+him of the flight of Pius IX and the Revolution of Rome.* And at once he
+quitted everything, wife and hearth, and hastened to Rome as if summoned
+thither by the call of destiny. This was the first time that he set out
+scouring the roads for the attainment of independence; and how
+frequently, yet again and again, was he to start upon fresh campaigns,
+never wearying, never disheartened! And now it was that he became
+acquainted with Mazzini, and for a moment was inflamed with enthusiasm
+for that mystical unitarian Republican. He himself indulged in an ardent
+dream of a Universal Republic, adopted the Mazzinian device, "/Dio e
+popolo/" (God and the people), and followed the procession which wended
+its way with great pomp through insurrectionary Rome. The time was one of
+vast hopes, one when people already felt a need of renovated religion,
+and looked to the coming of a humanitarian Christ who would redeem the
+world yet once again. But before long a man, a captain of the ancient
+days, Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose epic glory was dawning, made Orlando
+entirely his own, transformed him into a soldier whose sole cause was
+freedom and union. Orlando loved Garibaldi as though the latter were a
+demi-god, fought beside him in defence of Republican Rome, took part in
+the victory of Rieti over the Neapolitans, and followed the stubborn
+patriot in his retreat when he sought to succour Venice, compelled as he
+was to relinquish the Eternal City to the French army of General Oudinot,
+who came thither to reinstate Pius IX. And what an extraordinary and
+madly heroic adventure was that of Garibaldi and Venice! Venice, which
+Manin, another great patriot, a martyr, had again transformed into a
+republican city, and which for long months had been resisting the
+Austrians! And Garibaldi starts with a handful of men to deliver the
+city, charters thirteen fishing barks, loses eight in a naval engagement,
+is compelled to return to the Roman shores, and there in all wretchedness
+is bereft of his wife, Anita, whose eyes he closes before returning to
+America, where, once before, he had awaited the hour of insurrection. Ah!
+that land of Italy, which in those days rumbled from end to end with the
+internal fire of patriotism, where men of faith and courage arose in
+every city, where riots and insurrections burst forth on all sides like
+eruptions--it continued, in spite of every check, its invincible march to
+freedom!
+
+  * It was on November 24, 1848, that the Pope fled to Gaeta,
+    consequent upon the insurrection which had broken out nine
+    days previously.--Trans.
+
+Orlando returned to his young wife at Milan, and for two years lived
+there, almost in concealment, devoured by impatience for the glorious
+morrow which was so long in coming. Amidst his fever a gleam of happiness
+softened his heart; a son, Luigi, was born to him, but the birth killed
+the mother, and joy was turned into mourning. Then, unable to remain any
+longer at Milan, where he was spied upon, tracked by the police,
+suffering also too grievously from the foreign occupation, Orlando
+decided to realise the little fortune remaining to him, and to withdraw
+to Turin, where an aunt of his wife took charge of the child. Count di
+Cavour, like a great statesman, was then already seeking to bring about
+independence, preparing Piedmont for the decisive /role/ which it was
+destined to play. It was the time when King Victor Emmanuel evinced
+flattering cordiality towards all the refugees who came to him from every
+part of Italy, even those whom he knew to be Republicans, compromised and
+flying the consequences of popular insurrection. The rough, shrewd House
+of Savoy had long been dreaming of bringing about Italian unity to the
+profit of the Piedmontese monarchy, and Orlando well knew under what
+master he was taking service; but in him the Republican already went
+behind the patriot, and indeed he had begun to question the possibility
+of a united Republican Italy, placed under the protectorate of a liberal
+Pope, as Mazzini had at one time dreamed. Was that not indeed a chimera
+beyond realisation which would devour generation after generation if one
+obstinately continued to pursue it? For his part, he did not wish to die
+without having slept in Rome as one of the conquerors. Even if liberty
+was to be lost, he desired to see his country united and erect, returning
+once more to life in the full sunlight. And so it was with feverish
+happiness that he enlisted at the outset of the war of 1859; and his
+heart palpitated with such force as almost to rend his breast, when,
+after Magenta, he entered Milan with the French army--Milan which he had
+quitted eight years previously, like an exile, in despair. The treaty of
+Villafranca which followed Solferino proved a bitter deception: Venetia
+was not secured, Venice remained enthralled. Nevertheless the Milanese
+was conquered from the foe, and then Tuscany and the duchies of Parma and
+Modena voted for annexation. So, at all events, the nucleus of the
+Italian star was formed; the country had begun to build itself up afresh
+around victorious Piedmont.
+
+Then, in the following year, Orlando plunged into epopoeia once more.
+Garibaldi had returned from his two sojourns in America, with the halo of
+a legend round him--paladin-like feats in the pampas of Uruguay, an
+extraordinary passage from Canton to Lima--and he had returned to take
+part in the war of 1859, forestalling the French army, overthrowing an
+Austrian marshal, and entering Como, Bergamo, and Brescia. And now, all
+at once, folks heard that he had landed at Marsala with only a thousand
+men--the Thousand of Marsala, the ever illustrious handful of braves!
+Orlando fought in the first rank, and Palermo after three days'
+resistance was carried. Becoming the dictator's favourite lieutenant, he
+helped him to organise a government, then crossed the straits with him,
+and was beside him on the triumphal entry into Naples, whose king had
+fled. There was mad audacity and valour at that time, an explosion of the
+inevitable; and all sorts of supernatural stories were current--Garibaldi
+invulnerable, protected better by his red shirt than by the strongest
+armour, Garibaldi routing opposing armies like an archangel, by merely
+brandishing his flaming sword! The Piedmontese on their side had defeated
+General Lamoriciere at Castelfidardo, and were invading the States of the
+Church. And Orlando was there when the dictator, abdicating power, signed
+the decree which annexed the Two Sicilies to the Crown of Italy; even as
+subsequently he took part in that forlorn attempt on Rome, when the
+rageful cry was "Rome or Death!"--an attempt which came to a tragic issue
+at Aspromonte, when the little army was dispersed by the Italian troops,
+and Garibaldi, wounded, was taken prisoner, and sent back to the solitude
+of his island of Caprera, where he became but a fisherman and a tiller of
+the rocky soil.*
+
+  * M. Zola's brief but glowing account of Garibaldi's glorious
+    achievements has stirred many memories in my mind. My uncle,
+    Frank Vizetelly, the war artist of the /Illustrated London
+    News/, whose bones lie bleaching somewhere in the Soudan, was
+    one of Garibaldi's constant companions throughout the memorable
+    campaign of the Two Sicilies, and afterwards he went with him
+    to Caprera. Later, in 1870, my brother, Edward Vizetelly, acted
+    as orderly-officer to the general when he offered the help of
+    his sword to France.--Trans.
+
+Six years of waiting again went by, and Orlando still dwelt at Turin,
+even after Florence had been chosen as the new capital. The Senate had
+acclaimed Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy; and Italy was indeed almost
+built, it lacked only Rome and Venice. But the great battles seemed all
+over, the epic era was closed; Venice was to be won by defeat. Orlando
+took part in the unlucky battle of Custozza, where he received two
+wounds, full of furious grief at the thought that Austria should be
+triumphant. But at that same moment the latter, defeated at Sadowa,
+relinquished Venetia, and five months later Orlando satisfied his desire
+to be in Venice participating in the joy of triumph, when Victor Emmanuel
+made his entry amidst the frantic acclamations of the people. Rome alone
+remained to be won, and wild impatience urged all Italy towards the city;
+but friendly France had sworn to maintain the Pope, and this acted as a
+check. Then, for the third time, Garibaldi dreamt of renewing the feats
+of the old-world legends, and threw himself upon Rome like a soldier of
+fortune illumined by patriotism and free from every tie. And for the
+third time Orlando shared in that fine heroic madness destined to be
+vanquished at Mentana by the Pontifical Zouaves supported by a small
+French corps. Again wounded, he came back to Turin in almost a dying
+condition. But, though his spirit quivered, he had to resign himself; the
+situation seemed to have no outlet; only an upheaval of the nations could
+give Rome to Italy.
+
+All at once the thunderclap of Sedan, of the downfall of France,
+resounded through the world; and then the road to Rome lay open, and
+Orlando, having returned to service in the regular army, was with the
+troops who took up position in the Campagna to ensure the safety of the
+Holy See, as was said in the letter which Victor Emmanuel wrote to Pius
+IX. There was, however, but the shadow of an engagement: General
+Kanzler's Pontifical Zouaves were compelled to fall back, and Orlando was
+one of the first to enter the city by the breach of the Porta Pia. Ah!
+that twentieth of September--that day when he experienced the greatest
+happiness of his life--a day of delirium, of complete triumph, which
+realised the dream of so many years of terrible contest, the dream for
+which he had sacrificed rest and fortune, and given both body and mind!
+
+Then came more than ten happy years in conquered Rome--in Rome adored,
+flattered, treated with all tenderness, like a woman in whom one has
+placed one's entire hope. From her he awaited so much national vigour,
+such a marvellous resurrection of strength and glory for the endowment of
+the young nation. Old Republican, old insurrectional soldier that he was,
+he had been obliged to adhere to the monarchy, and accept a senatorship.
+But then did not Garibaldi himself--Garibaldi his divinity--likewise call
+upon the King and sit in parliament? Mazzini alone, rejecting all
+compromises, was unwilling to rest content with a united and independent
+Italy that was not Republican. Moreover, another consideration influenced
+Orlando, the future of his son Luigi, who had attained his eighteenth
+birthday shortly after the occupation of Rome. Though he, Orlando, could
+manage with the crumbs which remained of the fortune he had expended in
+his country's service, he dreamt of a splendid destiny for the child of
+his heart. Realising that the heroic age was over, he desired to make a
+great politician of him, a great administrator, a man who should be
+useful to the mighty nation of the morrow; and it was on this account
+that he had not rejected royal favour, the reward of long devotion,
+desiring, as he did, to be in a position to help, watch, and guide Luigi.
+Besides, was he himself so old, so used-up, as to be unable to assist in
+organisation, even as he had assisted in conquest? Struck by his son's
+quick intelligence in business matters, perhaps also instinctively
+divining that the battle would now continue on financial and economic
+grounds, he obtained him employment at the Ministry of Finances. And
+again he himself lived on, dreaming, still enthusiastically believing in
+a splendid future, overflowing with boundless hope, seeing Rome double
+her population, grow and spread with a wild vegetation of new districts,
+and once more, in his loving enraptured eyes, become the queen of the
+world.
+
+But all at once came a thunderbolt. One morning, as he was going
+downstairs, Orlando was stricken with paralysis. Both his legs suddenly
+became lifeless, as heavy as lead. It was necessary to carry him up
+again, and never since had he set foot on the street pavement. At that
+time he had just completed his fifty-sixth year, and for fourteen years
+since he had remained in his arm-chair, as motionless as stone, he who
+had so impetuously trod every battlefield of Italy. It was a pitiful
+business, the collapse of a hero. And worst of all, from that room where
+he was for ever imprisoned, the old soldier beheld the slow crumbling of
+all his hopes, and fell into dismal melancholy, full of unacknowledged
+fear for the future. Now that the intoxication of action no longer dimmed
+his eyes, now that he spent his long and empty days in thought, his
+vision became clear. Italy, which he had desired to see so powerful, so
+triumphant in her unity, was acting madly, rushing to ruin, possibly to
+bankruptcy. Rome, which to him had ever been the one necessary capital,
+the city of unparalleled glory, requisite for the sovereign people of
+to-morrow, seemed unwilling to take upon herself the part of a great
+modern metropolis; heavy as a corpse she weighed with all her centuries
+on the bosom of the young nation. Moreover, his son Luigi distressed him.
+Rebellious to all guidance, the young man had become one of the devouring
+offsprings of conquest, eager to despoil that Italy, that Rome, which his
+father seemed to have desired solely in order that he might pillage them
+and batten on them. Orlando had vainly opposed Luigi's departure from the
+ministry, his participation in the frantic speculations on land and house
+property to which the mad building of the new districts had given rise.
+But at the same time he loved his son, and was reduced to silence,
+especially now when everything had succeeded with Luigi, even his most
+risky financial ventures, such as the transformation of the Villa
+Montefiori into a perfect town--a colossal enterprise in which many of
+great wealth had been ruined, but whence he himself had emerged with
+millions. And it was in part for this reason that Orlando, sad and
+silent, had obstinately restricted himself to one small room on the third
+floor of the little palazzo erected by Luigi in the Via Venti
+Settembre--a room where he lived cloistered with a single servant,
+subsisting on his own scanty income, and accepting nothing but that
+modest hospitality from his son.
+
+As Pierre reached that new Via Venti Settembre* which climbs the side and
+summit of the Viminal hill, he was struck by the heavy sumptuousness of
+the new "palaces," which betokened among the moderns the same taste for
+the huge that marked the ancient Romans. In the warm afternoon glow,
+blent of purple and old gold, the broad, triumphant thoroughfare, with
+its endless rows of white house-fronts, bore witness to new Rome's proud
+hope of futurity and sovereign power. And Pierre fairly gasped when he
+beheld the Palazzo delle Finanze, or Treasury, a gigantic erection, a
+cyclopean cube with a profusion of columns, balconies, pediments, and
+sculptured work, to which the building mania had given birth in a day of
+immoderate pride. And on the other side of the street, a little higher
+up, before reaching the Villa Bonaparte, stood Count Prada's little
+palazzo.
+
+  * The name--Twentieth September Street--was given to the
+    thoroughfare to commemorate the date of the occupation
+    of Rome by Victor Emmanuel's army.--Trans.
+
+After discharging his driver, Pierre for a moment remained somewhat
+embarrassed. The door was open, and he entered the vestibule; but, as at
+the mansion in the Via Giulia, no door porter or servant was to be seen.
+So he had to make up his mind to ascend the monumental stairs, which with
+their marble balustrades seemed to be copied, on a smaller scale, from
+those of the Palazzo Boccanera. And there was much the same cold
+bareness, tempered, however, by a carpet and red door-hangings, which
+contrasted vividly with the white stucco of the walls. The
+reception-rooms, sixteen feet high, were on the first floor, and as a
+door chanced to be ajar he caught a glimpse of two /salons/, one
+following the other, and both displaying quite modern richness, with a
+profusion of silk and velvet hangings, gilt furniture, and lofty mirrors
+reflecting a pompous assemblage of stands and tables. And still there was
+nobody, not a soul, in that seemingly forsaken abode, which exhaled
+nought of woman's presence. Indeed Pierre was on the point of going down
+again to ring, when a footman at last presented himself.
+
+"Count Prada, if you please."
+
+The servant silently surveyed the little priest, and seemed to
+understand. "The father or the son?" he asked.
+
+"The father, Count Orlando Prada."
+
+"Oh! that's on the third floor." And he condescended to add: "The little
+door on the right-hand side of the landing. Knock loudly if you wish to
+be admitted."
+
+Pierre indeed had to knock twice, and then a little withered old man of
+military appearance, a former soldier who had remained in the Count's
+service, opened the door and apologised for the delay by saying that he
+had been attending to his master's legs. Immediately afterwards he
+announced the visitor, and the latter, after passing through a dim and
+narrow ante-room, was lost in amazement on finding himself in a
+relatively small chamber, extremely bare and bright, with wall-paper of a
+light hue studded with tiny blue flowers. Behind a screen was an iron
+bedstead, the soldier's pallet, and there was no other furniture than the
+arm-chair in which the cripple spent his days, with a table of black wood
+placed near him, and covered with books and papers, and two old
+straw-seated chairs which served for the accommodation of the infrequent
+visitors. A few planks, fixed to one of the walls, did duty as
+book-shelves. However, the broad, clear, curtainless window overlooked
+the most admirable panorama of Rome that could be desired.
+
+Then the room disappeared from before Pierre's eyes, and with a sudden
+shock of deep emotion he only beheld old Orlando, the old blanched lion,
+still superb, broad, and tall. A forest of white hair crowned his
+powerful head, with its thick mouth, fleshy broken nose, and large,
+sparkling, black eyes. A long white beard streamed down with the vigour
+of youth, curling like that of an ancient god. By that leonine muzzle one
+divined what great passions had growled within; but all, carnal and
+intellectual alike, had erupted in patriotism, in wild bravery, and
+riotous love of independence. And the old stricken hero, his torso still
+erect, was fixed there on his straw-seated arm-chair, with lifeless legs
+buried beneath a black wrapper. Alone did his arms and hands live, and
+his face beam with strength and intelligence.
+
+Orlando turned towards his servant, and gently said to him: "You can go
+away, Batista. Come back in a couple of hours." Then, looking Pierre full
+in the face, he exclaimed in a voice which was still sonorous despite his
+seventy years: "So it's you at last, my dear Monsieur Froment, and we
+shall be able to chat at our ease. There, take that chair, and sit down
+in front of me."
+
+He had noticed the glance of surprise which the young priest had cast
+upon the bareness of the room, and he gaily added: "You will excuse me
+for receiving you in my cell. Yes, I live here like a monk, like an old
+invalided soldier, henceforth withdrawn from active life. My son long
+begged me to take one of the fine rooms downstairs. But what would have
+been the use of it? I have no needs, and I scarcely care for feather
+beds, for my old bones are accustomed to the hard ground. And then too I
+have such a fine view up here, all Rome presenting herself to me, now
+that I can no longer go to her."
+
+With a wave of the hand towards the window he sought to hide the
+embarrassment, the slight flush which came to him each time that he thus
+excused his son; unwilling as he was to tell the true reason, the scruple
+of probity which had made him obstinately cling to his bare pauper's
+lodging.
+
+"But it is very nice, the view is superb!" declared Pierre, in order to
+please him. "I am for my own part very glad to see you, very glad to be
+able to grasp your valiant hands, which accomplished so many great
+things."
+
+Orlando made a fresh gesture, as though to sweep the past away. "Pooh!
+pooh! all that is dead and buried. Let us talk about you, my dear
+Monsieur Froment, you who are young and represent the present; and
+especially about your book, which represents the future! Ah! if you only
+knew how angry your book, your 'New Rome,' made me first of all."
+
+He began to laugh, and took the book from off the table near him; then,
+tapping on its cover with his big, broad hand, he continued: "No, you
+cannot imagine with what starts of protest I read your book. The Pope,
+and again the Pope, and always the Pope! New Rome to be created by the
+Pope and for the Pope, to triumph thanks to the Pope, to be given to the
+Pope, and to fuse its glory in the glory of the Pope! But what about us?
+What about Italy? What about all the millions which we have spent in
+order to make Rome a great capital? Ah! only a Frenchman, and a Frenchman
+of Paris, could have written such a book! But let me tell you, my dear
+sir, if you are ignorant of it, that Rome has become the capital of the
+kingdom of Italy, that we here have King Humbert, and the Italian people,
+a whole nation which must be taken into account, and which means to keep
+Rome--glorious, resuscitated Rome--for itself!"
+
+This juvenile ardour made Pierre laugh in turn. "Yes, yes," said he, "you
+wrote me that. Only what does it matter from my point of view? Italy is
+but one nation, a part of humanity, and I desire concord and fraternity
+among all the nations, mankind reconciled, believing, and happy. Of what
+consequence, then, is any particular form of government, monarchy or
+republic, of what consequence is any question of a united and independent
+country, if all mankind forms but one free people subsisting on truth and
+justice?"
+
+To only one word of this enthusiastic outburst did Orlando pay attention.
+In a lower tone, and with a dreamy air, he resumed: "Ah! a republic. In
+my youth I ardently desired one. I fought for one; I conspired with
+Mazzini, a saintly man, a believer, who was shattered by collision with
+the absolute. And then, too, one had to bow to practical necessities; the
+most obstinate ended by submitting. And nowadays would a republic save
+us? In any case it would differ but little from our parliamentary
+monarchy. Just think of what goes on in France! And so why risk a
+revolution which would place power in the hands of the extreme
+revolutionists, the anarchists? We fear all that, and this explains our
+resignation. I know very well that a few think they can detect salvation
+in a republican federation, a reconstitution of all the former little
+states in so many republics, over which Rome would preside. The Vatican
+would gain largely by any such transformation; still one cannot say that
+it endeavours to bring it about; it simply regards the eventuality
+without disfavour. But it is a dream, a dream!"
+
+At this Orlando's gaiety came back to him, with even a little gentle
+irony: "You don't know, I suppose, what it was that took my fancy in your
+book--for, in spite of all my protests, I have read it twice. Well, what
+pleased me was that Mazzini himself might almost have written it at one
+time. Yes! I found all my youth again in your pages, all the wild hope of
+my twenty-fifth year, the new religion of a humanitarian Christ, the
+pacification of the world effected by the Gospel! Are you aware that,
+long before your time, Mazzini desired the renovation of Christianity? He
+set dogma and discipline on one side and only retained morals. And it was
+new Rome, the Rome of the people, which he would have given as see to the
+universal Church, in which all the churches of the past were to be
+fused--Rome, the eternal and predestined city, the mother and queen,
+whose domination was to arise anew to ensure the definitive happiness of
+mankind! Is it not curious that all the present-day Neo-Catholicism, the
+vague, spiritualistic awakening, the evolution towards communion and
+Christian charity, with which some are making so much stir, should be
+simply a return of the mystical and humanitarian ideas of 1848? Alas! I
+saw all that, I believed and burned, and I know in what a fine mess those
+flights into the azure of mystery landed us! So it cannot be helped, I
+lack confidence."
+
+Then, as Pierre on his side was growing impassioned and sought to reply,
+he stopped him: "No, let me finish. I only want to convince you how
+absolutely necessary it was that we should take Rome and make her the
+capital of Italy. Without Rome new Italy could not have existed; Rome
+represented the glory of ancient time; in her dust lay the sovereign
+power which we wished to re-establish; she brought strength, beauty,
+eternity to those who possessed her. Standing in the middle of our
+country, she was its heart, and must assuredly become its life as soon as
+she should be awakened from the long sleep of ruin. Ah! how we desired
+her, amidst victory and amidst defeat, through years and years of
+frightful impatience! For my part I loved her, and longed for her, far
+more than for any woman, with my blood burning, and in despair that I
+should be growing old. And when we possessed her, our folly was a desire
+to behold her huge, magnificent, and commanding all at once, the equal of
+the other great capitals of Europe--Berlin, Paris, and London. Look at
+her! she is still my only love, my only consolation now that I am
+virtually dead, with nothing alive in me but my eyes."
+
+With the same gesture as before, he directed Pierre's attention to the
+window. Under the glowing sky Rome stretched out in its immensity,
+empurpled and gilded by the slanting sunrays. Across the horizon, far,
+far away, the trees of the Janiculum stretched a green girdle, of a
+limpid emerald hue, whilst the dome of St. Peter's, more to the left,
+showed palely blue, like a sapphire bedimmed by too bright a light. Then
+came the low town, the old ruddy city, baked as it were by centuries of
+burning summers, soft to the eye and beautiful with the deep life of the
+past, an unbounded chaos of roofs, gables, towers, /campanili/, and
+cupolas. But, in the foreground under the window, there was the new
+city--that which had been building for the last five and twenty
+years--huge blocks of masonry piled up side by side, still white with
+plaster, neither the sun nor history having as yet robed them in purple.
+And in particular the roofs of the colossal Palazzo delle Finanze had a
+disastrous effect, spreading out like far, bare steppes of cruel
+hideousness. And it was upon the desolation and abomination of all the
+newly erected piles that the eyes of the old soldier of conquest at last
+rested.
+
+Silence ensued. Pierre felt the faint chill of hidden, unacknowledged
+sadness pass by, and courteously waited.
+
+"I must beg your pardon for having interrupted you just now," resumed
+Orlando; "but it seems to me that we cannot talk about your book to any
+good purpose until you have seen and studied Rome closely. You only
+arrived yesterday, did you not? Well, stroll about the city, look at
+things, question people, and I think that many of your ideas will change.
+I shall particularly like to know your impression of the Vatican since
+you have cone here solely to see the Pope and defend your book against
+the Index. Why should we discuss things to-day, if facts themselves are
+calculated to bring you to other views, far more readily than the finest
+speeches which I might make? It is understood, you will come to see me
+again, and we shall then know what we are talking about, and, maybe,
+agree together."
+
+"Why certainly, you are too kind," replied Pierre. "I only came to-day to
+express my gratitude to you for having read my book so attentively, and
+to pay homage to one of the glories of Italy."
+
+Orlando was not listening, but remained for a moment absorbed in thought,
+with his eyes still resting upon Rome. And overcome, despite himself, by
+secret disquietude, he resumed in a low voice as though making an
+involuntary confession: "We have gone too fast, no doubt. There were
+expenses of undeniable utility--the roads, ports, and railways. And it
+was necessary to arm the country also; I did not at first disapprove of
+the heavy military burden. But since then how crushing has been the war
+budget--a war which has never come, and the long wait for which has
+ruined us. Ah! I have always been the friend of France. I only reproach
+her with one thing, that she has failed to understand the position in
+which we were placed, the vital reasons which compelled us to ally
+ourselves with Germany. And then there are the thousand millions of
+/lire/* swallowed up in Rome! That was the real madness; pride and
+enthusiasm led us astray. Old and solitary as I've been for many years
+now, given to deep reflection, I was one of the first to divine the
+pitfall, the frightful financial crisis, the deficit which would bring
+about the collapse of the nation. I shouted it from the housetops, to my
+son, to all who came near me; but what was the use? They didn't listen;
+they were mad, still buying and selling and building, with no thought but
+for gambling booms and bubbles. But you'll see, you'll see. And the worst
+is that we are not situated as you are; we haven't a reserve of men and
+money in a dense peasant population, whose thrifty savings are always at
+hand to fill up the gaps caused by big catastrophes. There is no social
+rise among our people as yet; fresh men don't spring up out of the lower
+classes to reinvigorate the national blood, as they constantly do in your
+country. And, besides, the people are poor; they have no stockings to
+empty. The misery is frightful, I must admit it. Those who have any money
+prefer to spend it in the towns in a petty way rather than to risk it in
+agricultural or manufacturing enterprise. Factories are but slowly built,
+and the land is almost everywhere tilled in the same primitive manner as
+it was two thousand years ago. And then, too, take Rome--Rome, which
+didn't make Italy, but which Italy made its capital to satisfy an ardent,
+overpowering desire--Rome, which is still but a splendid bit of scenery,
+picturing the glory of the centuries, and which, apart from its
+historical splendour, has only given us its degenerate papal population,
+swollen with ignorance and pride! Ah! I loved Rome too well, and I still
+love it too well to regret being now within its walls. But, good heavens!
+what insanity its acquisition brought us, what piles of money it has cost
+us, and how heavily and triumphantly it weighs us down! Look! look!"
+
+  * 40,000,000 pounds.
+
+He waved his hand as he spoke towards the livid roofs of the Palazzo
+delle Finanze, that vast and desolate steppe, as though he could see the
+harvest of glory all stripped off and bankruptcy appear with its fearful,
+threatening bareness. Restrained tears were dimming his eyes, and he
+looked superbly pitiful with his expression of baffled hope and grievous
+disquietude, with his huge white head, the muzzle of an old blanched lion
+henceforth powerless and caged in that bare, bright room, whose
+poverty-stricken aspect was instinct with so much pride that it seemed,
+as it were, a protest against the monumental splendour of the whole
+surrounding district! So those were the purposes to which the conquest
+had been put! And to think that he was impotent, henceforth unable to
+give his blood and his soul as he had done in the days gone by.
+
+"Yes, yes," he exclaimed in a final outburst; "one gave everything, heart
+and brain, one's whole life indeed, so long as it was a question of
+making the country one and independent. But, now that the country is
+ours, just try to stir up enthusiasm for the reorganisation of its
+finances! There's no ideality in that! And this explains why, whilst the
+old ones are dying off, not a new man comes to the front among the young
+ones--"
+
+All at once he stopped, looking somewhat embarrassed, yet smiling at his
+feverishness. "Excuse me," he said, "I'm off again, I'm incorrigible. But
+it's understood, we'll leave that subject alone, and you'll come back
+here, and we'll chat together when you've seen everything."
+
+From that moment he showed himself extremely pleasant, and it was
+apparent to Pierre that he regretted having said so much, by the
+seductive affability and growing affection which he now displayed. He
+begged the young priest to prolong his sojourn, to abstain from all hasty
+judgments on Rome, and to rest convinced that, at bottom, Italy still
+loved France. And he was also very desirous that France should love
+Italy, and displayed genuine anxiety at the thought that perhaps she
+loved her no more. As at the Boccanera mansion, on the previous evening,
+Pierre realised that an attempt was being made to persuade him to
+admiration and affection. Like a susceptible woman with secret misgivings
+respecting the attractive power of her beauty, Italy was all anxiety with
+regard to the opinion of her visitors, and strove to win and retain their
+love.
+
+However, Orlando again became impassioned when he learnt that Pierre was
+staying at the Boccanera mansion, and he made a gesture of extreme
+annoyance on hearing, at that very moment, a knock at the outer door.
+"Come in!" he called; but at the same time he detained Pierre, saying,
+"No, no, don't go yet; I wish to know--"
+
+But a lady came in--a woman of over forty, short and extremely plump, and
+still attractive with her small features and pretty smile swamped in fat.
+She was a blonde, with green, limpid eyes; and, fairly well dressed in a
+sober, nicely fitting mignonette gown, she looked at once pleasant,
+modest, and shrewd.
+
+"Ah! it's you, Stefana," said the old man, letting her kiss him.
+
+"Yes, uncle, I was passing by and came up to see how you were getting
+on."
+
+The visitor was the Signora Sacco, niece of Prada and a Neapolitan by
+birth, her mother having quitted Milan to marry a certain Pagani, a
+Neapolitan banker, who had afterwards failed. Subsequent to that disaster
+Stefana had married Sacco, then merely a petty post-office clerk. He,
+later on, wishing to revive his father-in-law's business, had launched
+into all sorts of terrible, complicated, suspicious affairs, which by
+unforeseen luck had ended in his election as a deputy. Since he had
+arrived in Rome, to conquer the city in his turn, his wife had been
+compelled to assist his devouring ambition by dressing well and opening a
+/salon/; and, although she was still a little awkward, she rendered him
+many real services, being very economical and prudent, a thorough good
+housewife, with all the sterling, substantial qualities of Northern Italy
+which she had inherited from her mother, and which showed conspicuously
+beside the turbulence and carelessness of her husband, in whom flared
+Southern Italy with its perpetual, rageful appetite.
+
+Despite his contempt for Sacco, old Orlando had retained some affection
+for his niece, in whose veins flowed blood similar to his own. He thanked
+her for her kind inquiries, and then at once spoke of an announcement
+which he had read in the morning papers, for he suspected that the deputy
+had sent his wife to ascertain his opinion.
+
+"Well, and that ministry?" he asked.
+
+The Signora had seated herself and made no haste to reply, but glanced at
+the newspapers strewn over the table. "Oh! nothing is settled yet," she
+at last responded; "the newspapers spoke out too soon. The Prime Minister
+sent for Sacco, and they had a talk together. But Sacco hesitates a good
+deal; he fears that he has no aptitude for the Department of Agriculture.
+Ah! if it were only the Finances--However, in any case, he would not have
+come to a decision without consulting you. What do you think of it,
+uncle?"
+
+He interrupted her with a violent wave of the hand: "No, no, I won't mix
+myself up in such matters!"
+
+To him the rapid success of that adventurer Sacco, that schemer and
+gambler who had always fished in troubled waters, was an abomination, the
+beginning of the end. His son Luigi certainly distressed him; but it was
+even worse to think that--whilst Luigi, with his great intelligence and
+many remaining fine qualities, was nothing at all--Sacco, on the other
+hand, Sacco, blunderhead and ever-famished battener that he was, had not
+merely slipped into parliament, but was now, it seemed, on the point of
+securing office! A little, swarthy, dry man he was, with big, round eyes,
+projecting cheekbones, and prominent chin. Ever dancing and chattering,
+he was gifted with a showy eloquence, all the force of which lay in his
+voice--a voice which at will became admirably powerful or gentle! And
+withal an insinuating man, profiting by every opportunity, wheedling and
+commanding by turn.
+
+"You hear, Stefana," said Orlando; "tell your husband that the only
+advice I have to give him is to return to his clerkship at the
+post-office, where perhaps he may be of use."
+
+What particularly filled the old soldier with indignation and despair was
+that such a man, a Sacco, should have fallen like a bandit on Rome--on
+that Rome whose conquest had cost so many noble efforts. And in his turn
+Sacco was conquering the city, was carrying it off from those who had won
+it by such hard toil, and was simply using it to satisfy his wild passion
+for power and its attendant enjoyments. Beneath his wheedling air there
+was the determination to devour everything. After the victory, while the
+spoil lay there, still warm, the wolves had come. It was the North that
+had made Italy, whereas the South, eager for the quarry, simply rushed
+upon the country, preyed upon it. And beneath the anger of the old
+stricken hero of Italian unity there was indeed all the growing
+antagonism of the North towards the South--the North industrious,
+economical, shrewd in politics, enlightened, full of all the great modern
+ideas, and the South ignorant and idle, bent on enjoying life
+immediately, amidst childish disorder in action, and an empty show of
+fine sonorous words.
+
+Stefana had begun to smile in a placid way while glancing at Pierre, who
+had approached the window. "Oh, you say that, uncle," she responded; "but
+you love us well all the same, and more than once you have given me
+myself some good advice, for which I'm very thankful to you. For
+instance, there's that affair of Attilio's--"
+
+She was alluding to her son, the lieutenant, and his love affair with
+Celia, the little Princess Buongiovanni, of which all the drawing-rooms,
+white and black alike, were talking.
+
+"Attilio--that's another matter!" exclaimed Orlando. "He and you are both
+of the same blood as myself, and it's wonderful how I see myself again in
+that fine fellow. Yes, he is just the same as I was at his age,
+good-looking and brave and enthusiastic! I'm paying myself compliments,
+you see. But, really now, Attilio warms my heart, for he is the future,
+and brings me back some hope. Well, and what about his affair?"
+
+"Oh! it gives us a lot of worry, uncle. I spoke to you about it before,
+but you shrugged your shoulders, saying that in matters of that kind all
+that the parents had to do was to let the lovers settle their affairs
+between them. Still, we don't want everybody to repeat that we are urging
+our son to get the little princess to elope with him, so that he may
+afterwards marry her money and title."
+
+At this Orlando indulged in a frank outburst of gaiety: "That's a fine
+scruple! Was it your husband who instructed you to tell me of it? I know,
+however, that he affects some delicacy in this matter. For my own part, I
+believe myself to be as honest as he is, and I can only repeat that, if I
+had a son like yours, so straightforward and good, and candidly loving, I
+should let him marry whomsoever he pleased in his own way. The
+Buongiovannis--good heavens! the Buongiovannis--why, despite all their
+rank and lineage and the money they still possess, it will be a great
+honour for them to have a handsome young man with a noble heart as their
+son-in-law!"
+
+Again did Stefana assume an expression of placid satisfaction. She had
+certainly only come there for approval. "Very well, uncle," she replied,
+"I'll repeat that to my husband, and he will pay great attention to it;
+for if you are severe towards him he holds you in perfect veneration. And
+as for that ministry--well, perhaps nothing will be done, Sacco will
+decide according to circumstances."
+
+She rose and took her leave, kissing the old soldier very affectionately
+as on her arrival. And she complimented him on his good looks, declaring
+that she found him as handsome as ever, and making him smile by speaking
+of a lady who was still madly in love with him. Then, after acknowledging
+the young priest's silent salutation by a slight bow, she went off, once
+more wearing her modest and sensible air.
+
+For a moment Orlando, with his eyes turned towards the door, remained
+silent, again sad, reflecting no doubt on all the difficult, equivocal
+present, so different from the glorious past. But all at once he turned
+to Pierre, who was still waiting. "And so, my friend," said he, "you are
+staying at the Palazzo Boccanera? Ah! what a grievous misfortune there
+has been on that side too!"
+
+However, when the priest had told him of his conversation with Benedetta,
+and of her message that she still loved him and would never forget his
+goodness to her, no matter whatever happened, he appeared moved and his
+voice trembled: "Yes, she has a good heart, she has no spite. But what
+would you have? She did not love Luigi, and he was possibly violent.
+There is no mystery about the matter now, and I can speak to you freely,
+since to my great grief everybody knows what has happened."
+
+Then Orlando abandoned himself to his recollections, and related how keen
+had been his delight on the eve of the marriage at the thought that so
+lovely a creature would become his daughter, and set some youth and charm
+around his invalid's arm-chair. He had always worshipped beauty, and
+would have had no other love than woman, if his country had not seized
+upon the best part of him. And Benedetta on her side loved him, revered
+him, constantly coming up to spend long hours with him, sharing his poor
+little room, which at those times became resplendent with all the divine
+grace that she brought with her. With her fresh breath near him, the pure
+scent she diffused, the caressing womanly tenderness with which she
+surrounded him, he lived anew. But, immediately afterwards, what a
+frightful drama and how his heart had bled at his inability to reconcile
+the husband and the wife! He could not possibly say that his son was in
+the wrong in desiring to be the loved and accepted spouse. At first
+indeed he had hoped to soften Benedetta, and throw her into Luigi's arms.
+But when she had confessed herself to him in tears, owning her old love
+for Dario, and her horror of belonging to another, he realised that she
+would never yield. And a whole year had then gone by; he had lived for a
+whole year imprisoned in his arm-chair, with that poignant drama
+progressing beneath him in those luxurious rooms whence no sound even
+reached his ears. How many times had he not listened, striving to hear,
+fearing atrocious quarrels, in despair at his inability to prove still
+useful by creating happiness. He knew nothing by his son, who kept his
+own counsel; he only learnt a few particulars from Benedetta at intervals
+when emotion left her defenceless; and that marriage in which he had for
+a moment espied the much-needed alliance between old and new Rome, that
+unconsummated marriage filled him with despair, as if it were indeed the
+defeat of every hope, the final collapse of the dream which had filled
+his life. And he himself had ended by desiring the divorce, so unbearable
+had become the suffering caused by such a situation.
+
+"Ah! my friend!" he said to Pierre; "never before did I so well
+understand the fatality of certain antagonism, the possibility of working
+one's own misfortune and that of others, even when one has the most
+loving heart and upright mind!"
+
+But at that moment the door again opened, and this time, without
+knocking, Count Luigi Prada came in. And after rapidly bowing to the
+visitor, who had risen, he gently took hold of his father's hands and
+felt them, as if fearing that they might be too warm or too cold.
+
+"I've just arrived from Frascati, where I had to sleep," said he; "for
+the interruption of all that building gives me a lot of worry. And I'm
+told that you spent a bad night!"
+
+"No, I assure you."
+
+"Oh! I knew you wouldn't own it. But why will you persist in living up
+here without any comfort? All this isn't suited to your age. I should be
+so pleased if you would accept a more comfortable room where you might
+sleep better."
+
+"No, no--I know that you love me well, my dear Luigi. But let me do as my
+old head tells me. That's the only way to make me happy."
+
+Pierre was much struck by the ardent affection which sparkled in the eyes
+of the two men as they gazed at one another, face to face. This seemed to
+him very touching and beautiful, knowing as he did how many contrary
+ideas and actions, how many moral divergencies separated them. And he
+next took an interest in comparing them physically. Count Luigi Prada,
+shorter, more thick-set than his father, had, however, much the same
+strong energetic head, crowned with coarse black hair, and the same frank
+but somewhat stern eyes set in a face of clear complexion, barred by
+thick moustaches. But his mouth differed--a sensual, voracious mouth it
+was, with wolfish teeth--a mouth of prey made for nights of rapine, when
+the only question is to bite, and tear, and devour others. And for this
+reason, when some praised the frankness in his eyes, another would
+retort: "Yes, but I don't like his mouth." His feet were large, his hands
+plump and over-broad, but admirably cared for.
+
+And Pierre marvelled at finding him such as he had anticipated. He knew
+enough of his story to picture in him a hero's son spoilt by conquest,
+eagerly devouring the harvest garnered by his father's glorious sword.
+And he particularly studied how the father's virtues had deflected and
+become transformed into vices in the son--the most noble qualities being
+perverted, heroic and disinterested energy lapsing into a ferocious
+appetite for possession, the man of battle leading to the man of booty,
+since the great gusts of enthusiasm no longer swept by, since men no
+longer fought, since they remained there resting, pillaging, and
+devouring amidst the heaped-up spoils. And the pity of it was that the
+old hero, the paralytic, motionless father beheld it all--beheld the
+degeneration of his son, the speculator and company promoter gorged with
+millions!
+
+However, Orlando introduced Pierre. "This is Monsieur l'Abbe Pierre
+Froment, whom I spoke to you about," he said, "the author of the book
+which I gave you to read."
+
+Luigi Prada showed himself very amiable, at once talking of home with an
+intelligent passion like one who wished to make the city a great modern
+capital. He had seen Paris transformed by the Second Empire; he had seen
+Berlin enlarged and embellished after the German victories; and,
+according to him, if Rome did not follow the movement, if it did not
+become the inhabitable capital of a great people, it was threatened with
+prompt death: either a crumbling museum or a renovated, resuscitated
+city--those were the alternatives.*
+
+  * Personally I should have thought the example of Berlin a great
+    deterrent. The enlargement and embellishment of the Prussian
+    capital, after the war of 1870, was attended by far greater
+    roguery and wholesale swindling than even the previous
+    transformation of Paris. Thousands of people too were ruined,
+    and instead of an increase of prosperity the result was the
+    very reverse.--Trans.
+
+Greatly struck, almost gained over already, Pierre listened to this
+clever man, charmed with his firm, clear mind. He knew how skilfully
+Prada had manoeuvred in the affair of the Villa Montefiori, enriching
+himself when every one else was ruined, having doubtless foreseen the
+fatal catastrophe even while the gambling passion was maddening the
+entire nation. However, the young priest could already detect marks of
+weariness, precocious wrinkles and a fall of the lips, on that
+determined, energetic face, as though its possessor were growing tired of
+the continual struggle that he had to carry on amidst surrounding
+downfalls, the shock of which threatened to bring the most firmly
+established fortunes to the ground. It was said that Prada had recently
+had grave cause for anxiety; and indeed there was no longer any solidity
+to be found; everything might be swept away by the financial crisis which
+day by day was becoming more and more serious. In the case of Luigi,
+sturdy son though he was of Northern Italy, a sort of degeneration had
+set in, a slow rot, caused by the softening, perversive influence of
+Rome. He had there rushed upon the satisfaction of every appetite, and
+prolonged enjoyment was exhausting him. This, indeed, was one of the
+causes of the deep silent sadness of Orlando, who was compelled to
+witness the swift deterioration of his conquering race, whilst Sacco, the
+Italian of the South--served as it were by the climate, accustomed to the
+voluptuous atmosphere, the life of those sun-baked cities compounded of
+the dust of antiquity--bloomed there like the natural vegetation of a
+soil saturated with the crimes of history, and gradually grasped
+everything, both wealth and power.
+
+As Orlando spoke of Stefana's visit to his son, Sacco's name was
+mentioned. Then, without another word, the two men exchanged a smile. A
+rumour was current that the Minister of Agriculture, lately deceased,
+would perhaps not be replaced immediately, and that another minister
+would take charge of the department pending the next session of the
+Chamber.
+
+Next the Palazzo Boccanera was mentioned, and Pierre, his interest
+awakened, became more attentive. "Ah!" exclaimed Count Luigi, turning to
+him, "so you are staying in the Via Giulia? All the Rome of olden time
+sleeps there in the silence of forgetfulness."
+
+With perfect ease he went on to speak of the Cardinal and even of
+Benedetta--"the Countess," as he called her. But, although he was careful
+to let no sign of anger escape him, the young priest could divine that he
+was secretly quivering, full of suffering and spite. In him the
+enthusiastic energy of his father appeared in a baser, degenerate form.
+Quitting the yet handsome Princess Flavia in his passion for Benedetta,
+her divinely beautiful niece, he had resolved to make the latter his own
+at any cost, determined to marry her, to struggle with her and overcome
+her, although he knew that she loved him not, and that he would almost
+certainly wreck his entire life. Rather than relinquish her, however, he
+would have set Rome on fire. And thus his hopeless suffering was now
+great indeed: this woman was but his wife in name, and so torturing was
+the thought of her disdain, that at times, however calm his outward
+demeanour, he was consumed by a jealous vindictive sensual madness that
+did not even recoil from the idea of crime.
+
+"Monsieur l'Abbe is acquainted with the situation," sadly murmured old
+Orlando.
+
+His son responded by a wave of the hand, as though to say that everybody
+was acquainted with it. "Ah! father," he added, "but for you I should
+never have consented to take part in those proceedings for annulling the
+marriage! The Countess would have found herself compelled to return here,
+and would not nowadays be deriding us with her lover, that cousin of
+hers, Dario!"
+
+At this Orlando also waved his hand, as if in protest.
+
+"Oh! it's a fact, father," continued Luigi. "Why did she flee from here
+if it wasn't to go and live with her lover? And indeed, in my opinion,
+it's scandalous that a Cardinal's palace should shelter such goings-on!"
+
+This was the report which he spread abroad, the accusation which he
+everywhere levelled against his wife, of publicly carrying on a shameless
+/liaison/. In reality, however, he did not believe a word of it, being
+too well acquainted with Benedetta's firm rectitude, and her
+determination to belong to none but the man she loved, and to him only in
+marriage. However, in Prada's eyes such accusations were not only fair
+play but also very efficacious.
+
+And now, although he turned pale with covert exasperation, and laughed a
+hard, vindictive, cruel laugh, he went on to speak in a bantering tone of
+the proceedings for annulling the marriage, and in particular of the plea
+put forward by Benedetta's advocate Morano. And at last his language
+became so free that Orlando, with a glance towards the priest, gently
+interposed: "Luigi! Luigi!"
+
+"Yes, you are right, father, I'll say no more," thereupon added the young
+Count. "But it's really abominable and ridiculous. Lisbeth, you know, is
+highly amused at it."
+
+Orlando again looked displeased, for when visitors were present he did
+not like his son to refer to the person whom he had just named. Lisbeth
+Kauffmann, very blonde and pink and merry, was barely thirty years of
+age, and belonged to the Roman foreign colony. For two years past she had
+been a widow, her husband having died at Rome whither he had come to
+nurse a complaint of the lungs. Thenceforward free, and sufficiently well
+off, she had remained in the city by taste, having a marked predilection
+for art, and painting a little, herself. In the Via Principe Amadeo, in
+the new Viminal district, she had purchased a little palazzo, and
+transformed a large apartment on its second floor into a studio hung with
+old stuffs, and balmy in every season with the scent of flowers. The
+place was well known to tolerant and intellectual society. Lisbeth was
+there found in perpetual jubilation, clad in a long blouse, somewhat of a
+/gamine/ in her ways, trenchant too and often bold of speech, but
+nevertheless capital company, and as yet compromised with nobody but
+Prada. Their /liaison/ had begun some four months after his wife had left
+him, and now Lisbeth was near the time of becoming a mother. This she in
+no wise concealed, but displayed such candid tranquillity and happiness
+that her numerous acquaintances continued to visit her as if there were
+nothing in question, so facile and free indeed is the life of the great
+cosmopolitan continental cities. Under the circumstances which his wife's
+suit had created, Prada himself was not displeased at the turn which
+events had taken with regard to Lisbeth, but none the less his incurable
+wound still bled.
+
+There could be no compensation for the bitterness of Benedetta's disdain,
+it was she for whom his heart burned, and he dreamt of one day wreaking
+on her a tragic punishment.
+
+Pierre, knowing nothing of Lisbeth, failed to understand the allusions of
+Orlando and his son. But realising that there was some embarrassment
+between them, he sought to take countenance by picking from off the
+littered table a thick book which, to his surprise, he found to be a
+French educational work, one of those manuals for the /baccalaureat/,*
+containing a digest of the knowledge which the official programmes
+require. It was but a humble, practical, elementary work, yet it
+necessarily dealt with all the mathematical, physical, chemical, and
+natural sciences, thus broadly outlining the intellectual conquests of
+the century, the present phase of human knowledge.
+
+  * The examination for the degree of bachelor, which degree is
+    the necessary passport to all the liberal professions in France.
+    M. Zola, by the way, failed to secure it, being ploughed for
+    "insufficiency in literature"!--Trans.
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Orlando, well pleased with the diversion, "you are
+looking at the book of my old friend Theophile Morin. He was one of the
+thousand of Marsala, you know, and helped us to conquer Sicily and
+Naples. A hero! But for more than thirty years now he has been living in
+France again, absorbed in the duties of his petty professorship, which
+hasn't made him at all rich. And so he lately published that book, which
+sells very well in France it seems; and it occurred to him that he might
+increase his modest profits on it by issuing translations, an Italian one
+among others. He and I have remained brothers, and thinking that my
+influence would prove decisive, he wishes to utilise it. But he is
+mistaken; I fear, alas! that I shall be unable to get anybody to take up
+his book."
+
+At this Luigi Prada, who had again become very composed and amiable,
+shrugged his shoulders slightly, full as he was of the scepticism of his
+generation which desired to maintain things in their actual state so as
+to derive the greatest profit from them. "What would be the good of it?"
+he murmured; "there are too many books already!"
+
+"No, no!" the old man passionately retorted, "there can never be too many
+books! We still and ever require fresh ones! It's by literature, not by
+the sword, that mankind will overcome falsehood and injustice and attain
+to the final peace of fraternity among the nations--Oh! you may smile; I
+know that you call these ideas my fancies of '48, the fancies of a
+greybeard, as people say in France. But it is none the less true that
+Italy is doomed, if the problem be not attacked from down below, if the
+people be not properly fashioned. And there is only one way to make a
+nation, to create men, and that is to educate them, to develop by
+educational means the immense lost force which now stagnates in ignorance
+and idleness. Yes, yes, Italy is made, but let us make an Italian nation.
+And give us more and more books, and let us ever go more and more forward
+into science and into light, if we wish to live and to be healthy, good,
+and strong!"
+
+With his torso erect, with his powerful leonine muzzle flaming with the
+white brightness of his beard and hair, old Orlando looked superb. And in
+that simple, candid chamber, so touching with its intentional poverty, he
+raised his cry of hope with such intensity of feverish faith, that before
+the young priest's eyes there arose another figure--that of Cardinal
+Boccanera, erect and black save for his snow-white hair, and likewise
+glowing with heroic beauty in his crumbling palace whose gilded ceilings
+threatened to fall about his head! Ah! the magnificent stubborn men of
+the past, the believers, the old men who still show themselves more
+virile, more ardent than the young! Those two represented the opposite
+poles of belief; they had not an idea, an affection in common, and in
+that ancient city of Rome, where all was being blown away in dust, they
+alone seemed to protest, indestructible, face to face like two parted
+brothers, standing motionless on either horizon. And to have seen them
+thus, one after the other, so great and grand, so lonely, so detached
+from ordinary life, was to fill one's day with a dream of eternity.
+
+Luigi, however, had taken hold of the old man's hands to calm him by an
+affectionate filial clasp. "Yes, yes, you are right, father, always
+right, and I'm a fool to contradict you. Now, pray don't move about like
+that, for you are uncovering yourself, and your legs will get cold
+again."
+
+So saying, he knelt down and very carefully arranged the wrapper; and
+then remaining on the floor like a child, albeit he was two and forty, he
+raised his moist eyes, full of mute, entreating worship towards the old
+man who, calmed and deeply moved, caressed his hair with a trembling
+touch.
+
+Pierre had been there for nearly two hours, when he at last took leave,
+greatly struck and affected by all that he had seen and heard. And again
+he had to promise that he would return and have a long chat with Orlando.
+Once out of doors he walked along at random. It was barely four o'clock,
+and it was his idea to ramble in this wise, without any predetermined
+programme, through Rome at that delightful hour when the sun sinks in the
+refreshed and far blue atmosphere. Almost immediately, however, he found
+himself in the Via Nazionale, along which he had driven on arriving the
+previous day. And he recognised the huge livid Banca d'Italia, the green
+gardens climbing to the Quirinal, and the heaven-soaring pines of the
+Villa Aldobrandini. Then, at the turn of the street, as he stopped short
+in order that he might again contemplate the column of Trajan which now
+rose up darkly from its low piazza, already full of twilight, he was
+surprised to see a victoria suddenly pull up, and a young man courteously
+beckon to him.
+
+"Monsieur l'Abbe Froment! Monsieur l'Abbe Froment!"
+
+It was young Prince Dario Boccanera, on his way to his daily drive along
+the Corso. He now virtually subsisted on the liberality of his uncle the
+Cardinal, and was almost always short of money. But, like all the Romans,
+he would, if necessary, have rather lived on bread and water than have
+forgone his carriage, horse, and coachman. An equipage, indeed, is the
+one indispensable luxury of Rome.
+
+"If you will come with me, Monsieur l'Abbe Froment," said the young
+Prince, "I will show you the most interesting part of our city."
+
+He doubtless desired to please Benedetta, by behaving amiably towards her
+protege. Idle as he was, too, it seemed to him a pleasant occupation to
+initiate that young priest, who was said to be so intelligent, into what
+he deemed the inimitable side, the true florescence of Roman life.
+
+Pierre was compelled to accept, although he would have preferred a
+solitary stroll. Yet he was interested in this young man, the last born
+of an exhausted race, who, while seemingly incapable of either thought or
+action, was none the less very seductive with his high-born pride and
+indolence. Far more a Roman than a patriot, Dario had never had the
+faintest inclination to rally to the new order of things, being well
+content to live apart and do nothing; and passionate though he was, he
+indulged in no follies, being very practical and sensible at heart, as
+are all his fellow-citizens, despite their apparent impetuosity. As soon
+as his carriage, after crossing the Piazza di Venezia, entered the Corso,
+he gave rein to his childish vanity, his desire to shine, his passion for
+gay, happy life in the open under the lovely sky. All this, indeed, was
+clearly expressed in the simple gesture which he made whilst exclaiming:
+"The Corso!"
+
+As on the previous day, Pierre was filled with astonishment. The long
+narrow street again stretched before him as far as the white dazzling
+Piazza del Popolo, the only difference being that the right-hand houses
+were now steeped in sunshine, whilst those on the left were black with
+shadow. What! was that the Corso then, that semi-obscure trench, close
+pressed by high and heavy house-fronts, that mean roadway where three
+vehicles could scarcely pass abreast, and which serried shops lined with
+gaudy displays? There was neither space, nor far horizon, nor refreshing
+greenery such as the fashionable drives of Paris could boast! Nothing but
+jostling, crowding, and stifling on the little footways under the narrow
+strip of sky. And although Dario named the pompous and historical
+palaces, Bonaparte, Doria, Odescalchi, Sciarra, and Chigi; although he
+pointed out the column of Marcus Aurelius on the Piazza Colonna, the most
+lively square of the whole city with its everlasting throng of lounging,
+gazing, chattering people; although, all the way to the Piazza del
+Popolo, he never ceased calling attention to churches, houses, and
+side-streets, notably the Via dei Condotti, at the far end of which the
+Trinity de' Monti, all golden in the glory of the sinking sun, appeared
+above that famous flight of steps, the triumphal Scala di Spagna--Pierre
+still and ever retained the impression of disillusion which the narrow,
+airless thoroughfare had conveyed to him: the "palaces" looked to him
+like mournful hospitals or barracks, the Piazza Colonna suffered terribly
+from a lack of trees, and the Trinity de' Monti alone took his fancy by
+its distant radiance of fairyland.
+
+But it was necessary to come back from the Piazza del Popolo to the
+Piazza di Venezia, then return to the former square, and come back yet
+again, following the entire Corso three and four times without wearying.
+The delighted Dario showed himself and looked about him, exchanging
+salutations. On either footway was a compact crowd of promenaders whose
+eyes roamed over the equipages and whose hands could have shaken those of
+the carriage folks. So great at last became the number of vehicles that
+both lines were absolutely unbroken, crowded to such a point that the
+coachmen could do no more than walk their horses. Perpetually going up
+and coming down the Corso, people scrutinised and jostled one another. It
+was open-air promiscuity, all Rome gathered together in the smallest
+possible space, the folks who knew one another and who met here as in a
+friendly drawing-room, and the folks belonging to adverse parties who did
+not speak together but who elbowed each other, and whose glances
+penetrated to each other's soul. Then a revelation came to Pierre, and he
+suddenly understood the Corso, the ancient custom, the passion and glory
+of the city. Its pleasure lay precisely in the very narrowness of the
+street, in that forced elbowing which facilitated not only desired
+meetings but the satisfaction of curiosity, the display of vanity, and
+the garnering of endless tittle-tattle. All Roman society met here each
+day, displayed itself, spied on itself, offering itself in spectacle to
+its own eyes, with such an indispensable need of thus beholding itself
+that the man of birth who missed the Corso was like one out of his
+element, destitute of newspapers, living like a savage. And withal the
+atmosphere was delightfully balmy, and the narrow strip of sky between
+the heavy, rusty mansions displayed an infinite azure purity.
+
+Dario never ceased smiling, and slightly inclining his head while he
+repeated to Pierre the names of princes and princesses, dukes and
+duchesses--high-sounding names whose flourish had filled history, whose
+sonorous syllables conjured up the shock of armour on the battlefield and
+the splendour of papal pomp with robes of purple, tiaras of gold, and
+sacred vestments sparkling with precious stones. And as Pierre listened
+and looked he was pained to see merely some corpulent ladies or
+undersized gentlemen, bloated or shrunken beings, whose ill-looks seemed
+to be increased by their modern attire. However, a few pretty women went
+by, particularly some young, silent girls with large, clear eyes. And
+just as Dario had pointed out the Palazzo Buongiovanni, a huge
+seventeenth-century facade, with windows encompassed by foliaged
+ornamentation deplorably heavy in style, he added gaily:
+
+"Ah! look--that's Attilio there on the footway. Young Lieutenant
+Sacco--you know, don't you?"
+
+Pierre signed that he understood. Standing there in uniform, Attilio, so
+young, so energetic and brave of appearance, with a frank countenance
+softly illumined by blue eyes like his mother's, at once pleased the
+priest. He seemed indeed the very personification of youth and love, with
+all their enthusiastic, disinterested hope in the future.
+
+"You'll see by and by, when we pass the palace again," said Dario. "He'll
+still be there and I'll show you something."
+
+Then he began to talk gaily of the girls of Rome, the little princesses,
+the little duchesses, so discreetly educated at the convent of the Sacred
+Heart, quitting it for the most part so ignorant and then completing
+their education beside their mothers, never going out but to accompany
+the latter on the obligatory drive to the Corso, and living through
+endless days, cloistered, imprisoned in the depths of sombre mansions.
+Nevertheless what tempests raged in those mute souls to which none had
+ever penetrated! what stealthy growth of will suddenly appeared from
+under passive obedience, apparent unconsciousness of surroundings! How
+many there were who stubbornly set their minds on carving out their lives
+for themselves, on choosing the man who might please them, and securing
+him despite the opposition of the entire world! And the lover was chosen
+there from among the stream of young men promenading the Corso, the lover
+hooked with a glance during the daily drive, those candid eyes speaking
+aloud and sufficing for confession and the gift of all, whilst not a
+breath was wafted from the lips so chastely closed. And afterwards there
+came love letters, furtively exchanged in church, and the winning-over of
+maids to facilitate stolen meetings, at first so innocent. In the end, a
+marriage often resulted.
+
+Celia, for her part, had determined to win Attilio on the very first day
+when their eyes had met. And it was from a window of the Palazzo
+Buongiovanni that she had perceived him one afternoon of mortal
+weariness. He had just raised his head, and she had taken him for ever
+and given herself to him with those large, pure eyes of hers as they
+rested on his own. She was but an /amorosa/--nothing more; he pleased
+her; she had set her heart on him--him and none other. She would have
+waited twenty years for him, but she relied on winning him at once by
+quiet stubbornness of will. People declared that the terrible fury of the
+Prince, her father, had proved impotent against her respectful, obstinate
+silence. He, man of mixed blood as he was, son of an American woman, and
+husband of an English woman, laboured but to retain his own name and
+fortune intact amidst the downfall of others; and it was rumoured that as
+the result of a quarrel which he had picked with his wife, whom he
+accused of not sufficiently watching over their daughter, the Princess
+had revolted, full not only of the pride of a foreigner who had brought a
+huge dowry in marriage, but also of such plain, frank egotism that she
+had declared she no longer found time enough to attend to herself, let
+alone another. Had she not already done enough in bearing him five
+children? She thought so; and now she spent her time in worshipping
+herself, letting Celia do as she listed, and taking no further interest
+in the household through which swept stormy gusts.
+
+However, the carriage was again about to pass the Buongiovanni mansion,
+and Dario forewarned Pierre. "You see," said he, "Attilio has come back.
+And now look up at the third window on the first floor."
+
+It was at once rapid and charming. Pierre saw the curtain slightly drawn
+aside and Celia's gentle face appear. Closed, candid lily, she did not
+smile, she did not move. Nothing could be read on those pure lips, or in
+those clear but fathomless eyes of hers. Yet she was taking Attilio to
+herself, and giving herself to him without reserve. And soon the curtain
+fell once more.
+
+"Ah, the little mask!" muttered Dario. "Can one ever tell what there is
+behind so much innocence?"
+
+As Pierre turned round he perceived Attilio, whose head was still raised,
+and whose face was also motionless and pale, with closed mouth, and
+widely opened eyes. And the young priest was deeply touched, for this was
+love, absolute love in its sudden omnipotence, true love, eternal and
+juvenescent, in which ambition and calculation played no part.
+
+Then Dario ordered the coachman to drive up to the Pincio; for, before or
+after the Corso, the round of the Pincio is obligatory on fine, clear
+afternoons. First came the Piazza del Popolo, the most airy and regular
+square of Rome, with its conjunction of thoroughfares, its churches and
+fountains, its central obelisk, and its two clumps of trees facing one
+another at either end of the small white paving-stones, betwixt the
+severe and sun-gilt buildings. Then, turning to the right, the carriage
+began to climb the inclined way to the Pincio--a magnificent winding
+ascent, decorated with bas-reliefs, statues, and fountains--a kind of
+apotheosis of marble, a commemoration of ancient Rome, rising amidst
+greenery. Up above, however, Pierre found the garden small, little better
+than a large square, with just the four necessary roadways to enable the
+carriages to drive round and round as long as they pleased. An
+uninterrupted line of busts of the great men of ancient and modern Italy
+fringed these roadways. But what Pierre most admired was the trees--trees
+of the most rare and varied kinds, chosen and tended with infinite care,
+and nearly always evergreens, so that in winter and summer alike the spot
+was adorned with lovely foliage of every imaginable shade of verdure. And
+beside these trees, along the fine, breezy roadways, Dario's victoria
+began to turn, following the continuous, unwearying stream of the other
+carriages.
+
+Pierre remarked one young woman of modest demeanour and attractive
+simplicity who sat alone in a dark-blue victoria, drawn by a
+well-groomed, elegantly harnessed horse. She was very pretty, short, with
+chestnut hair, a creamy complexion, and large gentle eyes. Quietly robed
+in dead-leaf silk, she wore a large hat, which alone looked somewhat
+extravagant. And seeing that Dario was staring at her, the priest
+inquired her name, whereat the young Prince smiled. Oh! she was nobody,
+La Tonietta was the name that people gave her; she was one of the few
+/demi-mondaines/ that Roman society talked of. Then, with the freeness
+and frankness which his race displays in such matters, Dario added some
+particulars. La Tonietta's origin was obscure; some said that she was the
+daughter of an innkeeper of Tivoli, and others that of a Neapolitan
+banker. At all events, she was very intelligent, had educated herself,
+and knew thoroughly well how to receive and entertain people at the
+little palazzo in the Via dei Mille, which had been given to her by old
+Marquis Manfredi now deceased. She made no scandalous show, had but one
+protector at a time, and the princesses and duchesses who paid attention
+to her at the Corso every afternoon, considered her nice-looking. One
+peculiarity had made her somewhat notorious. There was some one whom she
+loved and from whom she never accepted aught but a bouquet of white
+roses; and folks would smile indulgently when at times for weeks together
+she was seen driving round the Pincio with those pure, white bridal
+flowers on the carriage seat.
+
+Dario, however, suddenly paused in his explanations to address a
+ceremonious bow to a lady who, accompanied by a gentleman, drove by in a
+large landau. Then he simply said to the priest: "My mother."
+
+Pierre already knew of her. Viscount de la Choue had told him her story,
+how, after Prince Onofrio Boccanera's death, she had married again,
+although she was already fifty; how at the Corso, just like some young
+girl, she had hooked with her eyes a handsome man to her liking--one,
+too, who was fifteen years her junior. And Pierre also knew who that man
+was, a certain Jules Laporte, an ex-sergeant of the papal Swiss Guard, an
+ex-traveller in relics, compromised in an extraordinary "false relic"
+fraud; and he was further aware that Laporte's wife had made a
+fine-looking Marquis Montefiori of him, the last of the fortunate
+adventurers of romance, triumphing as in the legendary lands where
+shepherds are wedded to queens.
+
+At the next turn, as the large landau again went by, Pierre looked at the
+couple. The Marchioness was really wonderful, blooming with all the
+classical Roman beauty, tall, opulent, and very dark, with the head of a
+goddess and regular if somewhat massive features, nothing as yet
+betraying her age except the down upon her upper lip. And the Marquis,
+the Romanised Swiss of Geneva, really had a proud bearing, with his solid
+soldierly figure and long wavy moustaches. People said that he was in no
+wise a fool but, on the contrary, very gay and very supple, just the man
+to please women. His wife so gloried in him that she dragged him about
+and displayed him everywhere, having begun life afresh with him as if she
+were still but twenty, spending on him the little fortune which she had
+saved from the Villa Montefiori disaster, and so completely forgetting
+her son that she only saw the latter now and again at the promenade and
+acknowledged his bow like that of some chance acquaintance.
+
+"Let us go to see the sun set behind St. Peter's," all at once said
+Dario, conscientiously playing his part as a showman of curiosities.
+
+The victoria thereupon returned to the terrace, where a military band was
+now playing with a terrific blare of brass instruments. In order that
+their occupants might hear the music, a large number of carriages had
+already drawn up, and a growing crowd of loungers on foot had assembled
+there. And from that beautiful terrace, so broad and lofty, one of the
+most wonderful views of Rome was offered to the gaze. Beyond the Tiber,
+beyond the pale chaos of the new district of the castle meadows,* and
+between the greenery of Monte Mario and the Janiculum arose St. Peter's.
+Then on the left came all the olden city, an endless stretch of roofs, a
+rolling sea of edifices as far as the eye could reach. But one's glances
+always came back to St. Peter's, towering into the azure with pure and
+sovereign grandeur. And, seen from the terrace, the slow sunsets in the
+depths of the vast sky behind the colossus were sublime.
+
+  * See /ante/ note on castle meadows.
+
+Sometimes there are topplings of sanguineous clouds, battles of giants
+hurling mountains at one another and succumbing beneath the monstrous
+ruins of flaming cities. Sometimes only red streaks or fissures appear on
+the surface of a sombre lake, as if a net of light has been flung to fish
+the submerged orb from amidst the seaweed. Sometimes, too, there is a
+rosy mist, a kind of delicate dust which falls, streaked with pearls by a
+distant shower, whose curtain is drawn across the mystery of the horizon.
+And sometimes there is a triumph, a /cortege/ of gold and purple chariots
+of cloud rolling along a highway of fire, galleys floating upon an azure
+sea, fantastic and extravagant pomps slowly sinking into the less and
+less fathomable abyss of the twilight.
+
+But that night the sublime spectacle presented itself to Pierre with a
+calm, blinding, desperate grandeur. At first, just above the dome of St.
+Peter's, the sun, descending in a spotless, deeply limpid sky, proved yet
+so resplendent that one's eyes could not face its brightness. And in this
+resplendency the dome seemed to be incandescent, you would have said a
+dome of liquid silver; whilst the surrounding districts, the house-roofs
+of the Borgo, were as though changed into a lake of live embers. Then, as
+the sun was by degrees inclined, it lost some of its blaze, and one could
+look; and soon afterwards sinking with majestic slowness it disappeared
+behind the dome, which showed forth darkly blue, while the orb, now
+entirely hidden, set an aureola around it, a glory like a crown of
+flaming rays. And then began the dream, the dazzling symbol, the singular
+illumination of the row of windows beneath the cupola which were
+transpierced by the light and looked like the ruddy mouths of furnaces,
+in such wise that one might have imagined the dome to be poised upon a
+brazier, isolated, in the air, as though raised and upheld by the
+violence of the fire. It all lasted barely three minutes. Down below the
+jumbled roofs of the Borgo became steeped in violet vapour, sank into
+increasing gloom, whilst from the Janiculum to Monte Mario the horizon
+showed its firm black line. And it was the sky then which became all
+purple and gold, displaying the infinite placidity of a supernatural
+radiance above the earth which faded into nihility. Finally the last
+window reflections were extinguished, the glow of the heavens departed,
+and nothing remained but the vague, fading roundness of the dome of St.
+Peter's amidst the all-invading night.
+
+And, by some subtle connection of ideas, Pierre at that moment once again
+saw rising before him the lofty, sad, declining figures of Cardinal
+Boccanera and old Orlando. On the evening of that day when he had learnt
+to know them, one after the other, both so great in the obstinacy of
+their hope, they seemed to be there, erect on the horizon above their
+annihilated city, on the fringe of the heavens which death apparently was
+about to seize. Was everything then to crumble with them? was everything
+to fade away and disappear in the falling night following upon
+accomplished Time?
+
+
+
+V
+
+ON the following day Narcisse Habert came in great worry to tell Pierre
+that Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo complained of being unwell, and asked for
+a delay of two or three days before receiving the young priest and
+considering the matter of his audience. Pierre was thus reduced to
+inaction, for he dared not make any attempt elsewhere in view of seeing
+the Pope. He had been so frightened by Nani and others that he feared he
+might jeopardise everything by inconsiderate endeavours. And so he began
+to visit Rome in order to occupy his leisure.
+
+His first visit was for the ruins of the Palatine. Going out alone one
+clear morning at eight o'clock, he presented himself at the entrance in
+the Via San Teodoro, an iron gateway flanked by the lodges of the
+keepers. One of the latter at once offered his services, and though
+Pierre would have preferred to roam at will, following the bent of his
+dream, he somehow did not like to refuse the offer of this man, who spoke
+French very distinctly, and smiled in a very good-natured way. He was a
+squatly built little man, a former soldier, some sixty years of age, and
+his square-cut, ruddy face was barred by thick white moustaches.
+
+"Then will you please follow me, Monsieur l'Abbe," said he. "I can see
+that you are French, Monsieur l'Abbe. I'm a Piedmontese myself, but I
+know the French well enough; I was with them at Solferino. Yes, yes,
+whatever people may say, one can't forget old friendships. Here, this
+way, please, to the right."
+
+Raising his eyes, Pierre had just perceived the line of cypresses edging
+the plateau of the Palatine on the side of the Tiber; and in the delicate
+blue atmosphere the intense greenery of these trees showed like a black
+fringe. They alone attracted the eye; the slope, of a dusty, dirty grey,
+stretched out bare and devastated, dotted by a few bushes, among which
+peeped fragments of ancient walls. All was instinct with the ravaged,
+leprous sadness of a spot handed over to excavation, and where only men
+of learning could wax enthusiastic.
+
+"The palaces of Tiberius, Caligula, and the Flavians are up above,"
+resumed the guide. "We must keep then for the end and go round."
+Nevertheless he took a few steps to the left, and pausing before an
+excavation, a sort of grotto in the hillside, exclaimed: "This is the
+Lupercal den where the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. Just here at the
+entry used to stand the Ruminal fig-tree which sheltered the twins."
+
+Pierre could not restrain a smile, so convinced was the tone in which the
+old soldier gave these explanations, proud as he was of all the ancient
+glory, and wont to regard the wildest legends as indisputable facts.
+However, when the worthy man pointed out some vestiges of Roma
+Quadrata--remnants of walls which really seemed to date from the
+foundation of the city--Pierre began to feel interested, and a first
+touch of emotion made his heart beat. This emotion was certainly not due
+to any beauty of scene, for he merely beheld a few courses of tufa
+blocks, placed one upon the other and uncemented. But a past which had
+been dead for seven and twenty centuries seemed to rise up before him,
+and those crumbling, blackened blocks, the foundation of such a mighty
+eclipse of power and splendour, acquired extraordinary majesty.
+
+Continuing their inspection, they went on, skirting the hillside. The
+outbuildings of the palaces must have descended to this point; fragments
+of porticoes, fallen beams, columns and friezes set up afresh, edged the
+rugged path which wound through wild weeds, suggesting a neglected
+cemetery; and the guide repeated the words which he had used day by day
+for ten years past, continuing to enunciate suppositions as facts, and
+giving a name, a destination, a history, to every one of the fragments.
+
+"The house of Augustus," he said at last, pointing towards some masses of
+earth and rubbish.
+
+Thereupon Pierre, unable to distinguish anything, ventured to inquire:
+"Where do you mean?"
+
+"Oh!" said the man, "it seems that the walls were still to be seen at the
+end of the last century. But it was entered from the other side, from the
+Sacred Way. On this side there was a huge balcony which overlooked the
+Circus Maximus so that one could view the sports. However, as you can
+see, the greater part of the palace is still buried under that big garden
+up above, the garden of the Villa Mills. When there's money for fresh
+excavations it will be found again, together with the temple of Apollo
+and the shrine of Vesta which accompanied it."
+
+Turning to the left, he next entered the Stadium, the arena erected for
+foot-racing, which stretched beside the palace of Augustus; and the
+priest's interest was now once more awakened. It was not that he found
+himself in presence of well-preserved and monumental remains, for not a
+column had remained erect, and only the right-hand walls were still
+standing. But the entire plan of the building had been traced, with the
+goals at either end, the porticus round the course, and the colossal
+imperial tribune which, after being on the left, annexed to the house of
+Augustus, had afterwards opened on the right, fitting into the palace of
+Septimius Severus. And while Pierre looked on all the scattered remnants,
+his guide went on chattering, furnishing the most copious and precise
+information, and declaring that the gentlemen who directed the
+excavations had mentally reconstructed the Stadium in each and every
+particular, and were even preparing a most exact plan of it, showing all
+the columns in their proper order and the statues in their niches, and
+even specifying the divers sorts of marble which had covered the walls.
+
+"Oh! the directors are quite at ease," the old soldier eventually added
+with an air of infinite satisfaction. "There will be nothing for the
+Germans to pounce on here. They won't be allowed to set things
+topsy-turvy as they did at the Forum, where everybody's at sea since they
+came along with their wonderful science!"
+
+Pierre--a Frenchman--smiled, and his interest increased when, by broken
+steps and wooden bridges thrown over gaps, he followed the guide into the
+great ruins of the palace of Severus. Rising on the southern point of the
+Palatine, this palace had overlooked the Appian Way and the Campagna as
+far as the eye could reach. Nowadays, almost the only remains are the
+substructures, the subterranean halls contrived under the arches of the
+terraces, by which the plateau of the hill was enlarged; and yet these
+dismantled substructures suffice to give some idea of the triumphant
+palace which they once upheld, so huge and powerful have they remained in
+their indestructible massiveness. Near by arose the famous Septizonium,
+the tower with the seven tiers of arcades, which only finally disappeared
+in the sixteenth century. One of the palace terraces yet juts out upon
+cyclopean arches and from it the view is splendid. But all the rest is a
+commingling of massive yet crumbling walls, gaping depths whose ceilings
+have fallen, endless corridors and vast halls of doubtful destination.
+Well cared for by the new administration, swept and cleansed of weeds,
+the ruins have lost their romantic wildness and assumed an aspect of bare
+and mournful grandeur. However, flashes of living sunlight often gild the
+ancient walls, penetrate by their breaches into the black halls, and
+animate with their dazzlement the mute melancholy of all this dead
+splendour now exhumed from the earth in which it slumbered for centuries.
+Over the old ruddy masonry, stripped of its pompous marble covering, is
+the purple mantle of the sunlight, draping the whole with imperial glory
+once more.
+
+For more than two hours already Pierre had been walking on, and yet he
+still had to visit all the earlier palaces on the north and east of the
+plateau. "We must go back," said the guide, "the gardens of the Villa
+Mills and the convent of San Bonaventura stop the way. We shall only be
+able to pass on this side when the excavations have made a clearance. Ah!
+Monsieur l'Abbe, if you had walked over the Palatine merely some fifty
+years ago! I've seen some plans of that time. There were only some
+vineyards and little gardens with hedges then, a real campagna, where not
+a soul was to be met. And to think that all these palaces were sleeping
+underneath!"
+
+Pierre followed him, and after again passing the house of Augustus, they
+ascended the slope and reached the vast Flavian palace,* still half
+buried by the neighbouring villa, and composed of a great number of halls
+large and small, on the nature of which scholars are still arguing. The
+aula regia, or throne-room, the basilica, or hall of justice, the
+triclinium, or dining-room, and the peristylium seem certainties; but for
+all the rest, and especially the small chambers of the private part of
+the structure, only more or less fanciful conjectures can be offered.
+Moreover, not a wall is entire; merely foundations peep out of the
+ground, mutilated bases describing the plan of the edifice. The only ruin
+preserved, as if by miracle, is the house on a lower level which some
+assert to have been that of Livia,* a house which seems very small beside
+all the huge palaces, and where are three halls comparatively intact,
+with mural paintings of mythological scenes, flowers, and fruits, still
+wonderfully fresh. As for the palace of Tiberius, not one of its stones
+can be seen; its remains lie buried beneath a lovely public garden;
+whilst of the neighbouring palace of Caligula, overhanging the Forum,
+there are only some huge substructures, akin to those of the house of
+Severus--buttresses, lofty arcades, which upheld the palace, vast
+basements, so to say, where the praetorians were posted and gorged
+themselves with continual junketings. And thus this lofty plateau
+dominating the city merely offered some scarcely recognisable vestiges to
+the view, stretches of grey, bare soil turned up by the pick, and dotted
+with fragments of old walls; and it needed a real effort of scholarly
+imagination to conjure up the ancient imperial splendour which once had
+triumphed there.
+
+  * Begun by Vespasian and finished by Domitian.--Trans.
+
+  ** Others assert it to have been the house of Germanicus,
+     father of Caligula.--Trans.
+
+Nevertheless Pierre's guide, with quiet conviction, persisted in his
+explanations, pointing to empty space as though the edifices still rose
+before him. "Here," said he, "we are in the Area Palatina. Yonder, you
+see, is the facade of Domitian's palace, and there you have that of
+Caligula's palace, while on turning round the temple of Jupiter Stator is
+in front of you. The Sacred Way came up as far as here, and passed under
+the Porta Mugonia, one of the three gates of primitive Rome."
+
+He paused and pointed to the northwest portion of the height. "You will
+have noticed," he resumed, "that the Caesars didn't build yonder. And
+that was evidently because they had to respect some very ancient
+monuments dating from before the foundation of the city and greatly
+venerated by the people. There stood the temple of Victory built by
+Evander and his Arcadians, the Lupercal grotto which I showed you, and
+the humble hut of Romulus constructed of reeds and clay. Oh! everything
+has been found again, Monsieur l'Abbe; and, in spite of all that the
+Germans say there isn't the slightest doubt of it."
+
+Then, quite abruptly, like a man suddenly remembering the most
+interesting thing of all, he exclaimed: "Ah! to wind up we'll just go to
+see the subterranean gallery where Caligula was murdered."
+
+Thereupon they descended into a long crypto-porticus, through the
+breaches of which the sun now casts bright rays. Some ornaments of stucco
+and fragments of mosaic-work are yet to be seen. Still the spot remains
+mournful and desolate, well fitted for tragic horror. The old soldier's
+voice had become graver as he related how Caligula, on returning from the
+Palatine games, had been minded to descend all alone into this gallery to
+witness certain sacred dances which some youths from Asia were practising
+there. And then it was that the gloom gave Cassius Chaereas, the chief of
+the conspirators, an opportunity to deal him the first thrust in the
+abdomen. Howling with pain, the emperor sought to flee; but the
+assassins, his creatures, his dearest friends, rushed upon him, threw him
+down, and dealt him blow after blow, whilst he, mad with rage and fright,
+filled the dim, deaf gallery with the howling of a slaughtered beast.
+When he had expired, silence fell once more, and the frightened murderers
+fled.
+
+The classical visit to the Palatine was now over, and when Pierre came up
+into the light again, he wished to rid himself of his guide and remain
+alone in the pleasant, dreamy garden on the summit of the height. For
+three hours he had been tramping about with the guide's voice buzzing in
+his ears. The worthy man was now talking of his friendship for France and
+relating the battle of Magenta in great detail. He smiled as he took the
+piece of silver which Pierre offered him, and then started on the battle
+of Solferino. Indeed, it seemed impossible to stop him, when fortunately
+a lady came up to ask for some information. And, thereupon, he went off
+with her. "Good-evening, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said; "you can go down by
+way of Caligula's palace."
+
+Delightful was Pierre's relief when he was at last able to rest for a
+moment on one of the marble seats in the garden. There were but few
+clumps of trees, cypresses, box-trees, palms, and some fine evergreen
+oaks; but the latter, sheltering the seat, cast a dark shade of exquisite
+freshness around. The charm of the spot was also largely due to its
+dreamy solitude, to the low rustle which seemed to come from that ancient
+soil saturated with resounding history. Here formerly had been the
+pleasure grounds of the Villa Farnese which still exists though greatly
+damaged, and the grace of the Renascence seems to linger here, its breath
+passing caressingly through the shiny foliage of the old evergreen oaks.
+You are, as it were, enveloped by the soul of the past, an ethereal
+conglomeration of visions, and overhead is wafted the straying breath of
+innumerable generations buried beneath the sod.
+
+After a time, however, Pierre could no longer remain seated, so powerful
+was the attraction of Rome, scattered all around that august summit. So
+he rose and approached the balustrade of a terrace; and beneath him
+appeared the Forum, and beyond it the Capitoline hill. To the eye the
+latter now only presented a commingling of grey buildings, lacking both
+grandeur and beauty. On the summit one saw the rear of the Palace of the
+Senator, flat, with little windows, and surmounted by a high, square
+campanile. The large, bare, rusty-looking walls hid the church of Santa
+Maria in Ara Coeli and the spot where the temple of Capitoline Jove had
+formerly stood, radiant in all its royalty. On the left, some ugly houses
+rose terrace-wise upon the slope of Monte Caprino, where goats were
+pastured in the middle ages; while the few fine trees in the grounds of
+the Caffarelli palace, the present German embassy, set some greenery
+above the ancient Tarpeian rock now scarcely to be found, lost, hidden as
+it is, by buttress walls. Yet this was the Mount of the Capitol, the most
+glorious of the seven hills, with its citadel and its temple, the temple
+to which universal dominion was promised, the St. Peter's of pagan Rome;
+this indeed was the hill--steep on the side of the Forum, and a precipice
+on that of the Campus Martius--where the thunder of Jupiter fell, where
+in the dimmest of the far-off ages the Asylum of Romulus rose with its
+sacred oaks, a spot of infinite savage mystery. Here, later, were
+preserved the public documents of Roman grandeur inscribed on tablets of
+brass; hither climbed the heroes of the triumphs; and here the emperors
+became gods, erect in statues of marble. And nowadays the eye inquires
+wonderingly how so much history and so much glory can have had for their
+scene so small a space, such a rugged, jumbled pile of paltry buildings,
+a mole-hill, looking no bigger, no loftier than a hamlet perched between
+two valleys.
+
+Then another surprise for Pierre was the Forum, starting from the Capitol
+and stretching out below the Palatine: a narrow square, close pressed by
+the neighbouring hills, a hollow where Rome in growing had been compelled
+to rear edifice close to edifice till all stifled for lack of breathing
+space. It was necessary to dig very deep--some fifty feet--to find the
+venerable republican soil, and now all you see is a long, clean, livid
+trench, cleared of ivy and bramble, where the fragments of paving, the
+bases of columns, and the piles of foundations appear like bits of bone.
+Level with the ground the Basilica Julia, entirely mapped out, looks like
+an architect's ground plan. On that side the arch of Septimius Severus
+alone rears itself aloft, virtually intact, whilst of the temple of
+Vespasian only a few isolated columns remain still standing, as if by
+miracle, amidst the general downfall, soaring with a proud elegance, with
+sovereign audacity of equilibrium, so slender and so gilded, into the
+blue heavens. The column of Phocas is also erect; and you see some
+portions of the Rostra fitted together out of fragments discovered near
+by. But if the eye seeks a sensation of extraordinary vastness, it must
+travel beyond the three columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux,
+beyond the vestiges of the house of the Vestals, beyond the temple of
+Faustina, in which the Christian Church of San Lorenzo has so composedly
+installed itself, and even beyond the round temple of Romulus, to light
+upon the Basilica of Constantine with its three colossal, gaping
+archways. From the Palatine they look like porches built for a nation of
+giants, so massive that a fallen fragment resembles some huge rock hurled
+by a whirlwind from a mountain summit. And there, in that illustrious,
+narrow, overflowing Forum the history of the greatest of nations held for
+centuries, from the legendary time of the Sabine women, reconciling their
+relatives and their ravishers, to that of the proclamation of public
+liberty, so slowly wrung from the patricians by the plebeians. Was not
+the Forum at once the market, the exchange, the tribunal, the open-air
+hall of public meeting? The Gracchi there defended the cause of the
+humble; Sylla there set up the lists of those whom he proscribed; Cicero
+there spoke, and there, against the rostra, his bleeding head was hung.
+Then, under the emperors, the old renown was dimmed, the centuries buried
+the monuments and temples with such piles of dust that all that the
+middle ages could do was to turn the spot into a cattle market! Respect
+has come back once more, a respect which violates tombs, which is full of
+feverish curiosity and science, which is dissatisfied with mere
+hypotheses, which loses itself amidst this historical soil where
+generations rise one above the other, and hesitates between the fifteen
+or twenty restorations of the Forum that have been planned on paper, each
+of them as plausible as the other. But to the mere passer-by, who is not
+a professional scholar and has not recently re-perused the history of
+Rome, the details have no significance. All he sees on this searched and
+scoured spot is a city's cemetery where old exhumed stones are whitening,
+and whence rises the intense sadness that envelops dead nations. Pierre,
+however, noting here and there fragments of the Sacred Way, now turning,
+now running down, and now ascending with their pavement of silex indented
+by the chariot-wheels, thought of the triumphs, of the ascent of the
+triumpher, so sorely shaken as his chariot jolted over that rough
+pavement of glory.
+
+But the horizon expanded towards the southeast, and beyond the arches of
+Titus and Constantine he perceived the Colosseum. Ah! that colossus, only
+one-half or so of which has been destroyed by time as with the stroke of
+a mighty scythe, it rises in its enormity and majesty like a stone
+lace-work with hundreds of empty bays agape against the blue of heaven!
+There is a world of halls, stairs, landings, and passages, a world where
+one loses oneself amidst death-like silence and solitude. The furrowed
+tiers of seats, eaten into by the atmosphere, are like shapeless steps
+leading down into some old extinct crater, some natural circus excavated
+by the force of the elements in indestructible rock. The hot suns of
+eighteen hundred years have baked and scorched this ruin, which has
+reverted to a state of nature, bare and golden-brown like a
+mountain-side, since it has been stripped of its vegetation, the flora
+which once made it like a virgin forest. And what an evocation when the
+mind sets flesh and blood and life again on all that dead osseous
+framework, fills the circus with the 90,000 spectators which it could
+hold, marshals the games and the combats of the arena, gathers a whole
+civilisation together, from the emperor and the dignitaries to the
+surging plebeian sea, all aglow with the agitation and brilliancy of an
+impassioned people, assembled under the ruddy reflection of the giant
+purple velum. And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean
+ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics of a race of
+giants long since vanished from the world: halls extravagantly and
+inexplicably spacious and lofty; vestibules large enough for an entire
+population; a /frigidarium/ where five hundred people could swim
+together; a /tepidarium/ and a /calidarium/* on the same proportions,
+born of a wild craving for the huge; and then the terrific massiveness of
+the structures, the thickness of the piles of brick-work, such as no
+feudal castle ever knew; and, in addition, the general immensity which
+makes passing visitors look like lost ants; such an extraordinary riot of
+the great and the mighty that one wonders for what men, for what
+multitudes, this monstrous edifice was reared. To-day, you would say a
+mass of rocks in the rough, thrown from some height for building the
+abode of Titans.
+
+  * Tepidarium, warm bath; calidarium, vapour bath.--Trans.
+
+And as Pierre gazed, he became more and more immersed in the limitless
+past which encompassed him. On all sides history rose up like a surging
+sea. Those bluey plains on the north and west were ancient Etruria; those
+jagged crests on the east were the Sabine Mountains; while southward, the
+Alban Mountains and Latium spread out in the streaming gold of the
+sunshine. Alba Longa was there, and so was Monte Cavo, with its crown of
+old trees, and the convent which has taken the place of the ancient
+temple of Jupiter. Then beyond the Forum, beyond the Capitol, the greater
+part of Rome stretched out, whilst behind Pierre, on the margin of the
+Tiber, was the Janiculum. And a voice seemed to come from the whole city,
+a voice which told him of Rome's eternal life, resplendent with past
+greatness. He remembered just enough of what he had been taught at school
+to realise where he was; he knew just what every one knows of Rome with
+no pretension to scholarship, and it was more particularly his artistic
+temperament which awoke within him and gathered warmth from the flame of
+memory. The present had disappeared, and the ocean of the past was still
+rising, buoying him up, carrying him away.
+
+And then his mind involuntarily pictured a resurrection instinct with
+life. The grey, dismal Palatine, razed like some accursed city, suddenly
+became animated, peopled, crowned with palaces and temples. There had
+been the cradle of the Eternal City, founded by Romulus on that summit
+overlooking the Tiber. There assuredly the seven kings of its two and a
+half centuries of monarchical rule had dwelt, enclosed within high,
+strong walls, which had but three gateways. Then the five centuries of
+republican sway spread out, the greatest, the most glorious of all the
+centuries, those which brought the Italic peninsula and finally the known
+world under Roman dominion. During those victorious years of social and
+war-like struggle, Rome grew and peopled the seven hills, and the
+Palatine became but a venerable cradle with legendary temples, and was
+even gradually invaded by private residences. But at last Caesar, the
+incarnation of the power of his race, after Gaul and after Pharsalia
+triumphed in the name of the whole Roman people, having completed the
+colossal task by which the five following centuries of imperialism were
+to profit, with a pompous splendour and a rush of every appetite. And
+then Augustus could ascend to power; glory had reached its climax;
+millions of gold were waiting to be filched from the depths of the
+provinces; and the imperial gala was to begin in the world's capital,
+before the eyes of the dazzled and subjected nations. Augustus had been
+born on the Palatine, and after Actium had given him the empire, he set
+his pride in reigning from the summit of that sacred mount, venerated by
+the people. He bought up private houses and there built his palace with
+luxurious splendour: an atrium upheld by four pilasters and eight
+columns; a peristylium encompassed by fifty-six Ionic columns; private
+apartments all around, and all in marble; a profusion of marble, brought
+at great cost from foreign lands, and of the brightest hues, resplendent
+like gems. And he lodged himself with the gods, building near his own
+abode a large temple of Apollo and a shrine of Vesta in order to ensure
+himself divine and eternal sovereignty. And then the seed of the imperial
+palaces was sown; they were to spring up, grow and swarm, and cover the
+entire mount.
+
+Ah! the all-powerfulness of Augustus, his four and forty years of total,
+absolute, superhuman power, such as no despot has known even in his
+dreams! He had taken to himself every title, united every magistracy in
+his person. Imperator and consul, he commanded the armies and exercised
+executive power; pro-consul, he was supreme in the provinces; perpetual
+censor and princeps, he reigned over the senate; tribune, he was the
+master of the people. And, formerly called Octavius, he had caused
+himself to be declared Augustus, sacred, god among men, having his
+temples and his priests, worshipped in his lifetime like a divinity
+deigning to visit the earth. And finally he had resolved to be supreme
+pontiff, annexing religious to civil power, and thus by a stroke of
+genius attaining to the most complete dominion to which man can climb. As
+the supreme pontiff could not reside in a private house, he declared his
+abode to be State property. As the supreme pontiff could not leave the
+vicinity of the temple of Vesta, he built a temple to that goddess near
+his own dwelling, leaving the guardianship of the ancient altar below the
+Palatine to the Vestal virgins. He spared no effort, for he well realised
+that human omnipotence, the mastery of mankind and the world, lay in that
+reunion of sovereignty, in being both king and priest, emperor and pope.
+All the sap of a mighty race, all the victories achieved, and all the
+favours of fortune yet to be garnered, blossomed forth in Augustus, in a
+unique splendour which was never again to shed such brilliant radiance.
+He was really the master of the world, amidst the conquered and pacified
+nations, encompassed by immortal glory in literature and in art. In him
+would seem to have been satisfied the old intense ambition of his people,
+the ambition which it had pursued through centuries of patient conquest,
+to become the people-king. The blood of Rome, the blood of Augustus, at
+last coruscated in the sunlight, in the purple of empire. And the blood
+of Augustus, of the divine, triumphant, absolute sovereign of bodies and
+souls, of the man in whom seven centuries of national pride had
+culminated, was to descend through the ages, through an innumerable
+posterity with a heritage of boundless pride and ambition. For it was
+fatal: the blood of Augustus was bound to spring into life once more and
+pulsate in the veins of all the successive masters of Rome, ever haunting
+them with the dream of ruling the whole world. And later on, after the
+decline and fall, when power had once more become divided between the
+king and the priest, the popes--their hearts burning with the red,
+devouring blood of their great forerunner--had no other passion, no other
+policy, through the centuries, than that of attaining to civil dominion,
+to the totality of human power.
+
+But Augustus being dead, his palace having been closed and consecrated,
+Pierre saw that of Tiberius spring up from the soil. It had stood where
+his feet now rested, where the beautiful evergreen oaks sheltered him. He
+pictured it with courts, porticoes, and halls, both substantial and
+grand, despite the gloomy bent of the emperor who betook himself far from
+Rome to live amongst informers and debauchees, with his heart and brain
+poisoned by power to the point of crime and most extraordinary insanity.
+Then the palace of Caligula followed, an enlargement of that of Tiberius,
+with arcades set up to increase its extent, and a bridge thrown over the
+Forum to the Capitol, in order that the prince might go thither at his
+ease to converse with Jove, whose son he claimed to be. And sovereignty
+also rendered this one ferocious--a madman with omnipotence to do as he
+listed! Then, after Claudius, Nero, not finding the Palatine large
+enough, seized upon the delightful gardens climbing the Esquiline in
+order to set up his Golden House, a dream of sumptuous immensity which he
+could not complete and the ruins of which disappeared in the troubles
+following the death of this monster whom pride demented. Next, in
+eighteen months, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius fell one upon the other, in
+mire and in blood, the purple converting them also into imbeciles and
+monsters, gorged like unclean beasts at the trough of imperial enjoyment.
+And afterwards came the Flavians, at first a respite, with commonsense
+and human kindness: Vespasian; next Titus, who built but little on the
+Palatine; but then Domitian, in whom the sombre madness of omnipotence
+burst forth anew amidst a /regime/ of fear and spying, idiotic atrocities
+and crimes, debauchery contrary to nature, and building enterprises born
+of insane vanity instinct with a desire to outvie the temples of the
+gods. The palace of Domitian, parted by a lane from that of Tiberius,
+arose colossal-like--a palace of fairyland. There was the hall of
+audience, with its throne of gold, its sixteen columns of Phrygian and
+Numidian marble and its eight niches containing colossal statues; there
+were the hall of justice, the vast dining-room, the peristylium, the
+sleeping apartments, where granite, porphyry, and alabaster overflowed,
+carved and decorated by the most famous artists, and lavished on all
+sides in order to dazzle the world. And finally, many years later, a last
+palace was added to all the others--that of Septimius Severus: again a
+building of pride, with arches supporting lofty halls, terraced storeys,
+towers o'er-topping the roofs, a perfect Babylonian pile, rising up at
+the extreme point of the mount in view of the Appian Way, so that the
+emperor's compatriots--those from the province of Africa, where he was
+born--might, on reaching the horizon, marvel at his fortune and worship
+him in his glory.
+
+And now Pierre beheld all those palaces which he had conjured up around
+him, resuscitated, resplendent in the full sunlight. They were as if
+linked together, parted merely by the narrowest of passages. In order
+that not an inch of that precious summit might be lost, they had sprouted
+thickly like the monstrous florescence of strength, power, and unbridled
+pride which satisfied itself at the cost of millions, bleeding the whole
+world for the enjoyment of one man. And in truth there was but one palace
+altogether, a palace enlarged as soon as one emperor died and was placed
+among the deities, and another, shunning the consecrated pile where
+possibly the shadow of death frightened him, experienced an imperious
+need to build a house of his own and perpetuate in everlasting stone the
+memory of his reign. All the emperors were seized with this building
+craze; it was like a disease which the very throne seemed to carry from
+one occupant to another with growing intensity, a consuming desire to
+excel all predecessors by thicker and higher walls, by a more and more
+wonderful profusion of marbles, columns, and statues. And among all these
+princes there was the idea of a glorious survival, of leaving a testimony
+of their greatness to dazzled and stupefied generations, of perpetuating
+themselves by marvels which would not perish but for ever weigh heavily
+upon the earth, when their own light ashes should long since have been
+swept away by the winds. And thus the Palatine became but the venerable
+base of a monstrous edifice, a thick vegetation of adjoining buildings,
+each new pile being like a fresh eruption of feverish pride; while the
+whole, now showing the snowy brightness of white marble and now the
+glowing hues of coloured marble, ended by crowning Rome and the world
+with the most extraordinary and most insolent abode of sovereignty--
+whether palace, temple, basilica, or cathedral--that omnipotence and
+dominion have ever reared under the heavens.
+
+But death lurked beneath this excess of strength and glory. Seven hundred
+and thirty years of monarchy and republic had sufficed to make Rome
+great; and in five centuries of imperial sway the people-king was to be
+devoured down to its last muscles. There was the immensity of the
+territory, the more distant provinces gradually pillaged and exhausted;
+there was the fisc consuming everything, digging the pit of fatal
+bankruptcy; and there was the degeneration of the people, poisoned by the
+scenes of the circus and the arena, fallen to the sloth and debauchery of
+their masters, the Caesars, while mercenaries fought the foe and tilled
+the soil. Already at the time of Constantine, Rome had a rival,
+Byzantium; disruption followed with Honorius; and then some ten emperors
+sufficed for decomposition to be complete, for the bones of the dying
+prey to be picked clean, the end coming with Romulus Augustulus, the
+sorry creature whose name is, so to say, a mockery of the whole glorious
+history, a buffet for both the founder of Rome and the founder of the
+empire.
+
+The palaces, the colossal assemblage of walls, storeys, terraces, and
+gaping roofs, still remained on the deserted Palatine; many ornaments and
+statues, however, had already been removed to Byzantium. And the empire,
+having become Christian, had afterwards closed the temples and
+extinguished the fire of Vesta, whilst yet respecting the ancient
+Palladium. But in the fifth century the barbarians rush upon Rome, sack
+and burn it, and carry the spoils spared by the flames away in their
+chariots. As long as the city was dependent on Byzantium a custodian of
+the imperial palaces remained there watching over the Palatine. Then all
+fades and crumbles in the night of the middle ages. It would really seem
+that the popes then slowly took the place of the Caesars, succeeding them
+both in their abandoned marble halls and their ever-subsisting passion
+for domination. Some of them assuredly dwelt in the palace of Septimius
+Severus; a council of the Church was held in the Septizonium; and, later
+on, Gelasius II was elected in a neighbouring monastery on the sacred
+mount. It was as if Augustus were again rising from the tomb, once more
+master of the world, with a Sacred College of Cardinals resuscitating the
+Roman Senate. In the twelfth century the Septizonium belonged to some
+Benedictine monks, and was sold by them to the powerful Frangipani
+family, who fortified it as they had already fortified the Colosseum and
+the arches of Constantine and Titus, thus forming a vast fortress round
+about the venerable cradle of the city. And the violent deeds of civil
+war and the ravages of invasion swept by like whirlwinds, throwing down
+the walls, razing the palaces and towers. And afterwards successive
+generations invaded the ruins, installed themselves in them by right of
+trover and conquest, turned them into cellars, store-places for forage,
+and stables for mules. Kitchen gardens were formed, vines were planted on
+the spots where fallen soil had covered the mosaics of the imperial
+halls. All around nettles and brambles grew up, and ivy preyed on the
+overturned porticoes, till there came a day when the colossal assemblage
+of palaces and temples, which marble was to have rendered eternal, seemed
+to dive beneath the dust, to disappear under the surging soil and
+vegetation which impassive Nature threw over it. And then, in the hot
+sunlight, among the wild flowerets, only big, buzzing flies remained,
+whilst herds of goats strayed in freedom through the throne-room of
+Domitian and the fallen sanctuary of Apollo.
+
+A great shudder passed through Pierre. To think of so much strength,
+pride, and grandeur, and such rapid ruin--a world for ever swept away! He
+wondered how entire palaces, yet peopled by admirable statuary, could
+thus have been gradually buried without any one thinking of protecting
+them. It was no sudden catastrophe which had swallowed up those
+masterpieces, subsequently to be disinterred with exclamations of
+admiring wonder; they had been drowned, as it were--caught progressively
+by the legs, the waist, and the neck, till at last the head had sunk
+beneath the rising tide. And how could one explain that generations had
+heedlessly witnessed such things without thought of putting forth a
+helping hand? It would seem as if, at a given moment, a black curtain
+were suddenly drawn across the world, as if mankind began afresh, with a
+new and empty brain which needed moulding and furnishing. Rome had become
+depopulated; men ceased to repair the ruins left by fire and sword; the
+edifices which by their very immensity had become useless were utterly
+neglected, allowed to crumble and fall. And then, too, the new religion
+everywhere hunted down the old one, stole its temples, overturned its
+gods. Earthly deposits probably completed the disaster--there were, it is
+said, both earthquakes and inundations--and the soil was ever rising, the
+alluvia of the young Christian world buried the ancient pagan society.
+And after the pillaging of the temples, the theft of the bronze roofs and
+marble columns, the climax came with the filching of the stones torn from
+the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus, with the pounding of the
+statuary and sculpture-work, thrown into kilns to procure the lime needed
+for the new monuments of Catholic Rome.
+
+It was nearly one o'clock, and Pierre awoke as from a dream. The sun-rays
+were streaming in a golden rain between the shiny leaves of the
+ever-green oaks above him, and down below Rome lay dozing, overcome by
+the great heat. Then he made up his mind to leave the garden, and went
+stumbling over the rough pavement of the Clivus Victoriae, his mind still
+haunted by blinding visions. To complete his day, he had resolved to
+visit the old Appian Way during the afternoon, and, unwilling to return
+to the Via Giulia, he lunched at a suburban tavern, in a large, dim room,
+where, alone with the buzzing flies, he lingered for more than two hours,
+awaiting the sinking of the sun.
+
+Ah! that Appian Way, that ancient queen of the high roads, crossing the
+Campagna in a long straight line with rows of proud tombs on either
+hand--to Pierre it seemed like a triumphant prolongation of the Palatine.
+He there found the same passion for splendour and domination, the same
+craving to eternise the memory of Roman greatness in marble and daylight.
+Oblivion was vanquished; the dead refused to rest, and remained for ever
+erect among the living, on either side of that road which was traversed
+by multitudes from the entire world. The deified images of those who were
+now but dust still gazed on the passers-by with empty eyes; the
+inscriptions still spoke, proclaiming names and titles. In former times
+the rows of sepulchres must have extended without interruption along all
+the straight, level miles between the tomb of Caecilia Metella and that
+of Casale Rotondo, forming an elongated cemetery where the powerful and
+wealthy competed as to who should leave the most colossal and lavishly
+decorated mausoleum: such, indeed, was the craving for survival, the
+passion for pompous immortality, the desire to deify death by lodging it
+in temples; whereof the present-day monumental splendour of the Genoese
+Campo Santo and the Roman Campo Verano is, so to say, a remote
+inheritance. And what a vision it was to picture all the tremendous tombs
+on the right and left of the glorious pavement which the legions trod on
+their return from the conquest of the world! That tomb of Caecilia
+Metella, with its bond-stones so huge, its walls so thick that the middle
+ages transformed it into the battlemented keep of a fortress! And then
+all the tombs which follow, the modern structures erected in order that
+the marble fragments discovered might be set in place, the old blocks of
+brick and concrete, despoiled of their sculptured-work and rising up like
+seared rocks, yet still suggesting their original shapes as shrines,
+/cippi/, and /sarcophagi/. There is a wondrous succession of high reliefs
+figuring the dead in groups of three and five; statues in which the dead
+live deified, erect; seats contrived in niches in order that wayfarers
+may rest and bless the hospitality of the dead; laudatory epitaphs
+celebrating the dead, both the known and the unknown, the children of
+Sextius Pompeius Justus, the departed Marcus Servilius Quartus, Hilarius
+Fuscus, Rabirius Hermodorus; without counting the sepulchres venturously
+ascribed to Seneca and the Horatii and Curiatii. And finally there is the
+most extraordinary and gigantic of all the tombs, that known as Casale
+Rotondo, which is so large that it has been possible to establish a
+farmhouse and an olive garden on its substructures, which formerly upheld
+a double rotunda, adorned with Corinthian pilasters, large candelabra,
+and scenic masks.*
+
+  * Some believe this tomb to have been that of Messalla Corvinus,
+    the historian and poet, a friend of Augustus and Horace; others
+    ascribe it to his son, Aurelius Messallinus Cotta.--Trans.
+
+Pierre, having driven in a cab as far as the tomb of Caecilia Metella,
+continued his excursion on foot, going slowly towards Casale Rotondo. In
+many places the old pavement appears--large blocks of basaltic lava, worn
+into deep ruts that jolt the best-hung vehicles. Among the ruined tombs
+on either hand run bands of grass, the neglected grass of cemeteries,
+scorched by the summer suns and sprinkled with big violet thistles and
+tall sulphur-wort. Parapets of dry stones, breast high, enclose the
+russet roadsides, which resound with the crepitation of grasshoppers;
+and, beyond, the Campagna stretches, vast and bare, as far as the eye can
+see. A parasol pine, a eucalyptus, some olive or fig trees, white with
+dust, alone rise up near the road at infrequent intervals. On the left
+the ruddy arches of the Acqua Claudia show vigorously in the meadows, and
+stretches of poorly cultivated land, vineyards, and little farms, extend
+to the blue and lilac Sabine and Alban hills, where Frascati, Rocca di
+Papa, and Albano set bright spots, which grow and whiten as one gets
+nearer to them. Then, on the right, towards the sea, the houseless,
+treeless plain grows and spreads with vast, broad ripples, extraordinary
+ocean-like simplicity and grandeur, a long, straight line alone parting
+it from the sky. At the height of summer all burns and flares on this
+limitless prairie, then of a ruddy gold; but in September a green tinge
+begins to suffuse the ocean of herbage, which dies away in the pink and
+mauve and vivid blue of the fine sunsets.
+
+As Pierre, quite alone and in a dreary mood, slowly paced the endless,
+flat highway, that resurrection of the past which he had beheld on the
+Palatine again confronted his mind's eye. On either hand the tombs once
+more rose up intact, with marble of dazzling whiteness. Had not the head
+of a colossal statue been found, mingled with fragments of huge sphinxes,
+at the foot of yonder vase-shaped mass of bricks? He seemed to see the
+entire colossal statue standing again between the huge, crouching beasts.
+Farther on a beautiful headless statue of a woman had been discovered in
+the cella of a sepulchre, and he beheld it, again whole, with features
+expressive of grace and strength smiling upon life. The inscriptions also
+became perfect; he could read and understand them at a glance, as if
+living among those dead ones of two thousand years ago. And the road,
+too, became peopled: the chariots thundered, the armies tramped along,
+the people of Rome jostled him with the feverish agitation of great
+communities. It was a return of the times of the Flavians or the
+Antonines, the palmy years of the empire, when the pomp of the Appian
+Way, with its grand sepulchres, carved and adorned like temples, attained
+its apogee. What a monumental Street of Death, what an approach to Rome,
+that highway, straight as an arrow, where with the extraordinary pomp of
+their pride, which had survived their dust, the great dead greeted the
+traveller, ushered him into the presence of the living! He may well have
+wondered among what sovereign people, what masters of the world, he was
+about to find himself--a nation which had committed to its dead the duty
+of telling strangers that it allowed nothing whatever to perish--that its
+dead, like its city, remained eternal and glorious in monuments of
+extraordinary vastness! To think of it--the foundations of a fortress,
+and a tower sixty feet in diameter, that one woman might be laid to rest!
+And then, far away, at the end of the superb, dazzling highway, bordered
+with the marble of its funereal palaces, Pierre, turning round,
+distinctly beheld the Palatine, with the marble of its imperial
+palaces--the huge assemblage of palaces whose omnipotence had dominated
+the world!
+
+But suddenly he started: two carabiniers had just appeared among the
+ruins. The spot was not safe; the authorities watched over tourists even
+in broad daylight. And later on came another meeting which caused him
+some emotion. He perceived an ecclesiastic, a tall old man, in a black
+cassock, edged and girt with red; and was surprised to recognise Cardinal
+Boccanera, who had quitted the roadway, and was slowly strolling along
+the band of grass, among the tall thistles and sulphur-wort. With his
+head lowered and his feet brushing against the fragments of the tombs,
+the Cardinal did not even see Pierre. The young priest courteously turned
+aside, surprised to find him so far from home and alone. Then, on
+perceiving a heavy coach, drawn by two black horses, behind a building,
+he understood matters. A footman in black livery was waiting motionless
+beside the carriage, and the coachman had not quitted his box. And Pierre
+remembered that the Cardinals were not expected to walk in Rome, so that
+they were compelled to drive into the country when they desired to take
+exercise. But what haughty sadness, what solitary and, so to say,
+ostracised grandeur there was about that tall, thoughtful old man, thus
+forced to seek the desert, and wander among the tombs, in order to
+breathe a little of the evening air!
+
+Pierre had lingered there for long hours; the twilight was coming on, and
+once again he witnessed a lovely sunset. On his left the Campagna became
+blurred, and assumed a slaty hue, against which the yellowish arcades of
+the aqueduct showed very plainly, while the Alban hills, far away, faded
+into pink. Then, on the right, towards the sea, the planet sank among a
+number of cloudlets, figuring an archipelago of gold in an ocean of dying
+embers. And excepting the sapphire sky, studded with rubies, above the
+endless line of the Campagna, which was likewise changed into a sparkling
+lake, the dull green of the herbage turning to a liquid emerald tint,
+there was nothing to be seen, neither a hillock nor a flock--nothing,
+indeed, but Cardinal Boccanera's black figure, erect among the tombs, and
+looking, as it were, enlarged as it stood out against the last purple
+flush of the sunset.
+
+Early on the following morning Pierre, eager to see everything, returned
+to the Appian Way in order to visit the catacomb of St. Calixtus, the
+most extensive and remarkable of the old Christian cemeteries, and one,
+too, where several of the early popes were buried. You ascend through a
+scorched garden, past olives and cypresses, reach a shanty of boards and
+plaster in which a little trade in "articles of piety" is carried on, and
+there a modern and fairly easy flight of steps enables you to descend.
+Pierre fortunately found there some French Trappists, who guard these
+catacombs and show them to strangers. One brother was on the point of
+going down with two French ladies, the mother and daughter, the former
+still comely and the other radiant with youth. They stood there smiling,
+though already slightly frightened, while the monk lighted some long,
+slim candles. He was a man with a bossy brow, the large, massive jaw of
+an obstinate believer and pale eyes bespeaking an ingenuous soul.
+
+"Ah! Monsieur l'Abbe," he said to Pierre, "you've come just in time. If
+the ladies are willing, you had better come with us; for three Brothers
+are already below with people, and you would have a long time to wait.
+This is the great season for visitors."
+
+The ladies politely nodded, and the Trappist handed a candle to the
+priest. In all probability neither mother nor daughter was devout, for
+both glanced askance at their new companion's cassock, and suddenly
+became serious. Then they all went down and found themselves in a narrow
+subterranean corridor. "Take care, mesdames," repeated the Trappist,
+lighting the ground with his candle. "Walk slowly, for there are
+projections and slopes."
+
+Then, in a shrill voice full of extraordinary conviction, he began his
+explanations. Pierre had descended in silence, his heart beating with
+emotion. Ah! how many times, indeed, in his innocent seminary days, had
+he not dreamt of those catacombs of the early Christians, those asylums
+of the primitive faith! Even recently, while writing his book, he had
+often thought of them as of the most ancient and venerable remains of
+that community of the lowly and simple, for the return of which he
+called. But his brain was full of pages written by poets and great prose
+writers. He had beheld the catacombs through the magnifying glass of
+those imaginative authors, and had believed them to be vast, similar to
+subterranean cities, with broad highways and spacious halls, fit for the
+accommodation of vast crowds. And now how poor and humble the reality!
+
+"Well, yes," said the Trappist in reply to the ladies' questions, "the
+corridor is scarcely more than a yard in width; two persons could not
+pass along side by side. How they dug it? Oh! it was simple enough. A
+family or a burial association needed a place of sepulchre. Well, a first
+gallery was excavated with pickaxes in soil of this description--granular
+tufa, as it is called--a reddish substance, as you can see, both soft and
+yet resistant, easy to work and at the same time waterproof. In a word,
+just the substance that was needed, and one, too, that has preserved the
+remains of the buried in a wonderful way." He paused and brought the
+flamelet of his candle near to the compartments excavated on either hand
+of the passage. "Look," he continued, "these are the /loculi/. Well, a
+subterranean gallery was dug, and on both sides these compartments were
+hollowed out, one above the other. The bodies of the dead were laid in
+them, for the most part simply wrapped in shrouds. Then the aperture was
+closed with tiles or marble slabs, carefully cemented. So, as you can
+see, everything explains itself. If other families joined the first one,
+or the burial association became more numerous, fresh galleries were
+added to those already filled. Passages were excavated on either hand, in
+every sense; and, indeed, a second and lower storey, at times even a
+third, was dug out. And here, you see, we are in a gallery which is
+certainly thirteen feet high. Now, you may wonder how they raised the
+bodies to place them in the compartments of the top tier. Well, they did
+not raise them to any such height; in all their work they kept on going
+lower and lower, removing more and more of the soil as the compartments
+became filled. And in this wise, in these catacombs of St. Calixtus, in
+less than four centuries, the Christians excavated more than ten miles of
+galleries, in which more than a million of their dead must have been laid
+to rest. Now, there are dozens of catacombs; the environs of Rome are
+honeycombed with them. Think of that, and perhaps you will be able to
+form some idea of the vast number of people who were buried in this
+manner."
+
+Pierre listened, feeling greatly impressed. He had once visited a coal
+pit in Belgium, and he here found the same narrow passages, the same
+heavy, stifling atmosphere, the same nihility of darkness and silence.
+The flamelets of the candles showed merely like stars in the deep gloom;
+they shed no radiance around. And he at last understood the character of
+this funereal, termite-like labour--these chance burrowings continued
+according to requirements, without art, method, or symmetry. The rugged
+soil was ever ascending and descending, the sides of the gallery snaked:
+neither plumb-line nor square had been used. All this, indeed, had simply
+been a work of charity and necessity, wrought by simple, willing
+grave-diggers, illiterate craftsmen, with the clumsy handiwork of the
+decline and fall. Proof thereof was furnished by the inscriptions and
+emblems on the marble slabs. They reminded one of the childish drawings
+which street urchins scrawl upon blank walls.
+
+"You see," the Trappist continued, "most frequently there is merely a
+name; and sometimes there is no name, but simply the words /In Pace/. At
+other times there is an emblem, the dove of purity, the palm of
+martyrdom, or else the fish whose name in Greek is composed of five
+letters which, as initials, signify: 'Jesus Christ, Son of God,
+Saviour.'"
+
+He again brought his candle near to the marble slabs, and the palm could
+be distinguished: a central stroke, whence started a few oblique lines;
+and then came the dove or the fish, roughly outlined, a zigzag indicating
+a tail, two bars representing the bird's feet, while a round point
+simulated an eye. And the letters of the short inscriptions were all
+askew, of various sizes, often quite misshapen, as in the coarse
+handwriting of the ignorant and simple.
+
+However, they reached a crypt, a sort of little hall, where the graves of
+several popes had been found; among others that of Sixtus II, a holy
+martyr, in whose honour there was a superbly engraved metrical
+inscription set up by Pope Damasus. Then, in another hall, a family vault
+of much the same size, decorated at a later stage, with naive mural
+paintings, the spot where St. Cecilia's body had been discovered was
+shown. And the explanations continued. The Trappist dilated on the
+paintings, drawing from them a confirmation of every dogma and belief,
+baptism, the Eucharist, the resurrection, Lazarus arising from the tomb,
+Jonas cast up by the whale, Daniel in the lions' den, Moses drawing water
+from the rock, and Christ--shown beardless, as was the practice in the
+early ages--accomplishing His various miracles.
+
+"You see," repeated the Trappist, "all those things are shown there; and
+remember that none of the paintings was specially prepared: they are
+absolutely authentic."
+
+At a question from Pierre, whose astonishment was increasing, he admitted
+that the catacombs had been mere cemeteries at the outset, when no
+religious ceremonies had been celebrated in them. It was only later, in
+the fourth century, when the martyrs were honoured, that the crypts were
+utilised for worship. And in the same way they only became places of
+refuge during the persecutions, when the Christians had to conceal the
+entrances to them. Previously they had remained freely and legally open.
+This was indeed their true history: cemeteries four centuries old
+becoming places of asylum, ravaged at times during the persecutions;
+afterwards held in veneration till the eighth century; then despoiled of
+their holy relics, and subsequently blocked up and forgotten, so that
+they remained buried during more than seven hundred years, people
+thinking of them so little that at the time of the first searches in the
+fifteenth century they were considered an extraordinary discovery--an
+intricate historical problem--one, moreover, which only our own age has
+solved.
+
+"Please stoop, mesdames," resumed the Trappist. "In this compartment here
+is a skeleton which has not been touched. It has been lying here for
+sixteen or seventeen hundred years, and will show you how the bodies were
+laid out. Savants say that it is the skeleton of a female, probably a
+young girl. It was still quite perfect last spring; but the skull, as you
+can see, is now split open. An American broke it with his walking stick
+to make sure that it was genuine."
+
+The ladies leaned forward, and the flickering light illumined their pale
+faces, expressive of mingled fright and compassion. Especially noticeable
+was the pitiful, pain-fraught look which appeared on the countenance of
+the daughter, so full of life with her red lips and large black eyes.
+Then all relapsed into gloom, and the little candles were borne aloft and
+went their way through the heavy darkness of the galleries. The visit
+lasted another hour, for the Trappist did not spare a detail, fond as he
+was of certain nooks and corners, and as zealous as if he desired to work
+the redemption of his visitors.
+
+While Pierre followed the others, a complete evolution took place within
+him. As he looked about him, and formed a more and more complete idea of
+his surroundings, his first stupefaction at finding the reality so
+different from the embellished accounts of story-tellers and poets, his
+disillusion at being plunged into such rudely excavated mole-burrows,
+gave way to fraternal emotion. It was not that he thought of the fifteen
+hundred martyrs whose sacred bones had rested there. But how humble,
+resigned, yet full of hope had been those who had chosen such a place of
+sepulchre! Those low, darksome galleries were but temporary
+sleeping-places for the Christians. If they did not burn the bodies of
+their dead, as the Pagans did, it was because, like the Jews, they
+believed in the resurrection of the body; and it was that lovely idea of
+sleep, of tranquil rest after a just life, whilst awaiting the celestial
+reward, which imparted such intense peacefulness, such infinite charm, to
+the black, subterranean city. Everything there spoke of calm and silent
+night; everything there slumbered in rapturous quiescence, patient until
+the far-off awakening. What could be more touching than those terra-cotta
+tiles, those marble slabs, which bore not even a name--nothing but the
+words /In Pace/--at peace. Ah! to be at peace--life's work at last
+accomplished; to sleep in peace, to hope in peace for the advent of
+heaven! And the peacefulness seemed the more delightful as it was enjoyed
+in such deep humility. Doubtless the diggers worked chance-wise and
+clumsily; the craftsmen no longer knew how to engrave a name or carve a
+palm or a dove. Art had vanished; but all the feebleness and ignorance
+were instinct with the youth of a new humanity. Poor and lowly and meek
+ones swarmed there, reposing beneath the soil, whilst up above the sun
+continued its everlasting task. You found there charity and fraternity
+and death; husband and wife often lying together with their offspring at
+their feet; the great mass of the unknown submerging the personage, the
+bishop, or the martyr; the most touching equality--that springing from
+modesty--prevailing amidst all that dust, with compartments ever similar
+and slabs destitute of ornament, so that rows and rows of the sleepers
+mingled without distinctive sign. The inscriptions seldom ventured on a
+word of praise, and then how prudent, how delicate it was: the men were
+very worthy, very pious: the women very gentle, very beautiful, very
+chaste. A perfume of infancy arose, unlimited human affection spread:
+this was death as understood by the primitive Christians--death which hid
+itself to await the resurrection, and dreamt no more of the empire of the
+world!
+
+And all at once before Pierre's eyes arose a vision of the sumptuous
+tombs of the Appian Way, displaying the domineering pride of a whole
+civilisation in the sunlight--tombs of vast dimensions, with a profusion
+of marbles, grandiloquent inscriptions, and masterpieces of
+sculptured-work. Ah! what an extraordinary contrast between that pompous
+avenue of death, conducting, like a highway of triumph, to the regal
+Eternal City, when compared with the subterranean necropolis of the
+Christians, that city of hidden death, so gentle, so beautiful, and so
+chaste! Here only quiet slumber, desired and accepted night, resignation
+and patience were to be found. Millions of human beings had here laid
+themselves to rest in all humility, had slept for centuries, and would
+still be sleeping here, lulled by the silence and the gloom, if the
+living had not intruded on their desire to remain in oblivion so long as
+the trumpets of the Judgment Day did not awaken them. Death had then
+spoken of Life: nowhere had there been more intimate and touching life
+than in these buried cities of the unknown, lowly dead. And a mighty
+breath had formerly come from them--the breath of a new humanity destined
+to renew the world. With the advent of meekness, contempt for the flesh,
+terror and hatred of nature, relinquishment of terrestrial joys, and a
+passion for death, which delivers and opens the portals of Paradise,
+another world had begun. And the blood of Augustus, so proud of purpling
+in the sunlight, so fired by the passion for sovereign dominion, seemed
+for a moment to disappear, as if, indeed, the new world had sucked it up
+in the depths of its gloomy sepulchres.
+
+However, the Trappist insisted on showing the ladies the steps of
+Diocletian, and began to tell them the legend. "Yes," said he, "it was a
+miracle. One day, under that emperor, some soldiers were pursuing several
+Christians, who took refuge in these catacombs; and when the soldiers
+followed them inside the steps suddenly gave way, and all the persecutors
+were hurled to the bottom. The steps remain broken to this day. Come and
+see them; they are close by."
+
+But the ladies were quite overcome, so affected by their prolonged
+sojourn in the gloom and by the tales of death which the Trappist had
+poured into their ears that they insisted on going up again. Moreover,
+the candles were coming to an end. They were all dazzled when they found
+themselves once more in the sunlight, outside the little hut where
+articles of piety and souvenirs were sold. The girl bought a paper
+weight, a piece of marble on which was engraved the fish symbolical of
+"Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour of Mankind."
+
+On the afternoon of that same day Pierre decided to visit St. Peter's. He
+had as yet only driven across the superb piazza with its obelisk and twin
+fountains, encircled by Bernini's colonnades, those four rows of columns
+and pilasters which form a girdle of monumental majesty. At the far end
+rises the basilica, its facade making it look smaller and heavier than it
+really is, but its sovereign dome nevertheless filling the heavens.
+
+Pebbled, deserted inclines stretched out, and steps followed steps, worn
+and white, under the burning sun; but at last Pierre reached the door and
+went in. It was three o'clock. Broad sheets of light streamed in through
+the high square windows, and some ceremony--the vesper service, no
+doubt--was beginning in the Capella Clementina on the left. Pierre,
+however, heard nothing; he was simply struck by the immensity of the
+edifice, as with raised eyes he slowly walked along. At the entrance came
+the giant basins for holy water with their boy-angels as chubby as
+Cupids; then the nave, vaulted and decorated with sunken coffers; then
+the four cyclopean buttress-piers upholding the dome, and then again the
+transepts and apsis, each as large as one of our churches. And the proud
+pomp, the dazzling, crushing splendour of everything, also astonished
+him: he marvelled at the cupola, looking like a planet, resplendent with
+the gold and bright colours of its mosaic-work, at the sumptuous
+/baldacchino/ of bronze, crowning the high altar raised above the very
+tomb of St. Peter, and whence descend the double steps of the Confession,
+illumined by seven and eighty lamps, which are always kept burning. And
+finally he was lost in astonishment at the extraordinary profusion of
+marble, both white and coloured. Oh! those polychromatic marbles,
+Bernini's luxurious passion! The splendid pavement reflecting the entire
+edifice, the facings of the pilasters with their medallions of popes, the
+tiara and the keys borne aloft by chubby angels, the walls covered with
+emblems, particularly the dove of Innocent X, the niches with their
+colossal statues uncouth in taste, the /loggie/ and their balconies, the
+balustrade and double steps of the Confession, the rich altars and yet
+richer tombs--all, nave, aisles, transepts, and apsis, were in marble,
+resplendent with the wealth of marble; not a nook small as the palm of
+one's hand appearing but it showed the insolent opulence of marble. And
+the basilica triumphed, beyond discussion, recognised and admired by
+every one as the largest and most splendid church in the whole world--the
+personification of hugeness and magnificence combined.
+
+Pierre still wandered on, gazing, overcome, as yet not distinguishing
+details. He paused for a moment before the bronze statue of St. Peter,
+seated in a stiff, hierarchical attitude on a marble pedestal. A few of
+the faithful were there kissing the large toe of the Saint's right foot.
+Some of them carefully wiped it before applying their lips; others, with
+no thought of cleanliness, kissed it, pressed their foreheads to it, and
+then kissed it again. Next, Pierre turned into the transept on the left,
+where stand the confessionals. Priests are ever stationed there, ready to
+confess penitents in every language. Others wait, holding long staves,
+with which they lightly tap the heads of kneeling sinners, who thereby
+obtain thirty days' indulgence. However, there were few people present,
+and inside the small wooden boxes the priests occupied their leisure time
+in reading and writing, as if they were at home. Then Pierre again found
+himself before the Confession, and gazed with interest at the eighty
+lamps, scintillating like stars. The high altar, at which the Pope alone
+can officiate, seemed wrapped in the haughty melancholy of solitude under
+its gigantic, flowery /baldacchino/, the casting and gilding of which
+cost two and twenty thousand pounds. But suddenly Pierre remembered the
+ceremony in the Capella Clementina, and felt astonished, for he could
+hear nothing of it. As he drew near a faint breath, like the far-away
+piping of a flute, was wafted to him. Then the volume of sound slowly
+increased, but it was only on reaching the chapel that he recognised an
+organ peal. The sunlight here filtered through red curtains drawn before
+the windows, and thus the chapel glowed like a furnace whilst resounding
+with the grave music. But in that huge pile all became so slight, so
+weak, that at sixty paces neither voice nor organ could be distinguished.
+
+On entering the basilica Pierre had fancied that it was quite empty and
+lifeless. There were, however, some people there, but so few and far
+between that their presence was not noticed. A few tourists wandered
+about wearily, guide-book in hand. In the grand nave a painter with his
+easel was taking a view, as in a public gallery. Then a French seminary
+went by, conducted by a prelate who named and explained the tombs. But in
+all that space these fifty or a hundred people looked merely like a few
+black ants who had lost themselves and were vainly seeking their way. And
+Pierre pictured himself in some gigantic gala hall or tremendous
+vestibule in an immeasurable palace of reception. The broad sheets of
+sunlight streaming through the lofty square windows of plain white glass
+illumined the church with blending radiance. There was not a single stool
+or chair: nothing but the superb, bare pavement, such as you might find
+in a museum, shining mirror-like under the dancing shower of sunrays. Nor
+was there a single corner for solitary reflection, a nook of gloom and
+mystery, where one might kneel and pray. In lieu thereof the sumptuous,
+sovereign dazzlement of broad daylight prevailed upon every side. And, on
+thus suddenly finding himself in this deserted opera-house, all aglow
+with flaring gold and purple, Pierre could but remember the quivering
+gloom of the Gothic cathedrals of France, where dim crowds sob and
+supplicate amidst a forest of pillars. In presence of all this ceremonial
+majesty--this huge, empty pomp, which was all Body--he recalled with a
+pang the emaciate architecture and statuary of the middle ages, which
+were all Soul. He vainly sought for some poor, kneeling woman, some
+creature swayed by faith or suffering, yielding in a modest half-light to
+thoughts of the unknown, and with closed lips holding communion with the
+invisible. These he found not: there was but the weary wandering of the
+tourists, and the bustle of the prelates conducting the young priests to
+the obligatory stations; while the vesper service continued in the
+left-hand chapel, nought of it reaching the ears of the visitors save,
+perhaps, a confused vibration, as of the peal of a bell penetrating from
+outside through the vaults above.
+
+And Pierre then understood that this was the splendid skeleton of a
+colossus whence life was departing. To fill it, to animate it with a
+soul, all the gorgeous display of great religious ceremonies was needed;
+the eighty thousand worshippers which it could hold, the great pontifical
+pomps, the festivals of Christmas and Easter, the processions and
+/corteges/ displaying all the luxury of the Church amidst operatic
+scenery and appointments. And he tried to conjure up a picture of the
+past magnificence--the basilica overflowing with an idolatrous multitude,
+and the superhuman /cortege/ passing along whilst every head was lowered;
+the cross and the sword opening the march, the cardinals going two by
+two, like twin divinities, in their rochets of lace and their mantles and
+robes of red moire, which train-bearers held up behind them; and at last,
+with Jove-like pomp, the Pope, carried on a stage draped with red velvet,
+seated in an arm-chair of red velvet and gold, and dressed in white
+velvet, with cope of gold, stole of gold, and tiara of gold. The bearers
+of the /Sedia gestatoria/* shone bravely in red tunics broidered with
+gold. Above the one and only Sovereign Pontiff of the world the
+/flabelli/ waved those huge fans of feathers which formerly were waved
+before the idols of pagan Rome. And around the seat of triumph what a
+dazzling, glorious court there was! The whole pontifical family, the
+stream of assistant prelates, the patriarchs, the archbishops, and the
+bishops, with vestments and mitres of gold, the /Camerieri segreti
+partecipanti/ in violet silk, the /Camerieri partecipanti/ of the cape
+and the sword in black velvet Renascence costumes, with ruffs and golden
+chains, the whole innumerable ecclesiastical and laical suite, which not
+even a hundred pages of the "Gerarchia" can completely enumerate, the
+prothonotaries, the chaplains, the prelates of every class and degree,
+without mentioning the military household, the gendarmes with their
+busbies, the Palatine Guards in blue trousers and black tunics, the Swiss
+Guards costumed in red, yellow, and black, with breastplates of silver,
+suggesting the men at arms of some drama of the Romantic school, and the
+Noble Guards, superb in their high boots, white pigskins, red tunics,
+gold lace, epaulets, and helmets! However, since Rome had become the
+capital of Italy the doors were no longer thrown wide open; on the rare
+occasions when the Pope yet came down to officiate, to show himself as
+the supreme representative of the Divinity on earth, the basilica was
+filled with chosen ones. To enter it you needed a card of invitation. You
+no longer saw the people--a throng of fifty, even eighty, thousand
+Christians--flocking to the Church and swarming within it promiscuously;
+there was but a select gathering, a congregation of friends convened as
+for a private function. Even when, by dint of effort, thousands were
+collected together there, they formed but a picked audience invited to
+the performance of a monster concert.
+
+  * The chair and stage are known by that name.--Trans.
+
+And as Pierre strolled among the bright, crude marbles in that cold if
+gorgeous museum, the feeling grew upon him that he was in some pagan
+temple raised to the deity of Light and Pomp. The larger temples of
+ancient Rome were certainly similar piles, upheld by the same precious
+columns, with walls covered with the same polychromatic marbles and
+vaulted ceilings having the same gilded panels. And his feeling was
+destined to become yet more acute after his visits to the other
+basilicas, which could but reveal the truth to him. First one found the
+Christian Church quietly, audaciously quartering itself in a pagan
+church, as, for instance, San Lorenzo in Miranda installed in the temple
+of Antoninus and Faustina, and retaining the latter's rare porticus in
+/cipollino/ marble and its handsome white marble entablature. Then there
+was the Christian Church springing from the ruins of the destroyed pagan
+edifice, as, for example, San Clemente, beneath which centuries of
+contrary beliefs are stratified: a very ancient edifice of the time of
+the kings or the republic, then another of the days of the empire
+identified as a temple of Mithras, and next a basilica of the primitive
+faith. Then, too, there was the Christian Church, typified by that of
+Saint Agnes-beyond-the-walls which had been built on exactly the same
+pattern as the Roman secular basilica--that Tribunal and Exchange which
+accompanied every Forum. And, in particular, there was the Christian
+Church erected with material stolen from the demolished pagan temples. To
+this testified the sixteen superb columns of that same Saint Agnes,
+columns of various marbles filched from various gods; the one and twenty
+columns of Santa Maria in Trastevere, columns of all sorts of orders torn
+from a temple of Isis and Serapis, who even now are represented on their
+capitals; also the six and thirty white marble Ionic columns of Santa
+Maria Maggiore derived from the temple of Juno Lucina; and the two and
+twenty columns of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, these varying in substance,
+size, and workmanship, and certain of them said to have been stolen from
+Jove himself, from the famous temple of Jupiter Capitolinus which rose
+upon the sacred summit. In addition, the temples of the opulent Imperial
+period seemed to resuscitate in our times at San Giovanni in Laterano and
+San Paolo-fuori-le-mura. Was not that Basilica of San Giovanni--"the
+Mother and Head of all the churches of the city and the earth"--like the
+abode of honour of some pagan divinity whose splendid kingdom was of this
+world? It boasted five naves, parted by four rows of columns; it was a
+profusion of bas-reliefs, friezes, and entablatures, and its twelve
+colossal statues of the Apostles looked like subordinate deities lining
+the approach to the master of the gods! And did not San Paolo, lately
+completed, its new marbles shimmering like mirrors, recall the abode of
+the Olympian immortals, typical temple as it was with its majestic
+colonnade, its flat, gilt-panelled ceiling, its marble pavement
+incomparably beautiful both in substance and workmanship, its violet
+columns with white bases and capitals, and its white entablature with
+violet frieze: everywhere, indeed, you found, the mingling of those two
+colours so divinely carnal in their harmony. And there, as at St.
+Peter's, not one patch of gloom, not one nook of mystery where one might
+peer into the invisible, could be found! And, withal, St. Peter's
+remained the monster, the colossus, larger than the largest of all
+others, an extravagant testimony of what the mad passion for the huge can
+achieve when human pride, by dint of spending millions, dreams of lodging
+the divinity in an over-vast, over-opulent palace of stone, where in
+truth that pride itself, and not the divinity, triumphs!
+
+And to think that after long centuries that gala colossus had been the
+outcome of the fervour of primitive faith! You found there a blossoming
+of that ancient sap, peculiar to the soil of Rome, which in all ages has
+thrown up preposterous edifices, of exaggerated hugeness and dazzling and
+ruinous luxury. It would seem as if the absolute masters successively
+ruling the city brought that passion for cyclopean building with them,
+derived it from the soil in which they grew, for they transmitted it one
+to the other, without a pause, from civilisation to civilisation, however
+diverse and contrary their minds. It has all been, so to say, a
+continuous blossoming of human vanity, a passionate desire to set one's
+name on an imperishable wall, and, after being master of the world, to
+leave behind one an indestructible trace, a tangible proof of one's
+passing glory, an eternal edifice of bronze and marble fit to attest that
+glory until the end of time. At the bottom the spirit of conquest, the
+proud ambition to dominate the world, subsists; and when all has
+crumbled, and a new society has sprung up from the ruins of its
+predecessor, men have erred in imagining it to be cured of the sin of
+pride, steeped in humility once more, for it has had the old blood in its
+veins, and has yielded to the same insolent madness as its ancestors, a
+prey to all the violence of its heredity directly it has become great and
+strong. Among the illustrious popes there has not been one that did not
+seek to build, did not revert to the traditions of the Caesars,
+eternising their reigns in stone and raising temples for resting-places,
+so as to rank among the gods. Ever the same passion for terrestrial
+immortality has burst forth: it has been a battle as to who should leave
+the highest, most substantial, most gorgeous monument; and so acute has
+been the disease that those who, for lack of means and opportunity, have
+been unable to build, and have been forced to content themselves with
+repairing, have, nevertheless, desired to bequeath the memory of their
+modest achievements to subsequent generations by commemorative marble
+slabs engraved with pompous inscriptions! These slabs are to be seen on
+every side: not a wall has ever been strengthened but some pope has
+stamped it with his arms, not a ruin has been restored, not a palace
+repaired, not a fountain cleaned, but the reigning pope has signed the
+work with his Roman and pagan title of "Pontifex Maximus." It is a
+haunting passion, a form of involuntary debauchery, the fated florescence
+of that compost of ruins, that dust of edifices whence new edifices are
+ever arising. And given the perversion with which the old Roman soil
+almost immediately tarnished the doctrines of Jesus, that resolute
+passion for domination and that desire for terrestrial glory which
+wrought the triumph of Catholicism in scorn of the humble and pure, the
+fraternal and simple ones of the primitive Church, one may well ask
+whether Rome has ever been Christian at all!
+
+And whilst Pierre was for the second time walking round the huge
+basilica, admiring the tombs of the popes, truth, like a sudden
+illumination, burst upon him and filled him with its glow. Ah! those
+tombs! Yonder in the full sunlight, in the rosy Campagna, on either side
+of the Appian Way--that triumphal approach to Rome, conducting the
+stranger to the august Palatine with its crown of circling palaces--there
+arose the gigantic tombs of the powerful and wealthy, tombs of
+unparalleled artistic splendour, perpetuating in marble the pride and
+pomp of a strong race that had mastered the world. Then, near at hand,
+beneath the sod, in the shrouding night of wretched mole-holes, other
+tombs were hidden--the tombs of the lowly, the poor, and the
+suffering--tombs destitute of art or display, but whose very humility
+proclaimed that a breath of affection and resignation had passed by, that
+One had come preaching love and fraternity, the relinquishment of the
+wealth of the earth for the everlasting joys of a future life, and
+committing to the soil the good seed of His Gospel, sowing the new
+humanity which was to transform the olden world. And, behold, from that
+seed, buried in the soil for centuries, behold, from those humble,
+unobtrusive tombs, where martyrs slept their last and gentle sleep whilst
+waiting for the glorious call, yet other tombs had sprung, tombs as
+gigantic and as pompous as the ancient, destroyed sepulchres of the
+idolaters, tombs uprearing their marbles among a pagan-temple-like
+splendour, proclaiming the same superhuman pride, the same mad passion
+for universal sovereignty. At the time of the Renascence Rome became
+pagan once more; the old imperial blood frothed up and swept Christianity
+away with the greatest onslaught ever directed against it. Ah! those
+tombs of the popes at St. Peter's, with their impudent, insolent
+glorification of the departed, their sumptuous, carnal hugeness, defying
+death and setting immortality upon this earth. There are giant popes of
+bronze, allegorical figures and angels of equivocal character wearing the
+beauty of lovely girls, of passion-compelling women with the thighs and
+the breasts of pagan goddesses! Paul III is seated on a high pedestal,
+Justice and Prudence are almost prostrate at his feet. Urban VIII is
+between Prudence and Religion, Innocent XI between Religion and Justice,
+Innocent XII between Justice and Charity, Gregory XIII between Religion
+and Strength. Attended by Prudence and Justice, Alexander VII appears
+kneeling, with Charity and Truth before him, and a skeleton rises up
+displaying an empty hour-glass. Clement XIII, also on his knees, triumphs
+above a monumental sarcophagus, against which leans Religion bearing the
+Cross; while the Genius of Death, his elbow resting on the right-hand
+corner, has two huge, superb lions, emblems of omnipotence, beneath him.
+Bronze bespeaks the eternity of the figures, white marble describes
+opulent flesh, and coloured marble winds around in rich draperies,
+deifying the monuments under the bright, golden glow of nave and aisles.
+
+And Pierre passed from one tomb to the other on his way through the
+magnificent, deserted, sunlit basilica. Yes, these tombs, so imperial in
+their ostentation, were meet companions for those of the Appian Way.
+Assuredly it was Rome, the soil of Rome, that soil where pride and
+domination sprouted like the herbage of the fields that had transformed
+the humble Christianity of primitive times, the religion of fraternity,
+justice, and hope into what it now was: victorious Catholicism, allied to
+the rich and powerful, a huge implement of government, prepared for the
+conquest of every nation. The popes had awoke as Caesars. Remote heredity
+had acted, the blood of Augustus had bubbled forth afresh, flowing
+through their veins and firing their minds with immeasurable ambition. As
+yet none but Augustus had held the empire of the world, had been both
+emperor and pontiff, master of the body and the soul. And thence had come
+the eternal dream of the popes in despair at only holding the spiritual
+power, and obstinately refusing to yield in temporal matters, clinging
+for ever to the ancient hope that their dream might at last be realised,
+and the Vatican become another Palatine, whence they might reign with
+absolute despotism over all the conquered nations.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+PIERRE had been in Rome for a fortnight, and yet the affair of his book
+was no nearer solution. He was still possessed by an ardent desire to see
+the Pope, but could in no wise tell how to satisfy it, so frequent were
+the delays and so greatly had he been frightened by Monsignor Nani's
+predictions of the dire consequences which might attend any imprudent
+action. And so, foreseeing a prolonged sojourn, he at last betook himself
+to the Vicariate in order that his "celebret" might be stamped, and
+afterwards said his mass each morning at the Church of Santa Brigida,
+where he received a kindly greeting from Abbe Pisoni, Benedetta's former
+confessor.
+
+One Monday evening he resolved to repair early to Donna Serafina's
+customary reception in the hope of learning some news and expediting his
+affairs. Perhaps Monsignor Nani would look in; perhaps he might be lucky
+enough to come across some cardinal or domestic prelate willing to help
+him. It was in vain that he had tried to extract any positive information
+from Don Vigilio, for, after a short spell of affability and willingness,
+Cardinal Pio's secretary had relapsed into distrust and fear, and avoided
+Pierre as if he were resolved not to meddle in a business which, all
+considered, was decidedly suspicious and dangerous. Moreover, for a
+couple of days past a violent attack of fever had compelled him to keep
+his room.
+
+Thus the only person to whom Pierre could turn for comfort was Victorine
+Bosquet, the old Beauceronne servant who had been promoted to the rank of
+housekeeper, and who still retained a French heart after thirty years'
+residence in Rome. She often spoke to the young priest of Auneau, her
+native place, as if she had left it only the previous day; but on that
+particular Monday even she had lost her wonted gay vivacity, and when she
+heard that he meant to go down in the evening to see the ladies she
+wagged her head significantly. "Ah! you won't find them very cheerful,"
+said she. "My poor Benedetta is greatly worried. Her divorce suit is not
+progressing at all well."
+
+All Rome, indeed, was again talking of this affair. An extraordinary
+revival of tittle-tattle had set both white and black worlds agog. And so
+there was no need for reticence on Victorine's part, especially in
+conversing with a compatriot. It appeared, then, that, in reply to
+Advocate Morano's memoir setting forth that the marriage had not been
+consummated, there had come another memoir, a terrible one, emanating
+from Monsignor Palma, a doctor in theology, whom the Congregation of the
+Council had selected to defend the marriage. As a first point, Monsignor
+Palma flatly disputed the alleged non-consummation, questioned the
+certificate put forward on Benedetta's behalf, and quoted instances
+recorded in scientific text-books which showed how deceptive appearances
+often were. He strongly insisted, moreover, on the narrative which Count
+Prada supplied in another memoir, a narrative well calculated to inspire
+doubt; and, further, he so turned and twisted the evidence of Benedetta's
+own maid as to make that evidence also serve against her. Finally he
+argued in a decisive way that, even supposing the marriage had not been
+consummated, this could only be ascribed to the resistance of the
+Countess, who had thus set at defiance one of the elementary laws of
+married life, which was that a wife owed obedience to her husband.
+
+Next had come a fourth memoir, drawn up by the reporter of the
+Congregation, who analysed and discussed the three others, and
+subsequently the Congregation itself had dealt with the matter, opining
+in favour of the dissolution of the marriage by a majority of one
+vote--such a bare majority, indeed, that Monsignor Palma, exercising his
+rights, had hastened to demand further inquiry, a course which brought
+the whole /procedure/ again into question, and rendered a fresh vote
+necessary.
+
+"Ah! the poor Contessina!" exclaimed Victorine, "she'll surely die of
+grief, for, calm as she may seem, there's an inward fire consuming her.
+It seems that Monsignor Palma is the master of the situation, and can
+make the affair drag on as long as he likes. And then a deal of money had
+already been spent, and one will have to spend a lot more. Abbe Pisoni,
+whom you know, was very badly inspired when he helped on that marriage;
+and though I certainly don't want to soil the memory of my good mistress,
+Countess Ernesta, who was a real saint, it's none the less true that she
+wrecked her daughter's life when she gave her to Count Prada."
+
+The housekeeper paused. Then, impelled by an instinctive sense of
+justice, she resumed. "It's only natural that Count Prada should be
+annoyed, for he's really being made a fool of. And, for my part, as there
+is no end to all the fuss, and this divorce is so hard to obtain, I
+really don't see why the Contessina shouldn't live with her Dario without
+troubling any further. Haven't they loved one another ever since they
+were children? Aren't they both young and handsome, and wouldn't they be
+happy together, whatever the world might say? Happiness, /mon Dieu/! one
+finds it so seldom that one can't afford to let it pass."
+
+Then, seeing how greatly surprised Pierre was at hearing such language,
+she began to laugh with the quiet composure of one belonging to the
+humble classes of France, whose only desire is a quiet and happy life,
+irrespective of matrimonial ties. Next, in more discreet language, she
+proceeded to lament another worry which had fallen on the household,
+another result of the divorce affair. A rupture had come about between
+Donna Serafina and Advocate Morano, who was very displeased with the ill
+success of his memoir to the congregation, and accused Father
+Lorenza--the confessor of the Boccanera ladies--of having urged them into
+a deplorable lawsuit, whose only fruit could be a wretched scandal
+affecting everybody. And so great had been Morano's annoyance that he had
+not returned to the Boccanera mansion, but had severed a connection of
+thirty years' standing, to the stupefaction of all the Roman
+drawing-rooms, which altogether disapproved of his conduct. Donna
+Serafina was, for her part, the more grieved as she suspected the
+advocate of having purposely picked the quarrel in order to secure an
+excuse for leaving her; his real motive, in her estimation, being a
+sudden, disgraceful passion for a young and intriguing woman of the
+middle classes.
+
+That Monday evening, when Pierre entered the drawing-room, hung with
+yellow brocatelle of a flowery Louis XIV pattern, he at once realised
+that melancholy reigned in the dim light radiating from the lace-veiled
+lamps. Benedetta and Celia, seated on a sofa, were chatting with Dario,
+whilst Cardinal Sarno, ensconced in an arm-chair, listened to the
+ceaseless chatter of the old relative who conducted the little Princess
+to each Monday gathering. And the only other person present was Donna
+Serafina, seated all alone in her wonted place on the right-hand side of
+the chimney-piece, and consumed with secret rage at seeing the chair on
+the left-hand side unoccupied--that chair which Morano had always taken
+during the thirty years that he had been faithful to her. Pierre noticed
+with what anxious and then despairing eyes she observed his entrance, her
+glance ever straying towards the door, as though she even yet hoped for
+the fickle one's return. Withal her bearing was erect and proud; she
+seemed to be more tightly laced than ever; and there was all the wonted
+haughtiness on her hard-featured face, with its jet-black eyebrows and
+snowy hair.
+
+Pierre had no sooner paid his respects to her than he allowed his own
+worry to appear by inquiring whether they would not have the pleasure of
+seeing Monsignor Nani that evening. Thereupon Donna Serafina could not
+refrain from answering: "Oh! Monsignor Nani is forsaking us like the
+others. People always take themselves off when they can be of service."
+
+She harboured a spite against the prelate for having done so little to
+further the divorce in spite of his many promises. Beneath his outward
+show of extreme willingness and caressing affability he doubtless
+concealed some scheme of his own which he was tenaciously pursuing.
+However, Donna Serafina promptly regretted the confession which anger had
+wrung from her, and resumed: "After all, he will perhaps come. He is so
+good-natured, and so fond of us."
+
+In spite of the vivacity of her temperament she really wished to act
+diplomatically, so as to overcome the bad luck which had recently set in.
+Her brother the Cardinal had told her how irritated he was by the
+attitude of the Congregation of the Council; he had little doubt that the
+frigid reception accorded to his niece's suit had been due in part to the
+desire of some of his brother cardinals to be disagreeable to him.
+Personally, he desired the divorce, as it seemed to him the only means of
+ensuring the perpetuation of the family; for Dario obstinately refused to
+marry any other woman than his cousin. And thus there was an accumulation
+of disasters; the Cardinal was wounded in his pride, his sister shared
+his sufferings and on her own side was stricken in the heart, whilst both
+lovers were plunged in despair at finding their hopes yet again deferred.
+
+As Pierre approached the sofa where the young folks were chatting he
+found that they were speaking of the catastrophe. "Why should you be so
+despondent?" asked Celia in an undertone. "After all, there was a
+majority of a vote in favour of annulling the marriage. Your suit hasn't
+been rejected; there is only a delay."
+
+But Benedetta shook her head. "No, no! If Monsignor Palma proves
+obstinate his Holiness will never consent. It's all over."
+
+"Ah! if one were only rich, very rich!" murmured Dario, with such an air
+of conviction that no one smiled. And, turning to his cousin, he added in
+a whisper: "I must really have a talk with you. We cannot go on living
+like this."
+
+In a breath she responded: "Yes, you are right. Come down to-morrow
+evening at five. I will be here alone."
+
+Then dreariness set in; the evening seemed to have no end. Pierre was
+greatly touched by the evident despair of Benedetta, who as a rule was so
+calm and sensible. The deep eyes which illumined her pure, delicate,
+infantile face were now blurred as by restrained tears. He had already
+formed a sincere affection for her, pleased as he was with her equable if
+somewhat indolent disposition, the semblance of discreet good sense with
+which she veiled her soul of fire. That Monday even she certainly tried
+to smile while listening to the pretty secrets confided to her by Celia,
+whose love affairs were prospering far more than her own. There was only
+one brief interval of general conversation, and that was brought about by
+the little Princess's aunt, who, suddenly raising her voice, began to
+speak of the infamous manner in which the Italian newspapers referred to
+the Holy Father. Never, indeed, had there been so much bad feeling
+between the Vatican and the Quirinal. Cardinal Sarno felt so strongly on
+the subject that he departed from his wonted silence to announce that on
+the occasion of the sacrilegious festivities of the Twentieth of
+September, celebrating the capture of Rome, the Pope intended to cast a
+fresh letter of protest in the face of all the Christian powers, whose
+indifference proved their complicity in the odious spoliation of the
+Church.
+
+"Yes, indeed! what folly to try and marry the Pope and the King,"
+bitterly exclaimed Donna Serafina, alluding to her niece's deplorable
+marriage.
+
+The old maid now seemed quite beside herself; it was already so late that
+neither Monsignor Nani nor anybody else was expected. However, at the
+unhoped-for sound of footsteps her eyes again brightened and turned
+feverishly towards the door. But it was only to encounter a final
+disappointment. The visitor proved to be Narcisse Habert, who stepped up
+to her, apologising for making so late a call. It was Cardinal Sarno, his
+uncle by marriage, who had introduced him into this exclusive /salon/,
+where he had received a cordial reception on account of his religious
+views, which were said to be most uncompromising. If, however, despite
+the lateness of the hour, he had ventured to call there that evening, it
+was solely on account of Pierre, whom he at once drew on one side.
+
+"I felt sure I should find you here," he said. "Just now I managed to see
+my cousin, Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, and I have some good news for you.
+He will see us to-morrow at about eleven in his rooms at the Vatican."
+Then, lowering his voice: "I think he will endeavour to conduct you to
+the Holy Father. Briefly, the audience seems to me assured."
+
+Pierre was greatly delighted by this promised certainty, which came to
+him so suddenly in that dreary drawing-room, where for a couple of hours
+he had been gradually sinking into despair! So at last a solution was at
+hand!
+
+Meantime Narcisse, after shaking hands with Dario and bowing to Benedetta
+and Celia, approached his uncle the Cardinal, who, having rid himself of
+the old relation, made up his mind to talk. But his conversation was
+confined to the state of his health, and the weather, and sundry
+insignificant anecdotes which he had lately heard. Not a word escaped him
+respecting the thousand complicated matters with which he dealt at the
+Propaganda. It was as though, once outside his office, he plunged into
+the commonplace and the unimportant by way of resting from the anxious
+task of governing the world. And after he had spoken for a time every one
+got up, and the visitors took leave.
+
+"Don't forget," Narcisse repeated to Pierre, "you will find me at the
+Sixtine Chapel to-morrow at ten. And I will show you the Botticellis
+before we go to our appointment."
+
+At half-past nine on the following morning Pierre, who had come on foot,
+was already on the spacious Piazza of St. Peter's; and before turning to
+the right, towards the bronze gate near one corner of Bernini's
+colonnade, he raised his eyes and lingered, gazing at the Vatican.
+Nothing to his mind could be less monumental than the jumble of buildings
+which, without semblance of architectural order or regularity of any
+kind, had grown up in the shadow cast by the dome of the basilica. Roofs
+rose one above the other and broad, flat walls stretched out chance-wise,
+just as wings and storeys had been added. The only symmetry observable
+above the colonnade was that of the three sides of the court of San
+Damaso, where the lofty glass-work which now encloses the old /loggie/
+sparkled in the sun between the ruddy columns and pilasters, suggesting,
+as it were, three huge conservatories.
+
+And this was the most beautiful palace in the world, the largest of all
+palaces, comprising no fewer than eleven thousand apartments and
+containing the most admirable masterpieces of human genius! But Pierre,
+disillusioned as he was, had eyes only for the lofty facade on the right,
+overlooking the piazza, for he knew that the second-floor windows there
+were those of the Pope's private apartments. And he contemplated those
+windows for a long time, and remembered having been told that the fifth
+one on the right was that of the Pope's bed-room, and that a lamp could
+always be seen burning there far into the night.
+
+What was there, too, behind that gate of bronze which he saw before
+him--that sacred portal by which all the kingdoms of the world
+communicated with the kingdom of heaven, whose august vicar had secluded
+himself behind those lofty, silent walls? From where he stood Pierre
+gazed on that gate with its metal panels studded with large square-headed
+nails, and wondered what it defended, what it concealed, what it shut off
+from the view, with its stern, forbidding air, recalling that of the gate
+of some ancient fortress. What kind of world would he find behind it,
+what treasures of human charity jealously preserved in yonder gloom, what
+revivifying hope for the new nations hungering for fraternity and
+justice? He took pleasure in fancying, in picturing the one holy pastor
+of humanity, ever watching in the depths of that closed palace, and,
+while the nations strayed into hatred, preparing all for the final reign
+of Jesus, and at last proclaiming the advent of that reign by
+transforming our democracies into the one great Christian community
+promised by the Saviour. Assuredly the world's future was being prepared
+behind that bronze portal; assuredly it was that future which would issue
+forth.
+
+But all at once Pierre was amazed to find himself face to face with
+Monsignor Nani, who had just left the Vatican on his way to the
+neighbouring Palace of the Inquisition, where, as Assessor, he had his
+residence.
+
+"Ah! Monsignor," said Pierre, "I am very pleased. My friend Monsieur
+Habert is going to present me to his cousin, Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo,
+and I think I shall obtain the audience I so greatly desire."
+
+Monsignor Nani smiled with his usual amiable yet keen expression. "Yes,
+yes, I know." But, correcting himself as it were, he added: "I share your
+satisfaction, my dear son. Only, you must be prudent." And then, as if
+fearing that the young priest might have understood by his first words
+that he had just seen Monsignor Gamba, the most easily terrified prelate
+of the whole prudent pontifical family, he related that he had been
+running about since an early hour on behalf of two French ladies, who
+likewise were dying of a desire to see the Pope. However, he greatly
+feared that the help he was giving them would not prove successful.
+
+"I will confess to you, Monsignor," replied Pierre, "that I myself was
+getting very discouraged. Yes, it is high time I should find a little
+comfort, for my sojourn here is hardly calculated to brace my soul."
+
+He went on in this strain, allowing it to be seen that the sights of Rome
+were finally destroying his faith. Such days as those which he had spent
+on the Palatine and along the Appian Way, in the Catacombs and at St.
+Peter's, grievously disturbed him, spoilt his dream of Christianity
+rejuvenated and triumphant. He emerged from them full of doubt and
+growing lassitude, having already lost much of his usually rebellious
+enthusiasm.
+
+Still smiling, Monsignor Nani listened and nodded approvingly. Yes, no
+doubt that was the fatal result. He seemed to have foreseen it, and to be
+well satisfied thereat. "At all events, my dear son," said he,
+"everything is going on well, since you are now certain that you will see
+his Holiness."
+
+"That is true, Monsignor; I have placed my only hope in the very just and
+perspicacious Leo XIII. He alone can judge me, since he alone can
+recognise in my book his own ideas, which I think I have very faithfully
+set forth. Ah! if he be willing he will, in Jesus' name and by democracy
+and science, save this old world of ours!"
+
+Pierre's enthusiasm was returning again, and Nani, smiling more and more
+affably with his piercing eyes and thin lips, again expressed approval:
+"Certainly; quite so, my dear son. You will speak to him, you will see."
+
+Then as they both raised their heads and looked towards the Vatican, Nani
+carried his amiability so far as to undeceive Pierre with respect to the
+Pope's bed-room. No, the window where a light was seen every evening was
+simply that of a landing where the gas was kept burning almost all night.
+The window of his Holiness's bed-chamber was the second one farther on.
+Then both relapsed into silence, equally grave as they continued to gaze
+at the facade.
+
+"Well, till we meet again, my dear son," said Nani at last. "You will
+tell me of your interview, I hope."
+
+As soon as Pierre was alone he went in by the bronze portal, his heart
+beating violently, as if he were entering some redoubtable sanctuary
+where the future happiness of mankind was elaborated. A sentry was on
+duty there, a Swiss guard, who walked slowly up and down in a grey-blue
+cloak, below which one only caught a glimpse of his baggy red, black, and
+yellow breeches; and it seemed as if this cloak of sober hue were
+purposely cast over a disguise in order to conceal its strangeness, which
+had become irksome. Then, on the right-hand, came the covered stairway
+conducting to the Court of San Damaso; but to reach the Sixtine Chapel it
+was necessary to follow a long gallery, with columns on either hand, and
+ascend the royal staircase, the Scala Regia. And in this realm of the
+gigantic, where every dimension is exaggerated and replete with
+overpowering majesty, Pierre's breath came short as he ascended the broad
+steps.
+
+He was much surprised on entering the Sixtine Chapel, for it at first
+seemed to him small, a sort of rectangular and lofty hall, with a
+delicate screen of white marble separating the part where guests
+congregate on the occasion of great ceremonies from the choir where the
+cardinals sit on simple oaken benches, while the inferior prelates remain
+standing behind them. On a low platform to the right of the soberly
+adorned altar is the pontifical throne; while in the wall on the left
+opens the narrow singing gallery with its balcony of marble. And for
+everything suddenly to spread out and soar into the infinite one must
+raise one's head, allow one's eyes to ascend from the huge fresco of the
+Last Judgment, occupying the whole of the end wall, to the paintings
+which cover the vaulted ceiling down to the cornice extending between the
+twelve windows of white glass, six on either hand.
+
+Fortunately there were only three or four quiet tourists there; and
+Pierre at once perceived Narcisse Habert occupying one of the cardinals'
+seats above the steps where the train-bearers crouch. Motionless, and
+with his head somewhat thrown back, the young man seemed to be in
+ecstasy. But it was not the work of Michael Angelo that he thus
+contemplated. His eyes never strayed from one of the earlier frescoes
+below the cornice; and on recognising the priest he contented himself
+with murmuring: "Ah! my friend, just look at the Botticelli." Then, with
+dreamy eyes, he relapsed into a state of rapture.
+
+Pierre, for his part, had received a great shock both in heart and in
+mind, overpowered as he was by the superhuman genius of Michael Angelo.
+The rest vanished; there only remained, up yonder, as in a limitless
+heaven, the extraordinary creations of the master's art. That which at
+first surprised one was that the painter should have been the sole
+artisan of the mighty work. No marble cutters, no bronze workers, no
+gilders, no one of another calling had intervened. The painter with his
+brush had sufficed for all--for the pilasters, columns, and cornices of
+marble, for the statues and the ornaments of bronze, for the /fleurons/
+and roses of gold, for the whole of the wondrously rich decorative work
+which surrounded the frescoes. And Pierre imagined Michael Angelo on the
+day when the bare vault was handed over to him, covered with plaster,
+offering only a flat white surface, hundreds of square yards to be
+adorned. And he pictured him face to face with that huge white page,
+refusing all help, driving all inquisitive folks away, jealously,
+violently shutting himself up alone with his gigantic task, spending four
+and a half years in fierce solitude, and day by day adding to his
+colossal work of creation. Ah! that mighty work, a task to fill a whole
+lifetime, a task which he must have begun with quiet confidence in his
+own will and power, drawing, as it were, an entire world from his brain
+and flinging it there with the ceaseless flow of creative virility in the
+full heyday of its omnipotence.
+
+And Pierre was yet more overcome when he began to examine these
+presentments of humanity, magnified as by the eyes of a visionary,
+overflowing in mighty sympathetic pages of cyclopean symbolisation. Royal
+grace and nobility, sovereign peacefulness and power--every beauty shone
+out like natural florescence. And there was perfect science, the most
+audacious foreshortening risked with the certainty of success--an
+everlasting triumph of technique over the difficulty which an arched
+surface presented. And, in particular, there was wonderful simplicity of
+medium; matter was reduced almost to nothingness; a few colours were used
+broadly without any studied search for effect or brilliancy. Yet that
+sufficed, the blood seethed freely, the muscles projected, the figures
+became animated and stood out of their frames with such energy and dash
+that it seemed as if a flame were flashing by aloft, endowing all those
+beings with superhuman and immortal life. Life, aye, it was life, which
+burst forth and triumphed--mighty, swarming life, miraculous life, the
+creation of one sole hand possessed of the supreme gift--simplicity
+blended with power.
+
+That a philosophical system, a record of the whole of human destiny,
+should have been found therein, with the creation of the world, of man,
+and of woman, the fall, the chastisement, then the redemption, and
+finally God's judgment on the last day--this was a matter on which Pierre
+was unable to dwell, at this first visit, in the wondering stupor into
+which the paintings threw him. But he could not help noticing how the
+human body, its beauty, its power, and its grace were exalted! Ah! that
+regal Jehovah, at once terrible and paternal, carried off amid the
+whirlwind of his creation, his arms outstretched and giving birth to
+worlds! And that superb and nobly outlined Adam, with extended hand, whom
+Jehovah, though he touch him not, animates with his finger--a wondrous
+and admirable gesture, leaving a sacred space between the finger of the
+Creator and that of the created--a tiny space, in which, nevertheless,
+abides all the infinite of the invisible and the mysterious. And then
+that powerful yet adorable Eve, that Eve with the sturdy flanks fit for
+the bearing of humanity, that Eve with the proud, tender grace of a woman
+bent on being loved even to perdition, that Eve embodying the whole of
+woman with her fecundity, her seductiveness, her empire! Moreover, even
+the decorative figures of the pilasters at the corners of the frescoes
+celebrate the triumph of the flesh: there are the twenty young men
+radiant in their nakedness, with incomparable splendour of torso and of
+limb, and such intensity of life that a craze for motion seems to carry
+them off, bend them, throw them over in superb attitudes. And between the
+windows are the giants, the prophets and the sibyls--man and woman
+deified, with inordinate wealth of muscle and grandeur of intellectual
+expression. There is Jeremiah with his elbow resting on his knee and his
+chin on his hand, plunged as he is in reflection--in the very depths of
+his visions and his dreams; there is the Sibylla Erithraea, so pure of
+profile, so young despite the opulence of her form, and with one finger
+resting on the open book of destiny; there is Isaiah with the thick lips
+of truth, virile and haughty, his head half turned and his hand raised
+with a gesture of command; there is the Sibylla Cumaea, terrifying with
+her science and her old age, her wrinkled countenance, her vulture's
+nose, her square protruding chin; there is Jonah cast forth by the whale,
+and wondrously foreshortened, his torso twisted, his arms bent, his head
+thrown back, and his mouth agape and shouting: and there are the others,
+all of the same full-blown, majestic family, reigning with the
+sovereignty of eternal health and intelligence, and typifying the dream
+of a broader, loftier, and indestructible humanity. Moreover, in the
+lunettes and the arches over the windows other figures of grace, power,
+and beauty appear and throng, the ancestors of the Christ, thoughtful
+mothers with lovely nude infants, men with wondering eyes peering into
+the future, representatives of the punished weary race longing for the
+promised Redeemer; while in the pendentives of the four corners various
+biblical episodes, the victories of Israel over the Spirit of Evil,
+spring into life. And finally there is the gigantic fresco at the far
+end, the Last Judgment with its swarming multitude, so numerous that days
+and days are needed to see each figure aright, a distracted crowd, full
+of the hot breath of life, from the dead rising in response to the
+furious trumpeting of the angels, from the fearsome groups of the damned
+whom the demons fling into hell, even to Jesus the justiciar, surrounded
+by the saints and apostles, and to the radiant concourse of the blessed
+who ascend upheld by angels, whilst higher and still higher other angels,
+bearing the instruments of the Passion, triumph as in full glory. And
+yet, above this gigantic composition, painted thirty years subsequently,
+in the full ripeness of age, the ceiling retains its ethereality, its
+unquestionable superiority, for on it the artist bestowed all his virgin
+power, his whole youth, the first great flare of his genius.
+
+And Pierre found but one word to express his feelings: Michael Angelo was
+the monster dominating and crushing all others. Beneath his immense
+achievement you had only to glance at the works of Perugino,
+Pinturicchio, Roselli, Signorelli, and Botticelli, those earlier
+frescoes, admirable in their way, which below the cornice spread out
+around the chapel.
+
+Narcisse for his part had not raised his eyes to the overpowering
+splendour of the ceiling. Wrapt in ecstasy, he did not allow his gaze to
+stray from one of the three frescoes of Botticelli. "Ah! Botticelli," he
+at last murmured; "in him you have the elegance and the grace of the
+mysterious; a profound feeling of sadness even in the midst of
+voluptuousness, a divination of the whole modern soul, with the most
+troublous charm that ever attended artist's work."
+
+Pierre glanced at him in amazement, and then ventured to inquire: "You
+come here to see the Botticellis?"
+
+"Yes, certainly," the young man quietly replied; "I only come here for
+him, and five hours every week I only look at his work. There, just study
+that fresco, Moses and the daughters of Jethro. Isn't it the most
+penetrating work that human tenderness and melancholy have produced?"
+
+Then, with a faint, devout quiver in his voice and the air of a priest
+initiating another into the delightful but perturbing atmosphere of a
+sanctuary, he went on repeating the praises of Botticelli's art; his
+women with long, sensual, yet candid faces, supple bearing, and rounded
+forms showing from under light drapery; his young men, his angels of
+doubtful sex, blending stateliness of muscle with infinite delicacy of
+outline; next the mouths he painted, fleshy, fruit-like mouths, at times
+suggesting irony, at others pain, and often so enigmatical with their
+sinuous curves that one knew not whether the words they left unuttered
+were words of purity or filth; then, too, the eyes which he bestowed on
+his figures, eyes of languor and passion, of carnal or mystical rapture,
+their joy at times so instinct with grief as they peer into the nihility
+of human things that no eyes in the world could be more impenetrable. And
+finally there were Botticelli's hands, so carefully and delicately
+painted, so full of life, wantoning so to say in a free atmosphere, now
+joining, caressing, and even, as it were, speaking, the whole evincing
+such intense solicitude for gracefulness that at times there seems to be
+undue mannerism, though every hand has its particular expression, each
+varying expression of the enjoyment or pain which the sense of touch can
+bring. And yet there was nothing effeminate or false about the painter's
+work: on all sides a sort of virile pride was apparent, an atmosphere of
+superb passionate motion, absolute concern for truth, direct study from
+life, conscientiousness, veritable realism, corrected and elevated by a
+genial strangeness of feeling and character that imparted a
+never-to-be-forgotten charm even to ugliness itself.
+
+Pierre's stupefaction, however, increased as he listened to Narcisse,
+whose somewhat studied elegance, whose curly hair cut in the Florentine
+fashion, and whose blue, mauvish eyes paling with enthusiasm he now for
+the first time remarked. "Botticelli," he at last said, "was no doubt a
+marvellous artist, only it seems to me that here, at any rate, Michael
+Angelo--"
+
+But Narcisse interrupted him almost with violence. "No! no! Don't talk of
+him! He spoilt everything, ruined everything! A man who harnessed himself
+to his work like an ox, who laboured at his task like a navvy, at the
+rate of so many square yards a day! And a man, too, with no sense of the
+mysterious and the unknown, who saw everything so huge as to disgust one
+with beauty, painting girls like the trunks of oak-trees, women like
+giant butchers, with heaps and heaps of stupid flesh, and never a gleam
+of a divine or infernal soul! He was a mason--a colossal mason, if you
+like--but he was nothing more."
+
+Weary "modern" that Narcisse was, spoilt by the pursuit of the original
+and the rare, he thus unconsciously gave rein to his fated hate of health
+and power. That Michael Angelo who brought forth without an effort, who
+had left behind him the most prodigious of all artistic creations, was
+the enemy. And his crime precisely was that he had created life, produced
+life in such excess that all the petty creations of others, even the most
+delightful among them, vanished in presence of the overflowing torrent of
+human beings flung there all alive in the sunlight.
+
+"Well, for my part," Pierre courageously declared, "I'm not of your
+opinion. I now realise that life is everything in art; that real
+immortality belongs only to those who create. The case of Michael Angelo
+seems to me decisive, for he is the superhuman master, the monster who
+overwhelms all others, precisely because he brought forth that
+magnificent living flesh which offends your sense of delicacy. Those who
+are inclined to the curious, those who have minds of a pretty turn, whose
+intellects are ever seeking to penetrate things, may try to improve on
+the equivocal and invisible, and set all the charm of art in some
+elaborate stroke or symbolisation; but, none the less, Michael Angelo
+remains the all-powerful, the maker of men, the master of clearness,
+simplicity, and health."
+
+At this Narcisse smiled with indulgent and courteous disdain. And he
+anticipated further argument by remarking: "It's already eleven. My
+cousin was to have sent a servant here as soon as he could receive us. I
+am surprised to have seen nobody as yet. Shall we go up to see the
+/stanze/ of Raffaelle while we wait?"
+
+Once in the rooms above, he showed himself perfect, both lucid in his
+remarks and just in his appreciations, having recovered all his easy
+intelligence as soon as he was no longer upset by his hatred of colossal
+labour and cheerful decoration.
+
+It was unfortunate that Pierre should have first visited the Sixtine
+Chapel; for it was necessary he should forget what he had just seen and
+accustom himself to what he now beheld in order to enjoy its pure beauty.
+It was as if some potent wine had confused him, and prevented any
+immediate relish of a lighter vintage of delicate fragrance. Admiration
+did not here fall upon one with lightning speed; it was slowly,
+irresistibly that one grew charmed. And the contrast was like that of
+Racine beside Corneille, Lamartine beside Hugo, the eternal pair, the
+masculine and feminine genius coupled through centuries of glory. With
+Raffaelle it is nobility, grace, exquisiteness, and correctness of line,
+and divineness of harmony that triumph. You do not find in him merely the
+materialist symbolism so superbly thrown off by Michael Angelo; he
+introduces psychological analysis of deep penetration into the painter's
+art. Man is shown more purified, idealised; one sees more of that which
+is within him. And though one may be in presence of an artist of
+sentimental bent, a feminine genius whose quiver of tenderness one can
+feel, it is also certain that admirable firmness of workmanship confronts
+one, that the whole is very strong and very great. Pierre gradually
+yielded to such sovereign masterliness, such virile elegance, such a
+vision of supreme beauty set in supreme perfection. But if the "Dispute
+on the Sacrament" and the so-called "School of Athens," both prior to the
+paintings of the Sixtine Chapel, seemed to him to be Raffaelle's
+masterpieces, he felt that in the "Burning of the Borgo," and
+particularly in the "Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple," and "Pope
+St. Leo staying Attila at the Gates of Rome," the artist had lost the
+flower of his divine grace, through the deep impression which the
+overwhelming grandeur of Michael Angelo had wrought upon him. How
+crushing indeed had been the blow when the Sixtine Chapel was thrown open
+and the rivals entered! The creations of the monster then appeared, and
+the greatest of the humanisers lost some of his soul at sight of them,
+thenceforward unable to rid himself of their influence.
+
+From the /stanze/ Narcisse took Pierre to the /loggie/, those glazed
+galleries which are so high and so delicately decorated. But here you
+only find work which pupils executed after designs left by Raffaelle at
+his death. The fall was sudden and complete, and never had Pierre better
+understood that genius is everything--that when it disappears the school
+collapses. The man of genius sums up his period; at a given hour he
+throws forth all the sap of the social soil, which afterwards remains
+exhausted often for centuries. So Pierre became more particularly
+interested in the fine view that the /loggie/ afford, and all at once he
+noticed that the papal apartments were in front of him, just across the
+Court of San Damaso. This court, with its porticus, fountain, and white
+pavement, had an aspect of empty, airy, sunlit solemnity which surprised
+him. There was none of the gloom or pent-up religious mystery that he had
+dreamt of with his mind full of the surroundings of the old northern
+cathedrals. Right and left of the steps conducting to the rooms of the
+Pope and the Cardinal Secretary of State four or five carriages were
+ranged, the coachmen stiffly erect and the horses motionless in the
+brilliant light; and nothing else peopled that vast square desert of a
+court which, with its bareness gilded by the coruscations of its
+glass-work and the ruddiness of its stones, suggested a pagan temple
+dedicated to the sun. But what more particularly struck Pierre was the
+splendid panorama of Rome, for he had not hitherto imagined that the Pope
+from his windows could thus behold the entire city spread out before him
+as if he merely had to stretch forth his hand to make it his own once
+more.
+
+While Pierre contemplated the scene a sound of voices caused him to turn;
+and he perceived a servant in black livery who, after repeating a message
+to Narcisse, was retiring with a deep bow. Looking much annoyed, the
+/attache/ approached the young priest. "Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo," said
+he, "has sent word that he can't see us this morning. Some unexpected
+duties require his presence." However, Narcisse's embarrassment showed
+that he did not believe in the excuse, but rather suspected some one of
+having so terrified his cousin that the latter was afraid of compromising
+himself. Obliging and courageous as Habert himself was, this made him
+indignant. Still he smiled and resumed: "Listen, perhaps there's a means
+of forcing an entry. If your time is your own we can lunch together and
+then return to visit the Museum of Antiquities. I shall certainly end by
+coming across my cousin and we may, perhaps, be lucky enough to meet the
+Pope should he go down to the gardens."
+
+At the news that his audience was yet again postponed Pierre had felt
+keenly disappointed. However, as the whole day was at his disposal, he
+willingly accepted the /attache's/ offer. They lunched in front of St.
+Peter's, in a little restaurant of the Borgo, most of whose customers
+were pilgrims, and the fare, as it happened, was far from good. Then at
+about two o'clock they set off for the museum, skirting the basilica by
+way of the Piazza della Sagrestia. It was a bright, deserted, burning
+district; and again, but in a far greater degree, did the young priest
+experience that sensation of bare, tawny, sun-baked majesty which had
+come upon him while gazing into the Court of San Damaso. Then, as he
+passed the apse of St. Peter's, the enormity of the colossus was brought
+home to him more strongly than ever: it rose like a giant bouquet of
+architecture edged by empty expanses of pavement sprinkled with fine
+weeds. And in all the silent immensity there were only two children
+playing in the shadow of a wall. The old papal mint, the Zecca, now an
+Italian possession, and guarded by soldiers of the royal army, is on the
+left of the passage leading to the museums, while on the right, just in
+front, is one of the entrances of honour to the Vatican where the papal
+Swiss Guard keeps watch and ward; and this is the entrance by which,
+according to etiquette, the pair-horse carriages convey the Pope's
+visitors into the Court of San Damaso.
+
+Following the long lane which ascends between a wing of the palace and
+its garden wall, Narcisse and Pierre at last reached the Museum of
+Antiquities. Ah! what a museum it is, with galleries innumerable, a
+museum compounded of three museums, the Pio-Clementino, Chiaramonti, and
+the Braccio-Nuovo, and containing a whole world found beneath the soil,
+then exhumed, and now glorified in full sunlight. For more than two hours
+Pierre went from one hall to another, dazzled by the masterpieces,
+bewildered by the accumulation of genius and beauty. It was not only the
+celebrated examples of statuary, the Laocoon and the Apollo of the
+cabinets of the Belvedere, the Meleager, or even the torso of
+Hercules--that astonished him. He was yet more impressed by the
+/ensemble/, by the innumerable quantities of Venuses, Bacchuses, and
+deified emperors and empresses, by the whole superb growth of beautiful
+or August flesh celebrating the immortality of life. Three days
+previously he had visited the Museum of the Capitol, where he had admired
+the Venus, the Dying Gaul,* the marvellous Centaurs of black marble, and
+the extraordinary collection of busts, but here his admiration became
+intensified into stupor by the inexhaustible wealth of the galleries.
+And, with more curiosity for life than for art, perhaps, he again
+lingered before the busts which so powerfully resuscitate the Rome of
+history--the Rome which, whilst incapable of realising the ideal beauty
+of Greece, was certainly well able to create life. The emperors, the
+philosophers, the learned men, the poets are all there, and live such as
+they really were, studied and portrayed in all scrupulousness with their
+deformities, their blemishes, the slightest peculiarities of their
+features. And from this extreme solicitude for truth springs a wonderful
+wealth of character and an incomparable vision of the past. Nothing,
+indeed, could be loftier: the very men live once more, and retrace the
+history of their city, that history which has been so falsified that the
+teaching of it has caused generations of school-boys to hold antiquity in
+horror. But on seeing the men, how well one understands, how fully one
+can sympathise! And indeed the smallest bits of marble, the maimed
+statues, the bas-reliefs in fragments, even the isolated limbs--whether
+the divine arm of a nymph or the sinewy, shaggy thigh of a satyr--evoke
+the splendour of a civilisation full of light, grandeur, and strength.
+
+  * Best known in England, through Byron's lines, as the
+    Dying Gladiator, though that appellation is certainly
+    erroneous.--Trans.
+
+At last Narcisse brought Pierre back into the Gallery of the Candelabra,
+three hundred feet in length and full of fine examples of sculpture.
+"Listen, my dear Abbe," said he. "It is scarcely more than four o'clock,
+and we will sit down here for a while, as I am told that the Holy Father
+sometimes passes this way to go down to the gardens. It would be really
+lucky if you could see him, perhaps even speak to him--who can tell? At
+all events, it will rest you, for you must be tired out."
+
+Narcisse was known to all the attendants, and his relationship to
+Monsignor Gamba gave him the run of almost the entire Vatican, where he
+was fond of spending his leisure time. Finding two chairs, they sat down,
+and the /attache/ again began to talk of art.
+
+How astonishing had been the destiny of Rome, what a singular, borrowed
+royalty had been hers! She seemed like a centre whither the whole world
+converged, but where nothing grew from the soil itself, which from the
+outset appeared to be stricken with sterility. The arts required to be
+acclimatised there; it was necessary to transplant the genius of
+neighbouring nations, which, once there, however, flourished
+magnificently. Under the emperors, when Rome was the queen of the earth,
+the beauty of her monuments and sculpture came to her from Greece. Later,
+when Christianity arose in Rome, it there remained impregnated with
+paganism; it was on another soil that it produced Gothic art, the
+Christian Art /par excellence/. Later still, at the Renascence, it was
+certainly at Rome that the age of Julius II and Leo X shone forth; but
+the artists of Tuscany and Umbria prepared the evolution, brought it to
+Rome that it might thence expand and soar. For the second time, indeed,
+art came to Rome from without, and gave her the royalty of the world by
+blossoming so triumphantly within her walls. Then occurred the
+extraordinary awakening of antiquity, Apollo and Venus resuscitated
+worshipped by the popes themselves, who from the time of Nicholas V
+dreamt of making papal Rome the equal of the imperial city. After the
+precursors, so sincere, tender, and strong in their art--Fra Angelico,
+Perugino, Botticelli, and so many others--came the two sovereigns,
+Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, the superhuman and the divine. Then the
+fall was sudden, years elapsed before the advent of Caravaggio with power
+of colour and modelling, all that the science of painting could achieve
+when bereft of genius. And afterwards the decline continued until Bernini
+was reached--Bernini, the real creator of the Rome of the present popes,
+the prodigal child who at twenty could already show a galaxy of colossal
+marble wenches, the universal architect who with fearful activity
+finished the facade, built the colonnade, decorated the interior of St.
+Peter's, and raised fountains, churches, and palaces innumerable. And
+that was the end of all, for since then Rome has little by little
+withdrawn from life, from the modern world, as though she, who always
+lived on what she derived from others, were dying of her inability to
+take anything more from them in order to convert it to her own glory.
+
+"Ah! Bernini, that delightful Bernini!" continued Narcisse with his
+rapturous air. "He is both powerful and exquisite, his verve always
+ready, his ingenuity invariably awake, his fecundity full of grace and
+magnificence. As for their Bramante with his masterpiece, that cold,
+correct Cancelleria, we'll dub him the Michael Angelo and Raffaelle of
+architecture and say no more about it. But Bernini, that exquisite
+Bernini, why, there is more delicacy and refinement in his pretended bad
+taste than in all the hugeness and perfection of the others! Our own age
+ought to recognise itself in his art, at once so varied and so deep, so
+triumphant in its mannerisms, so full of a perturbing solicitude for the
+artificial and so free from the baseness of reality. Just go to the Villa
+Borghese to see the group of Apollo and Daphne which Bernini executed
+when he was eighteen,* and in particular see his statue of Santa Teresa
+in ecstasy at Santa Maria della Vittoria! Ah! that Santa Teresa! It is
+like heaven opening, with the quiver that only a purely divine enjoyment
+can set in woman's flesh, the rapture of faith carried to the point of
+spasm, the creature losing breath and dying of pleasure in the arms of
+the Divinity! I have spent hours and hours before that work without
+exhausting the infinite scope of its precious, burning symbolisation."
+
+  * There is also at the Villa Borghese Bernini's /Anchises carried
+    by Aeneas/, which he sculptured when only sixteen. No doubt his
+    faults were many; but it was his misfortune to belong to a
+    decadent period.--Trans.
+
+Narcisse's voice died away, and Pierre, no longer astonished at his
+covert, unconscious hatred of health, simplicity, and strength, scarcely
+listened to him. The young priest himself was again becoming absorbed in
+the idea he had formed of pagan Rome resuscitating in Christian Rome and
+turning it into Catholic Rome, the new political, sacerdotal, domineering
+centre of earthly government. Apart from the primitive age of the
+Catacombs, had Rome ever been Christian? The thoughts that had come to
+him on the Palatine, in the Appian Way, and in St. Peter's were gathering
+confirmation. Genius that morning had brought him fresh proof. No doubt
+the paganism which reappeared in the art of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle
+was tempered, transformed by the Christian spirit. But did it not still
+remain the basis? Had not the former master peered across Olympus when
+snatching his great nudities from the terrible heavens of Jehovah? Did
+not the ideal figures of Raffaelle reveal the superb, fascinating flesh
+of Venus beneath the chaste veil of the Virgin? It seemed so to Pierre,
+and some embarrassment mingled with his despondency, for all those
+beautiful forms glorifying the ardent passions of life, were in
+opposition to his dream of rejuvenated Christianity giving peace to the
+world and reviving the simplicity and purity of the early ages.
+
+All at once he was surprised to hear Narcisse, by what transition he
+could not tell, speaking to him of the daily life of Leo XIII. "Yes, my
+dear Abbe, at eighty-four* the Holy Father shows the activity of a young
+man and leads a life of determination and hard work such as neither you
+nor I would care for! At six o'clock he is already up, says his mass in
+his private chapel, and drinks a little milk for breakfast. Then, from
+eight o'clock till noon, there is a ceaseless procession of cardinals and
+prelates, all the affairs of the congregations passing under his eyes,
+and none could be more numerous or intricate. At noon the public and
+collective audiences usually begin. At two he dines. Then comes the
+siesta which he has well earned, or else a promenade in the gardens until
+six o'clock. The private audiences then sometimes keep him for an hour or
+two. He sups at nine and scarcely eats, lives on nothing, in fact, and is
+always alone at his little table. What do you think, eh, of the etiquette
+which compels him to such loneliness? There you have a man who for
+eighteen years has never had a guest at his table, who day by day sits
+all alone in his grandeur! And as soon as ten o'clock strikes, after
+saying the Rosary with his familiars, he shuts himself up in his room.
+But, although he may go to bed, he sleeps very little; he is frequently
+troubled by insomnia, and gets up and sends for a secretary to dictate
+memoranda or letters to him. When any interesting matter requires his
+attention he gives himself up to it heart and soul, never letting it
+escape his thoughts. And his life, his health, lies in all this. His mind
+is always busy; his will and strength must always be exerting themselves.
+You may know that he long cultivated Latin verse with affection; and I
+believe that in his days of struggle he had a passion for journalism,
+inspired the articles of the newspapers he subsidised, and even dictated
+some of them when his most cherished ideas were in question."
+
+  * The reader should remember that the period selected for this
+    narrative is the year 1894. Leo XIII was born in 1810.--Trans.
+
+Silence fell. At every moment Narcisse craned his neck to see if the
+little papal /cortege/ were not emerging from the Gallery of the
+Tapestries to pass them on its way to the gardens. "You are perhaps
+aware," he resumed, "that his Holiness is brought down on a low chair
+which is small enough to pass through every doorway. It's quite a
+journey, more than a mile, through the /loggie/, the /stanze/ of
+Raffaelle, the painting and sculpture galleries, not to mention the
+numerous staircases, before he reaches the gardens, where a pair-horse
+carriage awaits him. It's quite fine this evening, so he will surely
+come. We must have a little patience."
+
+Whilst Narcisse was giving these particulars Pierre again sank into a
+reverie and saw the whole extraordinary history pass before him. First
+came the worldly, ostentatious popes of the Renascence, those who
+resuscitated antiquity with so much passion and dreamt of draping the
+Holy See with the purple of empire once more. There was Paul II, the
+magnificent Venetian who built the Palazzo di Venezia; Sixtus IV, to whom
+one owes the Sixtine Chapel; and Julius II and Leo X, who made Rome a
+city of theatrical pomp, prodigious festivities, tournaments, ballets,
+hunts, masquerades, and banquets. At that time the papacy had just
+rediscovered Olympus amidst the dust of buried ruins, and as though
+intoxicated by the torrent of life which arose from the ancient soil, it
+founded the museums, thus reviving the superb temples of the pagan age,
+and restoring them to the cult of universal admiration. Never had the
+Church been in such peril of death, for if the Christ was still honoured
+at St. Peter's, Jupiter and all the other gods and goddesses, with their
+beauteous, triumphant flesh, were enthroned in the halls of the Vatican.
+Then, however, another vision passed before Pierre, one of the modern
+popes prior to the Italian occupation--notably Pius IX, who, whilst yet
+free, often went into his good city of Rome. His huge red and gold coach
+was drawn by six horses, surrounded by Swiss Guards and followed by Noble
+Guards; but now and again he would alight in the Corso, and continue his
+promenade on foot, and then the mounted men of the escort galloped
+forward to give warning and stop the traffic. The carriages drew up, the
+gentlemen had to alight and kneel on the pavement, whilst the ladies
+simply rose and devoutly inclined their heads, as the Holy Father,
+attended by his Court, slowly wended his way to the Piazza del Popolo,
+smiling and blessing at every step. And now had come Leo XIII, the
+voluntary prisoner, shut up in the Vatican for eighteen years, and he,
+behind the high, silent walls, in the unknown sphere where each of his
+days flowed by so quietly, had acquired a more exalted majesty, instinct
+with sacred and redoubtable mysteriousness.
+
+Ah! that Pope whom you no longer meet or see, that Pope hidden from the
+common of mankind like some terrible divinity whom the priests alone dare
+to approach! It is in that sumptuous Vatican which his forerunners of the
+Renascence built and adorned for giant festivities that he has secluded
+himself; it is there he lives, far from the crowd, in prison with the
+handsome men and the lovely women of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, with
+the gods and goddesses of marble, with the whole of resplendent Olympus
+celebrating around him the religion of life and light. With him the
+entire Papacy is there steeped in paganism. What a spectacle when the
+slender, weak old man, all soul, so purely white, passes along the
+galleries of the Museum of Antiquities on his way to the gardens. Right
+and left the statues behold him pass with all their bare flesh. There is
+Jupiter, there is Apollo, there is Venus the /dominatrix/, there is Pan,
+the universal god in whose laugh the joys of earth ring out. Nereids
+bathe in transparent water. Bacchantes roll, unveiled, in the warm grass.
+Centaurs gallop by carrying lovely girls, faint with rapture, on their
+steaming haunches. Ariadne is surprised by Bacchus, Ganymede fondles the
+eagle, Adonis fires youth and maiden with his flame. And on and on passes
+the weak, white old man, swaying on his low chair, amidst that splendid
+triumph, that display and glorification of the flesh, which shouts aloud
+the omnipotence of Nature, of everlasting matter! Since they have found
+it again, exhumed it, and honoured it, that it is which once more reigns
+there imperishable; and in vain have they set vine leaves on the statues,
+even as they have swathed the huge figures of Michael Angelo; sex still
+flares on all sides, life overflows, its germs course in torrents through
+the veins of the world. Near by, in that Vatican library of incomparable
+wealth, where all human science lies slumbering, there lurks a yet more
+terrible danger--the danger of an explosion which would sweep away
+everything, Vatican and St. Peter's also, if one day the books in their
+turn were to awake and speak aloud as speak the beauty of Venus and the
+manliness of Apollo. But the white, diaphanous old man seems neither to
+see nor to hear, and the huge heads of Jupiter, the trunks of Hercules,
+the equivocal statues of Antinous continue to watch him as he passes on!
+
+However, Narcisse had become impatient, and, going in search of an
+attendant, he learnt from him that his Holiness had already gone down. To
+shorten the distance, indeed, the /cortege/ often passes along a kind of
+open gallery leading towards the Mint. "Well, let us go down as well,"
+said Narcisse to Pierre; "I will try to show you the gardens."
+
+Down below, in the vestibule, a door of which opened on to a broad path,
+he spoke to another attendant, a former pontifical soldier whom he
+personally knew. The man at once let him pass with Pierre, but was unable
+to tell him whether Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo had accompanied his
+Holiness that day.
+
+"No matter," resumed Narcisse when he and his companion were alone in the
+path; "I don't despair of meeting him--and these, you see, are the famous
+gardens of the Vatican."
+
+They are very extensive grounds, and the Pope can go quite two and a half
+miles by passing along the paths of the wood, the vineyard, and the
+kitchen garden. Occupying the plateau of the Vatican hill, which the
+medieval wall of Leo IV still girdles, the gardens are separated from the
+neighbouring valleys as by a fortified rampart. The wall formerly
+stretched to the castle of Sant' Angelo, thereby forming what was known
+as the Leonine City. No inquisitive eyes can peer into the grounds
+excepting from the dome of St. Peter's, which casts its huge shadow over
+them during the hot summer weather. They are, too, quite a little world,
+which each pope has taken pleasure in embellishing. There is a large
+parterre with lawns of geometrical patterns, planted with handsome palms
+and adorned with lemon and orange trees in pots; there is a less formal,
+a shadier garden, where, amidst deep plantations of yoke-elms, you find
+Giovanni Vesanzio's fountain, the Aquilone, and Pius IV's old Casino;
+then, too, there are the woods with their superb evergreen oaks, their
+thickets of plane-trees, acacias, and pines, intersected by broad
+avenues, which are delightfully pleasant for leisurely strolls; and
+finally, on turning to the left, beyond other clumps of trees, come the
+kitchen garden and the vineyard, the last well tended.
+
+Whilst walking through the wood Narcisse told Pierre of the life led by
+the Holy Father in these gardens. He strolls in them every second day
+when the weather allows. Formerly the popes left the Vatican for the
+Quirinal, which is cooler and healthier, as soon as May arrived; and
+spent the dog days at Castle Gandolfo on the margins of the Lake of
+Albano. But nowadays the only summer residence possessed by his Holiness
+is a virtually intact tower of the old rampart of Leo IV. He here spends
+the hottest days, and has even erected a sort of pavilion beside it for
+the accommodation of his suite. Narcisse, like one at home, went in and
+secured permission for Pierre to glance at the one room occupied by the
+Pope, a spacious round chamber with semispherical ceiling, on which are
+painted the heavens with symbolical figures of the constellations; one of
+the latter, the lion, having two stars for eyes--stars which a system of
+lighting causes to sparkle during the night. The walls of the tower are
+so thick that after blocking up a window, a kind of room, for the
+accommodation of a couch, has been contrived in the embrasure. Beside
+this couch the only furniture is a large work-table, a dining-table with
+flaps, and a large regal arm-chair, a mass of gilding, one of the gifts
+of the Pope's episcopal jubilee. And you dream of the days of solitude
+and perfect silence, spent in that low donjon hall, where the coolness of
+a tomb prevails whilst the heavy suns of August are scorching overpowered
+Rome.
+
+An astronomical observatory has been installed in another tower,
+surmounted by a little white cupola, which you espy amidst the greenery;
+and under the trees there is also a Swiss chalet, where Leo XIII is fond
+of resting. He sometimes goes on foot to the kitchen garden, and takes
+much interest in the vineyard, visiting it to see if the grapes are
+ripening and if the vintage will be a good one. What most astonished
+Pierre, however, was to learn that the Holy Father had been very fond of
+"sport" before age had weakened him. He was indeed passionately addicted
+to bird snaring. Broad-meshed nets were hung on either side of a path on
+the fringe of a plantation, and in the middle of the path were placed
+cages containing the decoys, whose songs soon attracted all the birds of
+the neighbourhood--red-breasts, white-throats, black-caps, nightingales,
+fig-peckers of all sorts. And when a numerous company of them was
+gathered together Leo XIII, seated out of sight and watching, would
+suddenly clap his hands and startle the birds, which flew up and were
+caught by the wings in the meshes of the nets. All that then remained to
+be done was to take them out of the nets and stifle them by a touch of
+the thumb. Roast fig-peckers are delicious.*
+
+  * Perhaps so; but what a delightful pastime for the Vicar of the
+    Divinity!--Trans.
+
+As Pierre came back through the wood he had another surprise. He suddenly
+lighted on a "Grotto of Lourdes," a miniature imitation of the original,
+built of rocks and blocks of cement. And such was his emotion at the
+sight that he could not conceal it. "It's true, then!" said he. "I was
+told of it, but I thought that the Holy Father was of loftier mind--free
+from all such base superstitions!"
+
+"Oh!" replied Narcisse, "I fancy that the grotto dates from Pius IX, who
+evinced especial gratitude to our Lady of Lourdes. At all events, it must
+be a gift, and Leo XIII simply keeps it in repair."
+
+For a few moments Pierre remained motionless and silent before that
+imitation grotto, that childish plaything. Some zealously devout visitors
+had left their visiting cards in the cracks of the cement-work! For his
+part, he felt very sad, and followed his companion with bowed head,
+lamenting the wretched idiocy of the world. Then, on emerging from the
+wood, on again reaching the parterre, he raised his eyes.
+
+Ah! how exquisite in spite of everything was that decline of a lovely
+day, and what a victorious charm ascended from the soil in that part of
+the gardens. There, in front of that bare, noble, burning parterre, far
+more than under the languishing foliage of the wood or among the fruitful
+vines, Pierre realised the strength of Nature. Above the grass growing
+meagrely over the compartments of geometrical pattern which the pathways
+traced there were barely a few low shrubs, dwarf roses, aloes, rare tufts
+of withering flowers. Some green bushes still described the escutcheon of
+Pius IX in accordance with the strange taste of former times. And amidst
+the warm silence one only heard the faint crystalline murmur of the water
+trickling from the basin of the central fountain. But all Rome, its
+ardent heavens, sovereign grace, and conquering voluptuousness, seemed
+with their own soul to animate this vast rectangular patch of decorative
+gardening, this mosaic of verdure, which in its semi-abandonment and
+scorched decay assumed an aspect of melancholy pride, instinct with the
+ever returning quiver of a passion of fire that could not die. Some
+antique vases and statues, whitely nude under the setting sun, skirted
+the parterres. And above the aroma of eucalyptus and of pine, stronger
+even than that of the ripening oranges, there rose the odour of the
+large, bitter box-shrubs, so laden with pungent life that it disturbed
+one as one passed as if indeed it were the very scent of the fecundity of
+that ancient soil saturated with the dust of generations.
+
+"It's very strange that we have not met his Holiness," exclaimed
+Narcisse. "Perhaps his carriage took the other path through the wood
+while we were in the tower."
+
+Then, reverting to Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo, the /attache/ explained
+that the functions of /Copiere/, or papal cup-bearer, which his cousin
+should have discharged as one of the four /Camerieri segreti
+partecipanti/ had become purely honorary since the dinners offered to
+diplomatists or in honour of newly consecrated bishops had been given by
+the Cardinal Secretary of State. Monsignor Gamba, whose cowardice and
+nullity were legendary, seemed therefore to have no other /role/ than
+that of enlivening Leo XIII, whose favour he had won by his incessant
+flattery and the anecdotes which he was ever relating about both the
+black and the white worlds. Indeed this fat, amiable man, who could even
+be obliging when his interests were not in question, was a perfect
+newspaper, brimful of tittle-tattle, disdaining no item of gossip
+whatever, even if it came from the kitchens. And thus he was quietly
+marching towards the cardinalate, certain of obtaining the hat without
+other exertion than that of bringing a budget of gossip to beguile the
+pleasant hours of the promenade. And Heaven knew that he was always able
+to garner an abundant harvest of news in that closed Vatican swarming
+with prelates of every kind, in that womanless pontifical family of old
+begowned bachelors, all secretly exercised by vast ambitions, covert and
+revolting rivalries, and ferocious hatreds, which, it is said, are still
+sometimes carried as far as the good old poison of ancient days.
+
+All at once Narcisse stopped. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "I was certain of it.
+There's the Holy Father! But we are not in luck. He won't even see us; he
+is about to get into his carriage again."
+
+As he spoke a carriage drew up at the verge of the wood, and a little
+/cortege/ emerging from a narrow path, went towards it.
+
+Pierre felt as if he had received a great blow in the heart. Motionless
+beside his companion, and half hidden by a lofty vase containing a
+lemon-tree, it was only from a distance that he was able to see the white
+old man, looking so frail and slender in the wavy folds of his white
+cassock, and walking so very slowly with short, gliding steps. The young
+priest could scarcely distinguish the emaciated face of old diaphanous
+ivory, emphasised by a large nose which jutted out above thin lips.
+However, the Pontiff's black eyes were glittering with an inquisitive
+smile, while his right ear was inclined towards Monsignor Gamba del
+Zoppo, who was doubtless finishing some story at once rich and short,
+flowery and dignified. And on the left walked a Noble Guard; and two
+other prelates followed.
+
+It was but a familiar apparition; Leo XIII was already climbing into the
+closed carriage. And Pierre, in the midst of that large, odoriferous,
+burning garden, again experienced the singular emotion which had come
+upon him in the Gallery of the Candelabra while he was picturing the Pope
+on his way between the Apollos and Venuses radiant in their triumphant
+nudity. There, however, it was only pagan art which had celebrated the
+eternity of life, the superb, almighty powers of Nature. But here he had
+beheld the Pontiff steeped in Nature itself, in Nature clad in the most
+lovely, most voluptuous, most passionate guise. Ah! that Pope, that old
+man strolling with his Divinity of grief, humility, and renunciation
+along the paths of those gardens of love, in the languid evenings of the
+hot summer days, beneath the caressing scents of pine and eucalyptus,
+ripe oranges, and tall, acrid box-shrubs! The whole atmosphere around him
+proclaimed the powers of the great god Pan. How pleasant was the thought
+of living there, amidst that magnificence of heaven and of earth, of
+loving the beauty of woman and of rejoicing in the fruitfulness of all!
+And suddenly the decisive truth burst forth that from a land of such joy
+and light it was only possible for a temporal religion of conquest and
+political domination to rise; not the mystical, pain-fraught religion of
+the North--the religion of the soul!
+
+However, Narcisse led the young priest away, telling him other anecdotes
+as they went--anecdotes of the occasional /bonhomie/ of Leo XIII, who
+would stop to chat with the gardeners, and question them about the health
+of the trees and the sale of the oranges. And he also mentioned the
+Pope's former passion for a pair of gazelles, sent him from Africa, two
+graceful creatures which he had been fond of caressing, and at whose
+death he had shed tears. But Pierre no longer listened. When they found
+themselves on the Piazza of St. Peter's, he turned round and gazed at the
+Vatican once more.
+
+His eyes had fallen on the gate of bronze, and he remembered having
+wondered that morning what there might be behind these metal panels
+ornamented with big nails. And he did not yet dare to answer the
+question, and decide if the new nations thirsting for fraternity and
+justice would really find there the religion necessary for the
+democracies of to-morrow; for he had not been able to probe things, and
+only carried a first impression away with him. But how keen it was, and
+how ill it boded for his dreams! A gate of bronze! Yes, a hard,
+impregnable gate, so completely shutting the Vatican off from the rest of
+the world that nothing new had entered the palace for three hundred
+years. Behind that portal the old centuries, as far as the sixteenth,
+remained immutable. Time seemed to have stayed its course there for ever;
+nothing more stirred; the very costumes of the Swiss Guards, the Noble
+Guards, and the prelates themselves were unchanged; and you found
+yourself in the world of three hundred years ago, with its etiquette, its
+costumes, and its ideas. That the popes in a spirit of haughty protest
+should for five and twenty years have voluntarily shut themselves up in
+their palace was already regrettable; but this imprisonment of centuries
+within the past, within the grooves of tradition, was far more serious
+and dangerous. It was all Catholicism which was thus imprisoned, whose
+dogmas and sacerdotal organisation were obstinately immobilised. Perhaps,
+in spite of its apparent flexibility, Catholicism was really unable to
+yield in anything, under peril of being swept away, and therein lay both
+its weakness and its strength. And then what a terrible world was there,
+how great the pride and ambition, how numerous the hatreds and rivalries!
+And how strange the prison, how singular the company assembled behind the
+bars--the Crucified by the side of Jupiter Capitolinus, all pagan
+antiquity fraternising with the Apostles, all the splendours of the
+Renascence surrounding the pastor of the Gospel who reigns in the name of
+the humble and the poor!
+
+The sun was sinking, the gentle, luscious sweetness of the Roman evenings
+was falling from the limpid heavens, and after that splendid day spent
+with Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, the ancients, and the Pope, in the finest
+palace of the world, the young priest lingered, distracted, on the Piazza
+of St. Peter's.
+
+"Well, you must excuse me, my dear Abbe," concluded Narcisse. "But I will
+now confess to you that I suspect my worthy cousin of a fear that he
+might compromise himself by meddling in your affair. I shall certainly
+see him again, but you will do well not to put too much reliance on him."
+
+It was nearly six o'clock when Pierre got back to the Boccanera mansion.
+As a rule, he passed in all modesty down the lane, and entered by the
+little side door, a key of which had been given him. But he had that
+morning received a letter from M. de la Choue, and desired to communicate
+it to Benedetta. So he ascended the grand staircase, and on reaching the
+anteroom was surprised to find nobody there. As a rule, whenever the
+man-servant went out Victorine installed herself in his place and busied
+herself with some needlework. Her chair was there, and Pierre even
+noticed some linen which she had left on a little table when probably
+summoned elsewhere. Then, as the door of the first reception-room was
+ajar, he at last ventured in. It was almost night there already, the
+twilight was softly dying away, and all at once the young priest stopped
+short, fearing to take another step, for, from the room beyond, the large
+yellow /salon/, there came a murmur of feverish, distracted words, ardent
+entreaties, fierce panting, a rustling and a shuffling of footsteps. And
+suddenly Pierre no longer hesitated, urged on despite himself by the
+conviction that the sounds he heard were those of a struggle, and that
+some one was hard pressed.
+
+And when he darted into the further room he was stupefied, for Dario was
+there, no longer showing the degenerate elegance of the last scion of an
+exhausted race, but maddened by the hot, frantic blood of the Boccaneras
+which had bubbled up within him. He had clasped Benedetta by the
+shoulders in a frenzy of passion and was scorching her face with his hot,
+entreating words: "But since you say, my darling, that it is all over,
+that your marriage will never be dissolved--oh! why should we be wretched
+for ever! Love me as you do love me, and let me love you--let me love
+you!"
+
+But the Contessina, with an indescribable expression of tenderness and
+suffering on her tearful face, repulsed him with her outstretched arms,
+she likewise evincing a fierce energy as she repeated: "No, no; I love
+you, but it must not, it must not be."
+
+At that moment, amidst the roar of his despair, Dario became conscious
+that some one was entering the room. He turned and gazed at Pierre with
+an expression of stupefied insanity, scarce able even to recognise him.
+Then he carried his two hands to his face, to his bloodshot eyes and his
+cheeks wet with scalding tears, and fled, heaving a terrible,
+pain-fraught sigh in which baffled passion mingled with grief and
+repentance.
+
+Benedetta seated herself, breathing hard, her strength and courage
+wellnigh exhausted. But as Pierre, too much embarrassed to speak, turned
+towards the door, she addressed him in a calmer voice: "No, no, Monsieur
+l'Abbe, do not go away--sit down, I pray you; I should like to speak to
+you for a moment."
+
+He thereupon thought it his duty to account for his sudden entrance, and
+explained that he had found the door of the first /salon/ ajar, and that
+Victorine was not in the ante-room, though he had seen her work lying on
+the table there.
+
+"Yes," exclaimed the Contessina, "Victorine ought to have been there; I
+saw her there but a short time ago. And when my poor Dario lost his head
+I called her. Why did she not come?" Then, with sudden expansion, leaning
+towards Pierre, she continued: "Listen, Monsieur l'Abbe, I will tell you
+what happened, for I don't want you to form too bad an opinion of my poor
+Dario. It was all in some measure my fault. Last night he asked me for an
+appointment here in order that we might have a quiet chat, and as I knew
+that my aunt would be absent at this time to-day I told him to come. It
+was only natural--wasn't it?--that we should want to see one another and
+come to an agreement after the grievous news that my marriage will
+probably never be annulled. We suffer too much, and must form a decision.
+And so when he came this evening we began to weep and embrace, mingling
+our tears together. I kissed him again and again, telling him how I
+adored him, how bitterly grieved I was at being the cause of his
+sufferings, and how surely I should die of grief at seeing him so
+unhappy. Ah! no doubt I did wrong; I ought not to have caught him to my
+heart and embraced him as I did, for it maddened him, Monsieur l'Abbe; he
+lost his head, and would have made me break my vow to the Blessed
+Virgin."
+
+She spoke these words in all tranquillity and simplicity, without sign of
+embarrassment, like a young and beautiful woman who is at once sensible
+and practical. Then she resumed: "Oh! I know my poor Dario well, but it
+does not prevent me from loving him; perhaps, indeed, it only makes me
+love him the more. He looks delicate, perhaps rather sickly, but in truth
+he is a man of passion. Yes, the old blood of my people bubbles up in
+him. I know something of it myself, for when I was a child I sometimes
+had fits of angry passion which left me exhausted on the floor, and even
+now, when the gusts arise within me, I have to fight against myself and
+torture myself in order that I may not act madly. But my poor Dario does
+not know how to suffer. He is like a child whose fancies must be
+gratified. And yet at bottom he has a good deal of common sense; he waits
+for me because he knows that the only real happiness lies with the woman
+who adores him."
+
+As Pierre listened he was able to form a more precise idea of the young
+prince, of whose character he had hitherto had but a vague perception.
+Whilst dying of love for his cousin, Dario had ever been a man of
+pleasure. Though he was no doubt very amiable, the basis of his
+temperament was none the less egotism. And, in particular, he was unable
+to endure suffering; he loathed suffering, ugliness, and poverty, whether
+they affected himself or others. Both his flesh and his soul required
+gaiety, brilliancy, show, life in the full sunlight. And withal he was
+exhausted, with no strength left him but for the idle life he led, so
+incapable of thought and will that the idea of joining the new /regime/
+had not even occurred to him. Yet he had all the unbounded pride of a
+Roman; sagacity--a keen, practical perception of the real--was mingled
+with his indolence; while his inveterate love of woman, more frequently
+displayed in charm of manner, burst forth at times in attacks of frantic
+sensuality.
+
+"After all he is a man," concluded Benedetta in a low voice, "and I must
+not ask impossibilities of him." Then, as Pierre gazed at her, his
+notions of Italian jealousy quite upset, she exclaimed, aglow with
+passionate adoration: "No, no. Situated as we are, I am not jealous. I
+know very well that he will always return to me, and that he will be mine
+alone whenever I please, whenever it may be possible."
+
+Silence followed; shadows were filling the room, the gilding of the large
+pier tables faded away, and infinite melancholy fell from the lofty, dim
+ceiling and the old hangings, yellow like autumn leaves. But soon, by
+some chance play of the waning light, a painting stood out above the sofa
+on which the Contessina was seated. It was the portrait of the beautiful
+young girl with the turban--Cassia Boccanera the forerunner, the
+/amorosa/ and avengeress. Again was Pierre struck by the portrait's
+resemblance to Benedetta, and, thinking aloud, he resumed: "Passion
+always proves the stronger; there invariably comes a moment when one
+succumbs--"
+
+But Benedetta violently interrupted him: "I! I! Ah! you do not know me; I
+would rather die!" And with extraordinary exaltation, all aglow with
+love, as if her superstitious faith had fired her passion to ecstasy, she
+continued: "I have vowed to the Madonna that I will belong to none but
+the man I love, and to him only when he is my husband. And hitherto I
+have kept that vow, at the cost of my happiness, and I will keep it
+still, even if it cost me my life! Yes, we will die, my poor Dario and I,
+if it be necessary; but the holy Virgin has my vow, and the angels shall
+not weep in heaven!"
+
+She was all in those words, her nature all simplicity, intricate,
+inexplicable though it might seem. She was doubtless swayed by that idea
+of human nobility which Christianity has set in renunciation and purity;
+a protest, as it were, against eternal matter, against the forces of
+Nature, the everlasting fruitfulness of life. But there was more than
+this; she reserved herself, like a divine and priceless gift, to be
+bestowed on the one being whom her heart had chosen, he who would be her
+lord and master when God should have united them in marriage. For her
+everything lay in the blessing of the priest, in the religious
+solemnisation of matrimony. And thus one understood her long resistance
+to Prada, whom she did not love, and her despairing, grievous resistance
+to Dario, whom she did love, but who was not her husband. And how
+torturing it was for that soul of fire to have to resist her love; how
+continual was the combat waged by duty in the Virgin's name against the
+wild, passionate blood of her race! Ignorant, indolent though she might
+be, she was capable of great fidelity of heart, and, moreover, she was
+not given to dreaming: love might have its immaterial charms, but she
+desired it complete.
+
+As Pierre looked at her in the dying twilight he seemed to see and
+understand her for the first time. The duality of her nature appeared in
+her somewhat full, fleshy lips, in her big black eyes, which suggested a
+dark, tempestuous night illumined by flashes of lightning, and in the
+calm, sensible expression of the rest of her gentle, infantile face. And,
+withal, behind those eyes of flame, beneath that pure, candid skin, one
+divined the internal tension of a superstitious, proud, and self-willed
+woman, who was obstinately intent on reserving herself for her one love.
+And Pierre could well understand that she should be adored, that she
+should fill the life of the man she chose with passion, and that to his
+own eyes she should appear like the younger sister of that lovely, tragic
+Cassia who, unwilling to survive the blow that had rendered self-bestowal
+impossible, had flung herself into the Tiber, dragging her brother Ercole
+and the corpse of her lover Flavio with her.
+
+However, with a gesture of kindly affection Benedetta caught hold of
+Pierre's hands. "You have been here a fortnight, Monsieur l'Abbe," said
+she, "and I have come to like you very much, for I feel you to be a
+friend. If at first you do not understand us, at least pray do not judge
+us too severely. Ignorant as I may be, I always strive to act for the
+best, I assure you."
+
+Pierre was greatly touched by her affectionate graciousness, and thanked
+her whilst for a moment retaining her beautiful hands in his own, for he
+also was becoming much attached to her. A fresh dream was carrying him
+off, that of educating her, should he have the time, or, at all events,
+of not returning home before winning her soul over to his own ideas of
+future charity and fraternity. Did not that adorable, unoccupied,
+indolent, ignorant creature, who only knew how to defend her love,
+personify the Italy of yesterday? The Italy of yesterday, so lovely and
+so sleepy, instinct with a dying grace, charming one even in her
+drowsiness, and retaining so much mystery in the fathomless depths of her
+black, passionate eyes! And what a /role/ would be that of awakening her,
+instructing her, winning her over to truth, making her the rejuvenated
+Italy of to-morrow such as he had dreamt of! Even in that disastrous
+marriage with Count Prada he tried to see merely a first attempt at
+revival which had failed, the modern Italy of the North being over-hasty,
+too brutal in its eagerness to love and transform that gentle, belated
+Rome which was yet so superb and indolent. But might he not take up the
+task? Had he not noticed that his book, after the astonishment of the
+first perusal, had remained a source of interest and reflection with
+Benedetta amidst the emptiness of her days given over to grief? What! was
+it really possible that she might find some appeasement for her own
+wretchedness by interesting herself in the humble, in the happiness of
+the poor? Emotion already thrilled her at the idea, and he, quivering at
+the thought of all the boundless love that was within her and that she
+might bestow, vowed to himself that he would draw tears of pity from her
+eyes.
+
+But the night had now almost completely fallen, and Benedetta rose to ask
+for a lamp. Then, as Pierre was about to take leave, she detained him for
+another moment in the gloom. He could no longer see her; he only heard
+her grave voice: "You will not go away with too bad an opinion of us,
+will you, Monsieur l'Abbe? We love one another, Dario and I, and that is
+no sin when one behaves as one ought. Ah! yes, I love him, and have loved
+him for years. I was barely thirteen, he was eighteen, and we already
+loved one another wildly in those big gardens of the Villa Montefiori
+which are now all broken up. Ah! what days we spent there, whole
+afternoons among the trees, hours in secret hiding-places, where we
+kissed like little angels. When the oranges ripened their perfume
+intoxicated us. And the large box-plants, ah, /Dio!/ how they enveloped
+us, how their strong, acrid scent made our hearts beat! I can never smell
+then nowadays without feeling faint!"
+
+A man-servant brought in the lamp, and Pierre ascended to his room. But
+when half-way up the little staircase he perceived Victorine, who started
+slightly, as if she had posted herself there to watch his departure from
+the /salon/. And now, as she followed him up, talking and seeking for
+information, he suddenly realised what had happened. "Why did you not go
+to your mistress instead of running off," he asked, "when she called you,
+while you were sewing in the ante-room?"
+
+At first she tried to feign astonishment and reply that she had heard
+nothing. But her good-natured, frank face did not know how to lie, and
+she ended by confessing, with a gay, courageous air. "Well," she said,
+"it surely wasn't for me to interfere between lovers! Besides, my poor
+little Benedetta is simply torturing herself to death with those ideas of
+hers. Why shouldn't they be happy, since they love one another? Life
+isn't so amusing as some may think. And how bitterly one regrets not
+having seized hold of happiness when the time for it has gone!"
+
+Once alone in his room, Pierre suddenly staggered, quite overcome. The
+great box-plants, the great box-plants with their acrid, perturbing
+perfume! She, Benedetta, like himself, had quivered as she smelt them;
+and he saw them once more in a vision of the pontifical gardens, the
+voluptuous gardens of Rome, deserted, glowing under the August sun. And
+now his whole day crystallised, assumed clear and full significance. It
+spoke to him of the fruitful awakening, of the eternal protest of Nature
+and life, Venus and Hercules, whom one may bury for centuries beneath the
+soil, but who, nevertheless, one day arise from it, and though one may
+seek to wall them up within the domineering, stubborn, immutable Vatican,
+reign yet even there, and rule the whole, wide world with sovereign
+power!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Three Cities Trilogy: Rome,
+Vol. 2, by Emile Zola
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE CITIES: ROME, VOL. 2 ***
+
+This file should be named 8722.txt or 8722.zip
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