第 102 页

for the eternal sleep without any revolt of pride, satisfied with the one

joy of having accomplished one's share of toil!

When Pierre had finished his supper Victorine summoned Giacomo to clear

the things away. And as it was only half-past eight she advised the

priest to spend another quiet hour in his room. Why go and catch a chill

by waiting at the station? She could send for a cab at half-past nine,

and as soon as it arrived she would send word to him and have his luggage

carried down. He might be easy as to that, and need trouble himself about

nothing.

When she had gone off Pierre soon sank into a deep reverie. It seemed to

him, indeed, as if he had already quitted Rome, as if the city were far

away and he could look back on it, and his experiences within it. His

book, "New Rome," arose in his mind; and he remembered his first morning

on the Janiculum, his view of Rome from the terrace of San Pietro in

Montorio, a Rome such as he had dreamt of, so young and ethereal under

the pure sky. It was then that he had asked himself the decisive

question: Could Catholicism be renewed? Could it revert to the spirit of

primitive Christianity, become the religion of the democracy, the faith

which the distracted modern world, in danger of death, awaits in order

that it may be pacified and live? His heart had then beaten with hope and

enthusiasm. After his disaster at Lourdes from which he had scarcely

recovered, he had come to attempt another and supreme experiment by

asking Rome what her reply to his question would be. And now the

experiment had failed, he knew what answer Rome had returned him through

her ruins, her monuments, her very soil, her people, her prelates, her

cardinals, her pope! No, Catholicism could not be renewed: no, it could

not revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity; no, it could not

become the religion of the democracy, the new faith which might save the

old toppling societies in danger of death. Though it seemed to be of

democratic origin, it was henceforth riveted to that Roman soil, it

remained kingly in spite of everything, forced to cling to the principle

of temporal power under penalty of suicide, bound by tradition, enchained

by dogma, its evolutions mere simulations whilst in reality it was

reduced to such immobility that, behind the bronze doors of the Vatican,

the papacy was the prisoner, the ghost of eighteen centuries of atavism,

indulging the ceaseless dream of universal dominion. There, where with

priestly faith exalted by love of the suffering and the poor, he had come

to seek life and a resurrection of the Christian communion, he had found

death, the dust of a destroyed world in which nothing more could

germinate, an exhausted soil whence now there could never grow aught but

that despotic papacy, the master of bodies as it was of souls. To his

distracted cry asking for a new religion, Rome had been content to reply

by condemning his book as a work tainted with heresy, and he himself had

withdrawn it amidst the bitter grief of his disillusions. He had seen, he

had understood, and all had collapsed. And it was himself, his soul and

his brain, which lay among the ruins.

Pierre was stifling. He rose, threw the window overlooking the Tiber wide

open, and leant out. The rain had begun to fall again at the approach of

evening, but now it had once more ceased. The atmosphere was very mild,

moist, even oppressive. The moon must have arisen in the ashen grey sky,

for her presence could be divined behind the clouds which she illumined

with a vague, yellow, mournful light. And under that slumberous glimmer

the vast horizon showed blackly and phantom-like: the Janiculum in front

with the close-packed houses of the Trastevere; the river flowing away

yonder on the left towards the dim height of the Palatine; whilst on the

right the dome of St. Peter's showed forth, round and domineering in the

pale atmosphere. Pierre could not see the Quirinal but divined it to be

behind him, and could picture its long facade shutting off part of the

sky. And what a collapsing Rome, half-devoured by the gloom, was this, so

different from the Rome all youth and dreamland which he had beheld and

passionately loved on the day of his arrival! He remembered the three

symbolic summits which had then summed up for him the whole long history

of Rome, the ancient, the papal, and the Italian city. But if the

Palatine had remained the same discrowned mount on which there only rose

the phantom of the ancestor, Augustus, emperor and pontiff, master of the

world, he now pictured St. Peter's and the Quirinal as strangely altered.

To that royal palace which he had so neglected, and which had seemed to

him like a flat, low barrack, to that new Government which had brought

him the impression of some attempt at sacrilegious modernity, he now

accorded the large, increasing space that they occupied in the panorama,

the whole of which they would apparently soon fill; whilst, on the

contrary, St. Peter's, that dome which he had found so triumphal, all

azure, reigning over the city like a gigantic and unshakable monarch, at

present seemed to him full of cracks and already shrinking, as if it were

one of those huge old piles, which, through the secret, unsuspected decay

of their timbers, at times fall to the ground in one mass.

A murmur, a growling plaint rose from the swollen Tiber, and Pierre

shivered at the icy abysmal breath which swept past his face. And his

thoughts of the three summits and their symbolic triangle aroused within

him the memory of the sufferings of the great silent multitude of poor

and lowly for whom pope and king had so long disputed. It all dated from

long ago, from the day when, in dividing the inheritance of Augustus, the

emperor had been obliged to content himself with men's bodies, leaving

their souls to the pope, whose one idea had henceforth been to gain the

temporal power of which God, in his person, was despoiled. All the middle

ages had been disturbed and ensanguined by the quarrel, till at last the

silent multitude weary of vexations and misery spoke out; threw off the

papal yoke at the Reformation, and later on began to overthrow its kings.

And then, as Pierre had written in his book, a new fortune had been

offered to the pope, that of reverting to the ancient dream, by

dissociating himself from the fallen thrones and placing himself on the

side of the wretched in the hope that this time he would conquer the

people, win it entirely for himself. Was it not prodigious to see that

man, Leo XIII, despoiled of his kingdom and allowing himself to be called

a socialist, assembling under his banner the great flock of the

disinherited, and marching against the kings at the head of that fourth

estate to whom the coming century will belong? The eternal struggle for

possession of the people continued as bitterly as ever even in Rome

itself, where pope and king, who could see each other from their windows,

contended together like falcon and hawk for the little birds of the

woods. And in this for Pierre lay the reason why Catholicism was fatally

condemned; for it was of monarchical essence to such a point that the

Apostolic and Roman papacy could not renounce the temporal power under

penalty of becoming something else and disappearing. In vain did it feign

a return to the people, in vain did it seek to appear all soul; there was

no room in the midst of the world's democracies for any such total and

universal sovereignty as that which it claimed to hold from God. Pierre

ever beheld the Imperator sprouting up afresh in the Pontifex Maximus,

and it was this in particular which had killed his dream, destroyed his

book, heaped up all those ruins before which he remained distracted

without either strength or courage.

The sight of that ashen Rome, whose edifices faded away into the night,

at last brought him such a heart-pang that he came back into the room and

fell on a chair near his luggage. Never before had he experienced such

distress of spirit, it seemed like the death of his soul. After his

disaster at Lourdes he had not come to Rome in search of the candid and

complete faith of a little child, but the superior faith of an

intellectual being, rising above rites and symbols, and seeking to ensure

the greatest possible happiness of mankind based on its need of

certainty. And if this collapsed, if Catholicism could not be rejuvenated

and become the religion and moral law of the new generations, if the Pope

at Rome and with Rome could not be the Father, the arch of alliance, the

spiritual leader whom all hearkened to and obeyed, why then, in Pierre's

eyes, the last hope was wrecked, the supreme rending which must plunge

present-day society into the abyss was near at hand. That scaffolding of

Catholic socialism which had seemed to him so happily devised for the

consolidation of the old Church, now appeared to him lying on the ground;

and he judged it severely as a mere passing expedient which might perhaps

for some years prop up the ruined edifice, but which was simply based on

an intentional misunderstanding, on a skilful lie, on politics and

diplomacy. No, no, that the people should once again, as so many times

before, be duped and gained over, caressed in order that it might be

enthralled--this was repugnant to one's reason, and the whole system

appeared degenerate, dangerous, temporary, calculated to end in the worst

catastrophes. So this then was the finish, nothing remained erect and

stable, the old world was about to disappear amidst the frightful

sanguinary crisis whose approach was announced by such indisputable

signs. And he, before that chaos near at hand, had no soul left him,

having once more lost his faith in that decisive experiment which, he had

felt beforehand, would either strengthen him or strike him down for ever.

The thunderbolt had fallen, and now, O God, what should he do?

To shake off his anguish he began to walk across the room. Aye, what

should he do now that he was all doubt again, all dolorous negation, and

that his cassock weighed more heavily than it had ever weighed upon his

shoulders? He remembered having told Monsignor Nani that he would never

submit, would never be able to resign himself and kill his hope in

salvation by love, but would rather reply by a fresh book, in which he

would say in what new soil the new religion would spring up. Yes, a

flaming book against Rome, in which he would set down all he had seen, a

book which would depict the real Rome, the Rome which knows neither

charity nor love, and is dying in the pride of its purple! He had spoken

of returning to Paris, leaving the Church and going to the point of

schism. Well, his luggage now lay there packed, he was going off and he

would write that book, he would be the great schismatic who was awaited!

Did not everything foretell approaching schism amidst that great movement

of men's minds, weary of old mummified dogmas and yet hungering for the

divine? Even Leo XIII must be conscious of it, for his whole policy, his

whole effort towards Christian unity, his assumed affection for the

democracy had no other object than that of grouping the whole family

around the papacy, and consolidating it so as to render the Pope

invincible in the approaching struggle. But the times had come,

Catholicism would soon find that it could grant no more political

concessions without perishing, that at Rome it was reduced to the

immobility of an ancient hieratic idol, and that only in the lands of

propaganda, where it was fighting against other religions, could further

evolution take place. It was, indeed, for this reason that Rome was

condemned, the more so as the abolition of the temporal power, by

accustoming men's minds to the idea of a purely spiritual papacy, seemed

likely to conduce to the rise of some anti-pope, far away, whilst the

successor of St. Peter was compelled to cling stubbornly to his Apostolic

and Roman fiction. A bishop, a priest would arise--where, who could tell?

Perhaps yonder in that free America, where there are priests whom the

struggle for life has turned into convinced socialists, into ardent

democrats, who are ready to go forward with the coming century. And

whilst Rome remains unable to relinquish aught of her past, aught of her

mysteries and dogmas, that priest will relinquish all of those things

which fall from one in dust. Ah! to be that priest, to be that great

reformer, that saviour of modern society, what a vast dream, what a part,

akin to that of a Messiah summoned by the nations in distress. For a

moment Pierre was transported as by a breeze of hope and triumph. If that

great change did not come in France, in Paris, it would come elsewhere,

yonder across the ocean, or farther yet, wherever there might be a

sufficiently fruitful soil for the new seed to spring from it in

overflowing harvests. A new religion! a new religion! even as he had

cried on returning from Lourdes, a religion which in particular should

not be an appetite for death, a religion which should at last realise

here below that Kingdom of God referred to in the Gospel, and which

should equitably divide terrestrial wealth, and with the law of labour

ensure the rule of truth and justice.

In the fever of this fresh dream Pierre already saw the pages of his new

book flaring before him when his eyes fell on an object lying upon a

chair, which at first surprised him. This also was a book, that work of

Theophile Morin's which Orlando had commissioned him to hand to its

author, and he felt annoyed with himself at having left it there, for he

might have forgotten it altogether. Before putting it into his valise he

retained it for a moment in his hand turning its pages over, his ideas

changing as by a sudden mental revolution. The work was, however, a very

modest one, one of those manuals for the bachelor's degree containing

little beyond the first elements of the sciences; still all the sciences

were represented in it, and it gave a fair summary of the present state

of human knowledge. And it was indeed Science which thus burst upon

Pierre's reverie with the energy of sovereign power. Not only was