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things such as he had expected, the many shocks that his imagination had

received, aggravated his passion beyond endurance, and brought him an

acute desire to satisfy himself immediately. Nine o'clock had struck but

a few minutes previously, he had the whole morning before him to repair

to the Boccanera palace, so why should he not at once drive to the

classic spot, the summit whence one perceives the whole of Rome spread

out upon her seven hills? And when once this thought had entered into his

mind it tortured him until he was at last compelled to yield to it.

The driver no longer turned his head, so that Pierre rose up to give him

this new address: "To San Pietro in Montorio!"

On hearing him the man at first looked astonished, unable to understand.

He indicated with his whip that San Pietro was yonder, far away. However,

as the priest insisted, he again smiled complacently, with a friendly nod

of his head. All right! For his own part he was quite willing.

The horse then went on at a more rapid pace through the maze of narrow

streets. One of these was pent between high walls, and the daylight

descended into it as into a deep trench. But at the end came a sudden

return to light, and the Tiber was crossed by the antique bridge of

Sixtus IV, right and left of which stretched the new quays, amidst the

ravages and fresh plaster-work of recent erections. On the other side of

the river the Trastevere district also was ripped open, and the vehicle

ascended the slope of the Janiculum by a broad thoroughfare where large

slabs bore the name of Garibaldi. For the last time the driver made a

gesture of good-natured pride as he named this triumphal route.

"Via Garibaldi!"

The horse had been obliged to slacken its pace, and Pierre, mastered by

childish impatience, turned round to look at the city as by degrees it

spread out and revealed itself behind him. The ascent was a long one;

fresh districts were ever rising up, even to the most distant hills.

Then, in the increasing emotion which made his heart beat, the young

priest felt that he was spoiling the contentment of his desire by thus

gradually satisfying it, slowly and but partially effecting his conquest

of the horizon. He wished to receive the shock full in the face, to

behold all Rome at one glance, to gather the holy city together, and

embrace the whole of it at one grasp. And thereupon he mustered

sufficient strength of mind to refrain from turning round any more, in

spite of the impulses of his whole being.

There is a spacious terrace on the summit of the incline. The church of

San Pietro in Montorio stands there, on the spot where, as some say, St.

Peter was crucified. The square is bare and brown, baked by the hot

summer suns; but a little further away in the rear, the clear and noisy

waters of the Acqua Paola fall bubbling from the three basins of a

monumental fountain amidst sempiternal freshness. And alongside the

terrace parapet, on the very crown of the Trastevere, there are always

rows of tourists, slim Englishmen and square-built Germans, agape with

traditional admiration, or consulting their guide-books in order to

identify the monuments.

Pierre sprang lightly from the cab, leaving his valise on the seat, and

making a sign to the driver, who went to join the row of waiting cabs,

and remained philosophically seated on his box in the full sunlight, his

head drooping like that of his horse, both resigning themselves to the

customary long stoppage.

Meantime Pierre, erect against the parapet, in his tight black cassock,

and with his bare feverish hands nervously clenched, was gazing before

him with all his eyes, with all his soul. Rome! Rome! the city of the

Caesars, the city of the Popes, the Eternal City which has twice

conquered the world, the predestined city of the glowing dream in which

he had indulged for months! At last it was before him, at last his eyes

beheld it! During the previous days some rainstorms had abated the

intense August heat, and on that lovely September morning the air had

freshened under the pale blue of the spotless far-spreading heavens. And

the Rome that Pierre beheld was a Rome steeped in mildness, a visionary

Rome which seemed to evaporate in the clear sunshine. A fine bluey haze,

scarcely perceptible, as delicate as gauze, hovered over the roofs of the

low-lying districts; whilst the vast Campagna, the distant hills, died

away in a pale pink flush. At first Pierre distinguished nothing, sought

no particular edifice or spot, but gave sight and soul alike to the whole

of Rome, to the living colossus spread out below him, on a soil

compounded of the dust of generations. Each century had renewed the

city's glory as with the sap of immortal youth. And that which struck

Pierre, that which made his heart leap within him, was that he found Rome

such as he had desired to find her, fresh and youthful, with a volatile,

almost incorporeal, gaiety of aspect, smiling as at the hope of a new

life in the pure dawn of a lovely day.

And standing motionless before the sublime vista, with his hands still

clenched and burning, Pierre in a few minutes again lived the last three

years of his life. Ah! what a terrible year had the first been, spent in

his little house at Neuilly, with doors and windows ever closed,

burrowing there like some wounded animal suffering unto death. He had

come back from Lourdes with his soul desolate, his heart bleeding, with

nought but ashes within him. Silence and darkness fell upon the ruins of

his love and his faith. Days and days went by, without a pulsation of his

veins, without the faintest gleam arising to brighten the gloom of his

abandonment. His life was a mechanical one; he awaited the necessary

courage to resume the tenor of existence in the name of sovereign reason,

which had imposed upon him the sacrifice of everything. Why was he not

stronger, more resistant, why did he not quietly adapt his life to his

new opinions? As he was unwilling to cast off his cassock, through

fidelity to the love of one and disgust of backsliding, why did he not

seek occupation in some science suited to a priest, such as astronomy or

archaeology? The truth was that something, doubtless his mother's spirit,

wept within him, an infinite, distracted love which nothing had yet

satisfied and which ever despaired of attaining contentment. Therein lay

the perpetual suffering of his solitude: beneath the lofty dignity of

reason regained, the wound still lingered, raw and bleeding.

One autumn evening, however, under a dismal rainy sky, chance brought him

into relations with an old priest, Abbe Rose, who was curate at the

church of Ste. Marguerite, in the Faubourg St. Antoine. He went to see

Abbe Rose in the Rue de Charonne, where in the depths of a damp ground

floor he had transformed three rooms into an asylum for abandoned

children, whom he picked up in the neighbouring streets. And from that

moment Pierre's life changed, a fresh and all-powerful source of interest

had entered into it, and by degrees he became the old priest's passionate

helper. It was a long way from Neuilly to the Rue de Charonne, and at

first he only made the journey twice a week. But afterwards he bestirred

himself every day, leaving home in the morning and not returning until

night. As the three rooms no longer sufficed for the asylum, he rented

the first floor of the house, reserving for himself a chamber in which

ultimately he often slept. And all his modest income was expended there,

in the prompt succouring of poor children; and the old priest, delighted,

touched to tears by the young devoted help which had come to him from

heaven, would often embrace Pierre, weeping, and call him a child of God.

It was then that Pierre knew want and wretchedness--wicked, abominable

wretchedness; then that he lived amidst it for two long years. The

acquaintance began with the poor little beings whom he picked up on the

pavements, or whom kind-hearted neighbours brought to him now that the

asylum was known in the district--little boys, little girls, tiny mites

stranded on the streets whilst their fathers and mothers were toiling,

drinking, or dying. The father had often disappeared, the mother had gone

wrong, drunkenness and debauchery had followed slack times into the home;

and then the brood was swept into the gutter, and the younger ones half

perished of cold and hunger on the footways, whilst their elders betook

themselves to courses of vice and crime. One evening Pierre rescued from

the wheels of a stone-dray two little nippers, brothers, who could not

even give him an address, tell him whence they had come. On another

evening he returned to the asylum with a little girl in his arms, a

fair-haired little angel, barely three years old, whom he had found on a

bench, and who sobbed, saying that her mother had left her there. And by

a logical chain of circumstances, after dealing with the fleshless,

pitiful fledglings ousted from their nests, he came to deal with the

parents, to enter their hovels, penetrating each day further and further

into a hellish sphere, and ultimately acquiring knowledge of all its

frightful horror, his heart meantime bleeding, rent by terrified anguish

and impotent charity.

Oh! the grievous City of Misery, the bottomless abyss of human suffering

and degradation--how frightful were his journeys through it during those

two years which distracted his whole being! In that Ste. Marguerite

district of Paris, in the very heart of that Faubourg St. Antoine, so

active and so brave for work, however hard, he discovered no end of

sordid dwellings, whole lanes and alleys of hovels without light or air,

cellar-like in their dampness, and where a multitude of wretches wallowed

and suffered as from poison. All the way up the shaky staircases one's

feet slipped upon filth. On every story there was the same destitution,

dirt, and promiscuity. Many windows were paneless, and in swept the wind

howling, and the rain pouring torrentially. Many of the inmates slept on

the bare tiled floors, never unclothing themselves. There was neither

furniture nor linen, the life led there was essentially an animal life, a

commingling of either sex and of every age--humanity lapsing into

animality through lack of even indispensable things, through indigence of

so complete a character that men, women, and children fought even with

tooth and nail for the very crumbs swept from the tables of the rich. And

the worst of it all was the degradation of the human being; this was no

case of the free naked savage, hunting and devouring his prey in the

primeval forests; here civilised man was found, sunk into brutishness,

with all the stigmas of his fall, debased, disfigured, and enfeebled,

amidst the luxury and refinement of that city of Paris which is one of

the queens of the world.

In every household Pierre heard the same story. There had been youth and

gaiety at the outset, brave acceptance of the law that one must work.

Then weariness had come; what was the use of always toiling if one were

never to get rich? And so, by way of snatching a share of happiness, the

husband turned to drink; the wife neglected her home, also drinking at

times, and letting the children grow up as they might. Sordid

surroundings, ignorance, and overcrowding did the rest. In the great

majority of cases, prolonged lack of work was mostly to blame; for this

not only empties the drawers of the savings hidden away in them, but

exhausts human courage, and tends to confirmed habits of idleness. During

long weeks the workshops empty, and the arms of the toilers lose

strength. In all Paris, so feverishly inclined to action, it is

impossible to find the slightest thing to do. And then the husband comes

home in the evening with tearful eyes, having vainly offered his arms

everywhere, having failed even to get a job at street-sweeping, for that

employment is much sought after, and to secure it one needs influence and

protectors. Is it not monstrous to see a man seeking work that he may

eat, and finding no work and therefore no food in this great city

resplendent and resonant with wealth? The wife does not eat, the children

do not eat. And then comes black famine, brutishness, and finally revolt

and the snapping of all social ties under the frightful injustice meted

out to poor beings who by their weakness are condemned to death. And the

old workman, he whose limbs have been worn out by half a century of hard

toil, without possibility of saving a copper, on what pallet of agony, in

what dark hole must he not sink to die? Should he then be finished off

with a mallet, like a crippled beast of burden, on the day when ceasing

to work he also ceases to eat? Almost all pass away in the hospitals,

others disappear, unknown, swept off by the muddy flow of the streets.

One morning, on some rotten straw in a loathsome hovel, Pierre found a

poor devil who had died of hunger and had been forgotten there for a

week. The rats had devoured his face.

But it was particularly on an evening of the last winter that Pierre's

heart had overflowed with pity. Awful in winter time are the sufferings

of the poor in their fireless hovels, where the snow penetrates by every

chink. The Seine rolls blocks of ice, the soil is frost-bound, in all

sorts of callings there is an enforced cessation of work. Bands of

urchins, barefooted, scarcely clad, hungry and racked by coughing, wander

about the ragpickers' "rents" and are carried off by sudden hurricanes of

consumption. Pierre found families, women with five and six children, who

had not eaten for three days, and who huddled together in heaps to try to

keep themselves warm. And on that terrible evening, before anybody else,

he went down a dark passage and entered a room of terror, where he found

that a mother had just committed suicide with her five little

ones--driven to it by despair and hunger--a tragedy of misery which for a

few hours would make all Paris shudder! There was not an article of

furniture or linen left in the place; it had been necessary to sell

everything bit by bit to a neighbouring dealer. There was nothing but the