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one before the entrance and the other at the corner of the right-hand

lane, and they remained erect and still, coagulated, as it were, in that

dead street.

* Afterwards Louis XIV.--Trans.

Pierre's interest, however, was not merely confined to the Via Giulia; it

extended to the whole district, once so fine and fashionable, but now

fallen into sad decay, far removed from modern life, and exhaling a faint

musty odour of monasticism. Towards San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where

the new Corso Vittorio Emanuele has ripped up every olden district, the

lofty five-storeyed houses with their dazzling sculptured fronts

contrasted violently with the black sunken dwellings of the neighbouring

lanes. In the evening the globes of the electric lamps on the Corso shone

out with such dazzling whiteness that the gas lamps of the Via Giulia and

other streets looked like smoky lanterns. There were several old and

famous thoroughfares, the Via Banchi Vecchi, the Via del Pellegrino, the

Via di Monserrato, and an infinity of cross-streets which intersected and

connected the others, all going towards the Tiber, and for the most part

so narrow that vehicles scarcely had room to pass. And each street had

its church, a multitude of churches all more or less alike, highly

decorated, gilded, and painted, and open only at service time when they

were full of sunlight and incense. In the Via Giulia, in addition to San

Giovanni dei Fiorentini, San Biagio della Pagnotta, San Eligio degli

Orefici, and three or four others, there was the so-called Church of the

Dead, Santa Maria dell' Orazione; and this church, which is at the lower

end behind the Farnese palace, was often visited by Pierre, who liked to

dream there of the wild life of Rome, and of the pious brothers of the

Confraternita della Morte, who officiate there, and whose mission is to

search for and bury such poor outcasts as die in the Campagna. One

evening he was present at the funeral of two unknown men, whose bodies,

after remaining unburied for quite a fortnight, had been discovered in a

field near the Appian Way.

However, Pierre's favourite promenade soon became the new quay of the

Tiber beyond the Palazzo Boccanera. He had merely to take the narrow lane

skirting the mansion to reach a spot where he found much food for

reflection. Although the quay was not yet finished, the work seemed to be

quite abandoned. There were heaps of rubbish, blocks of stone, broken

fences, and dilapidated tool-sheds all around. To such a height had it

been necessary to carry the quay walls--designed to protect the city from

floods, for the river bed has been rising for centuries past--that the

old terrace of the Boccanera gardens, with its double flight of steps to

which pleasure boats had once been moored, now lay in a hollow,

threatened with annihilation whenever the works should be finished. But

nothing had yet been levelled; the soil, brought thither for making up

the bank, lay as it had fallen from the carts, and on all sides were pits

and mounds interspersed with the abandoned building materials. Wretched

urchins came to play there, workmen without work slept in the sunshine,

and women after washing ragged linen spread it out to dry upon the

stones. Nevertheless the spot proved a happy, peaceful refuge for Pierre,

one fruitful in inexhaustible reveries when for hours at a time he

lingered gazing at the river, the quays, and the city, stretching in

front of him and on either hand.

At eight in the morning the sun already gilded the vast opening. On

turning to the left he perceived the roofs of the Trastevere, of a misty,

bluish grey against the dazzling sky. Then, just beyond the apse of San

Giovanni, on the right, the river curved, and on its other bank the

poplars of the Ospedale di Santo Spirito formed a green curtain, while

the castle of Sant' Angelo showed brightly in the distance. But Pierre's

eyes dwelt more particularly on the bank just in front of him, for there

he found some lingering vestiges of old Rome. On that side indeed between

the Ponte Sisto and the Ponte Sant' Angelo, the quays, which were to

imprison the river within high, white, fortress-like walls, had not yet

been raised, and the bank with its remnants of the old papal city

conjured up an extraordinary vision of the middle ages. The houses,

descending to the river brink, were cracked, scorched, rusted by

innumerable burning summers, like so many antique bronzes. Down below

there were black vaults into which the water flowed, piles upholding

walls, and fragments of Roman stone-work plunging into the river bed;

then, rising from the shore, came steep, broken stairways, green with

moisture, tiers of terraces, storeys with tiny windows pierced here and

their in hap-hazard fashion, houses perched atop of other houses, and the

whole jumbled together with a fantastic commingling of balconies and

wooden galleries, footbridges spanning courtyards, clumps of trees

growing apparently on the very roofs, and attics rising from amidst pinky

tiles. The contents of a drain fell noisily into the river from a worn

and soiled gorge of stone; and wherever the houses stood back and the

bank appeared, it was covered with wild vegetation, weeds, shrubs, and

mantling ivy, which trailed like a kingly robe of state. And in the glory

of the sun the wretchedness and dirt vanished, the crooked, jumbled

houses seemed to be of gold, draped with the purple of the red petticoats

and the dazzling white of the shifts which hung drying from their

windows; while higher still, above the district, the Janiculum rose into

all the luminary's dazzlement, uprearing the slender profile of Sant'

Onofrio amidst cypresses and pines.

Leaning on the parapet of the quay wall, Pierre sadly gazed at the Tiber

for hours at a time. Nothing could convey an idea of the weariness of

those old waters, the mournful slowness of their flow along that

Babylonian trench where they were confined within huge, bare, livid

prison-like walls. In the sunlight their yellowness was gilded, and the

faint quiver of the current brought ripples of green and blue; but as

soon as the shade spread over it the stream became opaque like mud, so

turbid in its venerable old age that it no longer even gave back a

reflection of the houses lining it. And how desolate was its abandonment,

what a stream of silence and solitude it was! After the winter rains it

might roll furiously and threateningly, but during the long months of

bright weather it traversed Rome without a sound, and Pierre could remain

there all day long without seeing either a skiff or a sail. The two or

three little steam-boats which arrived from the coast, the few tartanes

which brought wine from Sicily, never came higher than the Aventine,

beyond which there was only a watery desert in which here and there, at

long intervals, a motionless angler let his line dangle. All that Pierre

ever saw in the way of shipping was a sort of ancient, covered pinnace, a

rotting Noah's ark, moored on the right beside the old bank, and he

fancied that it might be used as a washhouse, though on no occasion did

he see any one in it. And on a neck of mud there also lay a stranded boat

with one side broken in, a lamentable symbol of the impossibility and the

relinquishment of navigation. Ah! that decay of the river, that decay of

father Tiber, as dead as the famous ruins whose dust he is weary of

laving! And what an evocation! all the centuries of history, so many

things, so many men, that those yellow waters have reflected till, full

of lassitude and disgust, they have grown heavy, silent and deserted,

longing only for annihilation.

One morning on the river bank Pierre found La Pierina standing behind an

abandoned tool-shed. With her neck extended, she was looking fixedly at

the window of Dario's room, at the corner of the quay and the lane.

Doubtless she had been frightened by Victorine's severe reception, and

had not dared to return to the mansion; but some servant, possibly, had

told her which was the young Prince's window, and so she now came to this

spot, where without wearying she waited for a glimpse of the man she

loved, for some sign of life and salvation, the mere hope of which made

her heart leap. Deeply touched by the way in which she hid herself, all

humility and quivering with adoration, the priest approached her, and

instead of scolding her and driving her away as he had been asked to do,

spoke to her in a gentle, cheerful manner, asking her for news of her

people as though nothing had happened, and at last contriving to mention

Dario's name in order that she might understand that he would be up and

about again within a fortnight. On perceiving Pierre, La Pierina had

started with timidity and distrust as if anxious to flee; but when she

understood him, tears of happiness gushed from her eyes, and with a

bright smile she kissed her hand to him, calling: "_Grazie, grazie_,

thanks, thanks!" And thereupon she darted away, and he never saw her

again.

On another morning at an early hour, as Pierre was going to say mass at

Santa Brigida on the Piazza Farnese, he was surprised to meet Benedetta

coming out of the church and carrying a small phial of oil. She evinced

no embarrassment, but frankly told him that every two or three days she

went thither to obtain from the beadle a few drops of the oil used for

the lamp that burnt before an antique wooden statue of the Madonna, in

which she had perfect confidence. She even confessed that she had never

had confidence in any other Madonna, having never obtained anything from

any other, though she had prayed to several of high repute, Madonnas of

marble and even of silver. And so her heart was full of ardent devotion

for the holy image which refused her nothing. And she declared in all

simplicity, as though the matter were quite natural and above discussion,

that the few drops of oil which she applied, morning and evening, to

Dario's wound, were alone working his cure, so speedy a cure as to be

quite miraculous. Pierre, fairly aghast, distressed indeed to find such

childish, superstitious notions in one so full of sense and grace and

passion, did not even venture to smile.

In the evenings, when he came back from his strolls and spent an hour or

so in Dario's room, he would for a time divert the patient by relating

what he had done and seen and thought of during the day. And when he

again ventured to stray beyond the district, and became enamoured of the

lovely gardens of Rome, which he visited as soon as they opened in the

morning in order that he might be virtually alone, he delighted the young

prince and Benedetta with his enthusiasm, his rapturous passion for the

splendid trees, the plashing water, and the spreading terraces whence the

views were so sublime. It was not the most extensive of these gardens

which the more deeply impressed his heart. In the grounds of the Villa

Borghese, the little Roman Bois de Boulogne, there were certainly some

majestic clumps of greenery, some regal avenues where carriages took a

turn in the afternoon before the obligatory drive to the Pincio; but

Pierre was more touched by the reserved garden of the villa--that villa

dazzling with marble and now containing one of the finest museums in the

world. There was a simple lawn of fine grass with a vast central basin

surmounted by a figure of Venus, nude and white; and antique fragments,

vases, statues, columns, and _sarcophagi_ were ranged symmetrically all

around the deserted, sunlit yet melancholy, sward. On returning on one

occasion to the Pincio Pierre spent a delightful morning there,

penetrated by the charm of this little nook with its scanty evergreens,

and its admirable vista of all Rome and St. Peter's rising up afar off in

the soft limpid radiance. At the Villa Albani and the Villa Pamphili he

again came upon superb parasol pines, tall, stately, and graceful, and

powerful elm-trees with twisted limbs and dusky foliage. In the Pamphili

grounds, the elm-trees steeped the paths in a delicious half-light, the

lake with its weeping willows and tufts of reeds had a dreamy aspect,

while down below the _parterre_ displayed a fantastic floral mosaic

bright with the various hues of flowers and foliage. That which most

particularly struck Pierre, however, in this, the noblest, most spacious,

and most carefully tended garden of Rome, was the novel and unexpected

view that he suddenly obtained of St. Peter's, whilst skirting a low

wall: a view whose symbolism for ever clung to him. Rome had completely

vanished, and between the slopes of Monte Mario and another wooded height

which hid the city, there only appeared the colossal dome which seemed to

be poised on an infinity of scattered blocks, now white, now red. These

were the houses of the Borgo, the jumbled piles of the Vatican and the

Basilica which the huge dome surmounted and annihilated, showing greyly

blue in the light blue of the heavens, whilst far away stretched a

delicate, boundless vista of the Campagna, likewise of a bluish tint.

It was, however, more particularly in the less sumptuous gardens, those

of a more homely grace, that Pierre realised that even things have souls.

Ah! that Villa Mattei on one side of the Coelius with its terraced

grounds, its sloping alleys edged with laurel, aloe, and spindle tree,

its box-plants forming arbours, its oranges, its roses, and its

fountains! Pierre spent some delicious hours there, and only found a

similar charm on visiting the Aventine, where three churches are

embowered in verdure. The little garden of Santa Sabina, the birthplace

of the Dominican order, is closed on all sides and affords no view: it

slumbers in quiescence, warm and perfumed by its orange-trees, amongst

which that planted by St. Dominic stands huge and gnarled but still laden

with ripe fruit. At the adjoining Priorato, however, the garden, perched

high above the Tiber, overlooks a vast expanse, with the river and the

buildings on either bank as far as the summit of the Janiculum. And in

these gardens of Rome Pierre ever found the same clipped box-shrubs, the