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reigning, sharing the wealth of earth, and owing obedience to nought but

the levelling law of work! The Pope alone erect at the head of the

federation of nations, prince of peace, with the simple mission of

supplying the moral rule, the link of charity and love which was to unite

all men! And would not this be the speedy realisation of the promises of

Christ? The times were near accomplishment, secular and religious society

would mingle so closely that they would form but one; and it would be the

age of triumph and happiness predicted by all the prophets, no more

struggles possible, no more antagonism between the mind and the body, but

a marvellous equilibrium which would kill evil and set the kingdom of

heaven upon earth. New Rome, the centre of the world, bestowing on the

world the new religion!

Pierre felt that tears were coming to his eyes, and with an unconscious

movement, never noticing how much he astonished the slim Englishmen and

thick-set Germans passing along the terrace, he opened his arms and

extended them towards the _real_ Rome, steeped in such lovely sunshine

and stretched out at his feet. Would she prove responsive to his dream?

Would he, as he had written, find within her the remedy for our

impatience and our alarms? Could Catholicism be renewed, could it return

to the spirit of primitive Christianity, become the religion of the

democracy, the faith which the modern world, overturned and in danger of

perishing, awaits in order to be pacified and to live?

Pierre was full of generous passion, full of faith. He again beheld good

Abbe Rose weeping with emotion as he read his book. He heard Viscount

Philibert de la Choue telling him that such a book was worth an army. And

he particularly felt strong in the approval of Cardinal Bergerot, that

apostle of inexhaustible charity. Why should the Congregation of the

Index threaten his work with interdiction? Since he had been officiously

advised to go to Rome if he desired to defend himself, he had been

turning this question over in his mind without being able to discover

which of his pages were attacked. To him indeed they all seemed to glow

with the purest Christianity. However, he had arrived quivering with

enthusiasm and courage: he was all eagerness to kneel before the Pope,

and place himself under his august protection, assuring him that he had

not written a line without taking inspiration from his ideas, without

desiring the triumph of his policy. Was it possible that condemnation

should be passed on a book in which he imagined in all sincerity that he

had exalted Leo XIII by striving to help him in his work of Christian

reunion and universal peace?

For a moment longer Pierre remained standing before the parapet. He had

been there for nearly an hour, unable to drink in enough of the grandeur

of Rome, which, given all the unknown things she hid from him, he would

have liked to possess at once. Oh! to seize hold of her, know her,

ascertain at once the true word which he had come to seek from her! This

again, like Lourdes, was an experiment, but a graver one, a decisive one,

whence he would emerge either strengthened or overcome for evermore. He

no longer sought the simple, perfect faith of the little child, but the

superior faith of the intellectual man, raising himself above rites and

symbols, working for the greatest happiness of humanity as based on its

need of certainty. His temples throbbed responsive to his heart. What

would be the answer of Rome?

The sunlight had increased and the higher districts now stood out more

vigorously against the fiery background. Far away the hills became gilded

and empurpled, whilst the nearer house-fronts grew very distinct and

bright with their thousands of windows sharply outlined. However, some

morning haze still hovered around; light veils seemed to rise from the

lower streets, blurring the summits for a moment, and then evaporating in

the ardent heavens where all was blue. For a moment Pierre fancied that

the Palatine had vanished, for he could scarcely see the dark fringe of

cypresses; it was as though the dust of its ruins concealed the hill. But

the Quirinal was even more obscured; the royal palace seemed to have

faded away in a fog, so paltry did it look with its low flat front, so

vague in the distance that he no longer distinguished it; whereas above

the trees on his left the dome of St. Peter's had grown yet larger in the

limpid gold of the sunshine, and appeared to occupy the whole sky and

dominate the whole city!

Ah! the Rome of that first meeting, the Rome of early morning, whose new

districts he had not even noticed in the burning fever of his

arrival--with what boundless hopes did she not inspirit him, this Rome

which he believed he should find alive, such indeed as he had dreamed!

And whilst he stood there in his thin black cassock, thus gazing on her

that lovely day, what a shout of coming redemption seemed to arise from

her house-roofs, what a promise of universal peace seemed to issue from

that sacred soil, twice already Queen of the world! It was the third

Rome, it was New Rome whose maternal love was travelling across the

frontiers to all the nations to console them and reunite them in a common

embrace. In the passionate candour of his dream he beheld her, he heard

her, rejuvenated, full of the gentleness of childhood, soaring, as it

were, amidst the morning freshness into the vast pure heavens.

But at last Pierre tore himself away from the sublime spectacle. The

driver and the horse, their heads drooping under the broad sunlight, had

not stirred. On the seat the valise was almost burning, hot with rays of

the sun which was already heavy. And once more Pierre got into the

vehicle and gave this address:

"Via Giulia, Palazzo Boccanera."

II.

THE Via Giulia, which runs in a straight line over a distance of five

hundred yards from the Farnese palace to the church of St. John of the

Florentines, was at that hour steeped in bright sunlight, the glow

streaming from end to end and whitening the small square paving stones.

The street had no footways, and the cab rolled along it almost to the

farther extremity, passing the old grey sleepy and deserted residences

whose large windows were barred with iron, while their deep porches

revealed sombre courts resembling wells. Laid out by Pope Julius II, who

had dreamt of lining it with magnificent palaces, the street, then the

most regular and handsome in Rome, had served as Corso* in the sixteenth

century. One could tell that one was in a former luxurious district,

which had lapsed into silence, solitude, and abandonment, instinct with a

kind of religious gentleness and discretion. The old house-fronts

followed one after another, their shutters closed and their gratings

occasionally decked with climbing plants. At some doors cats were seated,

and dim shops, appropriated to humble trades, were installed in certain

dependencies. But little traffic was apparent. Pierre only noticed some

bare-headed women dragging children behind them, a hay cart drawn by a

mule, a superb monk draped in drugget, and a bicyclist speeding along

noiselessly, his machine sparkling in the sun.

* The Corso was so called on account of the horse races held in

it at carnival time.--Trans.

At last the driver turned and pointed to a large square building at the

corner of a lane running towards the Tiber.

"Palazzo Boccanera."

Pierre raised his head and was pained by the severe aspect of the

structure, so bare and massive and blackened by age. Like its neighbours

the Farnese and Sacchetti palaces, it had been built by Antonio da

Sangallo in the early part of the sixteenth century, and, as with the

former of those residences, the tradition ran that in raising the pile

the architect had made use of stones pilfered from the Colosseum and the

Theatre of Marcellus. The vast, square-looking facade had three upper

stories, each with seven windows, and the first one very lofty and noble.

Down below, the only sign of decoration was that the high ground-floor

windows, barred with huge projecting gratings as though from fear of

siege, rested upon large consoles, and were crowned by attics which

smaller consoles supported. Above the monumental entrance, with folding

doors of bronze, there was a balcony in front of the central first-floor

window. And at the summit of the facade against the sky appeared a

sumptuous entablature, whose frieze displayed admirable grace and purity

of ornamentation. The frieze, the consoles, the attics, and the door-case

were of white marble, but marble whose surface had so crumbled and so

darkened that it now had the rough yellowish grain of stone. Right and

left of the entrance were two antique seats upheld by griffons also of

marble; and incrusted in the wall at one corner, a lovely Renascence

fountain, its source dried up, still lingered; and on it a cupid riding a

dolphin could with difficulty be distinguished, to such a degree had the

wear and tear of time eaten into the sculpture.

Pierre's eyes, however, had been more particularly attracted by an

escutcheon carved above one of the ground-floor windows, the escutcheon

of the Boccaneras, a winged dragon venting flames, and underneath it he

could plainly read the motto which had remained intact: "_Bocca nera,

Alma rossa_" (black mouth, red soul). Above another window, as a pendant

to the escutcheon, there was one of those little shrines which are still

common in Rome, a satin-robed statuette of the Blessed Virgin, before

which a lantern burnt in the full daylight.

The cabman was about to drive through the dim and gaping porch, according

to custom, when the young priest, overcome by timidity, stopped him. "No,

no," he said; "don't go in, it's useless."

Then he alighted from the vehicle, paid the man, and, valise in hand,

found himself first under the vaulted roof, and then in the central court

without having met a living soul.

It was a square and fairly spacious court, surrounded by a porticus like

a cloister. Some remnants of statuary, marbles discovered in excavating,

an armless Apollo, and the trunk of a Venus, were ranged against the

walls under the dismal arcades; and some fine grass had sprouted between

the pebbles which paved the soil as with a black and white mosaic. It

seemed as if the sun-rays could never reach that paving, mouldy with

damp. A dimness and a silence instinct with departed grandeur and

infinite mournfulness reigned there.

Surprised by the emptiness of this silent mansion, Pierre continued

seeking somebody, a porter, a servant; and, fancying that he saw a shadow

flit by, he decided to pass through another arch which led to a little

garden fringing the Tiber. On this side the facade of the building was

quite plain, displaying nothing beyond its three rows of symmetrically

disposed windows. However, the abandonment reigning in the garden brought

Pierre yet a keener pang. In the centre some large box-plants were

growing in the basin of a fountain which had been filled up; while among

the mass of weeds, some orange-trees with golden, ripening fruit alone

indicated the tracery of the paths which they had once bordered. Between

two huge laurel-bushes, against the right-hand wall, there was a

sarcophagus of the second century--with fauns offering violence to

nymphs, one of those wild _baccanali_, those scenes of eager passion

which Rome in its decline was wont to depict on the tombs of its dead;

and this marble sarcophagus, crumbling with age and green with moisture,

served as a tank into which a streamlet of water fell from a large tragic

mask incrusted in the wall. Facing the Tiber there had formerly been a

sort of colonnaded loggia, a terrace whence a double flight of steps

descended to the river. For the construction of the new quays, however,

the river bank was being raised, and the terrace was already lower than

the new ground level, and stood there crumbling and useless amidst piles

of rubbish and blocks of stone, all the wretched chalky confusion of the

improvements which were ripping up and overturning the district.

Pierre, however, was suddenly convinced that he could see somebody

crossing the court. So he returned thither and found a woman somewhat

short of stature, who must have been nearly fifty, though as yet she had

not a white hair, but looked very bright and active. At sight of the

priest, however, an expression of distrust passed over her round face and

clear eyes.

Employing the few words of broken Italian which he knew, Pierre at once

sought to explain matters: "I am Abbe Pierre Froment, madame--" he began.

However, she did not let him continue, but exclaimed in fluent French,

with the somewhat thick and lingering accent of the province of the

Ile-de-France: "Ah! yes, Monsieur l'Abbe, I know, I know--I was expecting

you, I received orders about you." And then, as he gazed at her in

amazement, she added: "Oh! I'm a Frenchwoman! I've been here for five and

twenty years, but I haven't yet been able to get used to their horrible

lingo!"

Pierre thereupon remembered that Viscount Philibert de la Choue had

spoken to him of this servant, one Victorine Bosquet, a native of Auneau

in La Beauce, who, when two and twenty, had gone to Rome with a

consumptive mistress. The latter's sudden death had left her in as much

terror and bewilderment as if she had been alone in some land of savages;

and so she had gratefully devoted herself to the Countess Ernesta

Brandini, a Boccanera by birth, who had, so to say, picked her up in the

streets. The Countess had at first employed her as a nurse to her

daughter Benedetta, hoping in this way to teach the child some French;

and Victorine--remaining for some five and twenty years with the same

family--had by degrees raised herself to the position of housekeeper,

whilst still remaining virtually illiterate, so destitute indeed of any

linguistic gift that she could only jabber a little broken Italian, just

sufficient for her needs in her intercourse with the other servants.