Chapter 3

Sapientiae_. In my youth I was something of a Latinist. In these pages, less than a hundred, I have gathered my observations about the financial and political world. It might as well be called _Contribution to Common-sense, or Neo-Machiavellianism_. If you find that it helps you, keep it.”

Cæsar read the book with concentrated attention.

“How did it strike you?” said Yarza.

“There are many things in it I don’t agree with; I shall have to think over them again.”

“All right. Then keep my _Enchiridion_ and go on to London. Paris is a city that has finished. It is not worth the trouble of losing one’s time staying here.”

Cæsar went to London, always with the firm intention of going into something. From time to time he wrote a long letter to Ignacio Alzugaray, telling him his impressions of politics and financial questions.

While he was in London his sister joined him and invited him to go to Florence; two years later she begged him to accompany her to Rome. Cæsar had always declined to visit the Eternal City, until, on that occasion, he himself showed a desire to go to Rome with his sister.

IV. PEOPLE WHO PASS CLOSE BY

_THE SAN MARTINO YOUNG LADIES_

Arrived at Rome, Laura and Cæsar went up to the hotel, and were received by a bald gentleman with a pointed moustache, who showed them into a large round salon with a very high ceiling.

It was a theatrical salon, with antique furniture and large red-velvet arm-chairs with gilded legs. The enormous mirrors, somewhat tarnished by age, made the salon appear even larger. On the consoles and cabinets gleamed objects of majolica and porcelain.

The big window of this salon opened on the Piazza Esedra di Termini. Cæsar and Laura looked out through the glass. It was beginning to rain again; the great semi-circular extent of the square was shining with rain.

The passing trams slipped around the curve in the track; a caravan of tourists in ten or twelve carriages in file, all with their umbrellas open, were preparing to visit the monuments of Rome; strolling pedlars were showing them knick-knacks and religious gewgaws.

Cæsar’s and Laura’s rooms were got ready and the manager of the hotel asked them again if they had need of nothing else.

“What are you going to do?” said Laura to her brother.

“I am going to stretch myself out in bed for a while.”

“Lunch at half-past twelve.”

“Good, I will get up at that time.”

“Good-bye, _bambino_. Have a good rest. Put on your black suit to come to the table.”

“Very well.” Cæsar stretched himself on the bed, slept off and on, somewhat feverish from fatigue, and at about twelve he woke at the noise they made in bringing his luggage into the room. He got up to open the trunks, washed and dressed, and when the customary gong resounded, he presented himself in the salon.

Laura was chatting with two young ladies and an older lady, the Countess of San Martino and her daughters. They were in Rome for the season and lived regularly in Venice.

Laura introduced her brother to these ladies, and the Countess pressed Cæsar’s hand between both of hers, very affectionately.

The Countess was tiny and dried-up: a mummy with the face of a grey-hound, her skin close to her bones, her lips painted, little penetrating blue eyes, and great vivacity in her movements. She dressed in a showy manner; wore jewels on her bosom, on her head, on her fingers.

The daughters looked like two little blond princesses: with rosy cheeks, eyebrows like two golden brush-strokes, almost colourless, clear blue eyes of a heavenly blue, and such small red lips, that on seeing them, the classical simile of cherries came at once to one’s mind.

The Countess of San Martino asked Cæsar like a shot if he was married and if he hadn’t a sweetheart. Cæsar replied that he was a bachelor and that he had no sweetheart, and then the Countess came back by asking if he felt no vocation for matrimony.

“No, I believe I don’t,” responded Cæsar.

The two young women smiled, and their mother said, with truly diverting familiarity, that men were becoming impossible. Afterwards she added that she was anxious for her daughters to marry.

“When one of these children is married and has a _bambino_, I shall be more contented! If God sent me a _cheru-bino del cielo_, I shouldn’t be more so.”

Laura laughed, and one of the little blondes remarked with aristocratic indifference: “Getting married comes first, mamma.”

To this the Countess of San Martino observed that she didn’t understand the behaviour of girls nowadays.

“When I was a young thing, I always had five or six beaux at once; but my daughters haven’t the same idea. They are so indifferent, so superior!”

“It seems that you two don’t take all the notice you should,” said Cæsar to the girls in French.

“You see what a mistake it is,” answered one of them, smiling.

The last round of the gong sounded and various persons entered the salon. Laura knew the majority of them and introduced them, as they came, to her brother.

_OBSERVATIONS BY CÆSAR_

The waiter appeared at the door, announced that lunch was ready, and they all passed into the dining-room.

Laura and her brother were installed at a small table beside the window.

The dining-room, very large and very high, flaunted decorations copied from some palace. They consisted of a tapestry with garlands of flowers, and medallions. In each medallion were the letters S.P.Q.R. and various epicurean phrases of the Romans: “_Carpe diem. Post mortem nulla voluptas_,” et cetera.

“Beautiful decoration, but very cold,” said Cæsar. “I should prefer rather fewer mottoes and a little more warmth.”

“You are very hard to please,” retorted Laura.

Shortly after getting seated, everybody began to talk from table to table and even from one end of the room to the other. There was none of that classic coolness among the people in the hotel which the English have spread everywhere, along with underdone meat and bottled sauces.

Cæsar devoted himself for the first few moments to ethnology.

“Even from the people you find here, you can see that there is a great diversity of ethnic type in Italy,” he said to Laura. “That blond boy and the Misses San Martino are surely of Saxon origin; the waiter, on the other hand, swarthy like that, is a Berber.”

“Because the blond boy and the San Martines are from the North, and the waiter must be Neapolitan or Sicilian.

“Besides, there is still another type: shown by that dark young woman over there, with the melancholy air. She must be a Celtic type. What is obvious is that there is great liveliness in these people, great elegance in their movements. They are like actors giving a good performance.”

Cæsar’s observations were interrupted by the arrival of a dark, plump woman, who came in from the street, accompanied by her daughter, a blond girl, fat, smiling, and a bit timid.

This lady and Laura bowed with much ceremony.

“Who is she?” asked Cæsar in a low tone.

“It is the Countess Brenda,” said Laura.

“Another countess! But are all the women here countesses?”

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

At the other end of the dining-room a young Neapolitan with the expression of a Pulcinella and violent gestures, raised his sing-song voice, talking very loud and making everybody laugh.

After lunching, Cæsar went out to post some cards, and as it was raining buckets, he took refuge in the arcades of the Piazza Esedra.

When he was tired of walking he returned to the hotel, went to his room, turned on the light, and started to continue his unfinished perusal of Proudhon’s book on the speculator.

And while he read, there came from the salon the notes of a Tzigane waltz played on the piano.

_ART, FOR DECEIVED HUSBANDS_

Cæsar was writing something on the margin of a page when there came a knock at his door. “Come in,” said Cæsar.

It was Laura.

“Where are you keeping yourself?” she asked.

“Here I am, reading a little.”

“But my dear man, we are waiting for you.”

“What for?”

“The idea, what for? To talk.”

“I don’t feel like talking. I am very tired.”

“But, _bambino; Benedetto_. Are you going to live your life avoiding everybody?”

“No; I will come out tomorrow.”

“What do you want to do tonight?”

“Tonight! Nothing.”

“Don’t you want to go to the theatre?”

“No, no; I have a tremendously weak pulse, and a little fever. My hands are on fire at this moment.”

“What foolishness!”

“It’s true.”

“So then you won’t come out?”

“No.”

“All right. As you wish.”

“When the weather is good, I will go out.”

“Do you want me to fetch you a Baedeker?”

“No, I have no use for it.”

“Don’t you intend to look at the sights, either?”

“Yes, I will look willingly at what comes before my eyes; it wouldn’t please me if the same thing happened to me that took place in Florence.”

“What happened to you in Florence?”

“I lost my time lamentably, getting enthusiastic over Botticelli, Donatello, and a lot of other foolishness, and when I got back to London it cost me a good deal of work to succeed in forgetting those things and getting myself settled in my financial investigations again. So that now I have decided to see nothing except in leisure moments and without attaching any importance to all those fiddle-faddles.” “But what childishness! Is it going to distract you so much from your work, from that serious work you have in hand, to go and see a few pictures or some statues?”

“To see them, no, not exactly; but to occupy myself with them, yes. Art is a good thing for those who haven’t the strength to live, in realities. It is a good form of sport for old maids, for deceived husbands who need consolation, as hysterical persons need morphine....”

“And for strong people like you, what is there?” asked Laura, ironically.

“For strong people!... Action.”

“And you call lying in bed, reading, action?”

“Yes, when one reads with the intentions I read with.”

“And what are they? What is it you are plotting?”

“I will tell you.”

Laura saw that she could not convince her brother, and returned to the salon. A moment before dinner was announced Cæsar got dressed again in black, put on his patent-leather shoes, looked at himself offhandedly in the mirror, saw that he was all right, and joined his sister.

V. THE ABBE PRECIOZI. _THE BIG BIRDS IN ROME_

The next day Cæsar awoke at nine, jumped out of bed, and went to breakfast. Laura had left word that she would not eat at home. Cæsar took an umbrella and went out into the street. The weather was very dark but it held off from rain.

Cæsar took the Via Nazionale toward the centre of town. Among the crowd, some foreigners with red guide-books in their hands, were walking with long strides to see the sights of Rome, which the code of worldly snobbishness considers it indispensable to admire.

Cæsar had no settled goal. On a plan of the city, hung in a newspaper kiosk, he found the situation of the Piazza Esedra, the hotel and the adjacent streets, and continued slowly ahead.

“How many people there must be who are excited and have an irregular pulse on arriving for the first time in one of these historic towns,” thought Cæsar. “I, for my part, was in that situation the first time I clearly understood the mechanism of the London Exchange.”

Cæsar continued down the Via Nazionale and stopped in a small square with a little garden and a palm. Bounding the square on one side arose a greenish wall, and above this wall, which was adorned with statues, stretched a high garden with magnificent trees, and among them a great stone pine.

“A beautiful garden to walk in,” said Cæsar. “Perhaps it is an historic spot, perhaps it isn’t. I am very happy that I don’t know either its name or its history, if it really has one.” From the same point in the Via Nazionale, a street with flights of steps could be seen to the left, and below a white stone column.

“Nothing doing; I don’t know what that is either,” thought Cæsar; “the truth is that one is terribly ignorant. To make matters even, what a well of knowledge about questions of finance there is in my cranium!”

Cæsar continued on to the Piazza Venezia, contemplated the palace of the Austrian Embassy, yellow, battlemented; and stopped under a big white umbrella, stuck up to protect the switchman of the tramway.

“Here, at least, the weight of tradition or history is not noticeable. I don’t believe this canvas is a piece of Brutus’s tunic, or of Pompey’s campaign tent. I feel at home here; this canvas modernizes me.”

The square was very animated at that moment: groups of seminarians were passing in robes of black, red, blue, violet, and sashes of contrasting colours; monks of all sorts were crossing, smooth-shaven, bearded, in black, white, brown; foreign priests were conversing in groups, wearing little dishevelled hats adorned with a tassel; horrible nuns with moustaches and black moles, and sweet little white nuns, with a coquettish air.

The clerical fauna was admirably represented. A Capuchin friar, long-bearded and dirty, with the air of a footpad, and an umbrella by way of a blunderbuss or musket under his arm, was talking to a Sister of Charity.

“Undoubtedly religion is a very picturesque thing,” murmured Cæsar. “A spectacular impressario would not have the imagination to think out all these costumes.”

Cæsar took the Corso. Before he reached the Piazza Colonna it began to rain. The coachmen took out enormous umbrellas, all rolled up, opened them and stood them in iron supports, in such a way that the box-seat was as it were under a campaign tent.

Cæsar took refuge in the entrance to a bazaar. The rain began to assume the proportions of a downpour. An old friar, with a big beard, a white habit, and a hood, armed with an untamable umbrella, attempted to cross the square. The umbrella turned inside out in the gusts of wind, and his beard seemed to be trying to get away from his face.

“Pavero frate!” said one of the crowd, smiling.

A priest passed hidden under an umbrella. A tough among the refugees in the bazaar-doorway said that you couldn’t tell if it was a woman or a priest, and the cleric, who no doubt heard the remark, threw a severe and threatening look at the group.

It stopped raining, and Cæsar continued his walk along the Corso. He went a bit out of his way to throw a glance at the Piazza di Spagna. The great stairway in that square was shining, wet with the rain; a few seminarians in groups were going up the steps toward the Pincio.

Cæsar arrived at the Piazza del Popolo and stopped near some ragamuffins who were playing a game, throwing coins in the air. A tattered urchin had written with charcoal on a wall: “Viva Musolino!” and below that he was drawing a heart pierced by two daggers.

“Very good,” murmured Cæsar. “This youngster is like me: an advocate of action.”

It began to rain again; Cæsar decided to turn back. He took the same route and entered a café on the Corso for lunch. The afternoon turned out magnificent and Cæsar went wandering about at random.

_THE CICERONE_

At twilight he returned to his inn, changed, and went to the salon. Laura was conversing with a young abbé. “The Abbé Preciozi.... My brother Cæsar.”

The Abbé Preciozi was one of the household of Cardinal Fort, who had sent him to the hotel to act as cicerone to his nephew.

“Uncle has sent the abbé so that he can show you Rome.” “Oh, many thanks!” answered Cæsar. “I will make use of his knowledge; but I don’t want him to neglect his occupations or to put himself out on my account.” “No, no. I am at your disposition,” replied the abbé, “His Eminence has given me orders to wait on you, and it will not put me out in the least.”

“You will have dinner with us, Preciozi?” said Laura.

“Oh, Marchesa! Thank you so much!”

And the abbé bowed ceremoniously.

The three dined together, and afterwards went to the salon to chat. One of the San Martino young ladies played the viola and the other the piano, and people urged them to exhibit their skill.

The talkative Neapolitan turned over the pieces of music in the music-stand, and after discussing with the two _contessinas_, he placed on the rack the “Intermezzo” from _Cavalleria Rusticana_.

The two sisters played, and the listeners made great eulogies about their ability.

Laura presented Cæsar and the Abbé Preciozi to the Countess Brenda and to a lady who had just arrived from Malta.

“Did you know Rome before?” the Countess asked Cæsar in French.

“No.”

“And how does it strike you?”

“My opinion is of no value,” said Cæsar. “I am not an artist. Imagine; my specialty is financial questions. Up to the present what has given me the greatest shock is to find that Rome has walls.”

“You didn’t know it?” asked Laura.

“No.”

“Dear child, I find that you are very ignorant.”

“What do you wish?” replied Cæsar in Spanish. “I am inclined to be ignorant of everything I don’t get anything out of.”

Cæsar spoke jokingly of a square like a hole in the ground, out of which rises a white column similar to the one in Paris in the Place Vendôme.

“What does he mean? Trajan’s column?” asked Preciozi. “It must be,” said Laura. “I have a brother who’s a barbarian. Weren’t you in the Forum, too?”

“Which is the Forum? An open space where there are a lot of stones?”

“Yes.”

“I passed by there; there were a good many tourists, crowds of young ladies peering intently into corners and a gentleman with a bag over his shoulder who was pointing out some columns with an umbrella. Afterwards I saw a ticket-window. ‘That doubtless means that one pays to get in,’ I said, and as the ground was covered with mud and I didn’t care to wet my feet, I asked a young rascal who was selling post-cards what that place was. I didn’t quite understand his explanation, which I am sure was very amusing. He confused Emperors with the Madonna and the saints. I gave the lad a lira and had some trouble in escaping from there, because he followed me around everywhere calling me Excellency.”

“I think Don Cæsar is making fun of us,” said Preciozi.

“No, no.”

“But really, how did Rome strike you, on the whole?” asked the abbe.

“Well, I find it like a mixture of a monumental great city and a provincial capital.”

“That is possible,” responded the abbe. “Undoubtedly the provincial city is more of a city than the big modern capitals, where there is nothing to see but fine hotels on one hand and horrible hovels on the other. If you came from America, like me, you would see how agreeable you would find the impression of a city that one gets here. To forget all the geometry, the streets laid out with a compass, the right angles....”

“Probably so.”

The abbe seemed to have an interest in gaining Cæsar’s friendship. Cæsar said to him that, if he wished, they could go to his room to chat and smoke. The abbe accepted with gusto, and Cæsar, being a suspicious person, wondered if the Cardinal might have sent the abbe to find out what sort of man he was. Then he considered that his ideas must be of no importance whatsoever to his uncle; but on the chance, he set himself to throwing the abbé off the scent, talking volubly and emitting contradictory opinions about everything.

After chattering a long while and devoting himself to free paradox, Cæsar thought that for the first session he had not done altogether badly. Preciozi took leave, promising to come back the next day.

“If he reports our conversation to my uncle, the man won’t know what to think of me,” reflected Cæsar, on going to bed. “It would not be too much to expect, if His Eminence became interested and sent to fetch me. But I don’t believe he will; my uncle cannot be intelligent enough to have the curiosity to know a man like me.”

VI. THE LITTLE INTERESTS OF THE PEOPLE IN A ROMAN HOTEL. _INTIMACIES_

During some days the main interest of the people in the hotel was the growing intimacy established between the Marchesa Sciacca, who was the lady from Malta, and the Neapolitan with the Pulcinella air, Signor Carminatti.

The Maltese must have been haughty and exclusive, to judge from the queenly air she assumed. Only with the handsome Neapolitan did she behave amiably.

In the dining-room the Maltese sat with her two children, a boy and a girl, at the other end from where Cæsar and Laura were accustomed to sit. At her side, at a table close by, chattered and jested the diplomatic Carminatti.

The Marquis of Sciacca was ill with diabetes; he had come to Rome to take a treatment, and during these days he did not come to the dining-room.

The Marchesa was one of those mixed types, unharmonious, common among mongrel races. Her black hair shone like jet, her lips looked like an Egyptian’s, and her eyes of a very light blue showed off in a curious way in her bronzed face. She powdered her face, she painted her lips, she shaded her eyes with kohl. Her appearance was that of a proud, revengeful woman.

She ate with much nicety, opening her mouth so little that she could put no more than the tip of her spoon between her lips; with her children she talked English and Italian in equal perfection, and when she heard young Carminatti’s facetious remarks she laughed with marked impudence. Signer Carminatti was tall, with a black moustache, a hooked nose, well-formed languid eyes, lively and somewhat clownish gestures; he was at the same time sad and merry, melancholy and smiling, he changed his expression every moment. He was in the habit of appearing in the salon in a dinner-jacket, with a large flower in his button-hole and two or three fat diamonds on his chest. He would come along dragging his feet, would bow, make a joke, stand mournful; and this fluency of expression, and these gesticulations, gave him a manner halfway between woman and child.

When he grew petulant, especially, he seemed like a woman. “Macché!” he would say continually, with an acrid voice and the disgusted air of an hysterical dame.

In spite of his frequent petulant fits, he was the person most esteemed by the ladies of the hotel, both young and married.

“He is the darling of the ladies,” the Countess Brenda said of him, mockingly.

Laura had not the least use for him.

“I know that type by heart,” she asserted with disdain.

During lunch and dinner Signor Carminatti did not leave off talking for a moment with the Maltese. The Marchesa Sciacca’s children often wanted to tell their mother something; but she hushed them so as to be able to hear the bright sayings of the handsome Neapolitan.

The San Martino young ladies and the Countess Brenda’s daughter kept trying to find a way to steal Carminatti for their group; but he always went back to the Maltese, doubtless because her conversation was more diverting and spicy.

_THE CONTESSINA BRENDA_

The Countess Brenda’s daughter, Beatrice Brenda, in spite of her pea-hen air, was always endeavouring to stir up the Neapolitan and to start a conversation with him; but Carminatti in his light-hearted way would reply with a jest or a fatuous remark and betake himself again to the Marchesa Sciacca, who would make her disturbing children hush because they often prevented her from catching what the Neapolitan was saying.

She was not to be despised, not by a long shot, was Signorina Bice, not in any respect; besides being very rich, she was a beautiful girl and promised to be more beautiful; she had the type of Titian’s women, an opaline white skin, as though made of mother-of-pearl, plump milky arms, and dark eyes. The one thing lacking in her was expression.

She used frequently to go about in the company of an aristocratic old maid, very ugly, with red hair and a face like a horse, but very distinguished, who ate at the next table to Laura and Cæsar.

One day Carminatti brought another Neapolitan home to dinner with him, a fat grotesque person, whom he instigated to emit a series of improprieties about women and matrimony. Hearing the scandalous sallies of the rustic, the ladies said, with an amiable smile:

“He is a _benedetto_.”

The Contessina Brenda, fascinated by the Neapolitan, went to the Marchesa Sciacca’s table. As she passed, Carminatti arose with his napkin in one hand, and gesticulating with the other, said:

“Contessina. Allow me to present to you Signor Cappagutti, a merchant from Naples.”

Signor Cappagutti remained leaning back tranquilly in his chair, and the Contessina burst out laughing and began to move her arms as if somebody had put a horse-fly on her skirt. Then she raised her hand to her face, to hide her laughter, and suddenly sat down.

_DANCING_

As it rained a great deal the majority of the guests preferred not to go out. In the evenings they had dances. Cæsar did not appear at the first one; but his sister told him he ought to go. Cæsar was at the second dance, so as not to seem too much of an ogre. As he had no intention of dancing, he installed himself in a corner; and while the dance went on he kept talking with the Countesses Brenda and San Martino.

Various young men had arrived in the room. They exhibited that Southern vivacity which is a trifle tiresome to the onlooker, and they all listened to themselves while they spoke. The Neapolitan and two or three of his friends were introduced to Cæsar; but they showed him a certain rather ostentatious and impertinent coolness.

Signor Carminatti exchanged a few words with the Countess Brenda, and purposely acted as if he did not notice Cæsar’s presence.

The Neapolitan’s chatter did not irritate Cæsar in the slightest, and as he had no intention of being his rival, he listened to him quite entertained.

Cæsar noted that the San Martino ladies and some friends of theirs had a predilection for types like Carminatti, swarthy, prattling, and boastful South Italians.

The ladies showed an affectionate familiarity with the girls; they caressed them and kissed them effusively.

_YOU ARE AN INQUISITOR_

Laura, who was dancing with an officer, approached her brother, who was wedged into a corner, behind two rows of chairs.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him, stopping and informing her partner that she was going to sit down a moment.

“Nothing,” answered Cæsar, “I am waiting for this waltz to finish, so that I can get away.”

“You are not enjoying yourself?”

“Pish!”

“Nevertheless, there are amusing things about it.”

“Ah, surely. Do you know what happened to me with the Countess Brenda?”

“What did happen?”

“When she came in and gave me her hand, she said: ‘How hot your hands are; mine are frozen.’ And she held my hands between hers. That was comical.”

“Comical! Why?”

“How do I know?”

“It is comical to you, because you see only evil motives. She held your hand. Who knows what she may be after? Who knows if she wants to get something out of you? She has an income of eighty or ninety thousand lire, perhaps she wants to borrow money from you.”

“No, I know she doesn’t.”

“Then, what are you afraid of?”

“Afraid! Afraid of nothing! Only it surprised me.”

“That’s because you look at everything with the eye of an inquisitor. One must be suspicious: be always on one’s guard, always on the watch. It’s the attitude of a savage.”

“I don’t deny it. I have no desire to be civilized like these people. But what does come to me is that the husband of our illustrious and wealthy friend wears in his breast that porte-bonheur, which I believe is called horns.”

“Of course; and you haven’t discovered that his family is a family of assassins? How Spanish! What a savage Spaniard I have for a brother!”

Cæsar burst into laughter, and taking advantage of the moment when everybody was going to the buffet, left the room. In the corridor, one of the San Martino girls, the more sweet and angelic of the two, was in a corner with one of the dancers, and there was a sound like a kiss.

The little blonde made an exclamation of fright; Cæsar behaved as if he had noticed nothing and kept on his way.

“The devil!” exclaimed Cæsar, “that angelic little princess hides in corners with one of these _briganti_. And their mother has the face to say that they don’t know how to bait a hook! I don’t know what more she could wish. Although it is possible that this is the educational scheme of the future for marriageable girls.”

In the entrance-hall of the hotel were the Marchesa Sciacca’s two children, attended by a sleeping maid; the little girl, seated on a sofa, was watching her brother, who walked from one side to the other with a roll of paper in his hand. In the entrance hall, opposite the hotel door, there was a bulletin, which was changed every day, to announce the different performances that were to be given that night at the theatres of Rome.

The small boy walked back and forth in front of the poster, and addressing himself to a public consisting of the sleeping maid and the little girl, cried:

“Step up, gentlemen! Step up! Now is the time. We are about to perform _La Geisha_, the magnificent English operetta. Walk right in! Walk right in!”

While the mother was dancing with the Neapolitan in the ball-room, the children were amusing themselves thus alone.

“The truth is that our civilization is an absurdity. Even the children go mad,” thought Cæsar, and took refuge in his room.

During the whole night he heard from his bed the notes of the waltzes and two-steps, and dancers’ laughter and shouts and shuffling feet.

_THEY ARE JUST CHILDREN_

The next day, Laura, before going out to make a call, appeared at lunch-time most elegantly dressed, with a gown and a hat from Paris, in which she was truly most charming.

She had a great success: the San Martinos, the Countess Brenda, the other ladies congratulated her. The hat, above all, seemed ideal to them.

Carminatti was in raptures.

“_E bello, bellissimo_,” he said, with great enthusiasm, and all the ladies agreed that it was _bellissimo_, lengthening the “s” and nodding their heads with a gesture of admiration.

“And you don’t say anything to me, _bambino_?” Laura inquired of Cæsar.

“I say you are all right.”

“And nothing more?”

“If you want me to pay you a compliment, I will tell you that you are pretty enough to make incest legitimate.” “What a barbarian!” murmured Laura, half laughing, half blushing.

“What has he been saying to you?” two or three people inquired.

Laura translated his words into Italian, and Carminatti found them admirable.

“Very appropriate! Very witty!” he exclaimed, laughing, and gave Cæsar a friendly slap on the shoulder.

The Marchesa Sciacca looked at Laura several times with reflective glances and a rancorous smile.

“The truth is that these Southern people are just children,” thought Cæsar, mockingly. “What an inveterate preoccupation they have in the beautiful.”

The Neapolitan was one of those most preoccupied with esthetics.

Cæsar had a room opposite Signor Carminatti’s, and the first few days he had thought it was a woman’s room. Toilet flasks, sprays, boxes of powder; the room looked like a perfumery shop.

“It is curious,” Cæsar used to think, “how these people from famous historic towns can combine powder and the _maffia_, opoponax and daggers.”

Almost every night after dinner there was an improvised dance in the salon. Somebody played the languorous waltzes of the Tzigane orchestras on the piano. The Maltese and Carminatti used to sing romantic songs, of the kind whose words and music seem to be always the same, and in which there invariably is question of panting, refulgent, love, and other suggestive words.

One Sunday evening, when it was raining, Cæsar stayed in the hotel.

In the salon Carminatti was doing sleight-of-hand to entertain the ladies. Afterwards the Neapolitan was seen pursuing the Marchesa Sciacca and the two San Martino girls in the corridors. They shrieked shrilly when he grabbed them around the waist. The devil of a Neapolitan was an expert at sleight-of-hand.

VII. THE CONFIDENCES OF THE ABBE PRECIOZI

_NATURAL VARIETIES OF NOSES AND EXPRESSIONS_

Cæsar admitted before his conscience that he had no plans, or the slightest idea what direction to take. The Cardinal, no doubt, did not feel any desire to know him.

Cæsar often proceeded by more or less absurd hypotheses. “Suppose,” he would think, “that I had an idea, a concrete ambition. In that case it would behoove me to be reserved on such and such topics and to hint these and those ideas to people; let’s do it that way, even though it be only for sport.”

Preciozi was the only person who was able to give him any light in his investigations, because the guests at the hotel, most of them, on account of their position, thought of nothing but amusing themselves and of giving themselves airs.

Cæsar discovered that Preciozi was ambitious; but besides lacking an opening, he had not the necessary vigour and imagination to do anything.

The abbé spoke a macaronic Spanish, which he had learned in South America, and which provoked Cæsar’s laughter. He was constantly saying: “My friend,” and he mingled Gallicisms with a lot of coarse expressions of Indian or mulatto origin, and with Italian words. Preciozi’s dialect was a gibberish worthy of Babel.

The first day they went out together, the abbé wanted to show him divers of Rome’s picturesque spots. He led him behind the Quirinal, through the Via della Panetteria and the Via del Lavatore, where there is a fruit-market, to the Trevi fountain. “It is beautiful, eh?” said the abbé.

“Yes; what I don’t understand,” replied Cæsar, “is why, in a town where there is so much water, the hotel wash-basins are so small.”

Preciozi shrugged his shoulders.

“What types you have in Rome!” Cæsar went on. “What a variety of noses and expressions! Jesuits with the aspect of savants and plotters; Carmelites with the appearance of highway men; Dominicans, some with a sensual air, others with a professorial air. Astuteness, intrigue, brutality, intelligence, mystic stupor.... And as for priests, what a museum! Decorative priests, tall, with white shocks of hair and big cassocks; short priests, swarthy and greasy; noses thin as a knife; warty, fiery noses. Gross types; distinguished types; pale bloodless faces; red faces.... What a marvellous collection!”

Preciozi listened to Cæsar’s observations and wondered if the Cardinal’s nephew might be a trifle off his head.

“Point out what is noteworthy, so that I may admire it enough,” Cæsar told him. “I don’t care to burst out in an enthusiastic phrase for something of no value.”

Preciozi laughed at these jokes, as if they were a child’s bright sayings; but at times Cæsar appeared to him to be an innocent soul, and at other times a Machiavellian who dissembled his insidious purposes under an extravagant demeanour.

When Preciozi was involved in some historic dissertation, Cæsar used to ask him ingenuously:

“But listen, abbe; does this really interest you?”

Preciozi would admit that the past didn’t matter much to him, and then with one accord, they would burst out laughing.

Cæsar said that Preciozi and he were the most anti-historic men going about in Rome.

One morning they went to the Piazza del Campidoglio. It was drizzling; the wet roofs shone; the sky was grey.

“This intrusion of the country into Rome,” said Cæsar, “is what gives the city its romantic aspect. These hills with trees on them are very pretty.”

“Only pretty, Don Cæsar? They are sublime,” retorted Preciozi.

“What amazement I shall produce in you, my dear abbé, when I tell you that all my knowledge in respect to the Capitol reduces itself to the fact that some orator, I don’t know who, said that near the Capitol is the Tarpeian Rock.”

“You know nothing more about it?”

“Nothing more. I don’t know if Cicero said that, or Castelar, or Sir Robert Peel.”

Preciozi burst into merry laughter.

“What statue is that?” asked Cæsar, indicating the one in the middle of the square.

“That is Marcus Aurelius.”

“An Emperor?”

“Yes, an Emperor and a philosopher.”

“And why have they made him riding such a little, potbellied horse?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“He looks like a man taking a horse to water at a trough. Why does he ride bare-back? Hadn’t they invented stirrups at that period?”

Preciozi was a bit perplexed; before making a reply he gazed at the statue, and then said, confusedly:

“I think so.”

They crossed the Piazza Campidoglio and went out by the left side of the Palazzo del Senatore. Down the Via dell’ Arco di Severo, a street that runs down steps to the Forum, they saw a large arch that seemed sunk in the ground, and beyond, further away, another smaller arch with only one archway, which arose in the distance as if on top of the big arch. A square yellow tower, burned by the sun, lifted itself among the ruins; some hills showed rows of romantic cypresses, and in the background the blue Alban Mountains stood out against a grey sky.

“Would you like to go down to the Forum?” said the abbé. “Down there where the stones are? No. What for?”

“Do you wish to see the Tarpeian Rock?”

“Yes, man. But explain to me what this rock was.”

Preciozi got together all his information, which was not much.

They went by the Via Monte Tarpea, and came back by the Via della Consolazione.

“They must have thrown people who were already dead off the Tarpeian Rock,” said Cæsar, after hearing the explanation.

“No, no.”

“But if they threw them down alive, the majority of those they chucked down here would not have died. At most they would have dislocated an arm, a leg, or a finger-joint. Unless they chucked them head first.”

Preciozi could not permit the mortal effects of the Tarpeian Rock to be doubted, and he said that its height had been lessened and the level of the soil had risen.

After these explanations Cæsar found the spot of Roman executions somewhat less fantastic.

“How would you like to go to that church in the Forum?” said Preciozi.

“I was going to propose that we should go to the hotel; it must be lunch-time.”

“Come along.”

_THE CHURCH AND COOKING_

Cæsar had Marsala and Asti brought for the abbe, who was a gourmet.

While Preciozi ate and drank with all his jaws, Cæsar devoted himself to teasing him. The waiter had brought some cream-puffs and informed them that that was a dish every one ate that day. Laura and Preciozi praised the puffs, and Cæsar said:

“What an admirable religion ours is! For each day the church has a saint and a special dish. The truth is that the Catholic Church is very wise; it has broken all relations with science, but it remains in harmony with cooking. As Preciozi was a moment ago saying with great exactitude, this close relation that exists between the Church and the kitchen is moving.”

“I said that to you?” asked Preciozi. “What a falsehood!”

“Don’t pay any attention,” said Laura.

“Yes, my dear abbé,” retorted Cæsar, “and I even believe that you added confidentially that sometimes the Pope in the Vatican gardens, imitating Francis I after the battle of Pavia, is wont to say sadly to the Secretary of State: ‘All is lost, save faith and... good cooking.’”

“What a _bufone!_ What a bufone!” exclaimed Preciozi, with his mouth full.

“You are giving a proof of irreligion which is in bad taste,” said Laura. “Only janitors talk like that.”

“On such questions I am an honourary janitor.”

“That’s all right, but you ought to realize that there are religious people here, like the abbé....”

“Preciozi? Why, he’s a Voltairean.”

“Oh! Oh! My friend....” exclaimed Preciozi, emptying a glass of wine.

“Voltaireanism,” continued Cæsar. “There is nobody here who has faith, nobody who makes the little sacrifice of not eating on Fridays in Lent. Here we are, destroying with our own teeth one of the most beautiful works of the Church. You will both ask me what that work is....”

“No, we will not ask you anything,” said Laura, waving a hand in the air.

“Well, it is that admirable alimentary harmony sustained by the Church. During the whole year we are authorized to eat terrestrial animals, and in Lent aquatic ones only. Promiscuous as we are, we are undoing the equilibrium between the maritime and the land forces, we are attacking the peaceful rotation of meat and fish.”

“He is a child,” said Preciozi, “we must leave him alone.”

“Yes, but that will not impede my Spaniard’s heart, my Cardinal’s nephew’s heart from bleeding grievously.... Shall we go to the café, Abbé?”

“Yes, let us go.”

_THE MARVELLOUS BIRD OF ROME_

They left the hotel and entered a café in the Piazza Esedra. Preciozi made a vague move to pay, but Cæsar would not permit him to.

“What do you wish to do?” said the abbé.

“Whatever you like.”

“I have to go to the Altemps palace a moment.”

“To see my uncle?”

“Yes; then, if you feel like it, we can take a long walk.”

“Very good.”

They went towards the centre of the town by the Via Nazionale. It was a splendid sunny afternoon.

Preciozi went into the Altemps palace a moment; Cæsar waited for him in the street. Then, together they went over to opposite the Castel Sant’ Angelo, crossed the river, and approached the Piazza di San Pietro. The atmosphere was wonderfully clear and pure; the suave blue sky seemed to caress the pinnacles and decorations of the big square.

Preciozi met a dirty friar, dark, with a black beard and a mouth from ear to ear. The abbe showed no great desire to stop and speak with him, but the other detained him. This party wore a habit of a brown colour and carried a big umbrella under his arm.

“There’s a type!” said Cæsar, when Preciozi rejoined him.

“Yes, he is a peasant,” the abbe said with disgust.

“If that chap meets any one in the road, he plants his umbrella in his chest, and demands his money or his... eternal life.”

“Yes, he is a disagreeable man,” agreed Preciozi.

They continued their walk, through the Piazza Cavallegeri and outside the walls. As they went up one of the hills there, they could see the façade of Saint Peter’s continually nearer, with all the huge stone figures on the cornice. “The fact is that that poor Christ plays a sad rôle there in the middle,” said Cæsar.

“Oh! Oh! My friend,” exclaimed the abbé in protest.

“A plebeian Jew in the midst of so many princes of the Church! Doesn’t it strike you as an absurdity?”

“No, not absurd at all.”

“The truth is that this religion of yours is Jewish meat with a Roman sauce.”

“And yours? What is yours?”

“Mine? I have not got past fetichism. I worship the golden calf. Like the majority of Catholics.”

“I don’t believe it.”

They looked back; they could see the dome of the great basilica shining in the sun; then, to one side, a little viaduct and a tower.

“What a wonderful bird you keep in this beautiful cage!” said Cæsar.

“What bird?” asked Preciozi.

“The Pope, friend Preciozi, the Pope. Not the popinjay, but the Pope in white. What a very marvellous bird! He has a feather fan like a peacock’s tail; he speaks like the cockatoo, only he differs from them in being infallible; and he is infallible, because another bird, also marvellous, which is called the Holy Ghost, tells him by night everything that takes place on earth and in heaven. What very picturesque and extravagant things!”

“For you who have no faith everything must be extravagant.”

Cæsar and Preciozi went on encircling the walls and reading the various marble tablets set into them, and ascended to the Janiculum, to the terrace where Garibaldi’s statue stands.

_POOR TINDARO_

“But, are you anti-Catholic, seriously?” asked Preciozi. “But do you believe any one can be a Catholic seriously?” said Cæsar. “I can, yes; otherwise I shouldn’t be a priest.”

“But are you a priest because you believe, or do you make believe that you believe because you are a priest?”

“You are a child. I suppose you hate the Jesuits, like all Liberals.”

“And I suppose you hate Masons, like all Catholics.”

“No.”

“No more do I hate Jesuits. What is worse, I read the life of Saint Ignatius Loyola at school, and he seemed to me a great man.”

“Well, I should think so!”

“And the Jesuits have some power still?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes, man. They give the Church its direction. Oh, nobody fools the Society. You can see what happened to Cardinal Tindaro.”

“I don’t know what did happen to him,” said Cæsar, with indifference.

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, Cardinal Tindaro decided to follow the inspirations of the Society and made many Jesuits Cardinals with the object that when Pope Leo XIII died, they should elect him Pope; but the Jesuits smelled the rat, and when Leo XIII got very ill, the Council of Assistants of the Society had a meeting and decided that Tindaro should not be Pope, and ordered the Austrian Court to oppose its veto. When the election came, the Jesuit Cardinals gave Tindaro a fat vote, out of gratitude, but calculated not to be enough to raise him to the throne, and in case it was, the Austrian Cardinal and the Hungarian had their Empire’s veto to Tindaro’s election in their pocket.”

“And this Tindaro, is he intelligent?”

“Yes, he is indeed; very intelligent. Style Leo XIII.”

“Men of weight.”

“Yes, but neither of the two had Pius IX’s spirit.” “And the present one? He is a poor creature, eh?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know....”

“And the Society of Jesus, is it on good terms with this Pope?”

“Surely. He is their creation.”

“So that the Society is really powerful?”

“It certainly is! Without a doubt! It has a pleasant rule, and obedience, and knowledge, and money....”

“It has money too, eh?”

“Has it money? More than enough.”

“And in what form? In paper?”

“In paper, and in property, and industries; in steamship companies, in manufactories....”

“I would make an admirable business manager.”

“Well, your uncle, the Cardinal, could get you put in touch with the Society.”

“Is he a friend of theirs?”

“Close as a finger-nail.”

Cæsar was silent a moment, and then said:

“And I have heard that the Society of Jesus was, at bottom, an anti-Christian organization, a branch of Masonry....”

“_Macché_!” exclaimed the abbé. “How could you believe that? Oh, no, my friend! What an absurdity!”

Then, seeing Cæsar burst into laughter, he calmed himself, wondering if he was making fun of him.

They went down the hill, where the monument to Garibaldi flaunts itself, to the terrace of the Spanish Academy.

The view was magnificent; the evening, now falling, was clear; the sky limpid and transparent. From that height the houses of Rome were spread out silent, with an air of solemnity, of immobility, of calm. It appeared a flat town; one did not notice its slopes and its hills; it gave the impression of a city in stone set under a glass globe.

The sky itself, pure and diaphanous, augmented the sensation of withdrawal and quietude; not a cloud on the horizon, not a spot of smoke in the air; silence and repose everywhere. The dome of St. Peter’s had the colour of a cloud, the shrubberies on the Pincio were reddened by the sun, and the Alban Hills disclosed the little white towns and the smiling villas on their declivities.

Preciozi pointed out domes and towers; Cæsar did not hear him, and he was thinking, with a certain terror:

“We shall die, and these stones will continue to shine in the sunlight of other winter evenings.”

_THE VATICAN FAMILY_

Making an effort with himself, he threw off this painful idea, and turning to Preciozi, asked:

“So you believe that I might have made a nice career in the Church?”

“You! I certainly do think so!” exclaimed Preciozi. “With a cardinal for uncle, _che carriera_ you could have made!”

“But are there enough different jobs in the Church?”

“From the Pope to the canons and the Papal Guards, you ought to see all the hierarchies we have at the Vatican. First the Pope, then the Cardinals in bishop’s orders, next, the Cardinals in priest’s orders, then the Cardinal’s in deacon’s orders, the Secretaries, the _compisteria_ of the Holy College of Cardinals, the Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops, and the Pontifical Family.”

“Whose family is that? The Pope’s?”

“No; it is called that, as who should say, the General Staff of the Vatican. It is made up of the Palatine Cardinals, the Palatine Prelates, the Participating Privy Chamberlains, the Archbishops and Bishops assisting the Pontifical throne, the Domestic Prelates, who form the College of Apostolic Prothonotaries, the Pontifical Masters of Ceremonies, the Princes Assisting the Throne, the Privy Participating Cape-and-Sword Chamberlains, the Privy Numbered Cape-and-Sword Chamberlains....”

“Cape-and-Sword! Didn’t I tell you that that poor Christ plays a sorry part on the façade of Saint Peter’s?” exclaimed Cæsar.

“Why, man?”

“Because all this stuff about capes and swords doesn’t seem very fitting for the soul of a Christian. Unless, of course, the knights of the sword and cape do not use the sword to wound and the cape for a shield, but only wield the sword of Faith and the cape of Charity.... And haven’t you any gentlemen of Bed-and-Board, as they have at the Spanish Court?”

“No.”

“That’s a pity. It is so expressive,... bed and board. Bed and board, cape and sword. Who wouldn’t be satisfied? One must admit that there is nobody equal to the Church, and next to her a monarchy, when it comes to inventing pretty things. That is why it is said, and very well said, that there is no salvation outside of the Church.”

“You are a pagan.”

“And I believe you are one, too.”

“_Macché_!”

“What comes after all those Privy Cape-and-Sword Chamberlains, my dear Abbe?”

“Next, there is the Pontifical Noble Guard, the Swiss Papal Guard, the Palatine Guard of Honour, the Corps of Papal Gendarmes, the Privy Chaplains, the Privy Clerics, the suite of His Holiness. Next come the members of the Palatine Administration, the Congregations, and more Secretaries.”

“And do the Cardinals live well?”

“Yes.”

“How much do they make?”

“They get twenty thousand lire fixed salary, besides extras.”

“But that is very little!”

“Certainly! It used to be much more, at the time of the Papal States. Out of their twenty thousand lire they have to keep a carriage.”

“Those that aren’t rich must have a hard time.”

“Just imagine, some of them have to live in a third-floor apartment. There have been some that bought their red robes second-hand.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Are those robes so expensive?”

“Yes, they are expensive. Quite. They are made of a special cloth manufactured in Cologne.”

“Are there many Cardinals who are not of rich families?”

“A great many.”

“Well, you people have ruined that job.”

They went to Trastevere and there they took the tram. Preciozi got out at the Piazza Venezia and Cæsar went on to the end of the Via Nazionale.

_A TALK ABOUT MONEY_

“Where have you been?” asked Laura, on seeing him.

“I’ve been taking a walk with the abbe.”

“It’s evident that you find him more interesting than us women.”

“Preciozi is very interesting. He is a Machiavellian. He has a candour that is assumed and a dulness that is assumed. He plays a little comedy to get out of paying, at the café or in the tram. He is splendid. I think, if you will pardon me for saying so, that the Italians are damned close.”

“People that have no money are forced to be economical.”

“No, that isn’t so. I have known people in Madrid who made three pesetas a day, and spent two treating a friend.”

“Yes, out of ostentation, out of a desire to show off. I don’t like pretentious people.”

“Well, I believe I prefer them to skinflints.”

“Yes, that’s very Spanish. A man wasting money, while his wife and children are dying of hunger.... The man who won’t learn the value of money is not the best type.”

“Money is filthy. If it were only possible to abolish it!”

“For my part, son, I should like less to have it abolished than to have a great deal of it.” “I shouldn’t. If I could carry out my plans, all I should need afterwards would be a hut to live in, a garret.”

“Our ideas differ.”

“These people that need clothes and jewels and perfumes fairly nauseate me.... All such things are only fit for Jews.”

“Then I must surely be a Jewess.”

VIII. OLD PALACES, OLD SALONS, OLD LADIES

_THE CARDINAL UNCLE_

As the Cardinal gave no indication of curiosity to see Cæsar, Cæsar several times said to Laura:

“We ought to call on uncle, eh?”

“Do as you choose. He isn’t very anxious to see you. Apparently he takes you for an unbeliever.”

“All right, that has nothing to do with calling on him.”

“If you like I will go with you.”

The Cardinal lived in the Palazzo Altemps. That palace is situated in the Via di S. Apellinare, opposite a seminary. The brother and sister proceeded to the palace one morning, went up the grand staircase, and in a reception-room they found Preciozi with two other priests, talking together in low tones.

One was a worn, pallid old man, with his nose and the borders of his nasal appendage extremely red. Cæsar considered that so red a nose in that livid, ghastly face resembled a lantern in a melancholy landscape lighted by the evening twilight. This livid person was the house librarian.

“His Eminence is very busy,” said Preciozi, after bowing to the callers. He spoke with a different voice from the one he used outside. “I will go in, in a moment, and see if you can see him.”

Cæsar stepped to the window of the reception-room: one could see the court of the old palace and the colonnade surrounding it.

“This house must be very large,” he said.

“You shall see it later, if you like,” replied the abbé. A little after this Preciozi disappeared, and reappeared again in the opening of a glass door, saying, in the discreetly lowered voice which was no doubt that of his domestic functions:

“This way, this way.”

They went into a large, cold, shabby room. Through an open door they could see another bare salon, equally dark and sombre.

The Cardinal was seated at a table; he was dressed as a monk and had the air of being in a bad humour. Laura went promptly to him and kissed his hand. Cæsar bowed, and as the Cardinal did not deign to look at him, remained standing, at some distance from the table.

Laura, after having saluted her uncle as a pillar of the Church, talked to him as a relative. The Cardinal cast a rapid glance at Cæsar, and then, scowling somewhat less, asked him if his mother was well and if he expected to be long in Rome.

Cæsar, vexed by this frigid reception, answered shortly in a few cold words, that all of them were well.

The Cardinal’s secretary, who was by the window assisting at the interview, shot angry looks at Cæsar.

After a brief audience, which could not have lasted over five minutes, the Cardinal said, addressing Laura:

“Pardon me, my daughter, but I must go on with my work”; and immediately, without a look at his nephew or his niece, he called the secretary, who brought him a portfolio of papers.

Cæsar opened the glass door for Laura to pass.

“Would you like to see the palace?” Preciozi asked them. “There are some antique statues, magnificent marbles, and a chapel where Saint Aniceto’s body is preserved.”

“Let’s leave Saint Aniceto’s body for another day,” Cæsar replied sardonically.

Laura and Cæsar went down the stairway.

“There was no need to come, to behave like that,” she said, upset.

“How so?”

“How so! You behaved like a savage, no more nor less.” “No, he was the one that behaved like a savage. I bowed to him, and he wasn’t willing even to look at me.”

“You made up for it by staring at him as if he had been some curious insect in a cage.”

“It was his fault for not being even barely polite to me.”

“Do you think that a Cardinal is an ordinary person to whom you say: ‘Hello! How are you? How’s business?’”

“I met an English Cabinet Minister in a club once and he was like anybody else.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Do you believe that perhaps our uncle considers that he fulfils a providential mission, a divine mission?”

“What a question! Of course he does.”

“Then he is a poor idiot. However, it’s nothing to me. Our uncle is a stupid fool.”

“You discovered that in such a little while?”

“Yes. Fanatical, vain, fatuous, pleased with himself.... He is of no use to me.”

“Ah, so you thought he would be of some use to you?”

“Why not?”

Her brother’s arbitrary manner of taking things irritated and at the same time amused Laura.

She believed that he made it a rule to persist in always doing the contrary to other people.

Laura and her friends of both sexes used to run across one another in museums, out walking in the popular promenades, and at the races. Cæsar didn’t go to museums, because he said he had no artistic feeling; races didn’t interest him either; and when it came to walking, he preferred to wander at random in the streets.

As his memory was not full of historical facts, he experienced no great esthetic or archeological thrills, and no sympathy whatsoever with the various herds of tourists that went about examining old stones.

At night, in the salon, he used to give burlesque descriptions, in his laconic French, of street scenes: the Italian soldiers with cock-feathers drooping from a sort of bowler hat, the porters of the Embassies and great houses, with their cocked hats, their blue great-coats, and the staff with a silver knob in their hands.

The precise, jocose, biting report of his observations offended Laura and her lady friends.

“Why do you hate Italians so much?” the Countess Brenda asked him one day.

“But I don’t hate them.”

“He speaks equally badly of everybody,” explained Laura. “He has a bad character.”

“Is it because you have had an unhappy life?” the Countess asked, interested.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Cæsar, feeling like smiling; instead of which, and without knowing why and without any reason, he put on a sad look.

_EXERCISES IN HYPOCRISY_

Laura, with her feminine perspicacity, noted that from that day on the Countess looked at Cæsar a great deal and with melancholy smiles; and not only the mother appeared interested, but the daughter too.

“I don’t know what it is in my brother,” thought Laura; “women are attracted to him just because he pays no attention to them. And he knows it; yes, indeed he does, even thought he acts as if he were unconscious of it. Both mother and daughter taken with him! Carminatti has been routed.”

The Countess quickly discovered a great liking for Laura, and as they both had friends in good Roman society, they made calls together. Laura was astonished enough to hear Cæsar say that if there was no objection, he would go with them.

“But the majority of our friends are old ladies, devout old ladies.”

“All the better.”

“All right. But if you come, it is on condition that you say nothing that would shock them.” “Surely.”

Cæsar accompanied the Countess Brenda and his sister to various aristocratic houses, and at every one he heard the same conversation, about the King, the Pope, the Cardinals, and how few or how many people there were in the hotels. These topics, together with slanders, constituted the favourite motive for conversation in the great world.

Cæsar conversed with the somewhat flaccid old ladies (“castanae molles,” as Preciozi called them) with perfect hypocrisy; he regarded the classic decorations of the salons, and while he listened to rather strange French and to most elegant and pure Italian, he wondered if there might be somebody among all this Papal society whom he could use to forward his ambitions.

Sometimes among the guests he would meet a young “monsignor,” discreetly smiling, whose emerald ring it was necessary to kiss. Cæsar would kiss it and say to himself: “Let us practise tolerance with our lips.”

In many of these salons the mania for the English game called “bridge” had caught with great violence.

Cæsar hated card-games. For a man who made a study of the stock-exchange, the mechanism of a card-game was too stupid to arouse any interest. But he had no objection to playing and losing.

The Countesses Brenda and San Martino had “bridge-mania” very hard, and they used to go to Brenda’s room in the evening to play.

After playing bridge a week, Cæsar found that his money was insensibly melting away.

“Look here,” he said to Laura.

“What is it?”

“You have got to teach me bridge.”

“I don’t know how to play, because I have no head for such things and I forget what cards have been played; but they gave me a little book on the game. I will lend it to you, if you like.”

“Yes, give me it.”

Cæsar read the book, learned the intricacies of the game, and the next few evenings he acquitted himself so well that the Countess of San Martino marched off to her room with burning cheeks and almost in tears.

“What a cad you are!” Laura said to him at lunch some days later, laughing. “You are fleecing those women.”

“It’s their own fault. Why did they take advantage of my innocence?”

“They have decided to go and play in Carminatti’s room without telling you.”

“I’m glad of it.”

“Do you know, _bambino_, I have to go away for a few days.”

“Where?”

“To Naples. Come with me.”

“No; I have things to do here. I will take you to the station.”

“Ah, you rascal! You are a Don Juan.”

“No, dear sister. I am a financier.”

“I can see your victims from here. But I shall put them on their guard. You are a blood-thirsty hyena. You like to collect hearts the way the Red-skins did scalps.”

“You mean coupons.”

“No, hearts. You like to pretend to be simple, because you are wicked. I will tell the Countess Brenda and her daughter.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“That you are wicked, that you have a hyena’s heart, that you want to ruin them.”

“Don’t tell them that, because it will make them fall in love with me. A hyena-hearted man is always run after by the ladies.”

“You are right. Come along, go to Naples with me.”

“Is your husband such a terrible bore, little sister?”

“A little more cream and a little less impertinence, _bambino_,” said Laura, holding out her plate with a comic gesture.

Cæsar burst out laughing, and after lunch he took Laura to the station and remained in Rome alone. His two chief occupations consisted in making love respectfully to the Countess Brenda and going to walk with Preciozi.

The Countess Brenda was manifestly coming around; in the evening Cæsar would take a seat beside her and start a serious conversation about religious and philosophical matters. The Countess was a well-educated and religious woman; but beneath all her culture one could see the ardent dark woman, still young, and with intense eyes.

Cæsar made it a spiritual training to talk to the Countess. She often turned the conversation to questions of love, and discussed them with apparent keenness and insight, but it was evident that all her ideas about love came out of novels. Beyond a doubt, her calm, vulgar husband did not fill up the emptiness of her soul, because the Countess was discontented and had a vague hope that somewhere, above or beneath the commonplaces of the day, there was a mysterious region where the ineffable reigned.

Cæsar, who hadn’t much faith in the ineffable, used to listen to her with a certain amazement, as if the plump, strong woman had been a visionary incapable of understanding reality.

In the daytime Cæsar went walking with Preciozi and they talked of their respective plans.

_SOLITARY WALKS_

Often Cæsar went out alone, chewing the end of his thoughts as he strolled in the streets, working out possible schemes of investments or of politics.

When he got away from the main streets, he kept finding some corner at every step that left him astonished at its fantastic, theatrical air. Suddenly he would discover himself before a high wall, on top of which were statues covered with moss, or huge terra-cotta jars. Those decorations would stand out against the dark foliage of the Roman ilex and the tall, black cypresses. At the end of a street would rise a tall palm, drooping its branches over a little square, or a stone pine, like the one in the Aldobrandini garden.

“These people were real artists,” Cæsar would murmur, and mean it as a fact, not taking it for either praise or blame.

His curiosity got excited, despite his determination not to resemble a tourist in any way. The low windows of a palace would let him see lofty ceilings with great stretches of painting, or decorated with medallions and legends; a balcony would display a thick curtain of ivy that hid the railings; here he would read a Latin inscription cut in a marble tablet, there he would come upon a black lane between two old houses, with a battered lantern at its entrance. In the part of town between the Corso and the Tiber, which is full of narrow, crooked old streets, he loved to wander until he was lost.

Some details already familiar, he was delighted to see again; he always halted to look down the Via della Pillotta, with its arches over the street; and the little flower-market in the Piazza di Spagna always gave him a sensation of joy.

At dusk Cæsar would walk in the centre of town; the bars filled up with people who loved to take cakes and sweet wine; on the sidewalks the itinerant merchants cried their trifling wares; along the Corso a procession of carriages full of tourists passed rapidly, and a few well-appointed victorias came driving back from the Pincio and the Villa Borghese.

Once in a while Cæsar went out in the evening after dinner. There was scant animation in the streets, theatres didn’t interest him, and he would soon return to the hotel salon to chat with the Countess Brenda.

Later, in his room, he would write to Alzugaray, giving him his impressions.

IX. NEW ACQUAINTANCES

“I PROTESTANTI DELLA SIMPATÍA”

It began again to rain disastrously; the days were made up of downpours and squalls, to the great despair of the foreigners.

At night the Piazza Esedra was a fine sight from the hotel balcony. The arc lights reflected their glow in the lakes of rain beneath them, and the great jet of the fountain in the centre took on tones of blue and mother-of-pearl, where the rays of the electric light pierced through it.

In the hotel parlour one dance followed another. Everybody complained gaily of the bad weather.

Shortly before the middle of Lent there arrived a Parisian family at the hotel, composed of a mother with two daughters and a companion.

This family might be considered a representation of the _entente cordiale_. The mother was French, the widow first of a Spaniard, Señor Sandoval, by whom she had had one daughter, and then of an Englishman, Mr. Dawson, by whom she had had another.

Mme. Dawson was a fat, imposing lady, with tremendous brilliants in her ears and somewhat theatrical clothes; Mile. Sandoval, the elder daughter, was of Arab type, with black eyes, an aquiline nose, pale rose-coloured lips, and a malicious smile, full of mystery, as if it revealed restless and diabolical intentions.

Her half-sister, Mile. Dawson, was a contrast, being the perfect type of a grotesque Englishwoman, with a skin like a beet, and freckles.

The governess, Mile. Cadet, was not at all pretty, but she was gay and sprightly. These four women seated in the middle of the dining-room, a little stiff, a little out of temper, seemed, particularly the first few days, to defy anybody that might have wished to approach them. They replied coolly to the formal bows of the other guests, and none of them cared to take part in the dances.

The handsome Signor Carminatti shot incendiary glances at Mlle. de Sandoval; but she remained scornful; so one evening, as the Dawson family came out of the dining-room, the Neapolitan waved his hand toward them and said:

“I protestante della simpatia.”

Cæsar made much of this phrase, because it was apt, and he took it that Carminatti considered the ladies protestants against friendliness, because they had paid no attention to the charms that he displayed in their honour.

_CONSEQUENCES OF THE RAIN_

Two or three days later Mme. Dawson bowed to Cæsar on passing him in the hall, and asked him:

“Aren’t you Spanish?”

“Yes, madam.”

“But don’t you speak French?”

“Very little.”

“My daughter is Spanish too.”

“She is a perfect Spanish type.”

“Really?” asked the daughter referred to.

“Thoroughly.”

“Then I am happy.”

In the evening, after dinner, Cæsar again joined Mme. Dawson and began to talk with her. The Frenchwoman had a tendency to philosophize, to criticize, and to find out everything. She had no great capacity for admiration, and nothing she saw succeeded in dragging warm eulogies from her lips. There was none of the “_bello! bellissimo!_” of the Italian ladies in her talk, but a series of exact epithets.

Mme. Dawson had left all her capacity for admiration in France, and was visiting Italy for the purpose of arriving as soon as possible at the conclusion that there is no town like Paris, no nation like the French, and it didn’t matter much to Cæsar whether he agreed or denied it.

Mlle. de Sandoval had a great curiosity about things in Spain and an absurd idea about everything Spanish.

“It seems impossible,” thought Cæsar, “how stupid French people are about whatsoever is not French.”

Mlle. de Sandoval asked Cæsar a lot of questions, and finally, with an ironic gesture, said to him:

“You mustn’t let us keep you from going to talk with the Countess Brenda. She is looking over at you a great deal.”

Cæsar became a trifle dubious; indeed, the Countess was looking at him in a fixed and disdainful way.

“The Countess is a very intelligent woman,” said Cæsar; “I think you would all like her very much.”

Mme. Dawson said nothing; Cæsar rose, took his leave of the family, and went over to speak to the Countess and her daughter. She received him coldly. Cæsar thought he would stay long enough to be polite and then get away, when Carminatti, speaking to him in a very friendly way and calling him “_mio caro_,” asked him to introduce him to Mme. Dawson.

He did so, and when he had left the handsome Neapolitan leaning back in a chair beside the French ladies, he made the excuse that he had a letter to write, and said good-night.

“I see that you are an ogre,” said Mlle. de Sandoval.

“Do you want me for anything?”

“No, no; you may go when you choose.”

Cæsar repaired to his room.

“I don’t mind those people,” he said; “but if they think I am a man made for entertaining ladies, they are very clever.”

The next day Mme. Dawson talked with Cæsar very affably, and Mlle. de Sandoval made a few ironical remarks about his savage ways.

Of all the family Cæsar conceived that Mlle. Cadet was the most intelligent. She was a French country girl, very jovial, blond, with a turned-up nose, and on the whole insignificant looking. When she spoke, her voice had certain falsetto inflexions that were very comical.

Mlle. Cadet was on to everything the moment it happened. Cæsar asked her jokingly about the people in the hotel, and he was thunderstruck to find that she had discovered in three or four days who all the guests were and where they came from.

Mlle. Cadet also told him that Carminatti had sent an ardent declaration of love to the Sandoval girl the first day he saw her.

“The devil!” exclaimed Cæsar. “What an inflammable Neapolitan it is! And what did she reply?”

“What would she reply? Nothing.”

“As you are already familiar with everything going on here,” said Cæsar, “I am going to ask you a question: what is the noise in the court every night? I am always thinking of asking somebody.”

“Why, it is charging the accumulator of the lift,” replied Mlle. Cadet.

“You have relieved me from a terrible doubt which worried me.”

“I have never heard a noise,” said Mlle. de Sandoval, breaking into the conversation.

“That’s because your room is on the square,” Cæsar answered, “and the noise is in the court; on the poor side of the house.”

“Pshaw! There is no reason to complain,” remarked Mlle. Cadet, “if they give us a serenade.”

“Do you consider yourself poor?” Mlle. de Sandoval asked Cæsar, disdainfully.

“Yes, I consider myself poor, because I am.”

During the following days Mme. Dawson and her daughters were introduced to the rest of the people in the hotel, and became intimate with them. The “Contessina” Brenda and the San Martino girls made friends with the French girls, and the Neapolitan and his gentlemen friends flitted among them all.

The Countess Brenda at first behaved somewhat stiff with Mme. Dawson and her daughters, but later she little by little submitted and permitted them to be her friends.

She introduced the French ladies to the other ladies in the hotel; but doubtless her aristocratic ideas would not allow her to consider Mlle. Cadet a person worthy to be introduced, for whenever she got to her she acted as if she didn’t know her.

The governess, noticing this repeated contempt, would blush at it, and once she murmured, addressing Cæsar with tears ready to escape from her eyes:

“That’s a nice thing to do! Just because I am poor, I don’t think they ought to despise me.”

“Don’t pay any attention,” said Cæsar, quite aloud; “these middle-class people are often very rude.”

Mlle. de Sandoval gave Cæsar a look half startled and half reproving; and he explained, smiling:

“I was telling Mlle. Cadet a funny story.”

Mme. Dawson and her daughters soon became friends with the most distinguished persons in the hotel; only the Marchesa Sciacca, the Maltese, avoided them as if they inspired her with profound contempt.

In a few days the Countess Brenda and Cæsar’s friendship passed beyond the bonds of friendship; but in the course of time it cooled off again.

_INFLUENCE OF THE INCLINATION OF THE EARTH’S AXIS ON WHAT IS CALLED LOVE_

One evening, when the Countess Brenda’s daughter had left Rome to go with her father to a villa they owned in the North, the Countess and Cæsar had a long conversation in the salon. They were alone; a great tenor was singing at the Costanzi, and the whole hotel was at the theatre. The Countess chatted with Cæsar, she reclining in a chaise longue, and he seated in a low chair. That evening the Countess was feeling in a provocative humour, and she made fun of Cæsar’s mode of life and his ideas, not with the phrases and the manners of a great lady, but with the boldness and spice of a woman of the people.

The angle that the earth’s axis makes with the trajectory of the ecliptic, and which produces those absurd phenomena that we Spaniards call seasons, determined at that period the arrival of spring, and spring had no doubt shaken the Countess Brenda’s nerves.

Spring gave cooling inflexions to the lady’s voice and made her express herself with warmth and with a shamelessly libertine air.

No doubt the core of her personality was joyful, provoking, and somewhat licentious.

Her eyes flashed, and on her lips there was a sensual expression of challenge and mockery.

Cæsar, that evening, without knowing why, was dull at expressing himself, and depressed. Some of the Countess’s questions left him in a stupid unreadiness.

“Poor child; I am sorry for you,” she suddenly said.

“Why?”

“Because you are so weak; you have such an air of exhaustion. What do you do to make you like this? I am sure you ought to be given some sort of iron tonic, like the anaemic girls.”

“Do you really think I am so weak?” asked Cæsar.

“Isn’t it written all over you?”

“Well, anyway, I am stronger than you, Countess.”

“In a discussion, perhaps. But otherwise.... You have no strength except in your brains.”

“And in my hands. Give me your hand.”

The Countess gave him her hand and Cæsar pressed it tighter and tighter.

“You are strong after all,” she said.

“That is nothing. You wait,” and Cæsar squeezed the Countess’s hand until he made her give a sharp scream. A servant entered the salon. “It’s nothing,” said the Countess, getting up; “I seemed to have turned my foot.”

“I will take you to your room,” exclaimed Cæsar, offering her his arm.

“No, no. Thanks very much.”

“Yes. It has to be.”

“Then, all right,” she murmured, and added, “Now you frighten me.”

“Bah, you will get over that!” and Cæsar went into her room with her....

The next day Cæsar appeared in the salon looking as if he had been buried and dug up.

“What is the matter?” Mme. Dawson and her daughters asked him.

“Nothing; only I had a headache and I took a big dose of antipyrine.”

The relations of the Brenda lady and Cæsar soon cooled. Their temperaments were incompatible: there was no harmony between their imaginations or between their skins. In reality, the Countess, with all her romanticism, did not care for long and compromising liaisons, but for hotel adventures, which leave neither vivid memories nor deep imprints. Cæsar noted that despite her lyricism and her sentimental talk, there was a great deal of firmness in this plump woman, and a lack of sensitiveness.

Moreover, this woman, so little aristocratic in intimacy, had much vanity about stupid things and a great passion for jewelry; but what contributed most to making Cæsar feel a profound hatred for her was his discovering what good health she enjoyed. This good health seemed offensive to Cæsar, above all when he compared it to his own, to his weak nerves and his restless brain.

From considering her a spiritual and delicate lady he passed to considering her a powerful mare, which deserved no more than a whip and spurs.

The love-affair contributed to upsetting Cæsar and making him more sarcastic and biting. This spiritual ulceration of Cæsar’s profoundly astonished Mlle. Cadet.

One day a Roman aristocrat, nothing less than a prince, came to call on Mme. Dawson. He talked with her, with her daughters, and the Countess Brenda, and held forth about whether the hotels in Rome were full or empty, about the _pensions_, and the food in the restaurants, with a great wealth of details; afterwards he lamented that Mme. Dawson, as a relative of his, even though a very distant one, should have gone to a _ricevimento_ at the French Embassy, and he boasted of belonging to the Black party in Rome.

When he was gone, Mlle. Cadet came over to Cæsar, who was sunk in an arm-chair gazing at the ceiling, and asked him:

“What did you think of the prince?”

“What prince?”

“The gentleman who was here talking a moment ago.”

“Ah, was he a prince?”

“Yes.”

“As he talked about nothing but hotels, I took him to be the proprietor of one.”

Mlle. Cadet told Mme. Dawson what Cæsar had said, and she and her daughters were amused at his error.

X. A BALL

A little later than the real day, they got up a ball at the hotel in celebration of the French holiday Micarême.

When Cæsar was asked if he thought of going to the ball, he said no; but Mlle. de Sandoval warned him that if he didn’t go she would never speak to him again, and Mme. Dawson and the governess threatened him with like excommunication.

“But you know, these balls are very amusing,” said Mme. Dawson.

“Do you think so?”

“I do, and so do you.”

“Besides, an observer like you,” added Mlle. Cadet, “can devote himself to taking notes.”

“And why do you conclude that I am an observer?” asked Cæsar.

“The idea! Because it is evident.”

“And an observer with very evil intentions,” insisted Mlle. de Sandoval.

“You credit me with qualities I haven’t got.”

Cæsar had to accede, and the Dawson ladies and he were the first to enter the salon and take their seats. In one corner was a glass vase hung from the ceiling by a pulley.

“What is that?” Mme. Dawson asked a servant.

“It is a glass vase full of bonbons, which you have to break with a pole with your eyes closed.”

“Ah, yes.”

Since nobody else came in, the Dawson girls and Cæsar wandered about looking into the cupboards and finding the Marchesa Sciacca’s music and the Neapolitan’s. They looked out one of the salon windows. It was a detestable night, raining and hailing; the great drops were bouncing on the sidewalks of the Piazza Esedra. Water and hail fell mixed together, and for moments at a time the ground would stay white, as if covered with a thin coating of pearls.

The fountain in the centre cast up its streams of water, which mingled with the rain, and the central jet shone in the lays of the arc-lights; now and again the livid brilliance of lightning illuminated the stone arches and the rumbling of thunder was heard...

Still nobody else came to the salon. Doubtless the ladies were preparing their toilets very carefully.

The first to appear, dressed for the ball, were the Marchesa Sciacca and her husband, accompanied by the inevitable Carminatti.

The Marchesa, with her habitual brutality toward everybody that lived in the house, bowed with formal coolness to Mme. Dawson, and sat down by the piano, as far away as possible from the French ladies.

She wore a gown of green silk, with lace and gold ornaments. She was very décolletée and had a fretful air. Her husband was small and stooped, with a long moustache and shiny eyes; on his cheek-bones were the red spots frequent in consumptives, and he spoke in a sharp voice.

“Are you acquainted with the Marquis?” Mme. Dawson asked Cæsar.

“Yes, he is a tiresome busybody,” said Cæsar, “the most boresome fellow you could find. He stops you in the street to tell you things. The other day he made me wait a quarter of an hour at the door of a tourist agency, while he inquired the quickest way of getting to Moscow. ‘Are you thinking of going there?’ I asked him. ‘No; I just wanted to find out....’ He is an idiot.”

“God preserve us from your comments. What will you be saying about us?” exclaimed Mlle. de Sandoval.

The Countess Brenda entered, with her husband, her daughter, and a friend. She was dressed in black, low in the neck, and wore a collar of brilliants as big as filberts, which surrounded her bosom with rays of light and blinding reflections.

Her friend was a young lady of consummate beauty; a brunette with colour in her skin and features of flawless perfection; with neither the serious air nor the statuesqueness of a great beauty, and with none of the negroid tone of most brunettes. When she smiled she showed her teeth, which were a burst of whiteness. She was rather loaded with jewels, which gave her the aspect of an ancient goddess.

“You, who find everything wrong,” said Mlle. Cadet to Cæsar, “what have you to say of that woman? I have been looking at her ever since she came in, and I don’t find the slightest defect.”

“Nor I. It is a face which gives no indication that the least shadow of sorrow has ever crossed it. It is beauty as serene as a landscape or as the sea when calm. Moreover, that very perfection robs it of character. It seems to be less a human face than a symbol of an apathetic being and an apathetic beauty.”

“We have found her defect,” said Mlle. Cadet.

After introducing her friend to the ladies and to the young men, who were all dazzled, the Countess Brenda sat down near Mme. Dawson, in an antique arm-chair.

She was imposing.

“You look like a queen holding audience,” Mlle. de Sandoval said to her.

“Your beloved is like an actual monument,” Mlle. Cadet murmured jokingly, aside to Cæsar.

“Yes, I think we ought to station a veteran at the door,” retorted Cæsar.

“A veteran! No, for mercy’s sake! Poor lady! A warrior in active service, one on whom all the antipyrine in the world would make no impression,” Mlle. Cadet replied maliciously.

Cæsar smiled at the allusion.

_SILENO MACARRONI_

Among the people there was one gentlerman that attracted Mlle. Cadet’s special attention. He was apart from any group, but he knew everybody that arrived. This gentleman was fat, smiling, smooth-shaven, with a round, chubby, rosy face and the body of a Silenus. When he spoke he arched and lowered his eyebrows alternately, rolled his eyes, gesticulated with his fat, soft hands, and smiled and showed his teeth.

His way of greeting people was splendid.

“Come sta, marchesa?” he would say. “Cavaliere!” “Commendatore!” “La contessina va bene?” “Oh! Egregio!”

And the good gentleman would spread his arms, and close them, and look as if he wanted to embrace the whole of humanity to his abdomen, covered with a white waistcoat.

“Who can that gentleman be?” Mlle. Cadet asked various times.

“That? That is Signor Sileno Macarroni,” said Cæsar, “Commander of the Order of the Mighty Belly, Knight of the Round Buttocks, and of other distinguished Orders.”

“He is a singer,” said the Countess Brenda to Mlle. de Sandoval in a low tone.

“He is a singer,” repeated Mlle. de Sandoval to her governess in a similar tone.

“Sileno Macarroni is a singer,” said Mlle. Cadet, with equal mysteriousness, addressing Cæsar.

“But is our friend Macarroni going to sung?” asked Cæsar.

The question was passed from one person to another, and it was discovered that Macarroni was going to sing. As a matter of fact, the fat Silenus did sing, and everybody was startled to hear a high tenor voice issue from within that voluminous human being. The fat Silenus had the misfortune to sing false in the midst of his bravest trills, and the poor soul was overcome, despite the applause.

“Poor Macarroni!” said Cæsar, “his high tenor heart must be broken to bits.” “He is going,” put in Mlle. Cadet. “What a shame!” Sileno vanished and the pianist began to play waltzes.

_THE WORLD AS A ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN_

Carminatti was the first on the floor with his partner, who was the Marchesa Sciacca.

The Maltese lady danced with an abandon and a feline languor that imposed respect. One of the San Martino girls, dressed in white, like a vaporous fairy, danced with an officer in a blue uniform, a slim, distinguished person with languid eyes and rosy cheeks, who caused a veritable sensation among the ladies.

The other San Martino, in pale pink, was on a sofa chatting with a man of the cut-throat type, of jaundiced complexion, with bright eyes and a moustache so long as almost to touch his eyebrows.

“He is a Sicilian,” Mlle. Cadet told Cæsar; “behind us here they are saying rather curious things about the two of them.”

The Countess Brenda’s daughter was magnificent, with her milk-white skin, and her arms visible through gauze. Despite her beauty she didn’t count many admirers; she was too insipid, and the majority of the young men turned with greater enthusiasm to the married women and to those of a very provocative type.

Mlle. de Sandoval, the most sought after of all, didn’t wish to dance.

“My daughter is really very stiff,” Mme. Dawson remarked. “Spanish women are like that.”

“Yes, they often are,” said Cæsar.

Among all these Italians, who were rather theatrical and ridiculous, insincere and exaggerated, but who had great pliancy and great agility in their movements and their expression, there was one German family, consisting of several persons: a married couple with sons and daughters who seemed to be all made from one piece, cut from the same block. While the rest were busy with the little incidents of the ball, they were talking about the Baths of Caracalla, the aqueducts, the Colosseum. The father, the mother, and the children repeated their lesson in Roman archeology, which they had learned splendidly.

“What very absurd people they are,” murmured Cæsar, watching them.

“Why?” said Mlle. de Sandoval.

“It appeals to these Germans as their duty to make one parcel of everything artistic there is in a country and swallow it whole; which seems to an ignoramus like me, a stupid piece of pretentiousness. The French, on the contrary, are on more solid ground; they don’t understand anything that is not French, and they travel to have the pleasure of saying that Paris is the finest thing on earth.”

“It’s great luck to be so perfect as you are,” retorted Mlle. de Sandoval, violently, “you can see other people’s faults so clearly.”

“You mistake,” replied Cæsar, coldly, “I do not rely on my own good qualities to enable me to speak badly of others.”

“Then what do you rely on?”

“On my defects.”

“Ah, have you defects? Do you admit it?”

“I not only admit it, but I take pride in having them.”

Mlle. de Sandoval turned her head away contemptuously; the twist Cæsar gave to her questions appeared to irritate her.

“Mlle. de Sandoval doesn’t like me much,” said Cæsar to Mlle. Cadet.

“No? She generally says nice things about you.”

“Perhaps my clothes appeal to her, or the way I tie my cravat; but my ideas displease her.”

“Because you say such severe things.”

“Why do you say that at this moment? Because I spoke disparagingly of those Germans? Are they attractive to you?”

“Oh, no! Not at all.”

“They look like hunting dogs.” “But whom do you approve of? The English?”

“Not the English, either. They are a herd of cattle; sentimental, ridiculous people who are in ecstatics over their aristocracy and over their king. Latin peoples are something like cats, they are of the feline race; a Frenchman is like a fat, well-fed cat; an Italian is like an old Angora which has kept its beautiful fur; and the Spaniard is like the cats on a roof, skinny, bare of fur, almost too weak to howl with despair and hunger.... Then there are the ophidians, the Jews, the Greeks, the Armenians....”

“Then for you the world is a zoological garden?”

“Well, isn’t it?”

At midnight they tried to break the glass jar of bonbons. They blindfolded various men, and one by one they made them turn around a couple of times and then try to break the jar with a stick.

It was the Marquis Sciacca that did break the glass vase, and the pieces fell on his head.

“Have you hurt yourself?” people asked him.

“No,” said Cæsar, reassuringly, but aside; “his head is protected.”

_CHIROMANTIC INTERLUDE_

After this cornucopia number, there was a series of other games and amusements, which required a hand-glass, a candle, and a bottle. The conversation in Mlle. de Sandoval’s group jumped from one thing to another and finally arrived at palmistry.

Mlle. de Sandoval asked Cæsar if he, as a Spaniard, knew how to tell fortunes by the hand, and he jokingly replied that he did. Three or four hands were stretched out toward Cæsar, and he said whatsoever his imagination suggested, foolishness, absurdities, impertinences; a little of everything.

When anybody was a bit puzzled at Cæsar’s words, he said:

“Don’t pay any attention to it; these are absurdities.”

Afterwards Mlle. Cadet told Cæsar that she was going to cast his horoscope. “Good! Out with it.”

The governess, who was clever, studied Cæsar’s hand and expressed herself in sibylline terms:

“You have something of everything, a little of some things and a great deal of others; you are not a harmonious individual.”

“No?”

“No. You are very intelligent.”

“Thank you.”

“Let the sibyl talk,” said the Sandoval girl.

“You have a strong sense of logic,” the governess went on.

“That’s possible.”

“You are good and bad! You have much imagination and very little; you are at the same time very brave and very timid. You have a loving nature, but it is asleep, and little will-power.”

“Little and... a great deal,” said Cæsar.

“No, little.”

“Do you believe that I have little will-power?”

“I am telling you what your hand says.”

“Look here. My hand’s opinion doesn’t interest me so much as yours, because you are an intelligent woman. Do you believe I have no will-power?”

“A sibyl doesn’t discuss her affirmations.”

“Now you are worried about your lack of will-power,” said Mlle. de Sandoval, mockingly.

“Yes, I am, a bit.”

“Well, I think you have will-power enough,” she retorted; “what you do lack is a little more amiability.”

“Fortunately for you and for me, you are not so perspicacious in psychology as this young lady.”

“I don’t expect to earn my living telling fortunes.”

“I don’t believe this young lady expects to, either. You have told me what I am,” Cæsar pursued; “now tell me what is going to happen to me.”

“Let me look,” said Mlle. Cadet; “close your hand. You will make a journey.” “Very good! I like that.”

“You will get into a desperate struggle....”

“I like that, too.”

“And you will win, and you will be defeated....”

“I don’t like that so much.”

Mile. Cadet could not give other details. Her sibylline science extended no further. During this chiromantic interlude, the dancing kept up, until finally, about three in the morning, the party ended.

XI. A SOUNDING-LINE IN THE DARK WORLD

_THE ADVICE OF TWO ABBÉS_

The Abbé Preciozi several times advised Cæsar to make a new attempt at a reconciliation with the Cardinal; but Cæsar always refused.

“He is a man incapable of understanding me,” he would insist with naïve arrogance.

Preciozi felt a great liking for his new friend, who invited him to meals at good hotels and treated him very frequently. Almost every morning he went to call on Cæsar on one pretext or another, and they would go for a walk and chat about various things.

Preciozi was beginning to believe that his friend was a man with a future. Some explanations that Cæsar gave him about the mechanism of the stock-exchange convinced the abbé that he was in the presence of a great financier.

Preciozi talked to all his friends and acquaintances about Cardinal Fort’s nephew, picturing him as an extraordinary man; some took these praises as a joke; others thought that it was really very possible that the Spaniard had great talent; only one abbé, who was a teacher in a college, felt a desire to meet the Cardinal’s nephew, and Preciozi introduced him to Cæsar.

This abbé was named Cittadella, and he was fat, rosy, and blond; he looked more like a singer than a priest.

Cæsar invited the two abbés to dine at a restaurant and requested Preciozi to do the ordering.

“So you are a nephew of Cardinal Fort’s?” asked Cittadella. “Yes.”

“His own nephew?”

“His own nephew; son of his sister.”

“And he hasn’t done anything for you?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s a pity. He is a man of great influence, of great talent.”

“Influence, I believe; talent, I doubt,” said Cæsar.

“Oh, no, no! He is an intelligent man.”

“But I have heard that his _Theological Commentaries_ is absolutely absurd.”

“No, no.”

“A crude, banal book, full of stupidities....”

“_Macché_!” exclaimed the indignant Preciozi, neglecting the culinary conflict he was engaged in.

“All right. It makes no difference,” replied Cæsar, smiling. “Whether he is a famous man, as you two say, or a blockhead, as I think, the fact remains that my uncle doesn’t wish to have anything to do with me.”

“You must have done something to him,” said Cittadella.

“No; the only thing is that when I was small they told me the Cardinal wished me to be a priest, and I answered that I didn’t care to be.”

“And why so?”

“It seems to me a poor job. It’s evident that one doesn’t make much at it.”

Cittadella sighed.

“Yes, and what’s more,” Preciozi put in, “this gentleman says to anybody who cares to listen, that religion is a farce, that Catholicism is like a dish of Jewish meat with Roman sauce. Is it possible that a Cardinal should bother about a nephew that talks like that?”

The Abbé Cittadella looked very serious and remarked that it is necessary to believe, or at least to seem to believe, in the truths of religion.

“Is the Cardinal supposed to have money?” asked Cæsar.

“Yes, I should say he is,” replied Preciozi. “Your sister and you will be the only heirs,” said Cittadella.

“Of course,” agreed Preciozi.

“Has he made a will?” asked Cæsar.

“All the better if he hasn’t,” said one of the abbés.

“If we could only poison him,” sighed Cæsar, with melancholy.

“Don’t talk of such things just as we are going to eat,” said Preciozi.

The dinner was brought, and the two abbés did it the honour it deserved.

Preciozi deserved congratulations for his excellent selection. They ordered good wines and drank merry toasts.

“What an admirable secretary Preciozi would be, if I got to be a personage!” exclaimed Cæsar. “Twenty thousand francs or so salary, his board, and the duty of choosing the dinner for the next day. That’s my proposal.”

The abbé blushed with pleasure, emptied his glass of wine, and murmured:

“If it depended on me!”

“The fact is that the way things are arranged today is no good,” said Cæsar. “A hundred years ago, by the mere fact of being a Cardinal’s nephew, I should have been somebody.”

“That’s true,” exclaimed Preciozi.

“And as I should have no scruples, and neither would you two, we would have plunged into life strenuously, and sacked Rome, and the whole world would be ours.”

“You talk like a Cæsar Borgia,” said Preciozi, aroused. “You are a true Spaniard.”

“Today one must have something to stand on,” said Cittadella, coldly.

“Friend Cittadella,” retorted Cæsar, “I, as you see me here, am the man who knows the most about financial matters in all Spain, and I believe I shall soon get to where I can say, in all Europe. I put my knowledge at the service of whoever pays me. I am like one of your old _condottieri_, a mercenary general. I am ready to win battles for the Jewish bank, or against the Jewish bank, for the Church or against the Church.”

“For the Church is better. Against the Church we cannot assist you,” said Preciozi.

“I will try first, for the Church. To whom can you recommend me first?”

The two abbés said nothing, and drank in silence.

“Perhaps Verry would see him,” said Cittadella.

“Hm!...” replied Preciozi. “I rather doubt it.”

“What sort of a party is he?” asked Cæsar.

“He is one of those _prelati_ that come out of the College of Nobles,” said Cittadella, “and who get on, even if they are no good. Here they consider him a haughty Spaniard; they blame him for wearing his robes, and for always taking an automobile when he goes to Castel Gandolfo. The priests hate him because he is a Jesuit and a Spaniard.”

“And wherein does his strength lie?”

“In the Society, and in his knowing several languages. He was educated in England.”

“From what you two tell me of him, he gives me the impression of a fatuous person.”

A bottle of champagne was brought in and the three of them drank, toasting and touching glasses.

“If I were in your place,” said Cittadella, after thinking a long while, “I shouldn’t try to get at people in high places, but people who are inconspicuous and yet have influence in your country.”

“For instance....”

“For instance, Father Herreros, at the convent in Trastevere.”

“And Father Miró too,” added Preciozi, “and if you could talk to Father Ferrer, of the Gregorian University, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“That will be more difficult,” said Cittadella.

“You could tell them,” Preciozi suggested, “that your uncle the Cardinal sent you, and hint that he doesn’t want anybody to know that he is backing you.” “And if somebody should write to my uncle?”

“You mustn’t say anything definite. You must speak ambiguously. Besides, in case they did write, we would fix it up in the office.”

Cæsar began to laugh naïvely. Afterwards, the two abbés, a little excited by the food and the good wine, started in to have a violent discussion, speaking Italian. Cæsar paid the bill, and pretending that he had an urgent engagement, took leave of them and went out.

_A SPANISH MONK_

The next day Cæsar went to look up Father Herreros. He had not yet succeeded in forming a plan. His only idea was to see if he could take advantage of some chance: to follow a scent and be on the alert, in case something new should start up on one side or the other.

Father Herreros lived in a convent in Trastevere. Cæsar took the tram in the Piazza Venezia, and got out after crossing the Tiber, near the Via delle Fratte.

He soon found the convent; it had a yellow portal with a Latin inscription which sang the gymnastic glories of Saint Pascual Bailón. Above the inscription there was a picture, in which a monk, no doubt Bailón, was dancing among the clouds.

On the lintel of the gate were the arms of Spain, and at the sides, two medallions bearing hands wounded in the palm.

The convent door was old and quartered. Cæsar knocked.

A lay-brother, with a suspicious glance, came out to admit him, told him to wait, and left him alone. After some while, he came back and asked him to follow him.

They went down a small passage and up a staircase, which was at the end, and then along a corridor on the main floor. On one side of this corridor, in his cell, they found Father Herreros.

Cæsar, after bowing and introducing himself, sat down, as the monk asked him to do, in a chair with its back to the light. Cæsar began to explain why he had come, and as he had prepared what he was going to say, he employed his attention, while speaking, on the cage and the kind of big bird which were before his eyes.

Father Herreros had a big rough head, black heavy eyebrows, a short nose, an enormous mouth, yellow teeth, and grey hair. He wore a chocolate-coloured robe, open enough to show his whole neck down to his chest. The movement of the good monk’s lips was that of a man who wished to pass for keen and insinuating. His robe was dirty and he doubtless had the habit of leaving cigarette stubs on the table.

The cell had one window, and in front of it a bookcase. Cæsar made an effort to read the titles. They were almost all Latin books, the kind that nobody reads.

Father Herreros began to ask Cæsar questions. In his brain, he was doubtless wondering why Cardinal Fort’s nephew should come to him.

After many useless words they got to the concrete point that Cæsar wanted to take up, Father Herreros’s acquaintance in Spain, and the monk said that he knew a very rich widow who had property in Toledo. When Cæsar went to Madrid, he would give him a letter of recommendation to her.

“I cannot keep you any longer now, because a Mexican lady is waiting for me,” said Father Herreros.

Cæsar arose, and after shaking the monk’s fat hand, he left the convent. He returned to Rome on foot, crossing the river again, and looking at the Tiberine island; and arrived without hurrying at the hotel. He wrote to his friend Azugaray, requesting him to discover, by the indications he gave him, who the rich widow that had property in Toledo could be.

_THE LICENTIATE MIRÓ_

The next day Cæsar decided to pursue his investigations, and went to see Father Miró.

Father Miró lived in a college in the Via Monserrato. Cæsar inspected the map of Rome, looking for that street, and found that it is located in the vicinity of the Campo de’ Fiori, and took his way thither.

The spring day was magnificent; the sky was blue, without a cloud; the tiled roofs of some of the palaces were decorated with borders of plants and flowers; in the street, dry and flooded with sunshine, a water-carrier in a cart full of fat, green bottles, passed by, singing and cracking his whip.

Cæsar crossed the Campo de’ Fiori, a very lively, plebeian square, full of canvas awnings with open stalls of fruit under them. In the middle stood the statue of Giordano Bruno, with a crown of flowers around its neck.

Then he took the Via de’ Cappellari, a narrow lane and dirty enough. From one side to the other clothes were hung out to dry.

He came to the college and entered the church contiguous to it. He asked for Father Miró; a sacristan with a long moustache and a worn blue overcoat, took him to another entrance, made him mount an old wooden staircase, and conducted him to the office of the man he was looking for.

Father Miró was a tiny little man, dark and filthy, with a worn-out cassock, covered with dandruff, and a large dirty square cap with a big rosette.

“Will you tell me what you want?” said the little priest in a sullen tone.

Cæsar introduced himself, and explained in a few words who he was and what he proposed.

Father Miró, without asking him to sit down, answered rapidly, saying that he had no acquaintance with matters of finance or speculation.

Cæsar felt a shudder of anger at the rudeness with which he was treated by this draggled little priest, and felt a vehement desire to take him by the neck and twist it, like a chicken’s.

Despite his anger, he did not change expression, and he asked the priest smilingly if he knew who could give him advice about those questions.

“You can see Father Ferrer at the Gregorian University, or Father Mendia. He is an encyclopedist. It was he who wrote the theological portion of the encyclical _Pascendi_, the one about Modernism. He is a man of very great learning.”

“He will do. Many thanks,” and Cæsar turned toward the door.

“Excuse me for not having asked you to sit down, but...”

“No matter,” Cæsar replied, rapidly, and he went out to the stairs.

In view of the poor result of his efforts, he decided to go to the Gregorian University. He was told it was in the Via del Seminario, and supposed it must be the large edifice with little windowed bridges over two streets.

That edifice was the Collegio Romano; the Gregorian University was in the same street, but further on, opposite the Post Office Department. Father Ferrer could not receive him, because he was holding a class; and after they had gone up and come down and taken Cæsar’s card for Father Mendia, they told him he was out.

Cæsar concluded that it was not so easy to find a crack through which one could get information of what was going on in the clerical world.

“I see that the Church gives them all a defensive instinct which they make good use of. They are really only poor devils, but they have a great organization, and it cannot be easy to get one’s fingers through the meshes of their net.”

XII. A MEETING ON THE PINCIO

_A WALK IN THE VILLA BORGHESE_

At the beginning of Holy Week Laura returned to the hotel, at lunch-time.

“And your husband?” Cæsar asked her.

“He didn’t want to come. Rome bores him. He is giving all his attention to taking care of the heart-disease he says he has.”

“Is it serious?”

“I think not. Every time I see him I find him with a new disease and a new diet; one time it is vegetarian, another nothing but meat, another time he says one should eat only grapes, or nothing but bread.”

“Then I see that he belongs to the illustrious brotherhood of the insane.”

“You are not far from joining that brotherhood yourself.”

“Dear sister, I am one of the few sane men that go stumbling around this insane asylum let loose we call the earth.”

“What you say about men is the truth, even though you are not an exception. Really, the more I have to do with men, the more convinced I am that any one of them who is not crazy, is stupid or vain or proud.... How much more intelligent, discreet, logical we women are!”

“Don’t tell me. You are marvels; modest, kindly toward your rivals, so little given to humiliating your neighbours, male or female....”

“Yes, yes; but we are not so conceited or such play-actors as you are. A woman may think herself pretty and amiable and sweet, and not be so. That is true; but on the other hand, every man thinks himself braver than the Cid, even if he is afraid of a fly, and more talented than Seneca, even if he is a dolt.”

“To sum up, men are a calamity.”

“Just so.”

“And women spend their lives fishing for these calamities.”

“They need them; there are inferior things which still are necessary.”

“And there are superior things which are good for nothing.”

“Will you come and take a drive with me, philosopher brother?”

“Where?”

“Let’s go to the Villa Borghese. The carriage will be here in a moment.”

“All right. Let us go there.”

A two-horse victoria with rubber tires was waiting at the door, and Laura and Cæsar got in. The carriage went past the Treasury, and out the Porta Salaria, and entered the gardens of the Villa Borghese.

The morning had been rainy; the ground was damp; the wind waved the tree-tops gently and caused a murmur like the tide. The carriage rolled slowly along the avenues. Laura was very gay and chatty. Cæsar listened to her as one listens to a bird warbling.

Many times while listening he thought: “What is there inside this head? What is the master idea of her life? Has she really any idea about life, or has she none?”

After several rounds they crossed the viaduct that unites the Villa Borghese with the Pincio gardens.

_FROM THE PINCIO TERRACE_

They approached the great terrace of the gardens by an avenue that has busts of celebrated men along both sides.

“Poor great men!” exclaimed Cæsar. “Their statues serve only to decorate a public garden.” “They had their lives,” replied Laura, gaily; “now we have ours.”

Laura ordered the coachman to stop a moment. The air was still murmuring in the foliage, the birds singing, and the clouds flying slowly across the sky.

A man with a black box approached the carriage to offer them postcards.

“Buy two or three,” said Laura.

Cæsar bought a few and put them into his pocket. The vendor withdrew and Laura continued to look at Rome with enthusiasm.

“Oh, how beautiful, how lovely it is! I never get tired of looking at it. It is my favourite city. ‘_O fior d’ogni cittá, donna del mondo_.’”

“She is no longer mistress of the world, little sister.”

“For me she is. Look at St. Peter’s. It looks like a shred of cloud.”

“Yes, that’s so. It’s of a blue shade that seems transparent.”

Bells were ringing and great majestic white clouds kept moving along the horizon; on the Janiculum the statue of Garibaldi rose up gallantly into the air, like a bird ready to take wing.

“When I look at Rome this way,” murmured Laura, “I feel a pang, a pang of grief.”

“Why?”

“Because I remember that I must die, and then I shall not come back to see Rome. She will be here still, century after century, full of sunlight, and I shall be dead.... It is horrible, horrible!”

“And your religion?”

“Yes, I know. I believe I shall see other things; but not these things that are so beautiful.”

“You are an Epicurean.”

“It is so beautiful to be alive!”

They stayed there looking at the panorama. Below, in the Piazza del Popólo, they saw a red tram slipping along, which looked, at that distance, like a toy.

A tilbury, driven by a woman, stopped near their carriage. The woman was blond with green eyes, prominent cheek-bones, and a little fur cap. At her feet lay an enormous dog with long flame-coloured hair.

“She must be a Russian,” said Cæsar.

“Yes. Do you like that type?”

“She has a lot of character. She looks like one of the women that would order servants to be whipped.”

The Russian was smiling vaguely. Laura told the coachman to drive on. They made a few rounds in the avenues of the Pincio. The music was beginning; a few carriages, and groups of soldiers and seminarians, crowded around the bandstand; Laura didn’t care for brass bands, they were too noisy for her, and she gave the coachman orders to drive to the Corso.

_MEETING MARCHMONT_

They passed in front of the Villa Medici, and when they got near the Piazza, della Trinitá de’ Monti they met a man on horseback, who, on seeing them, immediately approached the carriage. It was Archibald Marchmont, who had just arrived in Rome.

“I thought you had forgotten us,” said Laura.

“I forget you, Marchesa! Never.”

“You say you came to Rome....”

“From Nice I had to return to London, because my father was seriously ill with an attack of gout.”

“He is well again?”

“Yes, thank you. You are coming back from a drive?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you want to come and have tea with my wife and me?”

“Where?”

“At the Hotel Excelsior. We are staying there. Will you come?” “All right.”

Laura accepted, and they went to the Via Veneto with the Englishman riding beside them.

They went into the hotel and passed through to the “hall” full of people, Marchmont sent word to his wife by a servant, to come down. Laura and Cæsar seated themselves with the Englishman.

“This hotel is unbearable,” exclaimed Marchmont; “there is nothing here but Americans.”

“Your wife, however, must like that,” said Cæsar.

“No. Susanna is more European every day, and she doesn’t care for the shrieking elegance of her compatriots. Besides, her father is here, and that makes her feel less American.”

“It is an odd form of filial enthusiasm,” remarked Cæsar.

“It doesn’t shock me. I almost think it’s the rule,” replied Marchmont; “at home I could see that my brothers and sisters hated one another cordially, and that every member of the family wanted to get away from the others. You two who are so fond of each other are a very rare instance. Is it frequent in Spain that brothers and sisters like one another?”

“Yes, there are instances of it,” answered Cæsar, laughing.

Mrs. Marchmont arrived, accompanied by an old man who evidently was her father, and two other men. Susanna was most smart; she greeted Laura and Cæsar very affably, and presented her father, Mr. Russell; then she presented an English author, tall, skinny, with blue eyes, a white beard, and hair like a halo; and then a young Englishman from the Embassy, a very distinguished person named Kennedy, who was a Catholic.

_TEA_

After the introductions they passed into the dining-room, which was most impressive. It was an exhibition of very smart women, some of them ideally beautiful, and idle men. All about them resounded a nasal English of the American sort.

Susanna Marchmont served the tea and did the honours to her guests. They all talked French, excepting Mr. Russell, who once in a long while uttered some categorical monosyllable in his own language.

Mr. Russell was not of the classic Yankee type; he looked like a vulgar Englishman. He was a serious man, with a short moustache, grey-headed, with three or four gold teeth.

What to Cæsar seemed wonderful in this gentleman was his economy of words. There was not one useless expression in his vocabulary, and not the slightest redundancy; whatever partook of merit, prestige, or nobility was condensed, for him, to the idea of value; whatever partook of arrangement, cleanliness, order, was condensed to the word “comfort”; so that Mr. Russell, with a very few words, had everything specified.

To Susanna, imbued with her preoccupation in supreme _chic_, her father no doubt did not seem a completely decorative father; but he gave Cæsar the impression of a forceful man.

Near them, at a table close by, was a little blond man, with a hooked nose and a scanty imperial, in company with a fat lady. They bowed to Marchmont and his wife.

“That gentleman looks like a Jew,” said Cæsar.

“He is,” replied Marchmont, “that is Señor Pereyra, a rich Jew; of Portuguese origin, I think.”

“How quickly you saw it!” exclaimed Susanna.

“He has that air of a sick goat, so frequent in Jews.”

“His wife has nothing sickly about her, or thin either,” remarked Laura.

“No,” said Cæsar; “his wife represents another Biblical type; one of the fat kine of somebody’s dream, which foretold abundance and a good harvest.”

The Englishman, Kennedy, had also little liking for Jews.

“I do not hate a Jew as anti-Christian,” said Cæsar; “but as super-Christian. Nor do I hate the race, but the tendency they have never to be producers, but always middlemen, and because they incarnate so well for our era the love of money, and of joy and pleasure.”

The English author was a great partisan of Jews, and he asserted that they were more distinguished in science and the arts than any other race. The Jewish question was dropped in an instant, when they saw a smart lady come in accompanied by a pale man with a black shock of hair and an uneasy eye.

“That is the Hungarian violinist Kolozsvar,” said Susanna.

“Kolozsvar, Kolozsvar!” they heard everybody saying.

“Is he a great virtuoso?” Cæsar asked Kennedy.

“No, I think not,” answered Kennedy. “It seems that this Hungarian’s speciality is playing the waltzes and folk-songs of his own country, which is certainly not anything great; but his successes are not obtained with the violin, but among the women. The ladies in London fight for him. His game is to pass himself off as a fallen man, depraved, worn-out. There you have his phraseology.... They see a man to save, to raise up, and convert into a great artist, and almost all of them yield to this temptation.”

“That is comical,” said Cæsar, looking curiously at the fiddler and his lady.

“To a Spaniard,” replied Kennedy, “it is comical; and probably it would be to an Italian too; but in England there are many women that have a purely imaginative idealism, a romanticism fed on ridiculous novels, and they fall into traps like these, which seem clumsy and grotesque to you here in the South, where people are more clear-sighted and realistic.”

Cæsar watched the brave fiddler, who played the role of a man used up, to great perfection.

After tea, Susanna invited them to go up to her rooms, and Laura and her brother and Kennedy and Mr. Russell went.

The English author had met a colleague, with whom he stayed behind talking, and Marchmont remained in the “hall,” as if it did not seem to him proper for him to go to his wife’s rooms.

Susanna’s rooms were very high, had balconies on the Via Veneto, and were almost opposite Queen Margherita’s palace. One overlooked the garden and could see the Queen Mother taking her walks, which is not without its importance for persons who live in a republic.

Susanna was most amiable to Laura; repeated to all of them her invitation to come and see her again; and after they had all promised to see one another frequently, Cæsar and Laura went down to their carriage, and took a turn on the Corso by twilight.

XIII. ESTHETICS AND DEMAGOGY

_SUSANNA AND THE YOUNGSTERS_

From this meeting on, Cæsar noticed that Marchmont paid court to Laura with much persistence. A light-hearted, coquettish woman, it pleased Laura to be pursued by a person like this Englishman, young, distinguished, and rich; but she was not prepared to yield. Her bringing-up, her class-feelings impelled her to consider adultery a heinous thing. Nor was divorce a solution for her, since accepting it would oblige her to cease being a Catholic and to quarrel irrevocably with the Cardinal. Marchmont showed no discretion in the way he paid court to Laura; he cared nothing about his wife, and talked of her with profound contempt....

Laura found herself besieged by the Englishman; she couldn’t decide to discourage him entirely, and at critical moments she would take the train, go off to Naples, and come back two or three days later, doubtless with more strength for withstanding the siege.

“As a matter of reciprocal justice, since he makes love to my sister, I ought to make love to his wife,” thought Cæsar, and he went several times to the Hotel Excelsior to call on Susanna.

The Yankee wife was full of complaints against her husband. Her father had advised her simply to get a divorce, but she didn’t want to. She found such a solution lacking in distinction, and no doubt she considered the advice of an author in her own country very true, who had given this triple injunction to the students of a woman’s college: “Do not drink, that is, do not drink too much; do not smoke, that is, do not smoke too much; and do not get married, that is, do not get married too much.”

It did not seem quite right to Susanna to get married too much. Besides she had a desire to become a Catholic. One day she questioned Cæsar about it:

“You want to change your religion!” exclaimed Cæsar, “What for? I don’t believe you are going to find your lost faith by becoming a Catholic.”

“And what do you think about it, Kennedy?” Susanna asked the young Englishman, who was there too.

“To me a Catholic woman seems doubly enchanting.”

“You would not marry a woman who wasn’t a Catholic?”

“No, indeed,” the Englishman proclaimed.

Cæsar and Kennedy disagreed about everything.

Susanna discussed her plans, and constantly referred to Paul Bourget’s novel _Cosmopolis_, which had obviously influenced her in her inclination for Catholicism.

“Are there many Jewish ladies who aspire to be baptized and become Catholics, as Bourget says?” asked Susanna.

“Bah!” exclaimed Cæsar.

“You do not believe that either?”

“No, it strikes me as a piece of naïvety in this good soul of a novelist. To become a Catholic, I don’t believe requires more than some few pesetas.”

“You are detestable, as a Cardinal’s nephew.”

“I mean that I don’t perceive that there are any obstacles to prevent anybody from becoming a Catholic, as there are to prevent his becoming rich. What a high ambition, to aspire to be a Catholic! While nobody anywhere does anything but laugh at Catholics; and it has become an axiom: ‘A Catholic country is a country bound for certain ruin.’”

Kennedy burst out laughing.

Susanna said that she had no real faith, but that she did have a great enthusiasm for churches and for choirs, for the smell of incense and religious music.

“Spain is the place for all that,” said Kennedy. “Here in Italy the Church ceremonies are too gay. Not so in Spain; at Toledo, at Burgos, there is an austerity in the cathedrals, an unworldliness....”

“Yes,” said Cæsar; “unhappily we have nothing left there but ceremonies. At the same time, the people are dying of hunger.”

They discussed whether it is better to live in a decorative, esthetic sphere, or in a more humble and practical one; and Susanna and Kennedy stood up for the superiority of an esthetic life.

As they left the hotel Cæsar said to Kennedy:

“Allow me a question. Have you any intentions concerning Mrs. Marchmont?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Simply because I shouldn’t go to see her often, so as not to be in the way.”

“Thank you ever so much. But I have no intentions in relation to her. She is too beautiful and too rich a woman for a modest employee like me to fix his eyes on.”

“Bah! A modest diplomat! That is absurd. It is merely that you don’t take to her.”

“No. It’s because she is a queen. There ought to be some defect in her face to make her human.”

“Yes; that’s true. She is too much of a prize beauty.”

“That is the defect in the Yankee women; they have no character. The weight of tradition might be fatal to industry and modern life, but it is the one thing that creates the spirituality of the old countries. Beyond contradiction American women have intelligence, beauty, energy, attractive flashes, but they lack that particular thing created by centuries: character. At times they have very charming impulses. Have you heard the story about Prince Torlonia’s wife?”

“No.”

“Well, Torlonia’s present wife was an American girl worth millions, who came with letters to the prince. He took her about Rome, and at the end of some days he said to her, supposing that the beautiful American had the intention of marrying: ‘I will introduce some young noblemen to you’; and she answered: ‘Don’t introduce anybody to me; because you please me more than anybody’; and she married him.”

“It was a pretty impulse.”

“Yes, Americans do things like that on the spur of the moment. But if you saw a Spanish woman behave that way, it would seem wrong to you.”

Chattering amicably they came to the Piazza Esedra.

“Would you care to have lunch with me?” said Kennedy.

“Just what I was going to propose to you.”

“I eat alone.”

“I do not. I eat with my sister.”

“The Marchesa di Vaccarone?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must pardon me if I accept your invitation, for I am very anxious to meet her.”

“Then come along.”

_RUSKIN AND THE PHILISTINES_

They reached the hotel and Cæsar introduced his friend to Laura.

“He is an admirer of yours.”

“A respectful admirer... from a distance,” explained Kennedy.

“But are there admirers of that sort?” asked Laura, laughing.

“Here you have one,” said the Englishman. “I have known you by sight ever since I came to Rome, and have never had the pleasure of speaking to you until today.”

“And have you been here a long time?”

“Nearly two years.”

“And do you like Rome; eh?”

“I should say so! At first, I didn’t, I must admit. It was a disappointment to me. I had dreamed so much about Rome!” and Kennedy talked of the books and guides he had read about the Eternal City.

“I must admit that I had never dreamed about Rome,” said Cæsar. “And you boast of that?” asked Laura.

“No, I don’t boast of it, I merely state it. I understand how agreeable it is to know things. Cæsar died here! Cicero made speeches here! Saint Peter stumbled over this stone! It is fine! But not knowing things is also very comfortable. I am rather like a barbarian walking indifferently among monuments he knows nothing about.”

“Doesn’t such an idea make you ashamed?”

“No, why? It would be a bother to me to know a lot of things offhand. To pass by a mountain and know how it was thrown up, what it is composed of, what its flora and fauna are; to get to a town and know its history in detail.... What things to be interested in! It’s tiresome! I hate history too much. I far prefer to be ignorant of everything, and especially the past, and from time to time to offer myself a capricious, arbitrary explanation.”

“But I think that knowing things not only is not tiresome,” said Kennedy, “but is a great satisfaction.”

“You think even learning things is a satisfaction?”

“Thousands of years ago one could know things almost without learning them; nowadays in order to know, one has to learn. That is natural and logical.”

“Yes, certainly. And the effort to learn about useful things seems natural and logical to me too, but not to learn about merely agreeable things. To learn medicine and mechanics is logical; but to learn to look at a picture or to hear a symphony is an absurdity.”

“Why?”

“At any rate the neophytes that go to see a Rafael picture or to hear a Bach sonata and have an exclamation all ready, give me the sad impression of a flock of lambs. As for your sublime pedagogues of the Ruskin type, they seem to me to be the fine flower of priggishness, of pedantry, of the most objectionable bourgeoisie.”

“What things your brother is saying!” exclaimed Kennedy.

“You shouldn’t notice him,” said Laura.

“Those artistic pedagogues enrage me; they remind me of Protestant pastors and of the friars that go around dressed like peasants, and who I think are called Brothers of the Christian Doctrine. The pedagogues are Brothers of the Esthetic Doctrine, one of the stupidest inventions that ever occurred to the English. I don’t know which I find more ridiculous, the Salvation Army or Ruskin’s books.”

“Why have you this hatred for Ruskin?”

“I find him an idiot. I only skimmed through a book of his called _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, and the first thing I read was a paragraph in which he said that to use an imitation diamond or any other imitation stone was a lie, an imposition, and a sin. I immediately said: ‘This man who thinks a diamond is the truth and paste a lie, is a stupid fool who doesn’t deserve to be read.’”

“Yes, all right: you take one point of view and he takes another. I understand why Ruskin wouldn’t please you. What I do not understand is why you find it absurd that if a person has a desire to penetrate into the beauties of a symphony or a picture, he should do so. What is there strange in that?”

“You are right,” said Cæsar; “whoever wants to learn, should. I have done so about financial questions.”

“Is it true that your brother knows all about questions of money?” Kennedy asked Laura.

“He says so.”

“I haven’t much belief in his financial knowledge.”

“No?”

“No, I have not. You are a sort of dilettante, half nihilist, half financier. You would like to pass for a tranquil, well-balanced man, for what is called a philistine, but you cannot compass it.”

“I will compass it. It is true that I want to be a philistine, but a philistine out in the real world. All those great artists you people admire, Goethe, Ruskin, were really philistines, who were in the business of being interested in poetry and statues and pictures.”

“Moncada, you are a sophist,” said Kennedy. “Possibly I am wrong in this discussion,” retorted Cæsar, “but the feeling I have is right. Artists irritate me; they seem to me like old ladies with a flatulency that prevents their breathing freely.”

Kennedy laughed at the definition.

_CHIC AND THE REVOLUTION_

“I understand hating bad kings and conquerors; but artists! What harm do they do?” said Laura.

“Artists are always doing harm to the whole of humanity. They have invented an esthetic system for the use of the rich, and they have killed the Revolution. The _chic_ put an end to the Revolution. And now everything is coming back; enthusiasm for the aristocracy, for the Church; the cult of kings. People look backward and the Revolutionary movement is paralysed. The people that irritate me most are those esthetes of the Ruskin school, for whom everything is religious: having money, buying jewels, blowing one’s nose... everything is religious. Vulgar creatures, lackeys that they are!”

“My brother is a demagogue,” said Laura ironically.

“Yes,” added Kennedy; “he doesn’t like categories.”

“But each thing has its value whether he likes it or not.”

“I do not deny different values, or even categories. There are things of great value in life; some natural, like youth, beauty, strength; others more artificial, like money, social position; but this idea of distinction, of aristocratic fineness, is a farce. It is a literary legend in the same style as the one current in novels, which tells us that the aristocrats of old families close their doors to rich Americans, or like that other story Mrs. Marchmont was talking to us of, about the Jewish ladies who were crazy to become Catholics.”

“I don’t see what you are trying to prove by all this,” said Laura.

“I am trying to prove that all there is underneath distinguished society is money, for which reason it doesn’t matter if it is destroyed. The cleverest and finest man, if he has no money, will die of hunger in a corner. Smart society, which thinks itself superior, will never receive him, because being really superior and intelligent is of no value on the market. On the other hand, when it is a question of some very rich brute, he will succeed in being accepted and fêted by the aristocrats, because money has a real value, a quotable value, or I’d better say, it is the only thing that has a quotable value.”

“What you are saying isn’t true. A man doesn’t go with the best people merely because he is rich.”

“No, certainly; not immediately. There is a preparatory process. He begins by robbing people in some miserable little shop, and feels himself democratic. Then he robs in a bank, and at that period he feels that he is a Liberal and begins to experience vaguely aristocratic ideas. If business goes splendidly, the aristocratic ideas get crystallized. Then he can come to Rome and go into ecstasies over all the humbugs of Catholicism; and after that, one is authorized to acknowledge that the religion of our fathers is a beautiful religion, and one finishes by giving a tip to the Pope, and another to Cardinal Verry, so that they will make him Prince of the Ecumenical Council or Marquis of the Holy Crusade.”

“What very stupid and false ideas,” exclaimed Laura. “Really I appreciate having a brother who talks in such a vulgar way.”

“You are an aristocrat and the truth doesn’t please you. But such are the facts. I can see the chief of the bureau of Papal titles. What fun he must have thinking up the most appropriate title for a magnate of Yankee tinned beef or for an illustrious Andean general! How magnificent it would be to gather all the Bishops _in partibus infidelium_ and all the people with Papal titles in one drawing-room! The Bishop of Nicaea discussing with the Marquis of the Holy Roman Empire; the Marchioness of Easter Sunday flirting with the Bishop of Sion, while the Patriarchs of Thebes, Damascus, and Trebizond played bridge with the sausage manufacturer, Mr. Smiles, the pork king, or with the illustrious General Pérez, the hero of Guachinanguito. What a moving spectacle it would be!”

“You are a clown!” said Laura.

“He is a finished satirist,” added Kennedy.

_CÆSAR’S PLAN_

After lunch, Laura, Kennedy, and Cæsar went into the salon, and Laura introduced the Englishman to the San Martino girls and the Countess Brenda. They stayed there chatting until four o’clock, at which time the San Martinos got ready to go out in a motor car, and Laura, with the Countess and her daughter, in a carriage.

Cæsar and Kennedy went into the street together.

“You are awfully well fixed here,” said Kennedy, “with no Americans, no Germans, or any other barbarians.”

“Yes, this hotel is a hive of petty aristocrats.”

“Your sister was telling me that you might pick out a very rich wife here, among the girls.”

“Yes, my sister would like me to live here, in a foreign country, in cowlike tranquillity, looking at pictures and statues, and travelling pointlessly. That wouldn’t be living for me; I am not a society man. I require excitement, danger.... Though I warn you that I am not in the least courageous.”

“You’re not?”

“Not at all. Not now. At moments I believe I could control myself and take a trench without wavering.”

“But you have some fixed plan, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I expect to go back to Spain, and work there.”

“At what?”

“In politics.”

“Are you patriotic?”

“Yes, up to a certain point. I have no transcendental idea of patriotism at all. Patriotism, as I interpret it, is a matter of curiosity. I believe that there is strength in Spain. If this strength could be led in a given direction, where would it get to? That is my form of patriotism; as I say, it is an experimental form.”

Kennedy looked at Cæsar with curiosity.

“And how can it help you with your plans to stay here in Rome?” he asked.

“It can help me. In Spain nobody knows me. This is the only place where I have a certain position, through being the nephew of a Cardinal. I am trying to build on that. How am I going to arrange it? I don’t know. I am feeling out my future course, taking soundings.”

“But the support you could find here would be all of a clerical nature,” said Kennedy.

“Of course.”

“But you are not Clerical!”

“No; but it is necessary for me to climb. Afterwards there will be time to change.”

“You are not taking it into account, my dear Cæsar, that the Church is still powerful and that it doesn’t pardon people who impose upon it.”

“Bah! I am not afraid of it.”

“And you were just saying you are not courageous! You are courageous, my dear man.... After this, I don’t doubt of your success.”

“I need data.”

“If I can furnish you with any....”

“Wouldn’t it be disagreeable for you to help a man who is your enemy, so far as ideas go?”

“No; because I am beginning to have some curiosity too, as to whether you will succeed in doing something. If I can be of any use, let me know.”

“I will let you know.”

Cæsar and Kennedy took a walk about the streets, and at twilight they took leave of each other affectionately.

XIV. NEW ATTEMPTS, NEW RAMBLES

_CARDINAL SPADA_

“I have arranged two interesting conferences for you,” said Kennedy, a few days later.

“My dear man!”

“Yes; one with Cardinal Spada, the other with the Abbé Tardieu. I have spoken to them both about you.”

“Splendid! What kind of people are they?”

“Cardinal Spada is a very intelligent man and a very amiable one. At heart he is a Liberal and fond of the French. As to the Abbé Tardieu, he is a very influential priest at the church of San Luigi.”

After lunch they went direct to a solitary street in the old part of Rome. At the door of the big, sad palace where Cardinal Spada lived, a porter with a cocked hat, a grey greatcoat, and a staff with a silver knob, was watching the few passers-by.

They went in by the broad entry-way, as far as a dark colonnaded court, paved with big flags which had grass between them.

In the middle of the court a fountain shot up a little way and fell into a stone basin covered with moss.

Kennedy and Cæsar mounted the wide monumental stairway; on the first floor a handsome glassed-in gallery ran around the court. The whole house had an air of solemnity and sadness. They entered the Cardinal’s office, which was a large, sad, severe room.

Monsignor Spada was a vigorous man, despite his age. He looked frank and intelligent, but one guessed that there was a hidden bitterness and desolation in him. He wore a black cassock with red edges and buttons.

Kennedy went close and was about to kneel to the Cardinal, but he prevented him.

Cæsar explained his ideas to the Cardinal with modesty. He felt that this man was worthy of all his respect.

Monsignor Spada listened attentively, and then said that he understood nothing about financial matters, but that on principle he was in favour of having the administration of all the Church’s property kept entirely at home, as in the time of Pius IX. Leo XIII had preferred to replace this paternal method by a trained bureaucracy, but the Church had not gained anything by it, and they had lost credit through unfortunate negotiations, buying land and taking mortgages.

Cæsar realized that it was useless to attempt to convince a man of the intelligence and austerity of the Cardinal, and he listened to him respectfully.

Monsignor Spada conversed amiably, he escorted them as far as the door, and shook hands when they said good-bye.

THE ABBÉ TARDIEU

Then they went to see the Abbé Tardieu. The abbé lived in the Piazza. Navona. His office, furnished in modern style, produced the effect of a violent contrast with Cardinal Spada’s sumptuous study, and yet brought it to mind. The Abbé Tardieu’s work-room was small, worldly, full of books and photographs.

The abbé, a tall young man, thin, with a rosy face, a long nose, and a mouth almost from ear to ear, had the air of an astute but jolly person, and laughed at everything said to him. He was liveliness personified. When they entered his office he was writing and smoking.

Cæsar explained about his financial knowledge, and how he had gone on acquiring it, until he got to the point where he could discern a law, a system, in things where others saw nothing more than chance. The Abbé Tardieu promised that if he knew a way to utilize Cæsar’s knowledge, he would send him word. In respect to giving him letters of introduction to influential persons in Spain, he had no objection.

They took leave of the abbé.

“All this has to go slowly,” said Kennedy.

“Of course. One cannot insist that it should happen all at once.”

_BERNINI_

“If you have nothing to do, let’s take a walk,” said the Englishman.

“If you like.”

“Have you noticed the fountains in this square?”

“No.”

“They are worth looking at.”

Cæsar contemplated the central obelisk. It is set on top of a rock hollowed out like a cavern, in the mouth of which a lion is seen. Afterwards they looked at the fountains at the ends of the square.

“The sculptures are by Bernini,” explained Kennedy. “Bernini belonged to an epoch that has been very much abused by the critics, but nowadays he is much praised. He enchants me.”

“It is rather a mixed style, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“The artist is not living?”

“For heaven’s sake, man! No.”

“Well, if he were alive today they would employ him to make those gewgaws some people present to leading ladies and to the deputies of their district. He would be the king of the manufacturers of ornate barometers.”

“It is undeniable that Bernini had a baroque taste.”

“He gives the impression of a rather pretentious and affected person.”

“Yes, he does. He was an exuberant, luxuriant Neapolitan; but when he chose he could produce marvels. Haven’t you seen his Saint Teresa?”

“No.”

“Then you must see it. Let’s take a carriage.”

They drove to the Piazza San Bernardo, a little square containing three churches and a fountain, and went into Santa Maria della Vittoria.

Kennedy went straight toward the high altar, and stopped to the left of it.

In an altar of the transept is to be seen a group carved in marble, representing the ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Cæsar gazed at it absorbed. The saint is an attractive young girl, falling backward in a sensual spasm; her eyes are closed, her mouth open, and her jaw a bit dislocated. In front of the swooning saint is a little angel who smilingly threatens her with an arrow.

“Well, what do you think of it?” said Kennedy.

“It is wonderful,” exclaimed Cæsar. “But it is a bedroom scene, only the lover has slipped away.”

“Yes, that is true.”

“It really is pretty; you seem to see the pallor of the saint’s face, the circles under her eyes, the relaxation of all her muscles. Then the angel is a little joker who stands there smiling at the ecstasy of the saint.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Kennedy; “it is all the more admirable for the very reason that it is tender, sensual, and charming, all at once.”

“However, this sort of thing is not healthy,” murmured Cæsar, “this kind of vision depletes your life-force. One wants to find the same things represented in works of art that one ought to look for in life, even if they are not to be found in life.”

“Good! Here enters the moralist. You talk like an Englishman,” exclaimed Kennedy. “Let us go along.”

“Where?”

“I have to stop in at the French Embassy a moment; then we can go where you like.”

_CORNERS OF ROME_

They went back to the carriage, and having crossed through the centre of Rome, got out in front of the Farnese Palace.

“I will be out inside of ten minutes,” said Kennedy.

The Farnese Palace aroused great admiration in Cæsar; he had never passed it before. By one of the fountains in the _piazza,_ he stood gazing at the huge square edifice, which seemed to him like a die cut from an immense block of stone.

“This really gives me an impression of grandeur and force,” he said to himself. “What a splendid palace! It looks like an ancient knight in full armour, looking indifferently at everything, sure of his own worth.”

Cæsar walked from one end of the _piazza_ to the other, absorbed in the majestic pile of stone.

Kennedy surprised him in his contemplation.

“Now will you say that you are a good philistine?”

“Ah, well, this palace is magnificent. Here are grandeur, strength, overwhelming force.”

“Yes, it is magnificent; but very uncomfortable, my French colleagues tell me.”

Kennedy related the history of the Farnese Palace to Cæsar. They went through the Via del Mascherone and came out into the Via Giulia.

“This Via Giulia is a street in a provincial capital,” said Kennedy; “always sad and deserted; a Cardinal or two who like isolation are still living here.”

At the entrance to the Via dei Farnesi, Cæsar stopped to look at two marble tablets set into the wall at the two sides of a chapel door.

Cut on the tablets were skeletons painted black; on one, the words: “Alms for the poor dead bodies found in the fields,” and on the other: “Alms for the perpetual lamp in the cemetery.”

“What does this mean?” said Cæsar.

“That is the Church of the Orison of the Confraternity of Death. The tablets are modern.”

They passed by the “Mascherone” again, and went rambling on until they reached the Synagogue and the Theatre of Marcellus.

They went through narrow streets without sidewalks; they passed across tiny squares; and it seemed like a dead city, or like the outskirts of a village. In certain streets towered high dark palaces of blackish stone. These mysterious palaces looked uninhabited; the gratings were eaten with rust, all sorts of weeds grew on the roofs, and the balconies were covered with climbing plants. At corners, set into the wall, one saw niches with glass fronts. A painted madonna, black now, with silver jewels and a crown, could be guessed at inside, and in front a little lantern swung on a cord.

Suddenly a cart would come down one of these narrow streets without sidewalks, driving very quickly and scattering the women and children seated by the gutter.

In all these poor quarters there were lanes crossed by ropes loaded with torn washing; there were wretched black shops from which an odour of grease exhaled; there were narrow streets with mounds of garbage in the middle. In the very palaces, now shorn of their grandeur, appeared the same decoration of rags waving in the breeze. In the Theatre of Marcellus one’s gaze got lost in the depths of black caves, where smiths stood out against flames.

This mixture of sumptuousness and squalor, of beauty and ugliness, was reflected in the people; young and most beautiful women were side by side with fat, filthy old ones covered with rags, their eyes gloomy, and of a type that recalled old African Jewesses.

_WHAT CAN BE READ ON WALLS_

Cæsar and Kennedy went on toward the Temple of Vesta and followed the river bank until the Tiber Embankment ended.

Here the banks were green and the river clearer and more poetic. To the left rose the Aventine with its villas; in the harbour two or three tugs were tied up; and here and there along the pier stood a crane. Evening was falling and the sky was filling with pink clouds.

They sat down awhile on the side of the road, and Cæsar entertained himself deciphering the inscriptions written in charcoal on a mud-wall.

“Do you go in for modern epigraphy?” asked Kennedy.

“Yes. It is one of the things I take pleasure in reading, in the towns I go to; the advertisements in the newspapers and the writings on the wall.”

“It’s a good kind of curiosity.”

“Yes, I believe one learns more about the real life in a town from such inscriptions than from the guide- and text-books.”

“That’s possible. And what conclusions have you drawn from your observations?”

“They are not of much value. I haven’t constructed a science of wall-inscriptions, as that fake Lambroso would have done.”

“But you will construct it surely, when you have lighted on the underlying system.”

“You think my epigraphical science is on the same level as my financial science. What a mistake!”

“All right. But tell me what you have discovered about different towns.”

“London, for instance, I have found, is childish in its inscriptions and somewhat clownish. When some sentimental foolishness doesn’t occur to a Londoner of the people, some brutality or rough joke occurs to him.”

“You are very kind,” said Kennedy, laughing.

“Paris has a vulgar, cruel taste; in the Frenchman of the people you find the tiger alternating with the monkey. There the dominant note on the walls is the patriotic note, insults to politicians, calling them assassins and thieves, and also sentiments of revenge expressed by an _‘A mort Dupin!’_ or _‘A mort Duval!’_ Moreover, there is a great enthusiasm for the guillotine.”

“And Madrid?”

“Madrid is at heart a rude, moral town with little imagination, and the epigraphs on the walls and benches are primitive.”

“And in Rome what do you find?”

“Here one finds a mixture of pornography, romanticism, and politics. A heart pierced by an arrow and poetic phrases, alternate with some enormous piece of filthiness and with hurrahs for Anarchy or for the _‘Papa-re.’_”

“Well done!” said Kennedy; “I can see that the branch of epigraphy you practise amounts to something. It should be systematized and given a name.”

“What do you think we should name it? Wallography?”

“Very good.”

“And one of these fine days we can systematize it. Now we might go and get dinner.”

They took a tram which was coming back from St. Paul’s beyond the Walls, and returned to the heart of the city.

_THE MONK WITH THE RED NOSE_

The next day Cæsar was finishing dressing when the servant told him that a gentleman was waiting for him.

“Who is it?” asked Cæsar.

“It’s a monk.”

Cæsar went to the salon and there found a tall monk with an evil face, a red nose, and a worn habit.

Cæsar recalled having seen him, but didn’t know where.

“What can I do for you?” asked Cæsar.

“I come from His Eminence, Cardinal Fort. I must speak with you.”

“Let’s go into the dining-room. We shall be alone there.”

“It would be better to talk in your room.”

“No, there is no one here. Besides, I have to eat breakfast. Will you join me?”

“No, thanks,” said the monk.

Cæsar remembered having seen that face in the Altemps palace. He was doubtless one of the domestic monks who had been with the Abbé Preciozi.

The waiter came bringing Cæsar’s breakfast. “Will you tell me what it is?” said Cæsar to the ecclesiastic, while he filled his cup.

The monk waited until the waiter was gone, and then said in a hard voice:

“His Eminence the Cardinal sent me to bid you not to present yourself anywhere again, giving his name.”

“What? What does this mean?” asked Cæsar, calmly.

“It means that His Eminence has found out about your intrigues and machinations.”

“Intrigues? What intrigues were those?”

“You know perfectly well. And His Eminence forbids you to continue in that direction.”

“His Eminence forbids me to pay calls? And for what reason?”

“Because you have used his name to introduce yourself into certain places.”

“It is not true.”

“You have told people you went to that you are Cardinal Fort’s nephew.”

“And I am not?” asked Cæsar, after taking a swallow of coffee.

“You are trying to make use of the relationship, we don’t know with what end in view.”

“I am trying to make use of my relationship to Cardinal Fort? Why shouldn’t I?”

“You admit it?”

“Yes, I admit it. People are such imbeciles that they think it is an honour to have a Cardinal in the family; I take advantage of this stupid idea, although I do not share it, because for me a Cardinal is merely an object of curiosity, an object for an archeological museum....”

Cæsar paused, because the monk’s countenance was growing dark. In the twilight of his pallid face, his nose looked like a comet portending some public calamity.

“Poor wretch!” murmured the monk. “You do not know what you are saying. You are blaspheming. You are offending God.” “Do you really believe that God has any relation to my uncle?” asked Cæsar, paying more attention to his toast than to his visitor.

And then he added:

“The truth is that it would be extravagant behaviour on the part of God.”

The monk looked at Cæsar with terrible eyes. Those grey eyes of his, under their long, black, thick brows, shot lightning.

“Poor wretch!” repeated the monk. “You ought to have more respect for things above you.”

Cæsar arose.

“You are bothering me and preventing me from drinking my coffee,” he said, with exquisite politeness, and touched the bell.

“Be careful!” exclaimed the monk, seizing Cæsar’s arm with violence.

“Don’t you touch me again,” said Cæsar, pulling away violently, his face pale and his eyes flashing. “If you do, I have a revolver here with five chambers, and I shall take pleasure in emptying them one by one, taking that lighthouse you carry about for a nose, as my target.”

“Fire it if you dare.”

Fortunately the waiter had come in on hearing the bell.

“Do you wish anything, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, please escort this clerical gentleman to the door, and tell him on the way not to come back here.”

Days later Cæsar found out that there had been a great disturbance at the Altemps palace in consequence of the calls he had made. Preciozi had been punished and sent away from Rome, and the various Spanish monasteries and colleges warned not to receive Cæsar.

XV. GIOVANNI BATTISTA, PAGAN

“My dear Cæsar,” said Kennedy, “I believe it will be very difficult for you to find what you want by looking for it. You ought to leave it a little to chance.”

“Abandon myself to events as they arrive? All right, it seems a good idea.”

“Then if you find something practicable, utilize it.”

Kennedy took his friend to a statue-shop where he used to pass some of his hours. The shop was in a lane near the Forum, and its stock was in antiques, majolicas, and plaster casts of pagan gods.

The shop was dark and rather gloomy, with a small court at the back covered with vines. The proprietor was an old man, with a moustache, an imperial, and a shock of white hair. His name was Giovanni Battista Lanza. He professed revolutionary ideas and had great enthusiasm about Mazzini. He expressed himself in an ironical and malicious manner.

Signora Vittoria, his wife, was a grumbling old woman, rather devoted to wine. She spoke like a Roman of the lowest class, was olive-coloured and wrinkled, and of her former beauty there remained only her very black eyes and hair that was still black.

The daughter, Simonetta, a girl who resembled her father, blond, with the build of a goddess, was the one that waited on customers and kept the accounts.

Simonetta, being the manager, divided up the profits; the elder son was head of the workshop and he made the most money; then came two workmen from outside; and then the father who still got his day’s wages, out of consideration for his age; and finally the younger son, twelve or fourteen years old, who was an apprentice.

Simonetta gave her mother what was indispensable for household expenses and managed the rest herself.

Kennedy retailed this information the first day they went to Giovanni Battista Lanza’s house. Cæsar could see Simonetta keeping the books, while the small brother, in a white blouse that came to his heels, was chasing a dog, holding a pipe in his hand by the thick part, as if it were a pistol, the dog barking and hanging on to the blouse, the small boy shrieking and laughing, when Signora Vittoria came bawling out.

Kennedy presented Simonetta to his friend Cæsar, and she smiled and gave her hand.

“Is Signore Giovanni Battista here?” Kennedy asked Signora Vittoria.

“Yes, he is in the court.” she answered in her gloomy way.

“Is something wrong with your mamma?” said Kennedy to Simonetta.

“Nothing.”

They went into the court and Giovanni Battista arose, very dignified, and bowed to Cæsar. The elder son and the two workmen in white blouses and paper caps were busy with water and wires, cleaning a plaster mould they had just emptied.

The mould was a big has-relief of the Way of the Cross. Giovanni Battista permitted himself various jocose remarks about the Way of the Cross, which his son and the other two workmen heard with great indifference; but while he was still emptying his store of anti-Christian irony, the voice of Signora Vittoria was heard, crying domineeringly:

“Giovanni Battista!”

“What is it?”

“That’s enough, that’s enough! I can hear you from here.”

“That’s my wife,” said Giovanni Battista, “she doesn’t like me to be lacking in respect for plaster saints.” “You are a pagan!” screamed the old woman. “You shall see, you shall see what will happen to you.”

“What do you expect to have happen to me, darling?”

“Leave her alone,” exclaimed the elder son, ill at ease; “you always have to be making mother fly into a rage.”

“No, my boy, no; she is the one who makes me fly into a rage.”

“Giovanni Battista is used to living among gods,” said Kennedy, “and he despises saints.”

“No, no,” replied the cast-maker; “some saints are all right. If all the churches had figures by Donatello or Robbia, I would go to church oftener; but to go and look at those statues in the Jesuit churches, those figures with their arms spread and their eyes rolling.... Oh, no! I cannot look at such things.”

Cæsar could see that Giovanni Battista expressed himself very well; but that he was not precisely a star when it came to working. After the mould for the bas-relief was cleaned and fixed, the cast-maker invited Cæsar and Kennedy to have a glass of wine in a wine-shop near by.

“How’s this, are you leaving already, father?” said Simonetta, as he went through the shop to get to the street.

“I’m coming back, I’m coming back right away.”

_SUPERSTITIONS_

The three of them went to a rather dirty tavern in the same lane, and settled themselves by the window. This post was a good point of observation for that narrow street, so crowded and so picturesque.

Workmen went by, and itinerant vendors, women with kerchiefs, half head-dress and half muffler, and with black eyes and expressive faces. Opposite was a booth of coloured candies, dried figs strung on a reed, and various kinds of sweets.

A wine-cart passed, and Kennedy made Cæsar observe how decorative it was with its big arm-seat in the middle and its hood above, like a prompter’s box.

Giovanni Battista ordered a flask of wine for the three of them. While he chatted and drank, friends of his came to greet them. They were men with beards, long hair, and soft hats, of the Garbaldi and Verdi type so abundant in Italy.

Among them were two serious old men; one was a model, a native of Frascati, with the face of a venerable apostle; the other, for contrast, looked like a buffoon and was the possessor of a grotesque nose, long, thin at the end and adorned with a red wart.

“My wife has a deadly hatred for all of them,” said Giovanni Battista, laughing.

“And why so?” asked Cæsar.

“Because we talk politics and sometimes they ask me for a few pennies....”

“Your wife must have a lively temper,...” said Cæsar.

“Yes, an unhappy disposition; good, awfully good; but very superstitious. Christianity has produced nothing but superstitions.”

“Giovanni Battista is a pagan, as his wife well says,” asserted Kennedy.

“What superstitions has your wife?” asked Cæsar.

“All of them. Romans are very superstitious and my wife is a Roman. If you see a hunchback, it is good luck; if you see three, then your luck is magnificent and you have to swallow your saliva three times; on the other hand, if you see a humpbacked woman it is a bad omen and you must spit on the ground to keep away the _jettatura_. Three priests together is a very good sign. We ought all to get along very well in Rome, because we see three and up to thirty priests together.”

“A spider is also very significant,” said Kennedy; “in the morning it is of bad augury, and in the evening good.”

“And at noon?” asked Cæsar.

“At noon,” answered Lanza, laughing, “it means nothing to speak of. But if you wish to make sure whether it is a good auspice or a bad, you kill the spider and count its legs. If they are an even number, it is a good omen; if uneven, bad.”

“But I believe spiders always have an even number of legs,” said Cæsar.

“Certainly,” responded the old man; “but my wife swears they do not; that she has seen many with seven and nine legs. It is religious unreasonableness.”

“Are there many people like that, so credulous?” asked Cæsar.

“Oh, lots,” replied Lanza; “in the shops you will find amulets, horns, hands made of coral or horseshoes, all to keep away bad luck. My wife and the neighbour women play the lottery, by combining the numbers of their birthdays, and the ages of their fathers, their mothers, and their children. When some relative dies, they make a magic combination of the dates of birth and death, the day and the month, and buy a lottery ticket. They never win; and instead of realizing that their systems are of no avail, they say that they omitted to count in the number of letters in the name or something of that sort. It is comical, so much religion and so much superstition.”

“But you confuse religion and superstition, my friend,” said Kennedy.

“It’s all the same,” answered the old man, smiling his suavely ironical smile. “There is nothing except Nature.”

“You do not believe in miracles, Giovanni Battista?” asked the Englishman.

“Yes, I believe in the earth’s miracles, making trees and flowers grow, and the miracle of children’s being born from their mothers. The other miracles I do not believe in. What for? They are so insignificant beside the works of Nature!”

“He is a pagan,” Kennedy again stated.

_YOUNG PAINTERS_

They were chatting, when three young lads came into the tavern, all three having the air of artists, black clothes, soft hats, flowing cravats, long hair, and pipes. “Two of them are fellow-countrymen of yours,” Kennedy told Cæsar.

“They are Spanish painters,” the old man added. “The other is a sculptor who has been in the Argentine, and he talks Spanish too.”

The three entered and sat down at the same table and were introduced to Cæsar. Everybody chattered. Buonacossi, the Italian, was a real type. Of very low stature, he had a giant’s torso and strong little legs. His head was like a woe-begone eagle, his nose hooked, thin, and reddish, eyes round, and hair black.

Buonacossi proved to be gay, exuberant, changeable, and full of vehemence.

He explained his artistic ideas with picturesque warmth, mingling them with blasphemies and curses. Things struck him as the best or the worst in the world. For him there doubtless were no middle terms.

One of the two Spaniards was serious, grave, jaundiced, sour-visaged, and named Cortés; the other, large, ordinary, fleshy, and coarse, seemed rather a bully.

Giovanni Battista was not able to be long outside the workshop, no doubt because his conscience troubled him, and though with difficulty, he got up and left. Kennedy, Cæsar, and the two Spaniards went toward the Piazza, del Campidoglio, and Buonacossi marched off in the opposite direction.

On reaching the Via Nazionale, Kennedy took his leave and Cæsar remained with the two Spaniards. The red, fleshy one, who had the air of a bully, started in to make fun of the Italians, and to mimic their bows and salutes; then he said that he had an engagement with a woman and made haste to take his leave.

When he had gone, the grave Spaniard with the sour face, said to Cæsar:

“That chap is like the dandies here; that’s why he imitates them so well.”

Afterwards Cortés talked about his studies in painting; he didn’t get on well, he had no money, and anyway Rome didn’t please him at all. Everything seemed wrong to him, absurd, ridiculous.

Cæsar, after he had said good-bye to him, murmured: “The truth is that we Spaniards are impossible people.”

XVI. THE PORTRAIT OF A POPE

Two or three days later Cæsar met the Spaniard Cortés in the Piazza Colonna. They bowed. The thin, sour-looking painter was walking with a beardless young German, red and snub-nosed. This young man was a painter too, Cortés said; he wore a green hat with a cock’s feather, a blue cape, thick eyeglasses, big boots, and had a certain air of being a blond Chinaman.

“Would you like to come to the Doria gallery with us?” asked Cortés.

“What is there to see there?”

“A stupendous portrait by Velázquez.”

“I warn you that I know nothing about pictures.”

“Nobody does,” Cortés declared roundly. “Everybody says what he thinks.”

“Is the gallery near here?”

“Yes, just a step.”

In company with Cortés and the German with the green hat with the cock’s feather, Cæsar went to the Piazza del Collegio Romano, where the Doria palace is. They saw a lot of pictures which didn’t seem any better to Cæsar than those in the antique shops and the pawnbrokers’, but which drew learned commentaries from the German. Then Cortés took them to a cabinet hung in green and lighted by a skylight. There was nothing to be seen in the cabinet except the portrait of the Pope. In order that people might look at it comfortably, a sofa had been installed facing it.

“Is this the Velázquez portrait?” asked Cæsar.

“This is it.”

Cæsar looked at it carefully. “That man had eaten and drunk well before his portrait was painted,” said Cæsar; “his face is congested.”

“It is extraordinary!” exclaimed Cortés. “It is something to see, the way this is done. What boldness! Everything is red, the cape, the cap, the curtains in the background.... What a man!”

The German aired his opinions in his own language, and took out a notebook and pencil and wrote some notes.

“What sort of man was this?” asked Cæsar, whom the technical side of painting did not preoccupy, as it did Cortés.

“They say he was a dull man, who lived under a woman’s domination.”

“The great thing is,” murmured Cæsar, “how the painter has left him here alive. It seems as if we had come in here to salute him, and he was waiting for us to speak. Those clear eyes are questioning us. It is curious.”

“Not curious,” exclaimed Cortés, “but admirable.”

“For me it is more curious than admirable. There is something brutal in this Pope; through his grey beard, which is so thin, you can see his projecting chin. The good gentleman was of a marked prognathism, a type of degeneration, indifference, intellectual torpor, and nevertheless, he reached the top. Perhaps in the Church it’s the same as in water, only corks float.”

_LEGEND AND HISTORY_

Cæsar went out of the cabinet, leaving the German and Cortés seated on the sofa, absorbed in the picture; he looked at various paintings in the gallery, went back, and sat down, beside the artists.

“This portrait,” he said presently, “is like history by the side of legend. All the other paintings in the gallery are legend, ‘folk-lore,’ as I believe one calls it. This one is history.”

“That’s what it is. It is truth,” agreed Cortés.

“Yes, but there are people who do not like the truth, my friend. I tell you: this is a man of flesh, somewhat enigmatic, like nature herself, and with arteries in which blood flows; this is a man who breathes and digests, and not merely a pleasant abstraction; you, who understand such things, will tell me that the drawing is perfect, and the colour such as it was in reality; but how about the person who doesn’t ask for reality?”

“Stendhal, the writer, was affected that way by this picture,” said Cortés; “he was shocked at its being hung among masterpieces.”

“He found it bad, no doubt.”

“Very bad?”

“Was this Stendhal English?”

“No, French.”

“Ah, then, you needn’t be surprised. A Frenchman has no obligation to understand anything that’s not French.”

“Nevertheless he was an intelligent man.”

“Did he perhaps have a good deal of veneration?”

“No, he boasted of not having any.”

“Doubtless he did have without suspecting it. With a man who had no veneration, what difference would it make whether there was one bad thing among a lot of good ones?”

The German with the green hat, who understood something of the conversation, was indignant at Cæsar’s irreverent ideas. He asked him if he understood Latin, and Cæsar told him no, and then, in a strange gibberish, half Latin and half Italian, he let loose a series of facts, dates, and numbers. Then he asserted that all artistic things of great merit were German: Greece. Rome, Gothic architecture, the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Velázquez, all German.

The snub-nosed young person, with his cape and his green hat with its cock-feather, did not let a mouse escape from his German mouse-trap.

The data of the befeathered German were too much for Cæsar, and he took his leave of the painters.

XVII. EVIL DAYS

Accompanied by Kennedy, Cæsar called repeatedly on the most auspicious members of the French clerical element living in Rome, and found persons more cultivated than among the rough Spanish monks; but, as was natural, nobody gave him any useful information offering the possibility of his putting his financial talents to the proof.

“Something must turn up,” he used to say to himself, “and at the least opening we will dive into the work.”

Cæsar kept gathering notes about people who had connections in Spain with the Black party in Rome; he called several times on Father Herreros, despite his uncle’s prohibition, and succeeded in getting the monk to write to the Marquesa de Montsagro, asking if there were no means of making Cæsar Moneada, Cardinal Fort’s nephew, Conservative Deputy for her district.

The Marquesa wrote back that it was impossible; the Conservative Deputy for the district was very popular and a man with large properties there.

When Holy Week was over, Laura and the Countess Brenda and her daughter decided to spend a while at Florence, and invited Cæsar to accompany them; but he was quite out of harmony with the Brenda lady, and said that he had to stay on in Rome.

A few days later Mme. Dawson and her daughters left, and the San Martinos and the Marchesa Sciacca; and an avalanche of English people and Germans, armed with their red Baedekers, took the hotel by storm. Susanna Marchmont had gone to spend some days at Corfu.

In less than a week Cæsar remained alone, knowing nobody in the hotel, and despite his believing that he was going to be perfectly indifferent about this, he felt deserted and sad. The influence of the springtime also affected him. The deep blue sky, cloudless, dense, dark, made him languish. Instead of entertaining himself with something or other, he did scarcely anything all day long but walk.

_TWO ABSURD MEN_

“I have continually near me in the hotel,” wrote Cæsar to Alzugaray, “two absurd fellows: one is one of those stout red Germans with a square head; the other a fine slim Norwegian. The German, who is a captain in some service or other, is a restless man, always busy about what the devil I don’t know. He is constantly carrying about trunks and boxes, with the aid of a sorrowful valet, dressed in black, who appears to detest his position. The captain must devote the morning to doing gymnastics, for I hear him from my room, which is next to his, jumping and dropping weights on the floor, each of which must weigh half a ton, to judge by the noise they make.

“He does all this to vocal commands, and when some feat doesn’t go right he reprimands himself.

“This German isn’t still a moment; he opens the salon door, crosses the room, stands at the window, takes up a paper, puts it down. He is a type that makes me nervous.

“The Norwegian at first appeared to be a reasonable man, somewhat sullen. He looked frowningly at me, and I watched him equally frowningly, and took him for a thinker, an Ibsenite whose imagination was lost among the ice of his own country. Now and then I would see him walking up and down the corridor, rubbing his hands together so continuously and so frantically that they made a noise like bones.

“Suddenly, this gentleman is transformed as if by magic; he begins to joke with the servants, he seizes a chair and dances with it, and the other day I saw him alone in the salon marching around with a paper hat on his head, like children playing soldiers, and blowing on a cornet, also made of paper.” I stared at him in amazement, he smiled like a child, and asked if he was disturbing me.

“‘No, no, not in the least,’ I told him.

“I have asked in the hotel if this man is crazy, and they have told me that he is not, but is a professor, a man of science, who is known to have these strange fits of gaiety.

“Another of the Norwegian’s doings has been to compose a serenade, with a vulgar melody that would disgust you, and which he has dedicated ‘_A la bella Italia_.’ He wrote the Italian words himself, but as he knows no music, he had a pianist come here and write out his serenade. What he especially wants is that it should be full of sentiment; and so the pianist arranged it with directions and many pauses, which satisfied the Norwegian. Almost every night the serenade ‘_A la bella Italia_’ is sung. Somebody who wants to amuse himself goes to the piano, the Norwegian strikes a languid attitude and chants his serenade. Sometimes he goes in front of the piano, sometimes behind, but invariably he hears the storm of applause when it ends, and he bows with great gusto.

“I don’t know whether it’s the other people who are laughing at him, or he who is laughing at the others.

“The other day he said to me in his macaronic Italian:

“‘Mr. Spaniard, I have good eyesight, good hearing, a good sense of smell, and... lots of sentiment.’

“I didn’t exactly understand what he meant me to think, and I didn’t pay any attention to him.

“It seems that the Norwegian is going away soon, and as the day of his departure approaches, he grows funereal.”

_THE SADNESS OF LIFE_

“I don’t know why I don’t go away,” Cæsar wrote to his friend another time. “When I go out in the evening and see the ochre-coloured houses on both sides and the blue sky above, a horrible sadness takes me. These spring days oppress me, make me want to weep; it seems to me it would be better to be dead, leaving no tomb or name or other ridiculous and disagreeable thing, but disappearing into the air or the sea. It doesn’t seem natural; but I have never been so happy as one time when I was in Paris sick, alone and with a fever. I was in an hotel room and my window looked into the garden of a fine house, where I could see the tops of the trees; and I transformed them into a virgin forest, wherein marvellous adventures happened to me.

“Since then I have often thought that things are probably neither good nor bad, neither sad nor happy, in themselves; he who has sound, normal nerves, and a brain equally sound, reflects the things around him like a good mirror, and feels with comfort the impression of his conformity to nature; nowadays we who have nerves all upset and brains probably upset too, form deceptive reflections. And so, that time in Paris, sick and shut in, I was happy; and here, sound and strong, when toward nightfall, I look at the splendid skies, the palaces, the yellow walls that take an extraordinary tone, I feel that I am one of the most miserable men on the planet....”

_ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON_

His lack of tranquillity led Cæsar to make absurd resolutions which he didn’t carry out.

One Sunday in the beginning of April, he went out into the street, disposed to take a walk outside of Rome, following the road anywhere it led. A hard, fine rain was falling, the sky was grey, the air mild, the streets were full of puddles, the shops closed; a few flower merchants were offering branches of almond in blossom.

Cæsar was very depressed. He went into a church to get out of the rain. The church was full; there were many people in the centre of it; he didn’t know what they were doing. Doubtless they were gathered there for some reason, although Cæsar didn’t understand what. Cæsar sat down on a bench, worn out; he would have liked to listen to organ music, to a boy choir. No ideas occurred to him but sentimental ones. Some time passed, and a priest began to preach. Cæsar got up and went into the street.

“I must get rid of these miserable impressions, get back to noble ideas. I must fight this sentimental leprosy.”

He started to walk with long strides through the sad, empty streets.

He went toward the river and met Kennedy, who was coming back, he told him, from the studio of a sculptor friend of his.

“You look like desolation. What has happened to you?”

“Nothing, but I am in a perfectly hellish humour.”

“I am melancholy too. It must be the weather. Let’s take a walk.”

They went along the bank of the Tiber. Full of clay, more turbid than ever, and very high between the white embankments hemming it in, the river looked like a big sewer.

“This is not the ‘coeruleus Tibris’ that Virgil speaks of in the Aeneld, which presented itself to Aeneas in the form of an ancient man with his head crowned with roses,” said Kennedy.

“No. This is a horrible river,” Cæsar opined.

They followed the shore, passed the Castel Sant’ Angelo and the bridge with the statues.

From the embankment, to the right, they could now see narrow lanes, sunk almost below the level of the river. On the other bank a new, white edifice towered in the rain.

They went as far as the Piazza d’Armi, and then came back at nightfall to Rome. The rain was gradually ceasing and the sky looked less threatening. A file of greenish gaslights followed the river-wall and then crossed over the bridge.

They walked to the Piazza del Popólo and through the Via Babuino to the Piazza di Spagna.

“Would you like to go to a Benedictine abbey tomorrow?” asked Kennedy.

“All right.”

“And if you are still melancholy, we will leave you there.”

_THE ABBEY_

The next day, after lunch, Kennedy and Cæsar went to visit the abbey of Sant’ Anselmo on the Aventine. The abbot, Hildebrand, was a friend of Kennedy’s, and like him an Englishman.

They took a carriage and Kennedy told it to stop at the church of Santa Sabina.

“It is still too early to go to the abbey. Let us look at this church, which is the best preserved of all the old Roman ones.”

They entered the church; but it was so cold there that Cæsar went out again directly and waited in the porch. There was a man there selling rosaries and photographs who spoke scarcely any Italian or French, but did speak Spanish. Probably he was a Jew.

Cæsar asked him where they manufactured those religious toys, and the pedlar told him in Westphalia.

Kennedy went to look at a picture by Sassoferrato, which is in one of the chapels, and meanwhile the rosary-seller showed the church door to Cæsar and explained the different bas-reliefs, cut in cypress wood by Greek artists of the V Century, and representing scenes from the Old and New Testaments.

Kennedy came back, they got into the carriage again, and they drove to the Benedictine abbey.

“Is the abbot Hildebrandus here?” asked Kennedy.

Out came the abbot, a man of about fifty, with a gold cross on his breast. They exchanged a few friendly words, and the superior showed them the convent.

The refectory was clean and very spacious; the long table of shining wood; the floor made of mosaic. The crypt held a statue, which Cæsar assumed must be of Sant’ Anselmo. The church was severe, without ornaments, without pictures; it had a primitive air, with its columns of fine granite that looked like marble. A monk was playing the harmonium, and in the opaque veiled light, the thin music gave a strange impression of something quite outside this life.

Afterwards they crossed a large court with palm-trees. They went up to the second story, and down a corridor with cells, each of which had on the lintel the name of the patron saint of the respective monk. Each door had a card with the name of the occupant of the room.

It looked more like a bath-house than a monastery. The cells were comfortable inside, without any air of sadness; each held a bed, a divan, and a small bookcase.

By a window at the end of the passage, one could see, far away, the Alban Hills, looking like a blue mountain-range, half hidden in white haze, and nearby one could see the trees in the Protestant cemetery and the pyramid of Caïus Cestius close to them.

Cæsar felt a sort of deep repugnance for the people shut up here, remote from life and protected from it by a lot of things.

“The man who is playing the harmonium in this church with its opaque light, is a coward,” he said to himself. “One must live and struggle in the open air, among men, in the midst of their passions and hatreds, even though one’s miserable nerves quiver and tremble.”

After showing them the monastery, the abbot Hildebrand took them to his study, where he worked at revising ancient translations of the Bible. He had photographic copies of all the Latin texts and he was collating them with the original.

They talked of the progress of the Church, and the abbot commented with some contempt on the worldly success of the Jesuit churches, with their saints who serve as well to get husbands and rich wives as to bring winning numbers in the lottery.

Before going out, they went to a window, at the other end of the corridor from where they had looked out before. Below them they could see the Tiber as far as the Ripa harbour; opposite, the heights of the Janiculum, and further, Saint Peter’s.

When they went out, Kennedy said to Cæsar:

“What devilish effect has the abbey produced in you, that you are so much gayer than when we went in?”

“It has confirmed me in my idea, which I had lost for a few days.”

“What idea is that?”

“That we must not defend ourselves in this life, but attack, always attack.”

“And now you are contented at having found it again?”

“Yes.”

_PIRANESI’S GARDEN_

“I am glad, because you have such a pitiable air when you are sad. Would you like to go to the Priory of Malta, which is only a step from here?”

“Good.”

They went down in the carriage to the Priory of Malta. They knocked at the gate and a woman came out who knew Kennedy, and who told them to wait a moment and she would open the church.

“Here,” said Kennedy, “you have all that remains of the famous Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. That anti-historic man Bonaparte rooted it out of Malta. The Order attempted to establish itself in Catania, and afterwards at Ferrara, and finally took refuge here. Now it has no property left, and all that remains are its memories and its archives.”

“That is how our descendants will see our Holy Mother the Church. In Chicago or Boston some traveller will find an abandoned chapel, and will ask: ‘What is this? ‘And they will tell him: ‘This is what remains of the Catholic Church.’”

“Don’t talk like an Homais,” said Kennedy.

“I don’t know who Homais is,” retorted Cæsar.

“An atheistical druggist in Flaubert’s novel, _Madame Bovary_. Haven’t you read it?”

“Yes; I have a vague idea that I have read it. A very heavy thing; yes, ... I think I have read it.”

The woman opened the door and they went into the church. It was small, overcharged with ornaments. They saw the tomb of Bishop Spinelli and Giotto’s Virgin, and then went into a hall gay with red flags with a white cross, on whose walls they could read the names of the Grand Masters of the Order of Malta. The majority of the names were French and Polish. Two or three were Spanish, and among them that of Cæsar Borgia.

“Your countryman and namesake was also a Grand Master of Malta,” said Kennedy.

“So it seems,” replied Cæsar with indifference. “I see that you speak with contempt of that extraordinary man. Is he not congenial to you?”

“The fact is I don’t know his history.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“How strange! We must go tomorrow to the Borgia Apartment in the Vatican.”

“Good.”

They saw the model of an ancient galley which was in the same hall, and went out through the church into the garden planned by Piranesi. The woman showed them a very old palm, with a hole in it made by a hand-grenade in the year ‘49. It had remained that way more than half a century, and it was only a few days since the trunk of the palm had broken.

From the garden they went, by a path between trees, to the bastion of Paul III, a little terrace, from which they could see the Tiber at their feet, and opposite the panorama of Rome and its environs, in the light of a beautiful spring sunshine....

XVIII. CÆSAR BORGIA’S MOTTO, “AUT CÆSAR, AUT NIHIL”

_THE BORGIAS_

The next day was one of the days for visiting the Borgia Apartment. Cæsar and Kennedy met in the Piazza di San Pietro, went into the Vatican museum, and walked by a series of stairs and passageways to the Gallery of Inscriptions.

Then they went down to a hall, at whose door there were guards dressed in slashed clothes, which were parti-coloured, red, yellow, and black. Some of them carried lances and others swords.

“Why are the guards here dressed differently?” asked Cæsar.

“Because this belongs to the Dominions of the Pope.”

“And what kind of guards are these?”

“These are pontifical Swiss guards.”

“They look comic-opera enough,” said Cæsar.

“My dear man, don’t say that. This costume was designed by no one less than Michelangelo.”

“All right. At that time they probably looked very well, but now they have a theatrical effect.”

“It is because you have no veneration. If you were reverential, they would look wonderful to you.”

“Very well, let us wait and see whether reverence will not spring up in me. Now, you go on and explain what there is here.”

“This first room, the Hall of Audience, or of the Popes, does not contain anything notable, as you see,” said Kennedy; “the five we are coming to later, have been restored, but are still the same as at the time when your countryman Alexander VI was Pope. All five were decorated by Pinturicchio and his pupils, and all with reference to the Borgias. The Borgias have their history, not well known in all its details, and their legend, which is more extensive and more picturesque. Really, it is not easy to distinguish one from the other.”

“Let’s have the history and the legend mixed.”

“I will give you a résumé in a few words. Alfonso Borja was a Valencian, born at Játiba; he was secretary to the King or Aragon; then Bishop of Valencia, later Cardinal, and lastly Pope, by the name of Calixtus III. While Calixtus lives, the Spaniards are all-powerful in Rome. Calixtus protects his nephews, sons of his sister Isabel and a Valencian named Lanzol or Lenzol. These nephews drop their original name and take their mother’s, Italianizing its spelling to Borgia. Their uncle, the Pope, appoints the elder, Don Pedro Luis, Captain of the Church; the second, Don Rodríguez....”

“Don Rodríguez?” said Cæsar. “In Spanish you can’t say Don Rodríguez.”

“Gregorovius calls him that.”

“Then Gregorovius, no doubt, knew no Spanish.”

“In Latin he is called Rodericus.”

“Then it should be Don Rodrigo.”

“All right, Rodrigo. Well, this Don Rodrigo, also from Játiba, his uncle makes a Cardinal, and at the death of Pedro Luis, he calls him to Rome. Rodrigo has had several children before becoming a Cardinal, and apparently he feels no great enthusiasm for ecclesiastical dignities; but when he finds himself in Rome, the ambition to be Pope assails him, and at the death of Innocent VIII, he buys the tiara? Is it legend or history that he bought the tiara? That is not clear. Now we will go in and see the portrait of Rodrigo Borgia, who in the series of Popes, bears the name Alexander VI.”

_ALEXANDER VI AND HIS BROTHER_

Kennedy and Cæsar entered the first room, the Hall of the Mysteries, and the Englishman stopped in front of a picture of the Resurrection. “Here you have Alexander VI, on his knees, adoring Christ who is leaving the tomb. He is the type of a Southerner; he has a hooked nose, a long head, tonsured, a narrow forehead, thick lips, a heavy beard, a strong neck, and small chubby hands. He wears a papal robe of gold, covered with jewels; the tiara is on the ground beside him. Of the soldiers, it is supposed that the one asleep by the sepulchre and the one who is waking and rising up, pulling himself to his knees by the aid of his lance, are two of the Pope’s sons, Cæsar and the Duke of Gandia. I rather believe that the little soldier with the lance is a woman, perhaps Lucrezia. How does your countryman strike you, my friend?”

“He is of Mediterranean race, a dolichocephalic Iberian; he has the small melon-shaped head, the sensual features. He is leptorrhine. He comes of an intriguing, commercial, lying, and charlatan race.”

“To which you have the honour to belong,” said Kennedy, laughing.

“Certainly.”

“They say this man was a great enthusiast about his countrymen and the customs of his country. These tiles, which are remains of the original floor, and the plates you see here, are Valencian. A Spanish painter told me that several letters of Alexander VI’s are preserved in the archives of the cathedral at Valencia, one among them asking to have tiles sent.”

Kennedy walked forward a little and planted himself before an Assumption of the Virgin, and said:

“It is supposed that this gloomy man dressed in red, with a little fringe of hair on his brow, is a brother of the Pope’s.”

“A bad type to encounter in the Tribunal of the Inquisition,” said Cæsar; “imagine what this red-robed fellow would have done with that Jew at the Excelsior, Señor Pereira, if he had happened to have him in his power.”

“In the soffits,” Kennedy went on, “as you see, are repetitions of the symbols of Iris, Osiris, and the bull Apis, doubtless because of their resemblance to the Christian symbols, and also because the bull Apis recalls the bull in the Borgia arms.” “Their arms were a bull?”

“Yes; it was a ‘scutcheon invented by some king-at-arms or other, a symbol of ferocity and strength.”

“Were they of a noble family, these Borgias?”

“No, probably not. Though I believe some people suppose that they were descended from the Aragonese family of Atares. Now that we know Alexander VI, let us take a glance at his court. It has often been said, and is no doubt taken from Vasari’s book, that in the Borgia Apartment Pinturicchio painted Pope Alexander VI adoring the Virgin represented under the likeness of his beloved, Julia Farnese. The critic must have been confused, because none of these madonnas recalls the face of _Giulia la bella_, whom people used to call the Bride of Christ. The picture that Vasari refers to must be one in the museum at Valencia.”

_THE HALL OF THE SAINTS_

They went into another room, the Hall of the Saints, and Kennedy took Cæsar in front of the fresco called, _The Dispute of Saint Catherine with the Emperor Maximian_.

“The place of this scene,” said Kennedy, “Pinturicchio has set in front of the Arch of Constantine. The artist has added the inscription _Pacis Cultori_, and below he has embossed the Borgia bull. The subject is the discussion between the Emperor and the saint. Maximian, seated on a throne under a canopy, is listening to Saint Catherine, who counts on her fingers the arguments she has been using in the dispute. Who was it served as model for the figure of Maximian? At first they imagined it was Cæsar Borgia; but as you may observe, the appearance of the Emperor is that of a man of twenty odd years, and when Pinturicchio painted this, Cæsar was about seventeen. So it is more logical to suppose that the model must have been the Pope’s eldest son, the Duke of Gandia. A chronicler of the period says that this Duke of Gandia was good among the great, as his brother Cæsar was great among the wicked. Also, legend or history, whichever it be, says that Cæsar procured his elder brother’s murder in a corner of the Ghetto, and that the Pope on learning of it, became as if crazy, and went into the full Consistory with his garments torn and ashes on his head.”

“What love for traditional symbolism!” said Cæsar.

“Everybody is not so anti-traditional as you. I will go on with my explanation,” added Kennedy. “Saint Catherine has Lucrezia’s features. She is small and slender. She wears her hair down, a little cap with a pearl cross which hangs on her forehead, and a collar also of pearls. She has large eyes, a candid expression. Cagnolo da Parma will say of her, when she goes to Ferrara, that she has ‘_il naso profilato e bello, li capelli aurei, gli occhi bianchi, la bocea alquanto grande con li denti candiaissimi._’ Literature will portray this sweet-faced little blond girl as a Messalina, a poisoner, and incestuous with her brothers and her father. At this time Lucrezia had just married Giovanni Sforza, although as a matter of fact the two never lived together. Giovanni Sforza is the little young man who appears there in the back of the picture riding a spirited horse. Sforza wears his hair like a woman, and has a broad-brimmed hat and a red mantle. A little later Cæsar Borgia will try several times to assassinate him.”

“What for?” asked Cæsar.

“No doubt he found him in the way. The man who is in the foreground, next to the Emperor’s throne, is Andrew Paleologos,” Kennedy continued. “He is the one wearing a pale purple cloak and looking so melancholy. It used to be supposed that he was Giovanni Borgia. Now they say that it is Paleologos, whom the death of the Emperor Constantine XIII, about this time, had caused to lose the crown of Byzance.

“Here at the right, riding a Barbary horse, is Prince Djem, second son of Muhammad II, whom Alexander VI kept as a hostage. Djem, as you see, has an expressive face, a prominent nose, lively eyes, a long pointed beard, a shock of hair, and a big turban. He rides Moorish fashion, with his stirrups very short, and wears a curved cutlass in his belt. He is a great friend of Cæsar Borgia’s, which does not prevent Cæsar and his father, according to public rumour, from poisoning him at a farewell banquet in Capua. And here is Giovanni Sforza again, on foot. Are those two children the younger sons of Alexander VI? Or are they Lucrezia and Cæsar again? I don’t know. Behind Paleologos are the Pope’s domestic retainers, and among them Pinturicchio himself.”

_THE LIFE OF CÆSAR BORGIA_

After explaining the picture in detail, Kennedy went into the next room, followed by Cæsar. This is called the Hall of the Liberal Arts, and is adorned with a large marble mantel.

“Is there no portrait here of Cæsar Borgia?” asked Cæsar.

“No. Here I have a photograph of the one by Giorgione,” said Kennedy, showing a postal card.

“What sort of man was he? What did he do?”

Kennedy seated himself on a bench near the window and Cæsar sat beside him.

“Cæsar Borgia,” said Kennedy, “came to Rome from the university of Pisa, approximately at the time when they made his father Pope. He must then have been about twenty, and was strong and active. He broke in horses, was an expert fencer and shot, and killed bulls in the ring.”

“That too?”

“He was a good Spaniard. In a court that cannot be seen from here, on account of those thick panes, but on which these windows look, Cæsar Borgia fought bulls, and the Pope stood here to watch his son’s dexterity with the sword.”

“What ruffians!” exclaimed Cæsar, smiling.

The Englishman continued with the history of Borgia, his intrigues with the King of France, the death of Lucrezia’s husband, the assassinations attributed to the Pope’s son, the mysterious execution of Ramiro del Orco, which made Machiavelli say that Cæsar Borgia was the prince who best knew how to make and unmake men, according to their merits; finally the _coup d’état_ at Sinigaglia with the _condottieri_.

By this time Cæsar Moncada was very anxious to know more. These Borgias interested him. His sympathies went out toward those great bandits who dominated Rome and tried to get all Italy into their power, leaf by leaf, like an artichoke. Their purpose struck him as a good one, almost a moral one. The device, _Aut Cæsar, aut nihil_, was worthy of a man of energy and courage.

Kennedy seeing Cæsar’s interest, then recounted the scene at Cardinal Adrian Corneto’s country-house; Alexander’s intention to give a supper there to various Cardinals and poison them all with a wine that had been put into three bottles, so as to inherit from them, the superstitiousness of the Pope, who sent Cardinal Caraffa to the Vatican for a golden box in which he kept his consecrated Host, from which he was never separated; and the mistake of the chamberlain, who served the poisoned wine to Cæsar and his father.

“Here, to this very room, they brought the dying Pope,” said Kennedy, and pointed to a door, on whose marble lintel one may read: _Alexander Borgia Valentín P. P._ “They say he passed eight days here between life and death, before he did die, and that when his corpse was exposed, it decomposed horribly.”

Then Kennedy related the story of Cæsar’s trying to cure himself by the strange method of being put inside of a mule just dead; his flight from Rome, sick on a litter, with his soldiers, as far as the Romagna; his imprisonment in the Castel Sant’ Angelo; his capture by the Great Captain; his efforts to escape from his prison at Medina del Campo; and his obscure death on the Mendavia road, near Viana in Navarre, through one of the Count of Lerin’s soldiers, named Garcés, a native of Agreda, who gave Borgia such a blow with a lance that it broke his armour and passed all the way through his body.

Cæsar was stirred up. Hearing the story of the people who had lived there, in those very rooms, gave him an impression of complete reality.

When they went out again by the Gallery of Inscriptions, they looked from a window.

“It must have been here that he fought bulls?” said Cæsar.

“Yes.”

The court was large, with a fountain of four streams in the middle. “Life then must have been more intense than now,” said Cæsar.

“Who knows? Perhaps it was the same as now,” replied Kennedy.

“And what does history, exact history, say of these Borgias?”

“Of Pope Alexander VI it says that he had his children in wedlock; that he was a good administrator; that the people were content with him; that the influence of Spain was justifiable, because he was Spanish; that the story of the poisonings does not seem certain; and that he himself could hardly have died of poison, but rather of a malarial fever.”

“And about Lucrezia?”

“Of Lucrezia it says that she was a woman like those of her period; that there are no proofs for belief in her incests and her poisonings; and that her first marriages, which were never really consummated, were nothing more than political moves of her father and her brother’s.”

“And about Cæsar?”

“Cæsar is the one member of the family who appears really terrible. His device, _Aut Cæsar, aut nihil_, was not a chance phrase, but the irrevocable decision to be a king or to be nothing.”

“That, at least, is not a mystification,” murmured Cæsar.

_IN FRONT OF THE CASTEL SANT’ ANGELO_

They left the Vatican, crossed the Piazza di San Pietro, and drew near the river.

As they passed in front of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, Kennedy said:

“Alexander VI shut himself up in this castle to weep for the Duke of Gandia. From one of those windows he watched the funeral procession of his son, whom they were carrying to Santa Maria del Popolo. According to old Italian custom they bore the corpse in an open casket. The funeral was at night, and two hundred men with torches lighted the way. When the cortège set foot on this bridge, the Pope’s retinue saw him draw back with horror, and cover his face, crying out sharply.”

XIX. CÆSAR’S REFLECTIONS

“I have had the curiosity,” Cæsar wrote to his friend Alzugaray, “to inform myself about the life of the Borgias, and going on from one to another, I reached Saint Francis Borgia; and from Saint Francis I have gone backwards to Saint Ignatius Loyola.

“The parallelism between the doings of Cæsar Borgia and of Iñigo de Loyola surprised me; what one tried to do in the sphere of action, the other did in the sphere of thought. These twin Spanish figures, both odious to the masses, have given its direction to the Church; one, Loyola, through the impulse to spiritual power; the other, Cæsar Borgia, through the impulse to temporal power.

“One may say that Spain gave Papal Rome its thought and activity, as it gave the Rome of the Cæsars also its thought and activity, through Seneca and Trajan.

“Really it is curious to see the traces that remain in Rome of that Basque, Iñigo. That half farceur, half ruffian, who had the characteristics of a modern anarchist, was a genius for organization. Bakunin and Mazzini are poor devils beside him. The Church still lives through Loyola. He was her last reformer.

“The Society of Jesus is the knot of the whole Catholic scaffolding; the Jesuits know that on the day when this knot, which their Society forms, is cut or pulled open, the whole frame-work of out-of-date ideas and lies, which defends the Vatican, will come down with a terrible noise.

“Rome lives on Jesuitism. Indubitably, without Loyola, Catholicism would have rotted away much sooner. It is obvious that this would have been better, but we are not talking about that. A good general is not one who defends just causes, but one who wins battles.

“The Borgias, Luther, and Saint Ignatius, between them, killed the predominance of the Latin race.

“The Borgias threw discredit on the free Renaissance life, before the face of all nations; Luther removed the centre of spiritual life and philosophy to Germany and England; Saint Ignatius prevented Roman Catholicism from rotting away; he put iron braces on the body that was doubling over with weakness, and inside his braces the body has gone on decomposing and has poisoned the Latin countries.

“On hearing this opinion here, they asked me:

“‘Then you think Catholicism is dead?’

“‘No, no; as to having any civilizing effect, it is dead; but as to having a sentimental effect, it is very much alive... and it will still unfortunately keep on being alive. All this business of the Virgin del Pilar and the Virgin del Carmen, and saints, and processions, and magnificent churches, is a terrible strength.... If there were an emancipated bourgeoisie and a sensible working class, Catholicism would not be a peril; but there are not, and Catholicism will have, not perhaps an overpowering expansion, but at least moments of new growth. While we have a lazy rich class and a brutalized poor class, Catholicism will be strong.’

“Leaving the utilitarian and moral questions aside, and considering merely the amount of influence and the traces left by this influence, one can see that Rome is living on Loyola’s work and still dreaming of Borgia’s. Those pilgrims in the Piazza di San Pietro who enthusiastically yell, _Viva il Papa-re!_ are acclaiming the memory of Cæsar Borgia. Thus you have the absurd result, people who speak with horror of an historic figure and still hold his work in admiration.

“This Spanish influence that our country gave to the Church in two ways, spiritual and material,--to the Church which now is an institution not merely foreign but contrary to our nature,--Spain ought today to try to use in her own behalf. Spain’s work ought to be to organize extra-religious individualism.

“We are individualists; therefore what we need is an iron discipline, like soldiers.

“This discipline established, we ought to spread it through the contiguous countries, especially through Africa. Democracy, the Republic, Socialism, have not, essentially, any root in our land. Families, cities, classes, can be united in a pact; isolated men, like us, can be united only by discipline.

“Moreover, as for us, we do not recognize prestige, nor do we cheerfully accept either kings or presidents or high priests or grand magi.

“The only thing that would suit us would be to have a chief... for the pleasure of eating him alive.

“A Loyola of the extra-religious individualism is what Spain needs. Deeds, always deeds, and a cold philosophy, realistic, based on deeds, and a morality based on action. Don’t you agree?

“I think, and I am becoming more confirmed in my opinion, that the only people who can give a direction, found a new civilization with its own proper characteristics, for that old Iberian race, which probably sprang from the shores of the Mediterranean... is we Spaniards.

“‘Why only you Spaniards?’ my friend Kennedy asked me; and I told him:

“‘To me it seems indubitable. France is leaning constantly more towards the North. In Italy the same is true; Milan and Turin, where the Saxon and the Gaul predominate, are the real capitals of Italy. In Spain, however, this does not happen. We are separated from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees, and joined to Africa by the sea and climate. Our plan ought to be to construct a great European Empire, to impose our ideas on the peninsula, and then to spread them everywhere.’”

XX. DON CALIXTO AT SAINT PETER’S

_DON CALIXTO UNDERSTANDS_

Kennedy was anxious that Cæsar should turn into the good road. The good road, for him, was art.

“At heart,” the Englishman informed him, “I am one of those Brothers of the Esthetic Doctrine who irritate you, and I must instruct you in the faith.”

“I am not opposed to your trying to instruct me.”

The two went several times to see museums, especially the Vatican museum.

One day, on leaving the Sistine Chapel, where they had had a long discussion on the merits of Michelangelo, Cæsar met the painter Cortés, who came to speak to him.

“I am here with a gentleman from my town, who is a Senator,” said Cortés. “A boresome old boy. Shall I introduce him?”

“All right.”

“He is an old fool who knows nothing about anything and talks about everything.”

Cortés presented Cæsar to Don Calixto García Guerrero, a man of some fifty-odd, Senator and boss of the province of Zamora.

Don Calixto invited Cæsar and Kennedy to dine with him. The Englishman expressed regrets, and Cæsar said he would go. They took leave of Cortés and Don Calixto, and went out to the Piazza di San Pietro.

“I imagine you are going to be bored tomorrow dining with that old countryman of yours,” said Kennedy. “Oh, surely. He has all the signs of a soporific person; but who knows? a type like that sometimes has influence.”

“So you are dining with him with a more or less practical object?”

“Why, of course.”

The next evening, Cæsar, in his evening clothes, betook himself to an hotel in the Piazza di Spagna, where Don Calixto García Guerrero was staying. Don Calixto received him very cordially. He doubtless knew that Cæsar was nephew to Cardinal Fort and brother to a marchioness, and doubtless that flattered Don Calixto.

Don Calixto honoured Cæsar with an excellent dinner, and during dessert became candid with him. He had come to Rome to put through his obtaining a Papal title. He was a friend of the Spanish Ambassador to the Vatican, and it wouldn’t have cost him any more to be made a prince, a duke, or a marquis; but he preferred the title of count. He had a magnificent estate called La Sauceda, and he wanted to be the Count de la Sauceda.

Cæsar comprehended that this gentleman might be fortune coming in the guise of chance, and he set himself to making good with him, to telling him stories of aristocratic life in Rome, some of which he had read in books, and some of which he had heard somewhere or other.

“What vices must exist here!” Don Calixto kept exclaiming. “That is why they say: _‘Roma veduta, fede perduta.’_”

Cæsar noted that Don Calixto had a great enthusiasm for the aristocracy; and so he took pains, every time he talked with him, to mix the names of a few princes and marquises into the conversation; he also gave him to understand that he lived among them, and went so far as to hint the possibility of being of service to him in Rome, but in a manner ambiguous enough to permit of withdrawing the offer in case of necessity. Fortunately for Cæsar, Don Calixto had his affairs all completely arranged; the one thing he desired was that Cæsar, whom he supposed to be an expert on archeological questions, should go about with him the three or four days he expected to remain in Rome. He had spent a whole week making calls, and as yet had seen nothing.

Cæsar had no other recourse but to buy a Baedeker and read it and learn a lot of things quite devoid of interest for him.

The next day Don Calixto was waiting for him in a carriage at the door, and they went to see the sights.

Don Calixto was a man that made phrases and ornamented them with many adverbs ending in -ly.

“Verily,” he said, after his first archeological walk in Rome, “verily, it seems strange that after more than two thousand years have passed, all these monuments should still remain.”

“That is most true,” replied Cæsar, looking at him with his impassive air.

“I understand why Rome is the real school for learning, integrally, both ancient and modern history.”

“Most certainly,” agreed Cæsar.

Don Calixto, who knew neither Italian nor French, found a source of help, for the days he was to spend in Rome, in Cæsar’s friendship, and made him accompany him everywhere. Cæsar was able to collect and preserve, though not precisely cut in brass, the phrases Don Calixto uttered in front of the principal monuments of Rome.

In front of the Colosseum, his first exclamation was: “What a lot of stone!” Then recalling his role of orator, he exclaimed: “The spirits are certainly daunted and the mind darkened on thinking how men could have sunk to such abysses of evil.”

“Don Calixto is referring to those holes,” thought Cæsar, looking at the cellars of the Circo Romano.

From the Colosseum the carriage went to the Capitol, and then Don Calixto asserted with energy:

“One cannot deny that, say what you will, Rome is one of the places most fertile in memories.”

Don Calixto was an easy traveller for his _cicerone_. He far preferred talking to being given explanations; Cæsar had said to him: “Don Calixto, you understand everything, by intuition.” And being thus reassured, Don Calixto kept uttering terrible absurdities.

One day Don Calixto went to see the Pope, in evening clothes and with his abdomen covered with decorations, and he asked Cæsar if a photographer couldn’t take his picture in the act of leaving the carriage, so that the photograph would have Saint Peter’s as a background.

“Yes, I think so. Why not? The only thing will be that the photographer will charge you more.”

“I don’t mind that. Could you arrange it for me?”

“Yes, man.”

What Don Calixto desired was done.

“How did the Pope impress you?” Cæsar asked him as he came out

“Very favourably, very favourably indeed.”

“He has a stupid face, hasn’t he?”

“No, man, not at all. He is like a nice country priest. His predecessor was no doubt more of a diplomat, more intelligent.”

“Yes, the other seemed more of a rogue,” said Cæsar, laughing at the precautions Don Calixto took in giving his opinion.

The proofs of the photographs came in the evening, and Don Calixto was enchanted with them. In one of them you could see the Swiss guard at the door, with his lance. It was splendid. Don Calixto would not permit Cæsar to go to his hotel, but invited him for dinner; and after dinner told him he was so indebted that he would be delighted to do anything Cæsar asked him.

“Why don’t you make me a Deputy?” said Cæsar, laughing.

“Do you want to be one?”

“Yes, man.”

“Really?”

“I should think so.”

“But you would have to live in Madrid.”

“Certainly.”

“Would you leave here?”

“Yes, why not?”

“Then, not another word, we will say no more about it. When the time comes, you will write to me and say: ‘Don Calixto, the moment has arrived for you to remember your promise: I want to be a Deputy.’”

“Very good. I will do it, and you shall present me as candidate for Castro... Castro... what?”

“Castro Duro.”

“You will see me there then.”

“All right. And now, another favour. There is a Canon from Zamora here, a friend of mine, who came on the pilgrimage and who desires nothing so much as to see Saint Peter’s and the Catacombs rather thoroughly. I could explain everything to him, but I am not sure about the dates. Will you come with us?”

“With great pleasure.”

“Then we shall expect you here at ten.”

“That will be fine.”

Sure enough, at ten Cæsar was there. Don Calixto and his friend the Canon Don Justo, who was a large gentleman, tall and fleshy and with a long nose, were waiting. The three got into the carriage.

“I hope this priest isn’t going to be one of those library rats who know everything on earth,” thought Cæsar, but when he heard him make a couple of mistakes in grammar, he became tranquil.

_THEODORA AND MAROZIA_

As they passed the Castel Sant’ Angelo, Cæsar began to tell the story of Theodora and her daughter Marozia, the two women who lived there and who, for forty odd years, changed the Popes as one changes cooks.

“You know the history of those women?” asked Cæsar.

“I don’t,” said the Canon.

“Nor I,” added Don Calixto.

“Then I will tell it to you before we get to Saint Peter’s. Theodora, an influential lady, fell in love with a young priest of Ravenna, and had him elected Pope, by the name of John X. Her daughter Marozia, a young girl and a virgin, gave herself to Pope Sergius III, a capricious, fantastic man, who had once had the witty idea of digging up Pope Formosus and subjecting him, putrefied as he was, to the judgment of a Synod. By this eccentric man Marozia had a son, and afterwards was married three times more. She exercised an omnipotent sway over the Holy See. John X, her mother’s lover, she deposed and sent to die in prison. With his successor, Leo VI, whom she herself had appointed Pope, she did the same. The following Pope, Stephen VII, died of illness, twenty months after his reign began, and then Marozia gave the Papal crown to the son she had had by Sergius III, who took the name of John XI. This Pope and his brother Alberic, began to feel their mother’s influence rather heavy, and during a popular revolt they decided to get Marozia into their power, and they seized her and buried her alive in the _in pace_ of a convent.”

“But is all this authentic?” asked the Canon, completely stupefied.

“Absolutely authentic.”

The Canon made a gesture of resignation and looked at Don Calixto in astonishment.

While Cæsar was telling the story, the carriage had passed down a narrow and rather deserted street, called Borgo Vecchio, in whose windows clothes were hanging out to dry, and then they came out in the Piazza di San Pietro. They drove around one edge of this enormous square. The sky was blue. A fountain was throwing water, which changed to a cloud in the air and produced a brilliant rainbow.

“One certainly wonders,” said Cæsar, “if Saint Peter’s is not one of the buildings in the worst taste that exist in the world.”

They got out in front of the steps.

“Your friend is probably well up on archeological matters?” asked Cæsar.

“Who? Don Justo? Not in the least.”

Cæsar began to laugh, went up the steps ahead of the others, lifted the leather curtain, and they all three went into Saint Peter’s. _THERE IS NO PERFORMANCE_

Cæsar began his explanations with the plan of the church. The Canon passed his hand over all the stones and kept saying:

“This is marble too,” and adding, “How expensive!”

“Do you like this, Don Calixto?” Cæsar asked.

“What a question, man!”

“Well, it is obviously very rich and very sumptuous, but it must give a fanatic coming here from far away the same feeling a person gets when he has a cold and asks for a hot drink and is given a glass of iced orgeat.”

“Don’t let Don Justo hear you,” said Don Calixto, as if they ought to keep the secret about the orgeat between the two of them.

They came to the statue of Saint Peter, and Cæsar told them it is the custom for strangers to kiss its foot. The Canon piously did so, but Don Calixto, who was somewhat uneasy, rubbed the statue’s worn foot surreptitiously with his handkerchief and then kissed it.

Cæsar abstained from kissing it, because he said the kiss was efficacious principally for strangers.

Then they went along, looking at the tombs of the Popes. Cæsar was several times mistaken in his explanations, but his friends did not notice his mistakes.

The thing that surprised the Canon most was the tomb of Alexander VII, because there is a skeleton on it. Don Calixto stopped with most curiosity before the tomb of Paul III, on which one sees two nude women. Cæsar told them that popular legend claims that one of these statues, the one representing Justice, is Julia Farnese, sister of Pope Paul III, and mistress of Pope Alexander VI; but such a supposition seems unlikely.

“Entirely,” insisted the Canon gravely; “those are things invented by the Free Thinkers.”

Don Calixto allowed himself to say that most of the Popes looked like drum-majors.

Don Justo continued appraising everything he saw like a contractor. Cæsar devoted himself to retailing his observations to Don Calixto, while the Canon walked alone.

“I will inform you,” he told him, “that on Saturday one may go up in the dome, but only decently dressed people. So a placard on that door informs us. If by any chance an apostle should re-arise and have a fancy to do a little gymnastics and see Rome from a height, as he would probably be dirty and badly dressed, he would get left, they wouldn’t let him go up. And then he could say: ‘Invent a religion like the Christian religion, so that after a while they won’t let you go up in the dome.’”

“Yes, certainly, certainly,” replied Don Calixto. “They are absurd. But do not let the Canon hear you. To be sure, all this does not look very religious, but it is magnificent.”

“Yes, it is a beautiful stage-setting, but there is no performance,” said Cæsar.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Don Calixto.

“That this is an empty place. It would have been well to build a temple as large and light as this in honour of Science, which is humanity’s great creation. These statues, instead of being stupid or warlike Popes, ought to be the inventor of vaccination or of chloroform. Then one could understand the chilliness and the fairly menacing air that everything in the place wears. Let people have confidence in the truth and in work, that is good; but that a religion founded on mysteries, on obscurities, should build a bright, challenging, flippant temple, is ridiculous.”

“Yes, yes,” said Don Calixto, always preoccupied in keeping the Canon from hearing, “you talk like a modern man. I myself, down in my heart, you know.... I believe you follow me, eh?”

“Yes, man.”

“Well, I think that all this has no transcendency.... That is to say....”

“No, it has none. You may well say so, Don Calixto.”

“But it did have it. That cannot be doubted, can it? And a great deal. This is undeniable.”

_IT IS A MAGNIFICENT BUSINESS CONCERN_

“It was really a magnificent business concern,” said Cæsar. “Think of monopolizing heaven and hell, selling the shares here on earth and paying the dividends in heaven! There’s no guarantee trust company or pawn-broker that pays an interest like that. And at its height, how many branches it developed! Here, in this square, I have a friend, a Jewish dealer in rosaries, who tells me his trade is flourishing. In three weeks he has sold a hundred and fifty kilos of rosaries blessed by the Pope, two hundred kilos of medals, and about half a square kilometre of scapulars.”

“What an exaggeration!” said Don Calixto.

“No, it is the truth. He is glad that these things, which he considers accursed, sell, because after all, he is a liberal and a Jew; the only thing he does, if he can, to ease his conscience, is to get ten per cent. profit on everything, and he says to himself: ‘Let the Catholics worry!’”

“What tales! If the Canon should hear you!”

“No, but all this is true. As my friend says: Business is business. And he has made me take notice that when the Garibaldini come here, they spend the price of a few bottles of Chianti, and then they sleep in any dog-kennel, and spend nothing more. On the contrary, the rich Catholics buy and buy... and off go his kilos of rosaries and of medals, his tons of veils for visiting the Pope, his reams of indulgences for eating meat, and for eating fish and meat, and even for blowing your nose on pages of the Bible if you like.”

“Do not be so disrespectful.”

When the Canon had made sure of all the square metres of marble there are in Saint Peter’s they went out into the square again. Cæsar indicated the heap of irregular edifices that form the Vatican.

“That ought to be the Pope’s room,” said Cæsar, pointing to a window, at random. “You must have been there, Don Calixto?” “I don’t know. Really,” he said, “I haven’t much idea where I was.”

“Nor has he any idea how he went,” thought Cæsar, and added: “That is the Library; over there is the Secretary of State’s apartment; there is where the Holy Office meets”; and he said whatsoever occurred to him, perfectly tranquilly.

They took their carriage, and as they passed a shop for objects of religion, Don Calixto said to the Canon:

“What do you say to this, Don Justo? According to Don Cæsar, the proprietors of the shops where they sell medals, are Jews.”

“Bah! that cannot be so,” replied the Canon roundly.

“Why not?”

“Bah!”

“Why should it shock you?” exclaimed Cæsar. “If they sold Jesus Christ alive, why are they not to sell him dead?”

“Well, I am glad to know it,” Don Justo burst forth, “because I was going to buy some medals for presents, and now I won’t buy them.”

Don Calixto smiled, and Cæsar understood that the good Canon was taking advantage of the information to save a penny.

XXI. DON CALIXTO IN THE CATACOMBS

Don Calixto and the Canon were very anxious to visit the Catacombs. Cæsar knew that the visit is not entirely agreeable, and attempted to dissuade them from their intention.

“I don’t know whether you gentlemen know that one has to spend the entire day there.”

“Without lunch?” asked the Canon.

“Yes.”

“Oh, no; that is impossible.”

“One has to sacrifice oneself for the sake of Christianity,” said Cæsar.

“You haven’t much desire to sacrifice yourself,” retorted Don Calixto.

“Because I believe it is damp and unwholesome down there, and a Christian bronchitis would not be wholly pleasant, despite its religious origin. And besides, as you already know, one must go without food.”

“We might eat something there,” said Don Justo.

“Eat there!” exclaimed Cæsar. “Eat a slice of ham, in front of the niches of the Catacombs! It would make me sick.”

“It wouldn’t me,” replied the Canon.

“In front of the tombs of martyrs and saints!”

“Even if they were saints, they ate too,” replied the Canon, with his excellent good sense.

Cæsar had to agree that even if they were saints, they ate.

There was a French family at the hotel who were also thinking of going to see the Catacombs, and Don Calixto and Don Justo decided to go the same day with them. The French family consisted of a Breton gentleman, tall and whiskered, who had been at sea; his wife, who looked like a village woman; and the daughter, a slender, pale, sad young lady. They had with them, half governess, half maid, a lean peasant-woman with a suspicious air.

The young lady confessed to Cæsar that she had been dreaming of the Catacombs for a long while. She knew the description Chateaubriand gives of them in _Les Martyres_ by heart.

The next day the French family in one landau, and Don Calixto with the Canon and Cæsar in another, went to see the Catacombs.

The French family had brought a fat, smiling abbé as cicerone.

Five persons couldn’t get inside the landau, and the Breton gentleman had to sit by the driver. Don Calixto offered him a seat in his carriage, but the Breton, who must have been obstinate as a mule, said no, that from the driver’s seat he enjoyed more of the panorama.

They halted a moment, on the abbé’s advice, at the Baths of Caracalla, and went through them. The cicerone explained where the different bathing-rooms had been and the size of the pools. Those cyclopean buildings, those high, high arches, those enormous walls, left Cæsar overcome.

One couldn’t understand a thing like this except in a town which had a mania for the gigantic, the titanic.

They left the baths and started along. They followed the Via di Porta San Sebastiano, between two walls. They left behind the imposing ruins of the Baths of Caracalla and various establishments for archeological reconstructions, and the carriage stopped at the gate of the Catacombs.

They went in, guided by the abbé, and arrived at a sort of office.

They each paid a lira for a taper which a friar was handing out, and they joined a group of other people, without quite knowing what they expected next. In the group there were two German Dominicans, a tall one whose fiery red beard hung to his waist, and a slim one, with a nose like a knife.

_IRREVERENT CICERONE_

It was not long before another numerous group of tourists came out of a hole in the floor, and among them was a Trappist brother who came over to where Don Calixto and Cæsar were. The Trappist carried a stick, and a taper twisted in the end of the stick. He asked if everybody understood French; any one that didn’t could wait for another group.

“I don’t understand it,” said the Canon.

“I will translate what he says, to you,” replied Cæsar.

“All right,” answered the Canon.

“_En avant, messieurs_,” said the Trappist, lighting his taper, and requesting them all to do the same.

They went around giving one another a light, and with their little candles aflame they began to descend into the Catacombs.

They went in by a gallery as narrow as one in a mine, which once in a while broadened into bigger spaces.

In certain spots there were openings in the roof.

Cæsar had never thought about what the celebrated Catacombs would be like, but he had not expected them so poor and so sinister.

The sensation they caused was disagreeable, a sensation of choking, of suffocation, without one’s really getting any impression of grandeur. The place seemed like an abandoned ant-hill. The wide spaces that opened out at the sides of the passage were chapels, the monk said.

The Trappist cicerone contributed to removing any serious feelings with his chatter and his jokes. Being familiar with these tombs, he had lost respect for them, as sacristans lose it for the saints they brush the dust off of with a feather-duster. Moreover, he judged everything by an esthetic criterion, completely devoid of respect; for him there were only sepulchres with artistic character, or without it; of a good or a poor period; and the latter sort he struck contemptuously with his stick.

The marine Breton was irritated, and asked Cæsar several times:

“Why is that permitted?” “I don’t know,” answered Cæsar.

The monk made extraordinary remarks.

Explaining the life of the Christians in the earliest eras of Christianity, he said:

“In this century the habits of the pontiffs were so lax that the Pope had to go out accompanied by two persons to insure his modest behaviour.”

“Oh, oh!” said a young Frenchman, in a tone of vexation.

_“Ah! C’est L’histoire,”_ replied the monk.

Cæsar translated what the Trappist had said, to Don Calixto and the Canon, and they were both really perplexed.

They followed the long, narrow galleries. It was a strange effect, seeing the procession of tourists with their burning candles. One didn’t notice the modern clothes and the ladies’ hats, and from a distance the procession lighted by the little flames of the candles, had a mysterious look.

At the tail of the crowd walked two men who spoke English. One was a “gentleman” little versed in archeological questions; the other a tall person with the face of a scholar. Cæsar drew near them to listen. The one was explaining to his companion everything they saw as they went along, the signification of the emblems cut in the tablets, and the funerary customs of the Christians.

“Didn’t they put crosses?” asked the unlearned gentleman.

“No,” said the other. “It is said that for the Romans the _crux_ represented the gallows! Thus the earliest representation of the Crucified is a drawing in the Kirchnerian museum, which shows a Christian kneeling before a man with a donkey’s head, who is nailed to a cross. In Greek letters one reads: ‘Alexamenes adores his God.’ They say this drawing comes from the Palace of the Cæsars, and it is considered to be a caricature of Christ, drawn by a Roman soldier on a wall.”

“Didn’t they put up images of Christ, either?”

“No. You do not consider that they were at the height of the discussion as to whether Christ was ugly or beautiful.”

The tall gentleman got involved in a long dissertation as to what motives they had had, some to insist that Christ’s person was of great beauty, others to affirm that it was of terrible ugliness.

Cæsar would have liked to go on listening to what this gentleman said, but Don Justo joined him. The Trappist was in front of two mummies, explaining something, and he wanted Cæsar to translate what he was saying.

Cæsar did this bit of interpreting for him. The candles were beginning to burn out and it was necessary to leave.

The cicerone took them rapidly along a gallery at whose end there was a stairway, and they issued into the sunlight. The monk extinguished the taper on his stick, and began crying:

“Now, gentlemen, do you want any scapulars, medals, chocolate?”

Cæsar looked over his companions in the expedition. The Canon was indifferent. The old maritime Breton showed signs of profound indignation, and his daughter, the little French mystic, had tears in her eyes.

“That poor little French girl, who arrived here so full of enthusiasm, has come out of these Catacombs like a rat out of a sewer,” said Cæsar.

“And why so?” asked Don Calixto.

“Because of the things the monk said. He was really scandalous.”

“It is true,” said the Canon gravely. “I never would have believed it.”

_“Roma veduta, fede perduta,”_ said Don Calixto. “And as for you, Cæsar, hasn’t this visit interested you?”

“Yes, I have been interested in trying to keep from catching cold.”

AGRO ROMANO

The landau that the Breton family was in took the Appian, Way, and Cæsar and Don Calixto’s carriage followed behind it.

They passed the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and were able to look ahead along the old road, on whose sides one sees the remains of aqueducts, which at evening-fall have a grandeur so imposing. Don Calixto and Don Justo were discussing a question of home politics.

On them magnificently indifferent, the broken sepulchres, the abandoned arches invaded by grass, the vestiges of a gigantic civilization, did not produce the least impression.

The coachman pointed out Frascati on the slope of a mountain, Albano, Grotta Ferrata, and Tivoli.

Cæsar felt the grandeur of the landscape; the enormous sadness of the remnants of aqueducts, which had the colour of rusty iron, beneath a sky of pink clouds.

At dusk they turned back. Cæsar felt a weight on his spirits. The walls of the Baths of Caracalla looked threatening to him. Those great towering thick walls, broken, brick-colour, burned by the sun, gave him an impression of the strength of the past. There were no trees, no houses near them; as if those imposing ruins precluded any life round about. Only one humble almond-tree held out its white flowers.

Don Calixto and the Canon continued chatting.

XXII. SENTIMENTALITY AND ARCHEOLOGY

Don Calixto and the Canon went away to Spain. Cæsar thought he was wasting time in Rome and that he ought to get out, but he remained. He kept wondering why Susanna Marchmont had left and never written him.

Twice he asked about her at the Hotel Excelsior, and was told that she had not returned.

One evening at the beginning of May, when he had managed to decide to pack up and go, he received a card from Susanna, telling him of her arrival and inviting him to have tea at the _Ristorante del Castello dei Cesari._

Cæsar immediately left the hotel and took a cab, which carried him to the top of the Aventine Hill.

He got out at the entrance to the garden of the _Ristorante_, went across it, and out on a large terrace.

There were a number of Americans having tea, and in one group of them was Susanna.

“How late you come!” she said.

“I have just received your card. And what did you do in Corfu? How did things go down there?”

“Very well indeed. It is all wonderful. And I have been in Epirus and Albania, too.”

Susanna related her impressions of those countries, with many details, which, surely, she had read in Baedeker.

She was very smart, and prettier than ever. She said her husband must be in London; she had had no news from him for more than a month. “And how did you know I was still here?” Cæsar asked her.

“Through Kennedy. He wrote to me. He is a good friend. He talked a lot about you in his letters.”

Cæsar thought he noticed that Susanna talked with more enthusiasm than ordinarily. Perhaps distance had produced a similar effect on her to what wondering about her had on him. Cæsar looked at her almost passionately.

From the terrace one could see the tragic ruins of the Palace of the Cæsars; broken arcades covered with grass, remains of walls still standing, the openings of arches and windows, and here and there a pointed cypress or a stone pine among the great devastated walls.

Far away one could see the country, Frascati, and the blue mountains of the distance.

As it was already late, the group of Susanna’s American friends decided to return by carriage.

“I am going to walk,” said Susanna in a low tone. “Would you like to come with me?”

“With great pleasure.”

They took leave of the others, went down the garden road, which was decorated on both sides with ancient statues and tablets, and issued on the Via di Santa Prisca, a street between two dark walls, with a lamp every once in a while.

“What a sky!” she exclaimed.

“It is splendid.”

It was of a blue with the lustre of mother-of-pearl; in the zenith a stray star was imperceptibly shining; to the west floated golden and red clouds.

They went down the steep street, alongside a garden wall. In some places, bunches of century plants showed their hard spikes, sharp as daggers, over the low walls.

There was a great silence in this coming of night. Among the foliage of the trees they heard the piping of sparrows. From far away there came, from time to time, the puffing of a train.

_DESOLATION_

They walked without speaking, mastered by the melancholy of their surroundings. Now and again, a peasant, tanned by the sun, with his little sack full of grass, came home from the fields, singing.

Cæsar and Susanna passed alongside of the Jewish cemetery, and stopped to look in through a grill. The wall hid the burning zone of twilight; a greenish blue reigned in the zenith.

They went on again. A bell began to ring.

Cæsar was depressed. Susanna was silent.

They crossed a street of new, dark houses; they passed by a little square with a melancholy church. The street they took was named for Saint Theodore. To the left, down the Via del Velabro, they saw an arch with many niches on the sides of the single opening.

A band of black seminarians passed.

“Poor creatures!” murmured Cæsar.

“Are you very sympathetic?” said Susanna, mockingly.

“Yes, those chaps rouse my pity.”

Now, on the right, the furious ruins of the Palatine were piled up: brick walls, ruined arches, decrepit partitions, and above, the terrace of a garden with a balustrade. Over the terrace, against the sky, were the silhouettes of high cypresses almost black, of ilexes with their dense foliage, and a large palm with arching leaves.

From these so tragic ruins there seemed to exhale a great desolation, beneath the deep, green sky.

Susanna and Cæsar drew near the Forum.

In the opaque light of dusk the Forum had the air of a cemetery. Two lighted windows were shining in the high dark wall of the Tabularium, and sharp-toned bells were beginning to ring.

They went up the stairway that leads to the Capitol, and on a little terrace they stopped to look at the Forum.

“What terrible desolation!” exclaimed Susanna.

“All the stones look like tombs,” said Cæsar. “Yes, that is true.”

“What are those three high open vaults that give so strange an impression of immense size?” asked Cæsar.

“That is what remains of Constantine’s basilica.”

For a long while they gazed at that abandoned space, with its melancholy columns and white stones.

In a street running into the Forum, there began to shine two rows of gaslights of a greenish colour.

As they passed down the slope leading to the Capitol, in a little street to the left, the Via Monte Tarpea, they saw a funeral procession ready to start. At that moment the corpse was being brought into the street. Several women in black were waiting by the house door with lighted candles.

The priest, in his white surplice and holding up his cross, gave the order to start, and pushed to the front of the crowd; four men raised the bier and took it on their shoulders, and the procession of women in black, men, and children, followed behind. Bells with sharp voices began again to sound in the air.

“Oh, isn’t it sad!” said Susanna, lifting her hand to her breast.

They watched how the procession moved away, and then Cæsar murmured, ill-humouredly:

“It is stupid.”

“What?” asked Susanna.

“I say that it’s stupid to take pleasure in feeling miserable. What we are doing is absurd and unhealthy.”

Susanna burst into laughter, and when she said good-night to Cæsar she squeezed his hand energetically.

XXIII. THE ‘SCUTCHEON OF A CHURCH

“Susanna Marchmont,” Cæsar wrote to his friend Alzugaray, “is a beautiful woman, rich, and apparently intelligent. She has given me to understand that she feels a certain inclination for me, and if I please her well enough, she will get a divorce and marry me.

“I have discovered the reasons for her inclination, first in a desire to revenge herself on her husband by marrying the brother of the woman he has fallen in love with; secondly, in my not having made love to her, like the majority of the men she has known.

“Really, Susanna is a beautiful woman; but whereas other women gain by being looked at and listened to, with her it is not so. In this beautiful woman there is something cold, utilitarian, which she does not succeed in hiding by her artistic effusions. Besides she has a great deal of vanity, but stupid vanity. She has asked me if I couldn’t manage to acquire a high-sounding, decorative title in Spain.

“If Susanna knew that in my heart I keep up her friendship only through inertia, because I have no plans, and that her millions and her beauty leave me cold, she would be dumfounded; I believe that perhaps she would admire me.

“At present we devote ourselves to walking, talking, and telling each other our impressions. Any one would say that we intentionally play a game of being contrary; whatsoever she finds wonderful seems worthy of contempt to me, and vice-versa. It is strange that such absolute disagreement can exist. This Sunday afternoon we have been taking a long walk, half sentimental, half archeological.

“I went to get her at her hotel; she came down, looking very smart, with an unmarried friend, also an American and also very chic.

“The three of us walked toward the Forum. We passed under the arch of Constantine. A small beggar-boy preceded us, getting ahead and turning hand-springs. I gave him some pennies. Susanna laughed. This woman, who pays bills of thousands of pesetas to her milliner, doesn’t like to give a copper to a ragamuffin.

“We turned off a bit from the avenue and went up on the right, toward the Palatine. Among the ruins some women were pulling up plants and putting them into sacks. At the end of the road, on the slope, there were Stations of the Cross, and some boys from a school were playing, guarded by priests with white rabbits.

“It was impossible to go further, and we went down the hill toward the Piazza di San Gregorio. On the open place in front of the church that is in this square, some vagabonds were stretched out on the ground; an old man with a long hoary beard and a pipe with a chain, two dark youths with shocks of black hair, and a red-headed woman with silver hoops in her ears and a baby in her arms.

“The two young boys threw me a glance of hatred, and stared at Susanna and her friend with extraordinary avidity.

“What very false ideas must have been going through their minds! I might have approached them and said politely:

“‘Do not imagine that these ladies are of different stuff from this red woman who has the baby in her arms. They are all the same. There is no more difference than what is caused by a little soap and some money.’

“‘Let us go in and see the church,’ said Susanna.

“‘Good. Come along.’

“The church has a flight of stone steps and two cypresses to one side.

“We went into a court with graves in it, and stayed there a while, reading the names of the people buried in them. Susanna’s friend is a sort of little devil with the instincts of a small boy, and she went springing about in all the corners.

“When we came out of the church we found the square, deserted before, now full of people. During the time we had stayed inside, a numerous group of tourists had formed a circle, and a gentleman was explaining in English what the Via Appia used to be.

“‘These are the things that please you,’ Susanna said to me, laughing.

“I answered with a joke. The truth is that no matter how many explanations I am given, an ancient Roman always seems a cardboard figure to me, or at most a marble figure. It is not possible to imagine how bored I used to be reading _Les Martyres_ of Chateaubriand and that famous _Quo Vadis_.

“From the Piazza di San Gregorio we took a steep street, the ‘Via di Santi Giovanni e Paolo,’ which passes under an arch with several brick buttresses.

“We came out in a little square, in an angle of which there is an ancient arcaded tower, which has tiles set into the walls, some round and others the shape of a Greek cross.

“The modern portico of the church has columns and a grated door, which we found open. Over the door is a picture of Saint John and Saint Paul; on the sides of it two shields with the mitre and the keys. On one, set round about, are the Latin words: _Omnium rerum est vicisitudo;_ on the other is written in Spanish: _Mi corazón arde en mucha llama._

“‘Is it Spanish?’ Susanna asked me.

“‘Yes.’

“‘What does it mean?’

“I translated the phrase into English: ‘My heart burns with a great flame’; and Susanna repeated it several times, and begged me to write it in her card-case.

“Her friend skimmed some pages in Baedeker and said:

“‘It seems that the house of two saints martyred by Julian the Apostate is preserved here.’

“I assured them that that was an error. I happen to have been reading just a few days ago a book about Julian the Apostate, and it turns out that that Emperor was an admirable man, good, generous, brave, full of virtues; but the Christians had reason for calumniating him and they calumniated him. All Julian’s persecutions of Christians are logical repressions of people that were disturbing public order, and the phrase, Vencisti, Galileo, is a pious fraud. Julian was a philosopher, he loved science, hygiene, cleanliness, peace, in a world of hysterical worshipers of corpses, who wanted to live in ignorance, filth, and prayer.

“But Christianity, always a religion of hallucinated persons, of mystifiers, has never vacillated in singing the praises of parricides like Constantine, and in calumniating the memory of great men like Julian.

“Susanna and her friend considered that the question of whether Julian has been calumniated by history, or not, was of no importance.

“The truth is that I feel the same way.

“From the Via di Santi Giovanni e Paolo we came out into a small square by a church, which has a little marble ship in front of its porch. We saw that his street is named after the _Navicella._”

A ROYAL IDYLL.

“By the side of the church of the Navicella, we passed the Villa Mattei, and Susanna wished to go in. What a beautiful property! What splendid terraces those in that garden are! What laurels! What lemon-trees! What old statues! What heavy shade of pines and live-oaks!

“Kennedy, who has an admirable knowledge of every corner of Rome, has told me that at the beginning of the XIX Century the Villa Mattei was the property of Godoy. King Charles IV and his wife were in Rome, living in the Barberini Palace, and they spent their days in the seclusion of the Villa Mattei; and while the favourite and the Queen, who had now become a harpy, walked in those poetical avenues, bordered with box and laurel, the good Bourbon, now an old man, walked behind them, his forehead ornamented like a faun’s, enchanted to watch them; I don’t know whether he was playing the flute.

“Susanna’s friend laughed at the thought of the good Charles IV, with his waistcoat and his long coat, and his satyr’s excrescences, and his rural flute; but the allusion did not find favour with Susanna, whether because she thought of her husband’s infidelities, or because she considered, that if her father gets to be the shoe-king, she will then have a certain spiritual relationship to the Bourbons. In the Villa Mattei we saw an _ediculo_, which rises at the edge of a terrace, amidst climbing plants. There, as an inscription says, Saint Philip Neri talked to his disciples of things divine. From the terrace one can see the Baths of Caracalla, and part of the Roman Campagna behind them.

“We came out of the Villa Mattei and left the Piazza, della Navicella and came down through a place where there is a wall with arches, under which some beggars have built huts out of gasoline cans. There is an eating-place thereabouts called the Osteria di Porta Metronia.

“Susanna’s friend consulted her book, and the result was that we found we were in the Vale of Egeria.

“From there we came out by a narrow road running along a wall, not a very high one, over which green laurel branches projected. We saw an obelisk at the end of the road, and the entablature of Saint John the Lateran. The group of statues, reddish brown, silhouetted against the sky, made a very strange effect.

“We started to go down by the Via di San Sisto Vecchio, which also runs along by a wall. At the bottom of the slope there is a mill, with a deep race. Susanna’s friend said she would enjoy bathing there.

“We came out, at nightfall, almost opposite the Baths of Caracalla.

“‘They ought to knock these ruins down altogether,’ I said.

“‘Why so?’ asked Susanna.

“‘Because they appear to be standing here to demonstrate the uselessness of human energy.’ Susanna was very little interested as to whether human energy is useful or useless.

“I am, because my own energy forms a part of human energy, and for no other reason.

“We came back past the Forum, but today we did not come upon any funerals. To demand that somebody should die every day and his corpse be carried out at twilight to feed tourists’ emotions, would, I think, be demanding too much.

“When we reached her hotel, Susanna let her friend go up first; and as soon as we were alone, she looked at me expressively, placing one hand on her breast, and said to me, in nasal Spanish:

“_‘Mi corazón arde en mucha llama.’_

“I don’t believe it.”

XXIV. TOURIST INTERLUDE

TRAVELLING

“Susanna said to me: ‘I have some inclination for you, but I don’t know you well enough. If you feel the same way, come with me. Let us travel together? I am with her, and nevertheless I am convinced that what I am doing is a piece of stupidity.

“We spent this Sunday morning in the train. In the country we saw men at work with great oxen that had long twisted horns. In a swampy field some labourers were draining the ground with great effort. From the train we saw the island of Elba, and Capraia, and the sea as blue as indigo.

“_‘Mare nostro,’_ said an elegant gentleman in a fluty voice, and pointed out something on the horizon which he said was Corsica, and he said that it can be seen from far away.

“While all we useless, unoccupied persons gathered in the dining-car, the people in the fields kept on working, bent over in the mud, draining the marshes.

“‘What a lot of effort those poor devils have to make to keep us alive.’ I said.

“‘We are not kept alive by them,’ retorted Susanna.

“‘No, we live off of other slaves, who work for us,’ I answered her. ‘Those out there serve to feed the officers, the effeminate priestlings, all the people that take part in the theatrical performance of the Vatican. Those unfortunates help to uphold the eight basilicas and the three hundred odd churches of Rome.’

“Susanna shrugged her shoulders and smiled.”

CLOSE TO

“Travelling with a woman one does not love, no matter how very pretty she is, produces a series of disenchantments. It seems as if one kept seeking defects and analysing them under the microscope. During these days that I have been accompanying Susanna, I have discovered a lot of physical and moral imperfections in her. There are moments in which she cannot conceal an egoism and brutality which are truly disagreeable; and besides, she is tyrannical, vain, and tries always to have her own way.

“We have been at Siena, which is a kind of Toledo, made up of narrow lanes. It was very hot. We were bored, especially she who has no artistic feeling.

“We have spent two days in Florence, a night in Bologna, another night at Milan, and after vacillating as to whether it would be better to go to Lake Como or to Switzerland, we have come to Geneva to spend a few days.

“Travelling like this in limited trains, one finds travelling more insipid than in any other fashion. All the sleeping-cars are alike, all the people alike, all the hotels alike. Really it is Stupid.

“It is still more stupid travelling with a woman who attracts attention wherever she goes. She attracts attention, that is all; she doesn’t awaken any liking. She cannot comprehend why, being a beautiful and distinguished woman, she has nobody who cares for her disinterestedly. She notices that all the smart young men who aim for her are simply coming to the beautiful rich woman.

“And she thinks they ought to be in ecstasies over her wit and over the repertory of ready-made phrases she keeps for conversation.”

A TIRESOME HOTEL.

“In this immense, luxurious hotel, situated two thousand odd metres above sea-level, as the announcement-cards stuck everywhere say, more than a hundred of us gather in the dining-room at lunch-time. The greatest coolness, the most frozen composure reigns among us.

“It is obvious that, thus harboured and united by chance in this hotel, we disturb one another; a wall of prejudices and conventionalities separates us. The English old maids read their romantic novels; the German families talk among themselves; some Russian or other drinks champagne while he stares with vague and inexpressive eyes; and some swarthy man from a sultry country appears to be crushed by the lugubrious silence.

“Through the windows one can see Lake Leman, closed in near here by mountains, blue like a great turquoise, ploughed by white, triangular sails. From time to time one hears the strident noise of a steamboat’s siren and the murmur of the funicular train.”

A MODEST FAMILY

“To this ostentatious hotel a family of modest air came two days ago. It was a family made up of five persons; two ladies, one of them plain, thin, spectacled, the other plumper and short; a merry girl, smiling and rosy, and a melancholy little girl, with a waxen face. They were accompanied by a man with a distinguished, weary manner.

“They are all in mourning. They are English; they treat one another with an attractive affability. The short lady, mother of the two girls, was pressing the man’s hand and caressing it, during lunch the first day. He kept smiling in a gentle, tired way. No doubt he was unable to stay here long, for he did not appear that evening, and the four females were alone in the dining-room.

“The two ladies and the fresh, blooming girl are much preoccupied about the pale little girl, so much so that they do not notice the interest they arouse among the guests. All the old ‘misses,’ loaded with jewels, watch the family in mourning, as if they were wondering: ‘How come they here, if their position is not so good as ours? How dare they mix among us, not being in our class?’

“And it is a fact; they cannot be; there is something that shows that this family is not rich. Besides, and this is extraordinary enough, it seems that they haven’t come here to look down on others, or to give themselves airs, but to take walks and to look at the immaculate peaks of Mont Blanc. So one sees the two girls going out into the country without making an elaborate toilet, carrying a book or an orange in their hands, and coming back with bunches of flowers....”

_TRAGEDY IN A HOTEL ROOM_

“This morning at lunch only one of the ladies appeared in the dining-room.

“‘Perhaps the others have gone off on some picnic,’ thought I.

“In the evening at dinner, the tall woman with the glasses and the larger of the two girls were at table. They didn’t eat, and disquietude was painted on their faces; the girl had flushed cheeks and swollen eyes.

“‘What can be happening to them?’ I asked myself.

“At that juncture, in came the short lady, with two vials of medicine in her hand, and put them on the table. By what I could hear of the conversation, she had just come from Lausanne, where she had gone for the doctor. The melancholy little girl, the one with the waxen face, must be ill.

“No doubt the family have come to Switzerland for the sake of the child, who is probably delicate, and have made a sacrifice to do so. That explains their modest air, and the rapid departure of the man who brought them.

“The three women gazed sadly at one another. What can the poor child have? I remember nothing about her, except her hair parted in the middle, and the pallid colour of her bloodless skin, and nevertheless it makes me sad to think that she is sick.

“I should like to offer myself to these women at this crisis; I should like to say to them: ‘I am a humble person, without money; but if I could be useful to you in any way, I would do it with all my heart; and that is more than I would do for this gang covered with brilliants.’

“The German who eats at the next table to the family understands what is happening, and he leaves off eating to look at them, and then looks at me with his blue eyes. At last he shrugs his shoulders, lowers his head, and empties a glass of wine at one gulp.

“The three women rise and go to their rooms. One hears them coming and going in the corridor; then a waiter takes their dinner upstairs.

“And while the family are desolate up there, down here in the ‘hall’ the ‘misses’ keep on looking at one another contemptuously, exhibiting rings that sparkle on their fingers, and which would keep hundreds of people alive; and while they are weeping upstairs, down here a blond Yankee woman, with a large blue hat, a friend of Susanna’s, who flirts with a youth from Chicago, is laughing heartily, showing a set of white teeth in which there shines a chip of gold.”

_SUSANNA DOES NOT UNDERSTAND_

“I have spoken to Susanna about the poor English girl, who, they say, is dying; and she has bidden me not to tell her sad things. She cannot bear other people’s suffering. She says she is more sensitive than others. How very comical!

“This fine lady, who thinks herself so witty and so sensitive, has an inner skin like a hippopotamus; she is covered with a magnificent egoism, which must be at least of galvanized steel. Her armour protects her against the action of other people’s miseries and pains.

“This woman, so beautiful, is of a grotesque egotism; one understands her husband’s despising her.

“I am leaving her with her millions and going away to Spain.”