автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу Italian Yesterdays, vol. 2
Hugh Fraser

ITALIAN YESTERDAYS VOL. II

ITALIAN
YESTERDAYS

MRS. HUGH FRASER

Author of “A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan,”
“A Diplomatist’s Wife in Many Lands,”
“Reminiscences of a Diplomatist’s Wife,” etc.

VOL. II

NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1913

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

Published November, 1913

CONTENTS OF VOL. II

CHAPTER I

PAGE

Saints of the Church 1

A Friend in Rome—A Story of Two Ways of Loving—Aglaë and Boniface—Become Christians—A New Life—Boniface Endures Terrible Tortures—Martyrdom—Death of Aglaë—Church of St. Boniface—Alexis, the Pilgrim—His Travels—Return to Rome—A Ragged Beggar—His Death and Burial in St. Boniface’s Church—St. Alexis’ Monastery—Trials of the Church After Constantine—Rome’s Lowest Ebb—Growth of the Spiritual City—Benedict the Blessed, and Scholastica.

CHAPTER II

Founder of Monasticism 15

Norcia in the Sabines—A Matrona—The Twins, Benedict and Scholastica—Benedict Goes to Rome—Conversion of Placidus—Benedict’s Retirement to La Mentorella—Life in a Cave—Temptations—Visit of St. Francis—Benedict’s Ministering—Real Founder of Monastic Life—Growth of His Order—Placidus and Maurus—St. Benedict’s Personality and Conversions—His Ideal of the Religious Life—His Greatest Miracles—His Sister, Scholastica—The Last Day Together—His Ascension.

CHAPTER III

St. Gregory the Great 37

Birth and Lineage of St. Gregory—Path from the World to the Cloister—Prayer, Study, and Charity—His Cat—A Prophecy—A Cardinal Deacon—Mission to Constantinople—Eutyches’ Heresy—Rome in Pestilence—Gregory Elected Pope—His Unbelievable Accomplishments—His Life as Pope—Championship of the Oppressed—Bond with English-speaking People—The Great Procession During the Pestilence—Gregory’s Successors.

CHAPTER IV

Memories of the Pantheon 52

The Pantheon—Hadrian’s Best Monument—Long Idle—Consecrated as St. Mary of the Martyrs—The Cathedral, the Symbol of the Soul—Its Purification—Continuity of the Church—A Priest’s Visit—The Alabaster Square—Procession of the Martyrs’ Relics—Giovanni Borgi, the Workman—Italian Guilds—Giovanni’s Selflessness—His Rescue of the Forsaken Children—Care of Them—Crusade in Behalf of All the Waifs of Rome—His Work of Love—Giovanni’s Successor, Later Pius IX.

CHAPTER V

Early Life of Father Mastai 70

Birth in 1792—A Happy Family—His Youth—Epilepsy—The Church at the Time of Napoleon—Abduction of Pius to Avignon—Napoleon’s Downfall—Return of the Pope to Rome—His Reception—Prophecies Regarding Pius IX—His Journey to Chile—Ocean Trip—Across the Andes—Failure of Mission—Rounding Cape Horn—English Settlement on the Cape—“Love-of-the-Soil”—The Falkland Islands.

CHAPTER VI

Pope Pius IX 91

Director of Ospizio di San Michele—A Splendid Record—Archbishop of Spoleto—A Turbulent Populace—Order Restored—Revolution in Europe—Spoleto Saved—The Earthquake in Umbria—New Post at Imola—Secret Societies—A Cardinal—Attack upon the Three Prelates—The Cardinal’s Bravery—How the Saints Forgive—Pope Pius IX—His Charity and Justice—Defenders of the Poor—Anecdotes of the Cardinal’s Generosity.

CHAPTER VII

Captivity of Pope Pius VII 108

Lebzeltern, the Ambassador of the Austrian Emperor—Origin of His Mission—Napoleon’s Anger Against Pius VII—Arrest of the Pope—Protests from the Church—Napoleon Excommunicated—Vain Efforts to Evade the Bull—Instructions for the Mission—“Do All, or Else, Do Nothing”—Pius VII in His Sixty-eighth Year—The Interview—The Pope’s Position—His Generosity—Message to Napoleon—Continued Captivity—Return to Rome—Napoleon’s Expiation.

CHAPTER VIII

In Sabina 131

Castel Gandolfo—Its Gardens—The Sabine Hills—The Reverendo—An Expedition into the Hills-The Campagna in the Early Morning—“Our Lady of Good Counsel”—Ancient Præneste—Italy’s Landscape—Struggles of the Colonna—Destruction of Palestrina—Boniface’s Revenge and Expiation—Olevano, the Haunt of Artists—“Picturesque Utility”—The Wrong Train—Romance of a Pebble—The Work of the Saints.

CHAPTER IX

People of the Hills 152

The Apennines—View from a Peak—Real Hospitality—Polenta—Woods of Sabina—A Hill Family—The Cook—A Queer Adventure—People of the South—A Night Festival in the Abruzzi—The Journey—The Old Organ—Marion Crawford’s Boys—Juvenile Theatricals.

CHAPTER X

A Story of Venice 172

A Follower of the Condottieri—The Raw Recruit—Division of the Dukedom of Milan—Carmagnola’s Turn—Growth in Wealth and Power—Disaffection—Venice Acquires His Services—War with Milan—A Leisurely Campaign—Carmagnola at the Height of His Glory—Fortune Turns Against the Venetians—Stirrings of Suspicion—Reception in Venice—The Senate Chamber—Growing Dusk—The Attack—End of His Part in the World—Another Story of the North—St. Raniero, the Patron of Pisa—The Power of Temperance.

CHAPTER XI

Queen Joan of Naples 191

A Conspicuous Feminine Sinner—Marriage of State—Her Beauty—Her Hungarian Husband—Petrarch and the Monk—Joan’s Ascent to the Throne—The Naples Succession—Her Favourites—The Churches of Naples—Joan’s Lovers—Factions of Naples—Charles of Durazzo—A Bold Proposal—Charles’ Ambitious Plots—War of the Factions—Disappearance of Maria—Becomes the Wife of Charles—Joan’s Horror.

CHAPTER XII

A Mediæval Nightmare 208

Pact Between Charles and Andrew of Hungary—Joan’s Homage to the Papal Legate—Andrew Ignored—Arrival of Andrew’s Mother—Andrew Upheld by the Pope—His Reprisals—“The Man Must Die”—The Queen’s Conspiracy—Last Meeting of Charles and Andrew—The Hunting Expedition—The Banquet in the Monastery—The Murder—Tempest Breaks over Joan’s Head—An Evil Blow at Charles—Trial of Andrew’s Murderers—A Nightmare of Cruelty and Fear.

CHAPTER XIII

The Vampire-Monarch from Hungary 233

Charles’ Further Acts as Dictator—Rise of the Favoured Louis of Taranto—Civil War—A Scheme of the Empress of Constantinople—Interference of the King of Hungary—The Empress Again to the Rescue—Hungary’s Advance—Death of the Empress—Flight of the Neapolitan Nobles—Joan and Her Husband in Provence—Charles’ Well-merited Fate—The King of Hungary’s Vengeance—Government by Execution.

CHAPTER XIV

End of Joan’s Career 246

Joan Detained at Aix—Greeted as a Queen—Joan Pronounced Innocent—Plans to Regain Naples—Sale of a City—Return to Naples—Indecisive War—Proposal for Personal Conflict—Flight of the Royal Family—Maria’s Narrow Escape—Hungarians Repulsed—Pope Clement as Intermediary—Departure of the King of Hungary—Festivity in Naples—Death of Louis and Joan’s Further Marital Adventures—Joan in Trouble—Her Untimely End.

CHAPTER XV

Naples under Murat 263

Beauty of Naples—Figures of Its History—St. Januarius—Murat, King of Naples—Achievements as King—The Carbonari—England’s Promises—Napoleonic Diplomacy—Rise of the Bourbons—Alliance with Austria—Murat’s Indecision—Distrust of the Allies—Murat’s Statesmanship—Talleyrand’s Diplomacy—Naples, the Gay—Conspiracy in the Palace—The Escape from Elba—Ideal Government—War Against Murat—Advance of the Austrians—Murat Driven to Naples—Interview with His Wife—Last Instructions to His Ministers—Escape.

CHAPTER XVI

Murat’s Last Days 299

Naples in Anarchy—Entrance of Austrians—Murat’s Repulse by Napoleon and by Louis—His Demon of Ill-luck—Ship-wrecked—Aid in Corsica—Emperor of Austria’s Proposal—Attempt Against Naples—Murat Betrayed into Ferdinand’s Hands—Murat’s “Trial”—Letter to His Wife—Before His “Judges”—A Brave Death—Ferdinand, the “Butcher King.”

CHAPTER XVII

Italian Seas 315

Our Moods and the Seas—Memories in Landscapes—The Healing of the Sea—A Vision in the Bay of Naples—Marion Crawford’s Yacht Expected—The Family Together at Leghorn—Lady Paget—A Bathing Scene—Hugh Fraser—“Spannocchi” for Dinner—The Avenging Boatman—Livorno, An Anomaly—Sunset on the Mare Ligure—Bay of Spezia, a Splurge of Colour and Light—A Hail Storm in Venice—The Joy of a Gondola—Moods of Venice—A Giorgione Beauty—The Nurseries of Venice—Her Shops—Saints and Heresies of the Thirteenth Century.

CHAPTER XVIII

Southern Shores 339

Melancholy Ravenna—Early Byzantine Architecture—Forests of Stone-pine—Smiles and Tears—The Need of a Little Misfortune—Monte Gargano—Millions of Spanish Merinos—Primæval Forest—A Forest Miracle—Church of the Apparition of St. Michael—Other Apparitions of the Archangel—The Revelation to St. Aubert—The Great Round Church—Order of the Knights of St. Michael—A “Maiden” Fortress of France.

CHAPTER I SAINTS OF THE CHURCH

It was my good fortune, many years ago, to make friends with a woman whose name was as beautiful as her mind—Mary Grace. We met in another hemisphere, under the Southern Cross, and for many days lived together in Chile’s one little paradise, Viña del Mar. There, in shady patios trellised with jessamine and bougainvillea, we talked of the impossible—of meeting in Rome and going together to the holy places and making better acquaintance with the Saints. Two or three years later the impossible happened. My Mary, with her daughter Lilium, floated into my mother’s drawing-room in the Odescalchi one April afternoon, when the swallows were whirling above the courtyard and the house seemed all roses and sunshine. In the weeks that followed all our dream programme was realised; together we went to the Pope’s Mass, together knelt at his feet while Leo XIII laid his hand on Lilium’s golden head and blessed us and promised to pray for us and all our dear ones; and together we wandered from place to place in the Eternal City, I, who had known it all my life, learning many things from her who came there for the first time, as so often happens. Of all those pleasant inspiring hours the one we both remembered most appreciatively, I think, was that of our visit to a lonely spot on the Aventine—the hill that somehow has always kept its character and is even to-day very little hurt by the destructions that have defaced most of the other quarters of the town.

My friend was Irish, “pur sang,” and her appreciations were extremely individual ones; things that other people felt obliged to rave about left her quite cold; but, when she had caught and joined the links of some beautiful story that the world had overlooked or forgotten, she became a veritable flame of enthusiasm, and every tiny detail and souvenir she could connect with it had to be sought out and stored in the big warm shrine of her heart. I think, though I am not certain, that she knew the story of the house on the Aventine before she came to Rome. Anyway, it was she who took me there, and we went over story and house together, and were exceedingly loath to come away when the Ave Maria rang over the city and all respectable people turned their faces homewards.

Here is the story, a story of two ways of loving. It is in two parts, and I only learnt the first long after I was familiar with the second. The beginning takes us back to the last years of the Third Century, to the oft-mentioned reign of Diocletian. At that time, although the Aventine had never been one of the most distinguished quarters of Rome, it contained a few dwellings of nobles, who, doubtless, overlooked the mass of poorer houses that swarmed about its base, for the sake of the view, both over the city and towards the sea, from which comes always the pleasant west wind that we Romans love. I have spoken of the palace of the good Marcella, where in her old age she was so roughly treated by Alaric’s Goths; before Marcella’s time there lived another noble lady on the Aventine, with very different ideas as to the conduct of life. Her name was Aglaë, not a Roman name, and I fancy she must have come of Greek parentage, although she is spoken of as a noble Roman matron. Of her husband, who seems to have died before the story begins, we are told nothing; her whole existence was wrapped up in a quite unsanctified passion for a handsome pagan called Boniface, a man of generous heart, as the sequel shows, but a sensualist, like most of his class at that time. He adored Aglaë, and the two must have passed some enchanting hours wandering on the terraces of the Aventine villa or sitting hand in hand to watch the sun sinking red into the distant sea. No thought of the future seems to have come to them there, nor any gleam of a scruple as to their way of life. Youth and beauty and love were theirs; this world was sweet, and they had never heard of another.

Then something happened. We are not told what it was—perhaps some miracle witnessed by Boniface at the martyrdom of some obscure Christian, one of those miracles which so often converted a crowd of brutal, mocking bystanders into Christians on the spot. Whatever it was, it rent his soul, summoned his intelligence, and claimed him for ever. If Aglaë was not with him at the moment, he must have rushed to her for one last visit to tell her of it, for her conversion was simultaneous, and sudden as his own. From that moment the lovers renounced each other for the love of Christ, and the remainder of their lives was devoted to atoning for their guilt in the past. Aglaë, in her lonely palace, gave herself up to prayer and penance; Boniface at once joined himself to the band of Christians who made it their business to gather up and bury the bodies of the martyrs. In no other way could he assuage the tumult of pain and repentance that filled his heart at the remembrance of his sins. Diocletian’s persecution was not confined to Rome, but was raging in many other parts of the Empire, notably in Asia Minor, and thither Boniface travelled with some devoted companions, in order to help and cheer the poor Christians in their sufferings.

On arriving at Tarsus, St. Paul’s city, he got separated from his fellow-travellers, and, wandering around, found that a great number of the Faithful were being cruelly tormented that day, in divers ways, for the name of Christ, and his heart was both torn with compassion for their pains and admiration for their heroism. Approaching them, he kissed their chains and encouraged them to endure these passing tortures for the sake of Him who would so quickly and splendidly reward them by an eternity of joy. Of course he was at once arrested, and the tormentors seem to have tasked their ingenuity in inventing agonies for him to bear. His sins of the flesh were expiated by having his whole body ploughed with hooks of iron, and by spikes of wood run in under his nails and on his limbs; he had spoken sinful words; they poured molten lead into his mouth; he had sinned in the lust of the eyes and the pride of life; the executioners plunged him head downwards in a cauldron of boiling pitch. But from this the Lord delivered him. When they drew him forth, his eyes were clear, his brow unscarred, and he looked once more—his last look—on the fair world where he had been so sinfully happy, and through it all he praised God aloud, saying, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, I thank Thee!” Then came the order—so usual when all the torments had failed and the dear spirit still clung to the lacerated body—“Behead him!”

As the axe fell, there was a terrific earthquake, and many of the bystanders were converted then and there, but no one was allowed to touch his body. Meanwhile his friends, who had been seeking for him everywhere, learnt of his martyrdom, and came to gather up his remains. But a strict watch had been set, and it was only after paying five hundred pieces of silver that they could obtain possession of the dear corpse. With love and tears, they anointed it with precious balms and wrapped it in costly coverings and transported it to Rome. During these months Aglaë had been living a life of such whole-hearted repentance that our dear Lord had taken her into great grace; and now, by an exquisite, Divine bit of indulgence—one of those flashes of hot sympathy that come straight from the Sacred Human Heart of Him in Heaven to some poor, broken human heart on earth—He sent an Angel to tell her that her Boniface’s body was returning to Rome and that she could go and meet it. So Aglaë, in her sombre penitential dress, her beautiful face covered with a veil, went forth, and, at a given place, saw the little procession approaching from the sea. There was no danger for her in looking at the beloved features now. Very quiet and strong she seems to have been as she met the wayfarers, bade them pause with their holy burden, and then led them back to her own house. There, where he and she had loved and sinned, she received him, who was to leave her no more. Those who had brought him told her of his glorious end, and she thanked the Lord for it again—for the Angel had not let her wait so long for the story. And when she had shown her gratitude by most loving hospitality and precious gifts to those who had brought his body, they went away and left her alone with her beloved. Ask any loving woman what she did then! Which of us would not place our dear tortured dead in our hall of honour, and burn sweet spices round them, and light tall tapers, and fill the place with every fragrance and loveliness that the garden has to give?

All this, we may be sure, Aglaë did for Boniface; but she did that from which most women are debarred. She turned her palace into a Church for his tomb, and prayed near it till she died, and then the poor and suffering, who had been her one care from the day of her conversion, came there and prayed for her soul. But we know that that went straight to Heaven.

So there stood the Church of St. Boniface, and, some two hundred years later, a most noble Roman family had established their own palace close to it, and the Church, as we know it, now includes a part of the house of Alexis. For this is where a great saint grew to manhood, the loved son of rich and affectionate parents. Alexis had every gift of mind, with beauty of countenance and strength of body; and, when the time was ripe, his father and mother betrothed him to a bride of their choosing, good and sweet, and very fair to see. In this they had, for the first time, met with stubborn opposition from the boy, who had never opposed them before. He told them that he had vowed himself to a single life for God’s service, and that no earthly bride, however beautiful, should make him swerve from that allegiance. But they, like many other good parents, persisted in their project, convinced that they knew what was good for their son; and the preparations for his marriage went merrily forward, each day but adding to the young man’s grief and perplexity. Rome was Rome still; he could protest, but he had to obey his father’s direct commands, and obey he did; but his vow had been made to a still higher authority, and he meant to keep it, and prayed for grace and guidance to do so, nor were grace and guidance refused him, who, as the Breviary puts it, “was of Rome’s noblest, but nobler yet through his great love for Christ.”

On the night of his wedding, when the feasting and singing and congratulating were over, and the matrons conducted the bride, probably a child of thirteen or fourteen, to the lighted, perfumed bridal chamber, Alexis would not so much as touch her hand, but, like one Galahad of another time and clime, bade her farewell and departed, having received from God a special command to go on a pilgrimage to the “illustrious Churches of the Universe.” He left all behind, riches and servants, and even his name, and for seventeen long years, with no companion but the Lady Poverty, wandered, a nameless poor pilgrim, through all the Holy Places, praising the Redeemer for His great mercies and praying for the hastening of the Kingdom of Heaven.

At the end of those seventeen years, he was one day praying fervently before an image of the Blessed Virgin in the great Church at Edessa, when a voice came from the image, proclaiming his name and rank. The people were greatly excited and wished to show him honour, both for his own sake and because Our Lady Herself seemed to wish it. But Alexis knew better. That strange, sweet voice had not rung in his ears to lure him back to things of earthly pride, and for him the disclosure of his identity was the command to depart from that land. He fled, and boarded the first ship he could find to carry him away from Syria. He never asked the vessel’s destination; it was enough for him that he was obeying a command, but he was being led back to where the second phase of his spiritual career awaited him—in his old home in Rome.

As the ship sped north and west, and one by one the lovely Greek islands seemed to come floating towards him, like opals on the shifting sapphire of the sea, he still kept silence, still prayed and praised. What cared he whither her course was set? The white sails might have been angel’s wings—so sure was Alexis that God was leading him. Then, when the Apennines swam up blue from the bluer water, and scents of violet and orange blossom were wafted out to greet the wanderer, he knew that this was Italy—and home. Still he spoke not—questioned not; past the isles of the Sirens, past Circe’s Promontory, still on, past all that shore of coral and pearl, of palm and ilex and olive, with Vesuvius’ dark smoke hanging like a menace in the background, the little Syrian galley held her way, and at last the helmsman turned her prow to the land, the sails were all furled but one; the enormous oars worked her up against a rushing yellow current till the long quay was reached, and with a rattling of chains the weary galley slaves shipped their oars and bent down to look, each through his little opening, at “the port of Rome.”

With the merchants and the free seamen, Alexis stepped on shore, and gazed at the city of his birth. He had been brought back—for what? Blindly, joyfully, obediently, he had gone forth, to fare alone with God, and alone with God he was still to be. An hour or so later a haggard mendicant stood at the gate of a palace on the Aventine, asking for charity. That was never refused in that house, and the servants brought him in, showed him a dark corner under a stairway close to the entrance, where they told him he might sleep, and gave him some scraps of food. Humbly and gratefully he accepted it all; he heard them speak of the master and the mistress and the “widow” of the eldest son who was long since dead; and that day or the next he must have seen his father and mother, and the maid who had never been a wife, passing through the courtyards or lingering in the garden. God’s ways are not our ways. When He covets the love of certain souls for Himself, He will not share it with any one, and that Divine jealousy leads the chosen soul through hard paths. The hearts that love God intensely are the very ones that are the most loving of their fellows, especially of all who hold close to them in the sacred ties of family affection. But these ties have to be snapped on earth when the Divine Lover so wills—and Saints like Alexis, and poor sinners like the rest of us, have to leave the broken ends in His Hands, knowing that the pain we are made to cause our dear ones is as necessary for them as that which we suffer is for us, and that every pang of theirs is a golden strand in the garment of their immortality. Alexis’ parents had sinned against him and Heaven in trying to force him to break his vow of virginity; their son had long forgiven them, but Heaven in its mercy was allowing them to expiate their sin here instead of hereafter, and, through their obstinacy, the young girl who might, wedded to another spouse, have become a joyful mother of children, had to spend her life in their sad house, waiting upon them, and with the prospect of a very lonely age before her when they should have passed away.

We may be sure that many and many a time Alexis longed to emerge from his despised obscurity and comfort them all three, but it was not for that God had brought him back. The command of silence was never lifted, and so the son—the heir—lived on, a ragged beggar, laughed at and also abused by his father’s servants, praying in St. Boniface’s Church by day, sleeping in the cranny under the stairs at night, allaying his hunger by the scraps the servants threw him, and always blessing them and praising God, who thus satisfied His own servant’s hunger for poverty and suffering and humiliation. This second trial, this exile of the heart, lasted also seventeen years. At that time the very existence of Rome was threatened by Alaric the Goth; once and twice, he had turned from its gates laden with the ransom exacted for not entering them; he was threatening to approach again, and this time he had sworn to enter and destroy. The population was crowding the Churches to pray for deliverance, when a mysterious voice rang out in each separate Church, “Seek ye the man of God, that he may pray for Rome!” Terror fell upon the suppliant masses, and none dared speak or move. Then the same voice cried, “Seek in the house of Euphemian.”

There was a rush to the Aventine, for all knew the great noble’s dwelling. The Pope, Innocent I, had heard the command and himself went thither, followed by all his ecclesiastics and the Senators as well. When they reached Euphemian’s house it was the Pope who led them to the dark corner under the stairs—dark no longer, but flooded with celestial light, where the nameless beggar lay dying alone. His hands were already cold, but in one he held a crucifix, in the other a slip of parchment which no one could make him relinquish, though many tried to take it away from him. Then Innocent commanded him, in the Name of God, to give it up, and immediately Alexis let him take it with his own hand. And the Pope, standing up beside the dying man, opened the slip, and read aloud therefrom the name and family of the beggar; and a great cry went through the house that it was Alexis, the son who had been mourned for dead these many years. And father and mother and wife threw themselves down beside him, embracing him and weeping bitterly, for in that moment his soul had gone to God.

Then Innocent buried him in the Church of St. Boniface, and it was called both by his name and that of Alexis for many years. Both their bodies rest there, and a chapel was thrown out at one side to take in the stairway, which, now covered with glass, remains to this day. Both Boniface and Alexis had travelled and prayed and suffered in the East, and their Church came to be a heritage of both East and West; for, five hundred years after the July day on which Alexis died, a great monastery called after him and built close to the Church on the hill of the “house of Euphemian,” sheltered monks of the Basilian and Benedictine orders at the same time, an innumerable spiritual family “to replace the fair family he had renounced to this world.”

The Aventine has been little touched by time and is still one of the quietest and loveliest spots in Rome. At certain seasons it suffers from malaria—blown up from the marshes near Ostia—and for that reason both mediæval and modern builders have generally avoided it. But it is full of gardens. That of St. Alexis’ Convent, now an Asylum for the Blind, is famous for its orange and lemon trees; and one can trace the dispositions of the terraces and courts of the old house in the approaches to the Church. I do not think that when my friend and I were wandering there we noticed one curious feature which, however, still exists to give one a glimpse of old Roman domestic ways—the queer little cells, one on each side of the inner porch of Euphemian’s house, where the slave porter, and his companion the watchdog, were chained, opposite to each other, to their respective posts! What queer and sympathetic confidences they must have exchanged sometimes!

Alexis surely prayed for his native city, but all the prayers of all her Saints could not avert the trials that were to visit on Rome her past sins. Constantine the Great believed that he had left the Church in the West impregnable in strength and assured of peace; and for nearly three centuries after his death she was forced to fight for her existence almost as stubbornly as she had during the three centuries preceding it. In 361, only twenty-four years after the death of Constantine, Julian the Apostate reversed his edicts and strained every nerve to reëstablish the worship of the Olympian deities. Paganism was dead, and he failed in his iniquitous efforts to restore animation to its corpse, but much suffering did he bring to the Church, and it was only at the price of blood that she conquered in the end. After Julian came the Barbarians—Alaric, Genseric, Odoacer, Totila—during the short space of one hundred and thirty years Rome was taken and ravaged five separate times, so that when, in 553, Narses, the prototype of Napoleon, abolished the Senate and annexed the city to the Eastern Empire, she had reached the lowest point in her history and was scarcely regarded as a prize even by the Lombards, when, in response to the invitation of Narses himself, they overran Italy from the Alps to the sea, only to be finally expelled by Charlemagne some two hundred years later.

But the Church had realised the truth of the saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. The high courage that had come unscathed through such appalling conflicts rose gallant and audacious in its certainty of final victory, and, at the very moment when Rome seemed to be annihilated, decreed to it such a triumph as the world had never seen before.

In 568, just a year after Narses, to gratify a personal spite, had invited the hornet swarm of Lombards to cross the Alps, he died in the city he had insulted. We must remember that there were two Romes: the corporeal city, depopulated and impoverished, despoiled and dying—the city of the government of the once proud “Senatus Populusque Romanus,” which had failed signally at every point, and had crawled to the feet of every conqueror; and the spiritual city, ruled by strong and holy men, who patiently went on with their invisible building, adding stone to stone with such calmness and patience that in contemplating their work one is almost led to believe that they were unconscious of the material ruin around them. During the forty years that followed the death of Narses there was growing up in Rome a phalanx of learned and holy ones to replace the leaders who had been found wanting, and we of to-day are still the inheritors and possessors of the treasures they amassed. While the grass grew unchecked in the streets and all who could migrated to happier lands; while commerce and war turned aside from the now worthless prize, and the poor tethered their few goats and sheep in the courtyards of the great ruined houses, the Benedicts, the Gregorys, the Bonifaces, with their clear-eyed, disciplined cohorts, were building the Liturgy, building the monastic orders, building the polity that guides and rules the Church and the Faithful to-day. Nothing escaped them; whether it were a question of the right antiphon for one of the psalms of a Nocturn, the placing on the Index some doubtful legend of a Saint (like that of our St. George, which the popular fancy was turning into a grotesque myth), the annihilation of some startling new heresy which was raising its poisonous head, or the question of bringing Constantinople to its senses by bold remonstrance with the Emperor—to every detail was brought the thoroughness and directness of trained minds, the compelling force of superior courage and invincible intellect.

And this work had been going on silently and infallibly from the moment that official persecution ceased. Through sieges and invasions, desertions and desolations, the mills of God were grinding the grain and filling the great storehouses with golden wealth. In 480, in the little town of Nursia, high among the fastnesses of the Abruzzi, where the snow lay thick in winter, as in the Alps, there was born to the lord of the place a son, who was christened Benedict—“the Blest,” and a little daughter, whom the father, a great admirer of learning, called Scholastica. When these two passed away, sixty-three years later, Literature and Saintliness were throned in Europe, and hold their thrones still in the innumerable fortresses manned by the spiritual descendants of the Nursian twins. Outside the Church few, comparatively, knew their names when they died. Learning and piety would scarcely exist for us had they not lived.

CHAPTER II FOUNDER OF MONASTICISM

In the heart of the Sabines, where the Nar breaks out from the rock near the mountain called the Lioness, there has been since very early times a little town, too inaccessible to tempt the spoiler and the invader, too sturdy and independent to serve long as a footstool for mediæval tyrants. It was well fortified, however, and the ancient walls encircle it still, in good repair, as witnesses to its immunity from the fate that has annihilated so many other little old cities, its neighbours. Nature, stern and wild enough here, helped to protect it. Even now it can only be reached by a carriage journey, a lengthy, tedious business in the winter time, when the snow almost cuts it off from communication with the outside world. The townsfolk have long memories, however. The chief square is called Piazza Sertorio, after the Roman General, Quintus Sertorius, who was born here in the second century before Christ, and the only public monument in Norcia is a statue of their other distinguished citizen, St. Benedict, in the same square. People from other places do not interest the good burghers of Norcia. They have accorded a passing notice to a gentleman named Vespasian, known elsewhere as a fairly successful Emperor, but as they would tell you, “a person quite without education,” that is to say, with no manners; nevertheless, they have allowed a hill in the vicinity to be called Monte Vespasio, because his mother was a decent woman and owned a farm there.

I fancy life in Norcia is in its essentials very much what it was when, in the year of grace 480, the lord of the manor was informed that his good wife had borne him twins, a son and a daughter. It is easy, knowing the ways of the people, to call up the picture of the “matrona” in her best gown—the midwife is the most honoured woman in every Roman town—coming down from the lady’s apartment in the tower, to the head of the house, sitting, quite forgotten and rather lonely, in the hall, waiting for news from the centre of interest upstairs. His own servants would only approach with signs of submission and respect; not so the all-important matrona! Conscious of her dignity and grave as a judge, she would advance a few steps and wait for him to rise. Then, as he approached on tiptoe and with some timidity, she would turn back the woollen covering from the unexpectedly large bundle on her left arm, and, without a word, show him two little pink faces where he only expected one.

“Yes,” she would say, in answer to his exclamations of delight and astonishment, “two has Domine Dio sent to this noble house. Two will be the gifts my lord must bestow on his lady”—this to remind him as well of the double remuneration due to herself. “Pretty? Oh, no, but they are not bad—thanks be! Will it please my lord to send for the priest—the ‘femminuccia’ is the younger—and seems not over-strong! I thank my lord!”

My lord has been feeling in his pouch and has slipped two of his few gold pieces into her hand, and, seeing that he is inclined to admire the babies, she covers them up and stalks away. Her demeanour has been rhadamanthine throughout. There must be no expression of admiration, no kissing or fondling of the little creatures before they are baptised. That would call the attention of the Devil to the small unregenerates who are still his property. When the taint of original sin has been washed away they will be angels of innocence, beautiful cherubs to be shown proudly to all and sundry—but not before!

So my lord sent for the priest and pondered meanwhile on the names he would give the new son and daughter, little dreaming, good man, that fifteen centuries later those names would be household words to every Catholic ear and perpetuated in the colossal literature of sanctuaries of holiness and learning. He fixed on Benedict for the boy, and Scholastica for the girl, and, so far as I can trace, it was the first time the names had been used. Benedict means the “Blest” or “Well Spoken”; Scholastica signifies a lover of learning, or “the Well Taught,” so we may infer that the lord of Norcia (it was called Nursia then) was a man of more education than most country gentlemen of those rough times, times of which history says: “Europe has perhaps never known a more calamitous or apparently desperate period than that which reached its climax at this date, the year 480. Confusion, corruption, despair, and death were everywhere; social dismemberment seemed complete. In all the ancient Roman world there did not exist a prince who was not either a pagan, or an Arian, or a Eutychian. In temporal affairs, the political edifice originated by Augustus—that monster assemblage of two hundred millions of human creatures, ‘of whom not a single individual was entitled to call himself free’—was crumbling into dust under the blows of the Barbarians.”[1]

Nevertheless, Rome still continued to be looked upon by the surrounding provinces as the centre of education; there was none, at any rate, to be had anywhere else within reach; and thither the lord of Norcia, a descendant of the great family of the Anicia so often mentioned in the Roman chronicles, sent his son to be instructed in philosophy and law—the two subjects which still promised some kind of a career to an intelligent youth. Benedict was scarcely that yet—he was certainly not more than twelve years old, so much of a child that his nurse, Cyrilla, was sent with him to take care of him. Doubtless she found some respectable people with whom to lodge, and indeed one feels some pity for the simple countrywoman, charged with such a heavy responsibility in a strange and, as it must have seemed to her, a very wicked, great city.

So it seemed to the boy, too. He studied, tried to carry out his father’s instructions as faithfully as he could, but all he saw around him inspired him with such a horror of the world and its ways that life became insupportable to him, and he resolved to fly into the wilderness and seek for God. He was only fourteen years old, but he knew with certainty that his life was not to lie in the crowded places. The devout nurse did not oppose his decision; his will was hers, and together they left Rome and took the road towards their old home. I fancy that the boy only then told her that Norcia was not to be their destination. Before reaching it he would find the place where Heaven willed him to stay. Thus they travelled on, till they came to La Mentorella, one of the strangest spots in all those strange mountains. Its parent is Guadagnolo, the highest standing town in the whole of Romagna, perched on a peak four thousand feet high, and yet shut in on every side with a wall of rock that completely hides it from the outer world. Just below the town a ledge of the precipitous rock juts out abruptly and affords foothold for a Church and hermitage, built here in memory of the conversion of St. Eustace, the mighty hunter. He was called Placidus then, and was a soldier, a noble and a good man, a commander-in-chief much trusted by his Emperor, Trajan, and very upright and charitable in all his dealings with his fellow-men. It has been thought by scientific historians that it is of him that Josephus spoke when recounting the exploits of the Tribune Placidus in the war with the Jews. There are links which seem to connect Placidus with the Octavian family, thus making him a relation of Augustus, and some writers see in the young Placidus, whom his father, Tertullus, confided to Benedict’s care, a descendant of the gallant soldier and hunter of Trajan’s time. Be all that as it may, we do know that in the days of his pagan prosperity, Placidus, hunting in the mountains, sighted a magnificent stag and pursued it madly through the narrow defiles till it fled up to the summit of an apparently inaccessible rock, and there turned and stood still, gazing down on him. Then Placidus fell on his knees in mortal fear, for between the creature’s antlers was a crucifix of fire, from which shot forth rays of such brilliance that they lighted up all the hillside. And from it came a voice saying: “Placidus, why dost thou pursue Me? I am Christ, whom thou hast hitherto served without knowing Me. Dost thou now believe?”

Yes, indeed, Placidus believed, and his whole house with him, and in the after years was privileged to suffer great things for his till then unknown Master. But, for me, I never got much further with his story than that blessed word, “Whom thou hast served without knowing Me.” When I read it I think of all the good, brave souls who thus served in past ages and of those who are serving thus now, all over the world, truly and successfully, by the inner light which is imparted to all, of every clime and every faith, so long as they are sincere and have the “single eye” to which Christ promised that “the body shall be full of light.”

Placidus, on becoming a Christian, took (or began to use, it may have been his already) the name of Eustace. Either in his time or soon afterwards a Church was built on the site of his vision and the bell-tower of the “Madonna della Vulturella,” although its name has been shortened to “La Mentorella,” still carries on its summit a gigantic pair of antlers in commemoration of the miracle. Until a few years ago (it may be so even now) the feast of St. Eustace attracted great crowds of pilgrims to the wild and beautiful spot. His day—the day of his martyrdom under Trajan, who, after all his great services could not forgive him for refusing to sacrifice to the gods on the occasion of the Triumph which Eustace had won for him—falls on the 20th of September, that ominous “date which marks one of the blackest steps of history,” as Dom Guéranger says—and the martyr’s feast has been combined with that of St. Michael on the 29th. Then the lonely rocks of Guadagnolo resound to hymns and litanies, and at night are all lit up with bonfires, one to every little group of pilgrims, who make a point of passing the night there, each family sleeping round its own well-stacked fire. For the autumn nights are keen among those wild precipices, with two cold mountain streams, the Girano and the Siciliano, roaring along their deep beds in the impenetrable darkness below; and also the crags used to be the haunts of naughty brigands who might well covet the gold chains and silver buttons, the rich cloth and lace of the peasants’ costumes. So some of the men kept watch, with their old-fashioned muzzle-loaders across their knees, while their rosaries slipped through their fingers—and the Blessed Madonna and St. Eustachio were pleased with their faith and kept the robbers away, for never yet has the pilgrimage been disturbed by those sons of Belial.

It was to La Mentorella that Benedict came, in the year 494, and there he remained for a while, praying to be delivered from the snares of the world. And the faithful Cyrilla staid with him and, their little store of money being exhausted, begged food from the good people round about, for herself and him. For she had not the courage to send and ask for money at home, now that the boy had broken away from teachers and parents to follow the higher call. And the neighbours gave gladly, and lent her utensils to cook with. One day she was grinding meal in a little sieve (a stone bowl pierced with holes). To her dismay she let it drop and it shivered in pieces at her feet. What should she say to the lender? Hearing her lamentations, Benedict came to see what was the matter. He picked up the broken pieces and at once they welded themselves together in his hands, and he gave her back the sieve, whole. Her delight got the better of her prudence, or else some one witnessed the miracle, for immediately the people cried out that they had a Saint in their midst, and they hung the stone bowl up in the Church as a sacred thing.

Their laudations horrified Benedict, and he ran away, alone this time, to find a place where no such temptations could assault his humility. At last he came to a solitary ravine with steep rocky walls through which rushed a turbulent little river, which four hundred years earlier had served Nero unwillingly, being dammed up and made to spread out into pleasure lakes for his gardens a little further on. All was deserted now, and Benedict, being an active, agile boy, crept along the face of the cliff and found a cave, so deep that the light of day never penetrated beyond the entrance; and here he remained, sure of the food his soul needed, solitary communion with God—and royally careless about sustenance for his body. But a kindred heart found him out. Lower down on the course of the Anio, a company of monks had established themselves on the ruins of Nero’s villa. There were many such communities then, living apart from the world to pray and do works of charity and penance, under no fixed rule, and therefore insufficiently organised, but many of them leading very holy lives all the same.

One of these monks of Sub Laqueum (as the place was called from the artificial lakes), Romanus by name, found out Benedict’s hiding-place and took it upon himself to provide him with food. He told none of his companions about the ardent young recluse, but every day he cut his one loaf of bread in two, and, going to the edge of the cliff, he let down the half loaf on a string, to which he had attached a little bell so that Benedict should know when to come to the mouth of the cave and reach out to catch the bread. Romanus had given him a hair shirt and a monastic habit made of skins. He slept on the bare ground and waged constant war on all the impulses of the flesh. That rebelled, fiercely. Many a temptation assailed him. The remembered beauty of one woman in Rome continually haunted him and very nearly dragged him forth from his cave to go and find her; but when that thought came to him, he pulled off his fur robe and rolled his young body in a clump of thorns that grew on the platform of his cave, till it was all one bleeding wound, and his soul regained the mastery.

Seven centuries afterwards St. Francis came from Assisi to visit the spot. He knelt there long and shed many tears over the thicket of thorns. Then he planted two rose trees there, and the thorns gave place to roses that have bloomed for eight hundred summers, and were blooming when I saw them, with never a thorn on their stems. But every leaf of their foliage has a little white line zigzagging across it—to mark the flight of the defeated Serpent from St. Benedict’s Eden. There is a pretty story that tells how, after nearly three years, the hermit’s retreat was discovered. Sometimes the Devil, in sheer spite (or maybe the chafing points of rock on which Romanus was letting down the bread), would cut the string and then, as Romanus could not come back till the next day, poor young Benedict, his whole supply for twenty-four hours whirled away into the river below, would grow faint and hungry before his benefactor could reach him again.

The Devil is always rampantly busy at holy seasons—it enrages him to see everybody trying to be good, and when Benedict had held out against him for three solid years, he selected Easter Sunday for one of these wicked tricks. Romanus’ string snapped, the loaf plunged into the river, and Benedict, always blessing God, resigned himself and went on with his prayers. The pangs of hunger made themselves felt with painful persistence, but he tried to take no notice of them. Not so his kind Creator. In His love for this faithful child He spoke to a good parish priest who was sitting down to his Easter dinner at that moment with a glad heart: “How canst thou enjoy these luxuries whilst a servant of God is pining for food?”

The good priest sprang up, gathered together all that he could carry, and, leaving his own dinner untouched, started out to find the suffering recluse. He knew not his name or his dwelling, but angels guided his steps and helped him to reach the inaccessible cave. There, instead of some aged penitent, he found a tall boy, with beautiful serious eyes, and lithe and strong though his body, clothed in tattered skins, was terribly thin.

Benedict was as much surprised as his visitor. The latter spread the good things before him and bade him eat.

“Nay, friend,” said Benedict, “thou bringest meat, eggs!—How can I partake of such luxurious food in this season? It is Lent.”

“Lent!” replied the priest. “No, indeed, my son! Lent is over. This is Easter Sunday!”

Then the boy fell to, rejoicing. He had lost count of the day in his solitude.

The priest stayed some time with him and questioned him of his way of life, and Benedict answered in all humility; and the visitor went away convinced of the truth proclaimed by the mysterious voice when it called him a servant of God.

Now some of the shepherds of that country—doubtless in seeking for some strayed kid of the goats—had caught sight of Benedict in his dark cave, and his matted hair and robe of skins had so terrified them that they fled, thinking they had seen a strange wild beast. Now their pastor told them about him, and the poor people began to come to him to ask for his prayers. And those who felt called to a higher life gathered themselves to him for guidance, and the fame of his sanctity and the miracles he wrought went abroad so that certain monks of Vico Varo begged him to come and rule over them. He consented at last and came, but when they realised that he meant to enforce a strict rule instead of letting them follow their own varying inclinations, their admiration—it had never been love—turned to hatred. Satan entered in amongst them, and they resolved to poison him. When the fatal cup was handed to Benedict, he took it without a word—and made the sign of the Cross over it. It was shivered to fragments on the instant. Then he left these false brethren and returned to his grotto, but never more to his solitude. Many came to him, some praying that he would guide their steps in religion, some to confide to him their sons to educate. This multitude could not be housed in the clefts of the rock, so he built twelve monasteries at Sub Laqueum, on the ruins of Nero’s villa, and placed in each twelve monks, who bound themselves to live under certain plain and simple rules—much prayer, much labour, fasting and penance; active charity, life-long chastity, and finally poverty, for no individual might own property of any kind. Thus began the monastic life of the West. Up to Benedict’s time, as I have said, the religious life was indeed led by many devout persons, but also by many who lacked true devotion and brought the calling into some disrepute. The Founder par excellence appeared, and immediately it took on the character by which we recognise it now.

Its deepest and strongest foundation was in its humility. In Benedict nature had been wholly subdued; his self-abasement was complete. No vision of the future had been granted him as yet, no breath of prophecy had whispered that in the years to come thirty thousand monasteries in Europe would be called by his name.

Meanwhile his twelve little houses at Sub Laqueum—our Subiaco—prospered exceedingly, and the numbers of his subjects increased daily. The times were so terrible that men who loved God and His peace were overjoyed to find a spot where war and murder came not and where they could serve God with quiet hearts. There were some such among the Barbarians themselves, and more than one Goth asked to be enrolled among Benedict’s spiritual children. All had to work, and the Goths, big honest fellows but dense and unskilful, joined the band of builders and cultivators of the soil. The country was thickly wooded then and there was much felling to be done. One day a Goth, hewing away at a tree, let his axe slip and fall into the lake. Immediately he began to weep and lament, for the implements were few and precious. Benedict came to him, saw what had happened, and made the sign of the Cross over the water. At once the heavy axe floated to the surface, and the Saint drew it forth and gave it back to the poor man, saying: “Ecce, labora, et noli contristare!”—“There, work, and be not afflicted!”

“Symbolical words,” says Montalembert, “in which we find an abridgment of the precepts and examples lavished by the monastic order on so many generations of conquering races! ‘Ecce, labora!’”

In the miserable and confused condition of public affairs it was difficult for parents of the better classes to procure proper education for their sons, and, as soon as the fame of Benedict’s holiness spread abroad, young boys of noble families were brought to him at Subiaco and confided to his care, in the hope that they, too, would devote themselves to the service of God. Two of these, Placidus and Maurus, were especially dear to him and were destined to become in a special manner his disciples and helpers. Placidus, the younger of the two, was the son of Tertullus, the feudal lord of Subiaco and of many other towns, and a great benefactor to the infant community. But Benedict would allow no distinctions of rank to interfere with the training in obedience and humility which is the only sure foundation for the religious life, and the two young patricians had to perform their share of menial labour like all the rest.

One day Placidus had been sent to fetch water from the lake, and as he stooped to lift out his heavy pitcher he lost his balance and fell into the water, which at that spot formed a dangerous whirlpool. St. Benedict witnessed the accident and, running to Maurus, who stood horrified beside him, said, “Go, my son, and save thy companion.”

Without an instant’s hesitation Maurus walked across the water with a step as firm as if it had been dry land, drew the drowning boy out of the whirlpool, and set him safely on the bank. St. Gregory, in his life of St. Benedict, says: “To what shall I attribute so great a miracle? To the virtue of the obedience, or to that of the commandment?”

“To both,” says Bossuet. “The obedience had grace to accomplish the command, and the command had grace to give efficacy to the obedience.”

St. Gregory gives us a beautiful picture of St. Benedict’s loving training of these two predestined souls. He kept them always near him, and would walk along the woody banks of the Anio leaning on Maurus and leading Placidus by the hand, discoursing so wisely and yet so clearly that the appeal to the more mature intelligence of the one was as convincing as to the child-like mind of the other. They witnessed his many miracles, trembled at the punishments that fell on some unfaithful members of the community, and stored up all his words in their hearts—Placidus to be the Apostle of Sicily and the first martyr of the order, Maurus to become the founder of the religious life in France, where he died at the age of seventy after having, as the Breviary puts it, “seen already more than one hundred of his spiritual children precede him to Heaven.”

Those first years at Subiaco were very happy and consoling ones for St. Benedict, but wicked men, some envious of his fame, some the open enemies of all virtue, tried by all means in their power to injure him and corrupt his followers. He took no notice of their calumnies, was unmoved by the attempt of one wretch to poison him; as long as he only was attacked, he went calmly on his way. But when the conspirators sent a crowd of abandoned women to invade the garden where the monks were working, he felt the time had come when he should depart and draw the attacks away from his beloved disciples. So, having set all things in order and adjured the mountain community to be faithful to its vows, he travelled southwards, surely with a heavy heart, and did not pause till he had put nearly a hundred miles between himself and his beloved retreat at Subiaco.

About eighty-five miles from Rome, where the ever-capricious Apennines sink to a rounded plain and rise in its centre in a natural fortress of rock, there stood, in Roman times, the little town of Cassinum, once the home of Varrus, whom Cicero called “sanctissimus et integerrimus,” one of those who served God without knowing Him. The place was in ruins when St. Benedict reached it, but he cared nothing for that; what arrested him was the sight of the poor country people climbing the hill to sacrifice to Apollo in the temple on the summit. Pagans yet! He stayed to teach them Christianity, and very soon the temple and grove of Apollo gave place to a Church and monastery—the most famous in the world, the monastery of Monte Cassino.

St. Benedict must have possessed even more than the Saint’s usual gift of divine magnetism, for wherever he went eager disciples sprang up around him—many faithful, some few less so, but all irresistibly attracted to the man himself. As it had been at Subiaco, so it was here. Very quickly he converted the poor people of the district, signs and wonders too many to recount “confirming the word,” and his inexhaustible charity making the harried peasants feel that they had found a father, a doctor, a protector, in the benignly gentle monk. The great heart that was utterly empty of self felt for all their sorrows and hardships; the eyes that, as St. Gregory tells us, had already been opened to the vision of the Godhead, saw, as mortals do not see, into the hearts of men, and showed events taking place hundreds of miles away as clearly as those close by, so that when his monks returned from the missions on which he sent them it was he who told them all they had said and done and thought on the way. He seems to have understood that God would spare him further wandering, and accepted Monte Cassino as the cradle of the order he was called to found. Here he composed the Rule which became the model of all succeeding orders, and in its simple completeness contains the essence and ideal of the religious life. That, according to St. Benedict, must include prayer and praise and penance, labour, and unbounded charity, but it does not consist in them. They are its garment, its inevitable expression, so to speak, but the life is the life of the heart in constant union with God. He was opposed to all undue extremes in outward observances, though inflexible as to the keeping of the Rule. “Let this,” he said, “be arduous enough to give the strong something to strive for, but not so hard as to discourage the weak!”

He worked at Monte Cassino as if for eternity, yet it was revealed to him that forty years after his death the Lombards would destroy the convent and disperse the monks. It puzzles one to understand that perfect trust and obedience. The knowledge saddened him, but it never made him desist from his labours, so splendidly justified by after events. “I have obtained from the Lord this much,” he told the frightened disciples, “when the Barbarian comes he will take things, not lives—res, non animas.” But other Barbarians were overrunning the country, left now to its fate by its supine and helpless rulers in Constantinople. The Goths were everywhere; many indeed became devout followers of Benedict, but their Arian brethren pillaged and persecuted, burnt and ravaged, unchecked, and terribly did the people suffer. St. Benedict, who foresaw the great destinies of these Northern races when they should become enlightened, stood between the conquerors and the conquered as judge and protector, and both in the end always bowed to his ruling.

There is a wonderful story that I must set down, because it shows his power over nature, both animate and inanimate things. To me it seems more impressive than all his other miracles, even those of restoring the dead to life. A particularly fierce Goth robber, named Galla, “traversed the country panting with rage and cupidity, and made a sport of slaying the priests and monks who fell under his power, and spoiling and torturing the people to extort from them the little they had remaining. An unfortunate peasant, exhausted by the torments inflicted upon him by the pitiless Goth, conceived the idea of bringing them to an end by declaring that he had confided all that he had to the keeping of Benedict, a servant of God, upon which Galla stopped the torture of the peasant, but, binding his arms with ropes and thrusting him in front of his own horse, ordered him to go before and show the way to the house of this Benedict who had defrauded him of his expected prey. Both thus pursued the way to Monte Cassino, the peasant on foot, with his hands tied behind his back, urged on by the blows and taunts of the Goth, who followed on horseback.

“When they reached the summit of the mountain, they perceived the Abbot, seated alone, reading at the door of his monastery. ‘Behold,’ said the prisoner, ‘there is the Father Benedict of whom I told thee.’

“Then the Goth shouted furiously to the monk: ‘Rise up, rise up, and restore quickly what thou hast received from this peasant!’ The man of God raised his eyes from his book and, without speaking, slowly turned his gaze first on the Barbarian on horseback, and then upon the husbandman bound and bowed down by his cords. Under the light of that powerful gaze the cords which tied his poor arms loosed of themselves, and the innocent victim stood erect and free, while the ferocious Galla, falling on the ground, trembling and beside himself, remained at the feet of Benedict, begging the Saint to pray for him. Benedict called his brethren and directed them to carry the fainting Barbarian into the monastery and give him some blessed bread. And when he had come to himself the Abbot represented to him the injustice and cruelty of his conduct, and exhorted him to change it for the future. The Goth was completely subdued.”[2]

The picture of the holy abbot sitting and reading in the doorway is one which recurs several times in his history, and it is good to know that the doorway is one of the very few fragments remaining of Benedict’s home at Monte Cassino. It still contains, I believe, an inscription to that effect. The Lombard destruction left this archway standing, and also the little tower whence Benedict’s bell called the monks to work and prayer. One loves even to touch the stones that knew his presence at Monte Cassino. Subiaco is full of him indeed, but it was at Monte Cassino that his greatest work was done; over its foreseen destruction he wept bitterly and it was there that he died.

A yet more notable encounter than the one with Galla took place at the arched doorway, in 542, one year before Benedict’s death. Totila, the Ostrogoth, swept down through Italy to retrieve the losses and defeats inflicted on his predecessor by Belisarius. It was a triumphal progress. He was on his way to Naples when the whim took him to see for himself the venerated prophet of the holy mountain. But first he wished to test the prophet’s powers. So he caused the captain of his guard to be dressed in all his own royal robes, down to the famous purple boots, gave him three noble counts for his attendants and a great escort of soldiers, and told him to go and pass himself off on Benedict as the real Totila. We are not informed how the unlucky captain regarded his mission—probably with fear and reluctance—but it failed dismally. As he approached the monastery St. Benedict perceived him from afar and called out: “My son, put off the dress you wear! It is not yours.”

The captain, terrified, threw himself on the ground. Then re-mounting, he and his whole company turned round and galloped away at full speed to tell Totila that it was useless to attempt to deceive the man of God. And Totila understood, and came himself, very humbly, and saw the Abbot sitting as usual in the doorway, reading a holy book. The conqueror was afraid. He threw himself face downward on the sward and dared not approach. Three times Benedict bade him rise—still he lay prone. Then the Saint left his seat and came and raised Totila up and led him to the house and talked long and earnestly with him, reproving him for the wrong he had done and showing him that he must treat his conquered subjects kindly and justly. Also, St. Benedict, mercifully moved thereto by the sincerity of the Barbarian, told him what lay in store for him: “You shall enter Rome; you shall cross the sea; nine years you shall reign, and in the tenth you shall die.”

And Totila repented of his many evil deeds and begged the seer to pray for him, and went back to his camp a changed man. Thenceforth he protected the weak, restrained his followers, and showed himself so mild and wise that the delighted Neapolitans, who had been expecting a repetition of the awful massacres ordered by Belisarius, said that Totila treated them as if they were his own children. From that time the tenth year was ever before his eyes, and when it came he died, contrite and resigned.

One gleam from home was shed on St. Benedict at Monte Cassino. His sister Scholastica had long since followed his example and given herself to God. It was not permitted to women to take the final vows before the age of forty, but that did not prevent them from preparing for the irrevocable dedication by living together in religious communities, under a fixed rule, from their early youth, when they were so inclined. Such a life Scholastica had led, somewhere in the solitudes of the Sabines—perhaps in her own home at Norcia; but she came at last to Monte Cassino and built a convent there for herself and her companions, so as to be near the brother she loved. Only once a year did they meet, and then they spent the day together in a hut on the side of Benedict’s mountain, he coming down with a few of the brethren, and she accompanied by some of the nuns. All their discourse was of holy things and much they spoke of the longed-for joys of Heaven.

Now, in the year 543, they had thus passed the day together and evening was drawing on. St. Benedict rose, saying that he and his companions must return to the monastery, but Scholastica, for the first time in all those years, begged him to remain with her till the morning. The Saint was horrified. “Do you not know, my sister,” he exclaimed, “that the Rule forbids a monk to pass the night out of the monastery? How can you ask me to do such a thing?”

Scholastica did not reply. She bowed her head on her hands on the table that had served for their repast and wept, praying to God that her brother might stay, for she knew that they were to meet no more in this world. She wept so heartbrokenly that her tears flooded the table and made little rivers on the ground. It was a mild February evening, and the sun had sunk away from a calm and cloudless sky. But suddenly a fearful tempest arose, the thunder roared, the rain came down in torrents, the lightning seared the heavens from side to side.

“Sister, what have you done?” St. Benedict exclaimed, fearing that the storm was a manifestation of the Divine displeasure.

Scholastica raised her head and smiled at him through her tears. “God has granted what you refused,” she said. “Go back to the monastery now, brother, if you can!”

But there was no going back through that tempest, and St. Benedict, perceiving that the Lord was on Scholastica’s side, stayed with her till morning, and they had great sweetness of holy converse all night long. And when the sun rose, Scholastica asked for his blessing and said farewell for the last time, and she and her nuns went down the hill to their own convent, looking back many times, I think, to that other one on the hill. And three days later she died, and her brother saw her soul mount to Heaven under the appearance of a spotless dove, and he called his monks and said to them, with great rejoicing: “My sister is with God. Go and bring her body hither that we may bury it with honour.” Which they did, and Benedict made her a grave at the foot of the altar in his Church.

Now he knew that his own end was approaching, and he disposed all things rightly, and mightily exhorted his brethren to persevere and to be faithful to their Rule. And he more than ever afflicted his body with penance and abounded in charity to the poor. And thirty-four days after Scholastica had departed, a great fever seized him, so that he had no strength and suffered much. But he never ceased from praying and bade all his monks pray that God would have mercy on his soul. On the sixth day of the fever he bade them carry him into the Church, where he had already caused his sister’s grave to be opened to receive him. There, on the edge of the grave, supported by his disciples, he received the Holy Viaticum, and then bade them lift him to his feet. He stretched out his arms, praised God once more for all His goodness, and died—standing, like the gallant warrior he was!

They buried him beside Scholastica. Two of his monks, whom he had sent forth on a mission, were very far away from Monte Cassino when they saw, in the dead of night, a vast number of the stars of heaven run together to form a great bridge of light towards the east. A voice spoke to them, saying, “By this road, Benedict, the beloved of God, has ascended to Heaven.”

1. Montalembert.

2. Montalembert.

CHAPTER III ST. GREGORY THE GREAT

Three years before St. Benedict and his sister Scholastica passed away, there was born, in a palace on the Cœlian Hill, a child who was christened Gregory, a name which signified “Vigilant.” His lineage was exceedingly illustrious, his parents belonging to the great old Gens Anicia, a family of nobles which had been respected and honoured ever since the days of the Republic, and in which, to use the words of a chronicler of Gregory’s time, “the men seemed all to have been born Consuls, and the women Saints.”

Gregory’s mother was St. Silvia, and I have seen the garden on the quiet Cœlian Hill where as a child he ran about at her side, asking a thousand questions, as clever children will, while she tended her flowers and gathered healing herbs—the “basilica” and “Madrecara” and “erba della Madonna” still dear to Roman apothecaries—to make into medicines for the sick poor who thronged her charitable doors. Mothers see a long way, and, while Gregory’s father was planning a great career in the world for his only son, Silvia was praying that God would keep him pure, and make him great in His sight. And her prayers prevailed, as mothers’ prayers generally do, and, though she had to wait a little, she lived to see their fulfilment.

As the boy grew up he threw himself heart and soul into his father’s plans; he studied hard, and his naturally brilliant gifts brought him much distinction. He rejoiced in all the pleasant things that birth and wealth had bestowed on him—good looks, popularity, rich garments, and sparkling jewels—and no doubt was immensely pleased and flattered when, being still quite young, he was made Proctor of Rome. That charge, however, was a grave one at the time, as the Lombards, the most cruel and brutal of all the savage tribes that had threatened the Eternal City, chose the period of Gregory’s proctorship to descend upon her and make her feel the weight of their heavy hand. There were religious troubles, too, and Gregory, who through all his busy official life in the world was an ardent Christian, was deeply exercised and distressed by them. But the world was only to claim him for a little while, in his early manhood. Then he was withdrawn from it to be prepared, through many long years of prayer and penance and study, to step forth towards the end of his life as its rescuer and ruler. Little by little the inner call came, faint at first, sometimes resisted, but ever stronger, till Gregory understood and obeyed.

His heart had gone out at once to the Benedictine monks, when, on the destruction of Monte Cassino by the Lombards, they had sought refuge in Rome. Some of them became his most intimate friends and their encouragement smoothed his path from the world to the cloister. From the moment when he recognised and embraced his vocation, all hesitation left him. He sold all his goods, distributed the larger part to the poor, and, as if to atone for what the Lombards had destroyed, built and endowed six new monasteries, placing twelve Benedictines in each, in Sicily. That done, he converted his home on the Cœlian into a seventh, where he gathered another community about him, of the same learned Order. His father was dead, and his mother, on becoming a widow, had already built a convent close by, where she had taken the veil herself.

Gregory now devoted himself to three things—prayer, study, and charity. For his own use—he was quickly elected abbot of the monastery—he reserved a small cell, where he could enjoy the solitude he now so greatly desired, but—a delightfully human touch!—he could not get on without his favourite cat, and one can see him, in imagination, pausing from his writing to smooth her velvety head when she sprang upon the table and rubbed it against his cheek! I had a little cat once who would sit motionless on a chair beside me all night while I was writing, but the instant I laid down the pen she was on my lap or my shoulder, talking in her own way, most intelligently and cheeringly; so I was mightily pleased when I read about St. Gregory’s cat!

The Benedictine Rule provided for all hospitality to strangers and the poor, but at the same time directed that the monks themselves were not to be disturbed from prayer and study. St. Gregory, however, seems to have received all who wished to see him, perhaps as an exercise of patience. Now there was a poor ship-wrecked sailor who seemed inclined to abuse the privilege. He came again and again, and was never turned away, but on the occasion of what proved to be his last visit Gregory had not a single thing left to give him. He was looking round his rough cell in perplexity, when a messenger appeared bringing the silver basin full of porridge, which was the only food he allowed himself and which his mother sent him every day! Here was what was needed! The next moment the needy sailor man was walking away with the hot porridge and the silver porringer. What St. Silvia said when she heard of the incident has not been recorded—but Gregory never gave the matter another thought until one day, long after, when the importunate sailor appeared to him in his true character, that of an Angel of light, and told him that God had taken note of his charity and—an alarming prophecy for the Saint—that he would be elected Pope and do great things for the Church.

All he asked was to be left quiet in his monastery, where he was putting his whole heart into living the life of a model monk. In his ardour against himself, he carried his penances too far and fasted so rigorously that he came near to dying—an imprudence for which he paid ever after in broken health and in being debarred from fasting at all. He complains pitifully of having to “drag about such a big body with so little strength,” but this was the least of the trials that awaited him.

In the year 577, when Gregory was about thirty-seven years of age, the reigning Pope, Benedict I, sent for him and insisted upon making him one of the Cardinal Deacons to whom was entrusted the jurisdiction of the seven “Regions” into which the city was divided. Gregory protested, but had to take on the charge, and from that time forward he belonged less to himself than to others. He was too necessary and valuable to be spared. The next year, Pope Benedict being dead, his successor, Pelagius II, decided to send Gregory on a very difficult and important mission to the Emperor Tiberius Constantinus at Constantinople, where trouble of all kinds seemed to be brewing. Although Gregory bewails this “thrusting out from port into the storm,” one cannot but feel how the alert fighting spirit in the man leaps to the call. The born leader may persuade himself that he is happiest in the seclusion he thinks good for his soul, but when the call to arms comes every repressed fibre of his being wakes and cries for action.

When Gregory, taking with him several of his monks, sailed away from Italy, he little dreamed that years were to pass before he should return. On his arrival in Constantinople, the first matter to claim his attention was the ugly new heresy started by Eutyches, who had drawn the Emperor and many others into the path of error by declaring that there was to be no resurrection of the flesh. Gregory was politely received by the Emperor, and instantly requested the latter to call a conference in which the dogma should be discussed. Tiberius consented, and there followed the famous conference in which Gregory’s fiery eloquence and invincible logic quashed the heresy at once. When he had finished speaking, the Emperor commanded that a fire should be lighted, and with his own hands and in the presence of a vast concourse burnt the book which Eutyches had written to propound the heresy, and declared himself now and for ever the faithful son of the Church. Eutyches, touched to the heart by Gregory’s arguments, accepted defeat and rebuke as but small punishment for his fault, and when he was dying, soon afterwards, pulled up the skin of one poor emaciated hand with the fingers of the other and cried to those around him, “I confess that in this flesh we shall rise from the dead!” Gregory proved a successful ambassador in every way. The relations between the Church and the imperial court had been badly interrupted by the Lombard invasion, but he welded them smoothly and firmly together. Tiberius died while Gregory was in Constantinople, and his successor, Maurice, was badly disposed to the Church. Gregory brought him to a better mind and obliged him to rescind an edict he had just issued forbidding any member of the army to embrace the monastic life.

At last, after six years of what must have been the most anxious work, requiring all that the great man had of wisdom and firmness and tact, he returned to Italy—to find his beloved Rome in terrible distress from a visitation of the pestilence. Gregory at once devoted himself to the care of the sick and dying, and one can fancy how the poor people’s eyes lighted up when he appeared among them again. Then the good Pope Pelagius succumbed to the disease, and at once all eyes turned to Gregory, who was unanimously elected as his successor.

Gregory was honestly horrified. He refused, he pleaded, he argued, but no one would listen to him. Then he fled. Disguised as a peasant, he slipped away and hid himself in a secret cave in the hills, entreating the Lord to protect him from the awful honour which his fellow-citizens wished to thrust upon him. They meanwhile were searching for him in every direction, and would have failed in their quest had not Heaven put itself visibly on their side. From very far off they beheld a tall pillar of light resting before the fugitive’s cave—they rushed to it, dragged him forth, and made him Pope. Seeing that his fellow-citizens would not listen to him, he wrote to the Emperor Maurice, begging him not to confirm the election, but the Romans intercepted the letter; the Emperor was informed of the election in the usual way and was only too glad to give it the imperial sanction, still required then from Constantinople. For once the “Vox Populi” had proved itself what it never is, nowadays, the “Vox Dei,” and for fourteen years Gregory reigned, in virtue and wisdom and glory, for the everlasting good of the people of God. Every gift that Heaven had bestowed upon him vindicated its unerring designs. He accomplished in those fourteen years so many wonderful things that cold sense almost refuses its adherence to the visible facts. His colossal labours for the Church gave us the Gregorian chant, the Sacramentary of the missal, and the Breviary; his correspondence, so vast that, like Napoleon and Julius Cæsar, he is supposed to have dictated to several secretaries at once, embraces every point that required treating of at home and abroad. His sermons, day after day, instructed the ignorant in the plain truths of salvation, while they no less amazed and illuminated the minds of the most learned; and through it all his soul was never disturbed from the calm heights of union with God, his heart never closed to a single cry from the suffering and the weary. The much abbreviated list of “some of his labours,” as the Breviary puts it, would stagger the grasp of any modern scholar or ruler. In a few lines he is shown to us reëstablishing the Catholic Faith in many places where it had suffered, repressing the Donatists in Africa, the Arians in Spain, expelling the Agnostics from Alexandria, and refusing the “Pallium” (the sign of pontifical investiture) to Syagrius, the Bishop-elect of Autun, until he had turned the “heretic Neophytes”[3] out of Gaul; quelling the audacity of John, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had dared to call himself the “Head of the Universal Church,” and so on, preaching, writing, praying, and through it all suffering constantly and acutely.

There is a legend to the effect that all these pains and sicknesses had been voluntarily accepted in order to deliver a certain soul from Purgatory. The legend is only a legend, unsupported by the authority of the Church—but it would have been just like St. Gregory to do it!

In every public or private trouble or upheaval, as well as in every effort to reorganise and restore, his name, his presence is dominant. After becoming Pope, he lived chiefly at the Lateran palace, then the official Papal residence, and they still keep there the narrow pallet that served him for a bed, and—mark this, ye modern schoolboys!—the little rod which he had to use to keep his dark-eyed, rampageous young choristers in order!

The men who can govern others with the most unerring wisdom are often entirely mistaken in their appreciation of themselves. Only the other day the local and most successful Superior of a great missionary order in America was bewailing his fate to me. “I told the Bishop he was making a dreadful mistake in making me the Rector,” he declared. “It is not my work—I was not intended to govern and lead! I am a born free-lance—I want to travel all over the country seeking out the lost souls. I am no good at anything else!”

But the Bishop knew better; and so it was with the great crowd of clergy and laity who designated Gregory for the Papacy. What he accomplished during his pontificate has been well summed up by Montalembert: “Gregory, who alone amongst men has received, by universal consent, the double surname of Saint and Great, will be an everlasting honour to the Benedictine order, as to the Papacy. By his genius, but especially by the charm and ascendency of his virtue, he was destined to organise the temporal power of the Popes, to develop and regulate their spiritual sovereignty, to found their paternal supremacy over the new-born crowns and races which were to become the great nations of the future, and to be called France, Spain, and England. It was he, indeed, who inaugurated the middle ages, modern society, and Christian civilisation.” The task he undertook was a gigantic one, for on the one side he had to contend with the exactions and oppressions of the corrupt and decrepit Byzantine Emperors who were still the nominal rulers of Rome and his own secular masters; on the other, with the great new forces let loose on the world in the increasing vigour and supremacy of the Lombards and other northern nations, more than half barbarous still, but, as Gregory clearly perceived, possessed of an intelligence and vitality which only required training and instruction to grow into great, new polities which would replace the already dead Roman Empire.

To appreciate his labours one would have to read that colossal correspondence which has fortunately been preserved entire. Besides the mighty matters of Church and Empire which it sets forth, there shows all through the most tender and minute care for the lower and therefore unprotected classes, as well as for individual souls. Slavery, in every form, excited Gregory’s generous indignation, and his most earnest efforts were devoted to restoring slaves to the rank of human beings. The peasants on the great, estates were serfs—practically slaves. He decreed that their marriages should be inviolable, their property their own, their wills valid; that wherever possible the Church revenues should be devoted to buying the freedom of slaves and that never, on any plea, should Christians be sold to Jews or pagans. At the same time he enacted that neither Jews nor pagans should be baptised by force, and commanded that the synagogues of the Jews should be restored to them and that they should be allowed freedom of worship. Always humble and diffident about asking anything for himself, it is amusing to find him severely reprimanding a Bishop who had authorised or permitted extortionate exactions to be practised against an obscure farmer in Sardinia, and at the same time writing meekly to the overseer of some ecclesiastical property in Sicily—a stud farm where were kept four hundred stallions: “You have sent me one bad horse and four asses. I cannot ride the horse, because it is bad, nor the asses, because they are asses. If you would assist to sustain me, send me something that I can use!”

But, after all, the special bond between St. Gregory and English-speaking peoples lies in the memorable act by which England was evangelised, after the Faith first planted there had been annihilated by the pagan Barbarians, Saxons, Angles, Scandinavians, to whom she fell an easy prey when Rome withdrew its protecting legions and abandoned her to her fate.

It is rather sweet to know that it was the fair, innocent beauty of a group of English children, standing, dazed and frightened, in the market to be sold, that first touched his heart to such warm pity for their country. He was then living as the abbot of the community he had founded on the Cœlian Hill, and enough has been said to show how happy he was in his quiet life there.

It must have been some unusual necessity which took him far down into the town on a certain day and through the noisy, crowded slave market. But on seeing the children, with their blue eyes full of tears and their long golden hair shining in the sun, everything else was forgotten; he stopped abruptly to ask who they were.

“Angles, from the isle of Britain,” was the answer, given indifferently enough. The keeper knew that the big, dark-faced monk was not a slave-buyer.

“Angles! They are born to be angels!” cried Gregory, and straightway he flew to the Pope and besought permission to go with some of his monks to Britain to preach the Gospel. The Pope, taken by surprise, consented, and before he had time to think over the matter Gregory, with his volunteers, had put three days of travelling between himself and Rome. Then the news leaked out, and the people rose like one man and rushed to the Pope, who was on his way to St. Peter’s, and, arresting his progress, burst into indignant cries: “You have offended St. Peter! You have ruined Rome in allowing Gregory to leave us!”

Pelagius saw his mistake and sent messengers in all haste to call Gregory back. Of course he obeyed; he never forgot England, but it was only in the sixth year of his own pontificate (596) that he could carry out his design, and then he could not himself take part in the expedition. He found a noble substitute in St. Augustine, and it must have been with a glad heart that he sent him forth, and gave him and his forty Benedictines the final blessing, as they knelt (so we are told) on the grassy stretch below the steps of Gregory’s own convent on the Cœlian Hill. The grass grows there still; still the green trees shadow the enclosure called St. Gregory’s park, through which one approaches the Church, and still the flowers bloom in Silvia’s garden where he played as a little boy. Even modern Rome has been loath to encroach on the place so dear to him who loved Rome so much.

I have often wondered what became of the little English children he saw and, seeing, loved. Surely he rescued them and placed them with kind people to be cared for. His quick notice of them reminds one of our own Pius IX, who could never pass an English child without stopping to bless it, and, while blessing the child, to pray for England, whom Augustine and his companions made “the Isle of Saints” and the “Dowry of Mary.” Poor England! she threw her glory to the winds at the command of an adulterous King and his unspeakable daughter, and, now that even the moth-eaten rags of her heresies will no longer hold together, dares to call her crumbling simulacrum of a Church the “Church of Saint Augustine”! That never died, in reality; and all honour to those of her children who, through three hundred years of abominable persecution and oppression, kept the Faith, and prepared the way for its splendid renaissance to-day!

One more picture of St. Gregory must close this humble sketch of his great life. As already related, after he had been elected Pope he sent a letter to the Emperor Maurice, imploring him not to confirm the decision of the people. And just then, as if jealous of all the good work that was going forward, the Powers of Evil let loose a terrible outbreak of the pestilence in Rome. They could not touch the spiritual city—Rome invisible, the Sanctuary of the Faith, but the material one seemed to be delivered into their hands and terrible were its sufferings. Poverty and neglect, and the ruin of ceaseless wars, had made it vulnerable at every point; the pestilence had swept it again and again, but this was the most frightful visitation of all. Gregory and his monks, and many other charitable persons, devoted themselves to the sick and dying; the lazarets and hospitals were crowded—every day with new sufferers as the dead were carried out; but it became impossible to bury the dead fast enough. Neither prayer nor effort seemed of any avail, and dull despair settled on all hearts. Apparently this was to be the end.

Then Gregory instituted the first of those great processions which, in moments of stress, have moved across the pages of history ever since, awing us a little by the whole-hearted faith and trust of our ancestors in the mercy of Heaven. Gregory decreed that all, Clergy and Laity, who could stand on their feet should put on the garments of penitence and follow him through the stricken streets to pray at the Tomb of St. Peter. And all who could obeyed like one man. What a sight that must have been when the Saint, “the strong, dark-faced man of heavy build,” led his afflicted people from the “Mother of Churches” at the Lateran Gate down past all the ruined pomp of the Palatine and the Colosseum and the Forum towards the river and the great Basilica of Constantine beyond! How the response of the Major Litanies must have thundered up from all those breaking hearts to the “skies of brass” that hung over Rome! The ever-repeated “Te rogamus, audi nos!” and “Libera nos, Domine” even now bring tears to one’s eyes with their almost despairing simplicity; then they were the last appeals of a crushed and ruined race for one more chance to repent and atone for its heaped misdeeds. And the chance was granted. As the endless procession moved along towards St. Peter’s its leader paused before the Mausoleum of Hadrian, that huge monument of pagan ambition, and raised his eyes and heart in supplication, offering we know not what of his own life and destiny for his people’s sins.

Suddenly he stood transfigured. The chanting ceased; all eyes followed Gregory’s gaze, all ears were strained to catch the heavenly melody that floated, high and clear, fresh as the song of birds at dawn, over the sorrowing city:

“Regina Cœli laetare,

Quia quem meruisti portare,

Resurrexit, sicut dixit!”

It was the chant of the Resurrection!

“Alleluia, Alleluia!” came the sequel in one burst from that great multitude, as the angels’ voices grew fainter and were lost in the depths overhead. And then, on hearts bursting now with relief and joy, there fell the awe that mortals feel in the presence of the Heavenly Ones, for there, on the summit of the towering fortress, stood the radiant Archangel—and he was sheathing his flaming sword.

The pestilence was over. Once more God had had mercy on His people. And, since the angels’ song was addressed to the Queen of Heaven, we know that it was she whose prayers had stayed the arm that had clung round her neck in Bethlehem.

St. Gregory passed to his reward on the 12th of March, 604, having reigned nearly fourteen years. The mourning city chose Sabinianus of Volterra to succeed him, but only three years had elapsed when Sabinianus in his turn made place for a Boniface (III), who lived but one year after his election, and then came another Boniface, a Saint, a strong man of the Abruzzi, and in his reign the world found out that, though imperial Rome was indeed dead, the Rome that Gregory and Benedict and their fellow-workers had planted on her grave during that century of apparent eclipse had taken root below and shot out branches above and had become as a mighty tree affording guidance, shelter, and sustenance to the whole Christian world.

Each of the great Popes seems to have had a special mission to fulfil, one that coloured all his acts and sheds its individual lustre on his memory. No doubt or hesitation seems to accompany the acceptance and fulfilment of it. Boniface’s mission bade him place the seal of visible Christianity on the city and consecrate it to the Faith for all time. It was Boniface, the fourth of that name, who decreed and carried out the Triumph of which I spoke in a preceding chapter. But it is a big subject and it must have a chapter to itself.

3. This term requires explanation. The two great sins of the Church in Gaul were first Simony, and secondly, the practice of admitting unprepared laymen to Holy Orders and often to the Episcopate. This last vice Gregory called “The heresy of Neophytes.”

CHAPTER IV MEMORIES OF THE PANTHEON

If you stand before San Pietro in Montorio and look down from the spot where St. Peter was crucified, you will see, rounding up in the low-lying heart of the city, a dome, white, huge, uncrowned, standing out from the darker buildings round it like an enormous mother-of-pearl shell, softly iridescent, yet, when storm is in the air, taking on a grey and deathlike hue. That is the Pantheon, and thus it has stood, reflecting every mood of the Roman sky, since the days of Hadrian, who became Emperor in the year 117. Hadrian built the magic dome, but it is not his name that stands out in the gigantic lettering on the pediment over the portico. Ninety years before his time Marcus Agrippa, the intimate friend and (for his sins!) the son-in-law of Augustus, erected a magnificent temple close to the Baths which still bear his name in the Campus Martius, the field of which my brother has told the touching story in “Ave, Roma Immortalis.” Agrippa must have forgotten to properly propitiate the gods; we moderns should say that he “had no luck,” for his gorgeous temple was soon struck by lightning and presented a forlorn appearance when Hadrian, that enthusiastic builder, decided to restore it.

This he did on his usual princely scale; when he had done with it, the Pantheon (properly “Pantheum,” all-holy) must indeed have dazzled the eyes of the beholders, for the dome was entirely covered with tiles of gilt bronze that under the rays of the sun made it seem a second sun that had come to rest on earth. The gilt tiles were stripped off in 663 by a greedy little Emperor, Constans II, who took them away to Syracuse, whence the Saracens successfully looted them a few years afterwards. So the thing that looks like mother-of-pearl is really only covered with sheets of lead—but even lead, when the Heavens have looked on it long enough, may become a thing of life and beauty. When Hadrian had finished his building there was nothing left of Agrippa’s original one except the portico; but Hadrian, with rare moderation, left the original founder’s name on that. The Pantheon, which is called by archæologists “the most perfect pagan monument in Rome,” seems to have been, in its beginnings, unfortunate, for only sixty-four years after Hadrian’s death it again stood sadly in need of repair, if we may believe the magniloquent inscription left on its front by Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla, when they had carried out their pious designs of further restoration.

But it remains Hadrian’s best monument, substantially what he made it, a vast and perfect round under a vast and perfect dome, a place where the winds of Heaven may sweep down from the central opening—thirty feet across—overhead, and circle round the wide well of the interior and rise to the sky again without having encountered the shock of a single angle on their way. And for more than seventeen hundred and fifty years the rain has fallen and the sun has shone and the stars have looked down on Hadrian’s pavement through the great opening, whence worshippers now, like the worshippers in his time, could raise their eyes and thoughts to the vault of Heaven above. But for two hundred years—as if to partly balance the three centuries of persecution which had preceded them—the Pantheum was closed and none were permitted to pray there, two hundred years during which the silence was never broken, and stars and sun and winds had their way in the stupendous, empty fane. It was the Emperor Honorius of inglorious memory who closed and sealed its bronze doors—the same that guard it now, (and perhaps this and a few other such acts, which showed him at heart a sincere believer, should be remembered to his attenuated credit)—preferring to have it abandoned altogether rather than used for the service of idols. And so it stood, a beautiful reproach, from 399 to 609, when our Pope Boniface told the Emperor Phocas that it was a burning shame not to wash it of pagan stains and consecrate it a Church of the Lord.

Phocas—that blood-stained figure who emerges now and then to surprise us by some memorable action—said the Pope was right, and gave him the building to do with it as he liked. And then Boniface carried out the great plan which must have been simmering in his brain for years. The temple, built for the seven deities of the seven planets, was to become the shrine of the bodies of the Saints and be consecrated to the one True God, under the tide of “St. Mary of the Martyrs.” Under that perfect dome of exactly equal height and diameter (one hundred and forty-two feet) he would finally lay to rest all the sacred remains which were still buried in the Catacombs all round the city. But there was much to do first. The rich architectural disposition of the interior required no alteration beyond the erection of a High Altar; the great window to the sky Boniface would not close; when dust and rubbish were cleared away the material preparations were over, but the tremendous ceremony of purification and consecration had yet to be accomplished. For these the illustrious predecessors of Boniface had been inspired to draw up a ceremonial of such profound meaning and glorious diction as remains matchless in the annals of the Liturgy.

We can only see it now with the eyes of the spirit, but, even while trying to do that, we must not let the magnificence of the external function make us forget that which the Church so lovingly and repeatedly impresses upon us—first, that there is but one Sanctuary worthy of the Most High, His Throne and dwelling in the inaccessible light of the Fixed Heaven, round which all universes that the human mind can grasp revolve, like starry spindrift round a living sun; and, secondly, that the home God has built for Himself on earth and loves with the most passionate tenderness is the heart of the Christian, where He will abide for time and eternity if it do not cast Him out. The chief object of ecclesiastical architecture is to symbolise the grandeur of the union between the soul and its Creator; as such, and as the storehouse and dispensary of graces, the banqueting hall where He feeds us with Himself, the arsenal where He arms us for the combat and trains us for His soldiers, where, in His surpassing love and mercy, He deigns to remain in the adorable Eucharist, the consecrated Church is the crown of human production, and rightly do we strain every nerve to make it rich and noble and fair.

When that is done, and all that men can give has been lavished on beautifying and enriching it, it has to be cleansed from every blemish of earthy contact before it can be offered to the service of God. When we wander through the Cathedrals of the world—Westminster Abbey, Strasburg, Notre Dame, Milan—asking ourselves how mere men ever attained to the production of such beauty and grandeur, do we ever stop to think that those towering walls were washed from vault to pavement, within and without, with holy oil, on the day of consecration?

The Cathedral was the symbol of the soul, and every act and prayer of the ceremonial depicted for our forefathers—so well instructed in the truths we first take for granted and then forget—the processes by which God confers on us the gift of immortality. On the eve of the great day all left the building, the new doors were closed, no step sounded on the pavement, no voice might break the stillness of the place. It was a dead thing waiting for life, as the soul that is not united to God waits, under its inherited burden of sinfulness, for regeneration.

Outside the precincts a great tent has been erected, and here, all through the night, the Bishop and his assistants have been praying, the prayers of David the great penitent. All night long the penitential psalms have been going up, beseeching the Lord to wash away the sins of His people, His exiles on earth who are waiting without the camp, and entreating Him to take them into grace and bring them to their Father’s home. With the first faint light of dawn the prayers cease, the supplicants arise, and the Bishop puts on his vestments, one by one and with a special prayer for each, because he thus figures the Son of God putting on the garment of our humanity. And because Christ, as man, prayed to His Father and ours, the Bishop comes forth from the tent and prostrates himself before the steps of the Church in fervent prayer, with all his clergy kneeling around him.

Now the natural soul is cold and blind, and closed to Grace; so the Church stands, unlighted and with fast closed doors. And because the Spirit of God is all gentleness and mercy, and condescends to most patient stratagems to capture the heart He covets, the Bishop goes three times round the great building, praying and knocking softly at its doors, while the clergy follow him and pray, too, as the angels pray for us. At last the first barrier falls; the doors open, reluctantly as it were. The Bishop crosses the threshold saying, “Peace eternal to this House, in the Name of the Eternal.” The procession passes within, the shadows swallowing up the gold and crimson of the vestments that had been sparkling in the sun. A strange sight the empty Church presents now. On the pavement two broad paths of ashes traverse its entire length and breadth, in the form of a Greek Cross. The assistants stand in silent groups while the Bishop, slowly moving down from the apse to the entrance, and then across from one transept to the other, traces in the ashes the Latin and Greek alphabets, with his crozier. Why? Because the first need of the soul is instruction. “How shall they know except they first be taught?” And, since God will not take possession of a soul without its own concurrence and consent, it must know Him before it receives Him.

Knowledge brings the desire for purification from sin, original or actual; and now the Church, the symbol of the soul, must be purified. The Bishop mingles wine with water, to denote the Humanity and the Divinity of Christ; to these he adds ashes to commemorate His death, and salt as an emblem of His resurrection; the mystic flood is poured in waves over the Altar, and thence all down the pavement of the Church, while hundreds of acolytes scale the ladders placed against the walls and the mystic liquid runs down them in glistening sheets to mingle with the mimic ripples on the floor. Let it run. When it has drained away, the holy oil flows golden and fragrant over the carved and gleaming walls, and pious hands are applying it to the exterior of the building—sometimes even to its roof—in copious floods. Now indeed the Church is ready for its destiny, even as the Christian emerges from Baptism ready for his God. The chants swell louder and sweeter, the Alleluia rings out triumphantly from a thousand hearts, the incense sends up its first perfumed spirals to hang among the fretted arches of the deep vault; the sub-deacons approach the Pontiff and offer for his blessing the rich vessels and vestments which are the wedding presents of the Faithful to the new-born Bride of Christ—the House is ready for the Master and His guests.

The guests are waiting still in the exiles’ tent, with Knights and Prelates for their Guard of Honour. Such nobility could not be entertained save in a spotless mansion. Their names? Oh, they had many—Greek and Latin and Persian and Armenian—besides the “wonderful new names” that had been given them in Heaven, for these guests were Holy Martyrs, and their relics were to be placed in the stone of the High Altar, because the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass must always be offered on them to-day, even as when the fervent yet trembling Christian knelt before their tombs in the Catacombs, and the doomed Priest asked the Lord to accept the Sacrifice in honour of those whom perhaps he had laid there an hour before.

Oh, the adorable continuity of the Church! In my eyrie in the Rockies, one of the loneliest spots on earth, there came to my door quite unexpectedly one summer evening—it was the 28th of June—a missionary priest, very tired. He had driven some hundred and fifty miles to get to us; his game little horses, his buggy, his coat—everything about him was covered with dust, but his eyes beamed with benevolence as he said, “I have come to say Mass for you.” We could have kissed his feet. The next morning, very early, in the sitting-room that was a bower of wild flowers, my son and I knelt and watched him prepare the altar. From his worn portmanteau the first thing he drew out was a square of white alabaster of which the centre had been removed, replaced, and sealed with a cross sunk into the stone. Very reverently he slipped it under the white linen “corporal,” lighted the blest candles on either side—and began “Introibo ad altare Dei.”

The alabaster square contained relics of the Martyrs; and our humble home-made altar was, through them, His friends, as worthy of Him who was about to descend upon it as the High Altar of St. Peter’s on that morning of his Feast in Rome.

When St. Boniface cleansed and consecrated the Pantheon, he showed, in the name he gave it, that it was to be the shrine of many valiant ones, a shrine of which, more truly than of any of our battlefields, it could be said:

“On Fame’s eternal camping ground

Their silent tents are spread,

And glory guards, with solemn round,

The Bivouac of the Dead!”

But one almost doubts whether the Pontiff himself appreciated the magnitude of the task he had undertaken. In person he went through the many Catacombs, for he was resolved that no smallest, humblest hero of the Lord should miss his share of the final triumph. He had had great cars prepared, decked with all possible richness, to convey the precious remains which had so long held the outposts of the city, to the Pantheon in its very heart; but when he had gone through all the dark, intricate passages of the underground cemeteries, tapping at the walls and examining every atom of surface that might conceal a once proscribed tomb, I think his artificers must have had to build more chariots for the returning army than they had expected, for it was very great. At last, however, all was ready. It was the 13th of May, Anno Domini 609, and a glorious morning, when the converging processions set forth, met, and entered the city in triumph. The Pontiff in his splendid vestments led the procession, swelled as it went along by all the inhabitants of Rome. Long serried ranks of prelates, priests, and monks followed him, carrying tall lighted tapers that gleamed but faintly in the Roman sun; the air was sweet with fragrances that grew stronger as the convoy passed along the flower-strewn streets, and the perfume of hundreds of censers swung up on the bright air. Rome was poor then, but the Romans had still found blue and crimson tapestries to hang from the windows, and every portico and window was crowded with eager onlookers who, as the procession approached, took up the roar of welcome with which the city greeted its dead. But I think a hush fell when the dead came into sight at the turn of the street or the entrance of the Square, and the enormous cars moved nearer, their dear, terrible burden piled high above the sides, and covered with silks and flowers, through which here and there showed just enough of a coffin’s outline to wring the heart and let loose a rain of tears. “Twenty-seven great cars, filled with the bones of the Martyrs, did Boniface the Pope bring to the Pantheum, now consecrated to the Service of God and the honour of the Blessed Virgin.”

Truly may that splendid temple, open to the sky, claim its title of “St. Mary of the Martyrs,” and rightly did the Pontiff and his followers as they brought them in raise the triumphant shout: “The Saints shall rejoice in their beds! Arise, ye friends of God, and enter into the glory He has prepared for His elect!”

After all these great names it seems strange to have to record a very humble one, that of a poor workingman, in connection with the Pantheon, but I can never pass the famous Church without remembering a certain Giovanni Borgi, whose memory was held in great benediction in Rome in my young days.

During the preceding century the city was really in a fairly peaceful and prosperous condition, but the many institutions of charity which flourished under Gregory XVI and Pius IX had not reached the point where they could provide night refuges for its many waifs and vagrants. There were numbers of poor boys—street arabs, as we should call them—who wandered about in the daytime, earning a little here and there but subsisting chiefly on charity and having no fixed dwelling-place of any kind. To these the broad steps and portico of the Pantheon offered at least shelter from the weather, and they used to gather there in crowds after dark and sleep—as boys can sleep—on the stones.

Now there was in Rome, towards 1780 or thereabouts, a poor mason called Giovanni Borgi. He belonged to the “opera di San Pietro”: that is, he was one of the workmen engaged for life by the administration of St. Peter’s for the maintenance and repair of the Basilica, the Vatican Palace, and its many dependent buildings. The “opera” was a close corporation and included artisans of every necessary craft, from mosaic workers to bricklayers, plumbers, and carpenters. Of course the privileges were largely hereditary, the Italian traditions of Guilds leading the son to follow the trade or profession of his father whenever possible, but high character and a blameless record were also indispensable qualifications for every appointment. Giovanni Borgi, though poor and almost illiterate, had worked all his life in the holy places and was regarded by his fellows as very nearly a saint. While he worked he prayed, and when working hours were over he went regularly to the great Hospital of Santo Spirito in the “Borgo,” and sat up late into the night nursing the sick and comforting the dying. The only reproach ever addressed to him was that he sometimes got sleepy over his work the morning after some unusually long vigil by the bedside of some sufferer who had entreated him to remain with him. Everybody loved the queer little man, and he loved all the world but himself. To this person he never gave a thought. Heaven had made him short and stumpy—but he could walk as well as the youngest; he had but one eye—but its sight was perfect; a funny bald head—but somebody had given him an old wig to cover it with; what was there to complain about? So, being empty of itself, his heart had room for others, and he took his fellow-beings’ wants and sufferings very seriously.

One evening, before going to the hospital, he was accompanying a religious procession through the streets, when he noticed the dark forms of a little crowd of sleepers on the steps of the Pantheon. Coming nearer, he found that they were boys of various ages, ragged and forlorn, huddled together for warmth, and sound asleep. A little further on, under the tables where fowls were sold in the daytime, more of these waifs had taken refuge. The sight grieved the good mason deeply. He could not pass on and leave them thus. Rousing some of them, he asked many questions and learnt that not one of them had a home or a guardian. Orphans, runaway boys from the hill villages, waifs of one sort and another—here was one of those collections of abandoned children who would later become criminals unless some kind hand were stretched out to save them. Giovanni did not hesitate for a moment. He bade the little crowd follow him to his lodging. There was one of those great ground-floor rooms only used for storing properties or cattle—no Roman will sleep near the ground if he can help it, for fear of fever—and in this barn-like place Giovanni bestowed his ragged guests after giving them whatever he could beg or buy for their supper.

I do not think he went to the hospital at all that night. I fancy he sat long in the brick-floored room, staring at the three wicks of the “lucerna” and begging Heaven to show him what to do next. In the morning he had to let his flock out, promising them some supper if they would come back at nightfall and exhorting them to be good meanwhile. The poor little creatures needed no second invitation and turned up faithfully, their numbers swelled by others to whom they had spoken of their good luck. Giovanni saw that he would soon have a community on his hands, and went to tell some priests, who were his friends, that he must be helped to teach and govern, as well as to maintain the forsaken children. For their food—breakfast and supper—he begged, and the kind-hearted neighbours responded generously. His first care was to teach them the Catechism, sitting among them in the evening and getting them to talk about themselves; he also taught them what little he knew of reading and writing; but it hurt him sorely to turn them out to face all the temptations of the streets during the daytime.

Very soon, the priests and some other charitable persons raised money to rent a part of an old palace, somewhat in ill-repair, but providing luxurious quarters in comparison to the Church steps and the fowl market. The priests offered to devote their evenings to teaching the boys, and found their efforts well rewarded, for the waifs, under the kind, firm rule of old Giovanni, were eager to make the best of their wonderful new advantages. He very soon solved the question of occupation during the daytime by placing them out in a number of workshops, where they could learn useful trades and earn something towards their own maintenance. He sent them out in the morning, giving each a loaf of bread to take with him for dinner; then he went to his own work at St. Peter’s. During the dinner hour he would rush round from one workshop to another to see that his “children” were behaving themselves and that none had played truant. Then in the evening he would go and fetch those of whose steadfastness he had any doubts, and by nightfall the whole big family was safely housed in the corner of the old Palazzo.

Whatever they had earned during the day had to be rendered up to “Tata Giovanni” (Daddy John), as they had come to call him, and very dearly they came to love their queer, kind protector. Old people used to describe his taking them all out to Villa Borghese on holidays, and said it was wonderful to see the old fellow flying round, playing ball with the rest, his wig all awry and his mighty laugh showing how happy he was with his children.

His good work had found friends and supporters from the beginning, and, being brought to the notice of Pius VI, the Pontiff bought the Palazzo Ruggia as a permanent home for it and constituted himself its chief protector. Thus encouraged, Tata Giovanni started on a crusade which had for its object nothing less than the reclamation of all the good-for-nothing boys in Rome! He used to seek them out and follow them up, and if persuasion proved unavailing the dogged old man would seize them by the arm and march them off to his “Asilo” without more ado. Vagrancy, mendicancy, gambling roused his ire to such an extent that his name became a terror to all youthful evildoers, and they would fly at the mere mention of it. Life at the Asilo was conducted on lines of military precision. The youngsters rose early, heard Mass, got a good breakfast, and marched away to their work, where, as I have said, their guardian looked in on some of them—and they never knew which it would be —during the course of the day. When the Ave Maria rang they all came home, and as they passed into the house Tata Giovanni stood at the door with a bag in his hand, and into this they had to drop their earnings—not a baiocco was to be spent on the way or kept back!

Then came the lessons, followed by the rosary, and supper, this last the crown of the day for the tired, healthy young people. The old ideals still found many followers in those days, and it was not at all unusual to see some great Cardinal “gird himself with a towel” and trot humbly a score of times between the kitchen and the refectory to wait on the boys. There were a hundred of them by this time, and great was Daddy John’s preoccupation as to their morals. Long inured to shortening his hours of sleep, he would pace the dormitories all night long to see that all was as it should be, only sleeping himself for a short hour in the morning; and certainly Heaven blessed his efforts, for as years went on, and his waifs grew old enough to go out into the world on their own account and others took their places, not one that I ever heard of brought discredit on his education.

The sick at the hospital were not forgotten amid all these new labours and responsibilities; Tata Giovanni (no one ever called him anything else) went to them whenever he could, and, when he could not, he would send some of the older boys in his place, thus teaching them the lesson which had been the moral of his whole life—that no one must live for himself alone, and that the poorest and most ignorant can always find some sufferer to cheer and console. He died at last—the good, humble old workman—fifteen years after he had strayed from the procession to inspect the ragged sleepers on the steps of the Pantheon. He passed away on the 28th of June, 1798. The whole city mourned for him, and his boys were broken-hearted. His work of love had become a public institution and incorporated with another, of the same kind, lived till a few years ago, when it was swept aside and swallowed up with hundreds of other beneficent foundations in the “indiscriminate brigandage” of Rome’s latest rulers.

Several years after Tata Giovanni’s death a young gentleman of noble birth, who came from Sinigaglia, was appointed the director of the Asilo. It was not a distinguished appointment by any means; of course no salary was attached to the position—it was not till the recent laïcisation of charity that any but unpaid volunteers attended to the wants of the poor in the Eternal City. That made no difference to this handsome young man, for he came of a wealthy family, but his father, who had had great ambitions for his son, was by no means pleased to see him buried in an orphan asylum. The young man himself was suffering under great despondency. He desired with all his heart to be a priest, but his health was so bad that the Bishop did not think it wise to ordain him. As a child he had suffered a severe shock from falling into the water and narrowly escaping drowning, and ever since his early youth he had suffered from sharp attacks of epilepsy, terrible in themselves and yet more terrible in the constant dread that hung over their victim, who never knew when he might be struck down by the fearful visitation.

Very gladly did Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti of Sinigaglia accept the charge of the Asilo which he had already constantly visited as a helper and instructor. And here, for four years, he who was to become Pius IX lived with the orphans, subsisted on their rough fare, and devoted all his powers to making forsaken lads into good Christians and useful citizens. Workshops were now installed in the Asilo itself, and the higher arts went hand in hand with humble trades, each boy’s talent and inclinations being carefully observed and consulted. Many good artists and good workmen were given to the world by the orphanage which had such humble beginnings, but for many of us its chief interest lies in its connection with the Pope, to whom it furnished the first opportunity of developing those gifts of organisation and command that later served humanity so well. Here he waited, a humble postulant on the threshold of the priesthood; here he prayed, as we know, those fervent, almost heart-broken prayers, that God would remove the infirmity which darkened his life and barred his way to the Altar; it was to his little room in the Asilo that he was brought back one night, apparently dying, having been struck down by one of those fearful attacks in the street. From here he used to go, day after day, to one or another of the city’s holy places to pray for relief or resignation; from here he started on the pilgrimage to Loreto, where the first light broke across the darkness and he received the Divine assurance that his prayers were heard, that the affliction was about to pass away. It was, finally, in the little Church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami (St. Joseph of the Carpenters), close to the Orphanage of Tata Giovanni, that he said his first Mass, on Easter Sunday, April 11, 1819. It was a very quiet affair, only a few near relations and his beloved orphans assisting at it. His uncle, Paulinus, who was a Canon of St. Peter’s and who had been his tutor in sacred studies, stood beside him all through, for the Pope had only consented to the young man’s ordination on condition that he would never celebrate the Holy Mysteries unless accompanied by another priest. This command the Pontiff rescinded soon afterwards at Father Mastai’s earnest request. He felt assured that his malady would trouble him no more, and Pius VII, in reply, said, “I also believe that, my son.” From that moment, during his long and eventful life, Giovanni Maria Mastai never suffered from any recurrence of the attacks which had, to outward seeming, saddened so many years of his life, but in reality had preserved and prepared him for his true vocation.

CHAPTER V EARLY LIFE OF FATHER MASTAI

Nearly a hundred years have passed since the day when the young priest who was to be the best loved and the worst hated man in Europe said his first Mass, and Time’s heavy wings have already blurred his memory in their flight, to a fading outline for the present generation. Very few now know anything about his early years, and in the story of them the finger of God is so clear that it seems to be worth while to make a brief record of the steps by which he was prepared for the burdens and honours of his Pontificate. In reading about his childhood one seems to be carried back not one, but many centuries, so sharply does it contrast with the ideals placed before children in these latter days. It seems to be a road on which there is no returning, but there can be no harm in glancing back at it for a moment.

It was on the 13th of May, 1792, that Pius IX was born, in the Umbrian seaport of Sinigaglia, in the Papal States. His father, Count Mastai-Ferretti, was the descendant of a long line of noblemen who had come thither from Crema in Lombardy towards the end of the Fourteenth Century. Home-loving but public-spirited men they had been, and for a long time their fellow-citizens had confided to them the chief interests of the town, one of the family always filling the office of Mayor, which had thereby become practically hereditary, to the advantage and convenience of all concerned. So Count Mastai was Mayor of his native city at the time that his youngest son came to make the eighth in the house already filled with the laughter and play of three sons and four daughters. The mother of this large family was Caterina Solazzo, one of those noble ladies of whom there were yet so many in Italy when I was a child—a woman of high education and devout soul, who saw in her maternal duties the highest honour to which woman could aspire, and fulfilled them with whole-hearted joy and ardour. That meant work such as the modern woman, who thinks she is an example to toilers for the benefit of the race, would shrink from; the Countess had to rise very early so that she should be the first to approach her children’s bedsides when the rising sun woke the nursery to the frolic and laughter of a new day, and from that moment till all were tucked up and asleep at night she never let them out of her sight. The first words they had ever spoken were the Holy Names, the first conscious movement of each baby hand had been trained to make the sign of the Cross.

They were all good and happy children, and the mother-heart prayed and watched and taught, doubtless forming noble plans for all, but as the youngest grew older his sweetness and goodness filled her with the hope that he might be called to the special service of God. Even as a tiny child his charity was of the alert, all-embracing kind that generally spells saintship in the end; toys, sweets, money—the little boy always found poor children to bestow them upon and would beg for his protégés when his own stores were exhausted. Naturally of a particularly cheerful and sociable disposition—as indeed he remained all his life—yet he pondered much on the stories he heard and took things to heart in a way very unusual for a child of his age. All devout and loyal subjects of the Papacy were grieving at that time over the trials inflicted by Napoleon on Pius VII, kept a prisoner far from his own dominions and subjected to many insults and privations. The Countess one evening told her son that he must pray for the Holy Father, thus suffering at the hands of wicked men. The child was deeply impressed, he obeyed, and prayed with tears for the Pope, and then, in his young logic, proposed to pray for the prompt punishment of his persecutors. Great was the surprise of the ardent little champion when his mother pointed out that that would be wrong—he must pray for their conversion instead!

Giovanni Maria was about ten years old when, romping about the grounds of his father’s country house, he fell into a pond and was nearly drowned. At first the accident seemed to have had only slight effects, but the malady which showed itself a little later and from which he suffered so long was, probably with reason, ascribed to that cause. It was a great sorrow to his father, who was bent upon his son’s entering the army, a desire which the boy was ready to satisfy through filial sentiment, but which went contrary to all his own wishes and to those of his mother. He was sent to an ecclesiastical school, of course—no other could be thought of then for a gentleman’s son—and in spite of bad health worked hard and attained much distinction. As he grew up—tall, handsome, and brilliantly intelligent—his father repeatedly applied for a commission in the Noble Guards for him, but Prince Barberini, then the chief authority in the Papal army, sternly refused to grant it, saying that an officer subject to epileptic attacks would be a danger to himself and others.[4]

By the time he was seventeen, it was fairly clear to all that he could never be a soldier, a relief to him and to his mother, though a terrible disappointment to the old Count. They had already brought him to Rome, and under the care of his Uncle Paulinus, a Canon of St. Peter’s, he worked assiduously at his theological studies, always hoping and praying that the strange malady which had kept him out of the army would not, in the end, keep him out of the Church. Those early years in Rome were illuminated with the crowning joy of seeing Pius VII return in triumph to the Throne of St. Peter, an event which threw the Romans, gentle and simple, into a state of delirious joy. Pius VI had died in captivity at Valence, on the 29th of August, 1799; his, successor, Cardinal Chiaramonti, was elected at Venice (Rome being in the hands of the French) on the 16th of March, 1800, and on the 3d of July of the same year the French, having been expelled from the Papal States by the Neapolitans and Austrians, the new Pope, who had taken the name of Pius VII, came back to his own. Everybody believed that once more “the Church would have peace”; Napoleon, whose genius realised that there was no governing a nation of atheists, had restored Religion to her public place, and was preparing, by the Concordat, to harmonise Church and State as far as the times would allow. But the Napoleon whose unerring eye showed him the necessity of Religion for mankind had counted without the other Napoleon, whose towering ambition demanded the sacrifice of all other claims to itself. With his coronation as Emperor all barriers seemed to break down; the Pope was to become his submissive vassal or cease to reign. His demands became more imperious and unreasonable every day and reached the limit of arrogance when he decided that the centre of Christendom was to be transferred to Avignon; France was to enjoy that glory instead of Italy, and the Pope, no longer an independent sovereign, was to rule the Church for the advantage and according to the caprices of the Emperor.

This proposition was first made soon after the election in Venice, when Napoleon had brought the Pope to Paris to crown him in Notre Dame. Pius VII replied, in an outburst of righteous indignation, that rather than so degrade his office he would resign it, and cause another election to be carried through; Napoleon could then do as he pleased with the obscure Benedictine monk who would be left on his hands!

Surprised at his firmness, the Emperor yielded for the moment and permitted him to return to Rome, but, amidst all the rejoicings with which he was greeted, the good Pope’s heart was heavy. He knew the character of his adversary too well. On the day of his coronation, at the foot of the altar, Napoleon had solemnly sworn to uphold and protect the Church. Immediately afterwards had come the insulting proposal to transfer the seat of her government to his own dominions. Who could say what he would do next?

That question did not long wait for its answer. The notion of having the Papacy established at Avignon was too alluring to be renounced. Again and again was it put forward, each time accompanied by some outrageous demand. The Pope was informed that he was to close all the Roman ports to British vessels; that he was to declare war (!) on Great Britain; that he was to annul the marriage of Jerome, the Emperor’s brother, with a Protestant lady in America; and so on. And always Pius VII replied by his quiet “non possumus”—“we cannot.” Then the great break came. The Emperor permitted himself an outburst of temper in which all considerations of policy and decency were thrown to the winds. On the 13th of May, 1809, the trembling world was informed that the States of the Church had become part of the French Empire. On the 10th of June all the Pope’s insignia in Rome were torn down and replaced by the heraldic réchauffé, which now represented the arms of France; Rome was elevated to the dignity of being proclaimed “a free French city”!

The outraged Pontiff responded by laying the usurper and his supporters under the major excommunication, and then came the crowning atrocity, the one which Napoleon, a contrite prisoner in St. Helena, called the beginning of his own downfall.

In the darkness of a soft summer night the Vatican was surrounded by French troops, and General Radet, sickly frightened at the task laid upon him, made his way with a detachment of soldiers to the Pope’s bedroom. The horrified attendants in the corridors and anterooms were forcibly silenced, and Pius VII was roused from his sleep by the sudden entrance of this sinister company. He was a brave man, and, although it seemed only too probable that they had come to murder him, he lost neither his nerve nor his dignity. He asked them what the errand was which caused them thus to transgress on the rules of respect. At first the General and his aides stood dumb, trembling with fear before the helpless old man. At last Radet found his tongue and delivered his master’s orders. The Pope was to rise at once and come downstairs, where a coach was waiting to take him into France. The instructions were that he was to be taken by force if he resisted, but so great was the awe inspired by his sacred person that, even in pronouncing the arrest, Radet could not bring himself to touch his victim.

There was no question of physical resistance. Gathering courage from the Pontiff’s calm demeanour, Radet gave him a few minutes to put on his clothes, and then hurried him downstairs surrounded by the soldiers. Only two attendants were allowed to follow him, he was hustled into the coach; mounted guards closed in on every side, and the party galloped at full speed out of the Porta del Popolo, heading for the north. By this time the people had learnt what was happening, and they came out in crowds and ran beside the coach, entreating with tears and sobs that their Father might not be taken away from them. The Pope blessed them from the carriage window as he was whirled along; soon all the mourning crowd was left behind, but at each town that he passed through in his dominions the same heart-rending scenes were renewed. His captors dared not pause—some attempt at a rescue might yet snatch him from their grasp—and it was only when they reached Grenoble that they stayed their flight. From there he was transferred to Savona, where he passed three melancholy years of captivity; when Napoleon was preparing to start on the Russian Campaign, he brought the Pope to Fontainebleau for safer keeping, and there Pius VII remained for nearly two years more.

The first care of the Allies after the taking of Paris on the 31st of March, 1814, was to officially reinstate the Pope in his temporal sovereignty, and secure it from future molestation, but Pius VII was even then approaching his own frontier. After Leipsic and the train of disasters which marked the close of 1813, Napoleon had informed his prisoner that he was free to go whither he chose. But it was not until the 25th of January following that the preparations for his journey were sufficiently completed for the Pope to leave Fontainebleau, and then, worn out with suffering of mind and body, he had to travel by stages of only a few miles at a time and to rest for long periods on the way. He finally reached Rome in May of that year, a few weeks after Napoleon had signed his abdication at Fontainebleau. Then for Napoleon came Elba,—the hundred days,—the short triumph, the irrevocable eclipse, and the five years at St. Helena. “Qui mange du Pape en meurt.”

I used to have among my possessions a number of old coloured drawings, the original designs for the decorations put up in Rome for the return of Pius VII. It was a triumph not decreed by politicians, but a spontaneous outburst of overwhelming joy. For five years the entire government of the Church had been suspended; not once had the Pontiff been allowed to make his voice heard in her affairs. There is something strangely sinister in that silence, during which no Bishops were appointed, and not a single line was added to the ecclesiastical archives. The fear and depression that weighed down Catholic hearts was indescribable, and the relief when the cloud lifted almost too overwhelming to be borne. The Papal States had suffered much during those years, and the Pope’s own city worst of all. Business was at a standstill, more than a third of the population had migrated elsewhere, preferring exile to the tyranny of the French rule. Those who remained were frightfully impoverished by heavy taxation and by the general paralysis of commerce which Napoleon’s wars and blockades had brought not only on Italy but on the whole of Europe.

The populations turned out en masse to meet their sovereign as he travelled home, and as he neared Rome many nobles who had retired to their estates came to accompany him on the last stages of his journey. Among these were Count Mastai-Ferretti and his son, Giovanni Maria, now eighteen years of age. The event made a profound impression on the young man. As a child he had wept and prayed for the Holy Father in his captivity; through the first years of his youth the thought of Pius VII, a helpless prisoner, had ever been present to his mind and many a fervent prayer had gone up for his sovereign’s and his country’s deliverance. Now it had come, and to him, not yet illuminated with knowledge of the future, as well as to all those around him, it seemed as if all trouble were passed away and the sun that shone so gloriously on that 24th of May, when the people took the horses from the Pope’s carriage and themselves dragged it through the rejoicing streets, were but an earnest of unbroken peace and happiness to come. Rome had seen many festivals, but none so spontaneously, madly joyful as this. From every window floated crimson and blue silk draperies rich with gold; the thousands of balconies were wreathed in flowers, and the vast procession moved along in a rain of roses and lilies and violets showered from above; music was everywhere, but it was drowned in the shouts and hosannas of the multitude that had gone out to meet the traveller with palms in their hands and now thronged the way before, beside, behind him. The women were weeping for joy and audibly thanking God for this great day; a hundred thousand persons knelt to receive his blessing, and many, many of them must have remembered how they knelt to receive it last, as the coach was whirled along the highway in the summer’s dawn and the weeping supplicants just caught a glimpse of the pale face and the blessing hand as it flashed by. Every town in the dominions had raised its triumphal arches, gathered all its flowers for his progress, but Rome surpassed them and all the records of herself that day. The “Te Deum” was sung in all the Churches as it had never been sung before, Rome’s thousand bells rang as if they would never cease; and when darkness fell, St. Peter’s gathered the stars to itself, and the magic dome, a hive of breathing gold, glowed through the night, a beacon of joy to the dwellers in a hundred mountain towns of Sabina and Latium and all the country round.

Thirty-two years were to elapse before the youth kneeling beside his father to receive the Pope’s blessing on that day would himself ascend the Papal Throne, but, strange to say, Pius VII himself had already foreseen the event. Pius IX had been reigning for some years when, through the merest accident, the written prophecy was discovered. Pius VII, while a prisoner at Fontainebleau, one day handed to his bodyservant a sealed packet, saying that it was not to be opened until 1846. The man religiously regarded the prohibition and put the packet away carefully. Before his own death he gave it to his son, repeating the Pope’s instructions. Eighteen forty-six was still far off, and the son laid the thing aside and had forgotten all about it when the year in question came round. Having occasion, however, to look through a number of old papers, he came across this, and broke the seal. Inside, in Pius VII’s handwriting, were these words: “The prelate who fills the office of Bishop of Imola in 1846 will be elected Pope and will take the name of Pius IX.”

Another prophecy, that of the venerable servant of God, Anna Maria Taigi, uttered in 1823, is very full and clear. After describing minutely the revolution of 1848 and all the sufferings that Rome and its ruler would undergo at that time, she added, “The Pope whose destiny this is, is now a simple priest and far beyond the sea.” After minutely describing the personal appearance of Pius IX, she continued: “He will be elected in a very unusual way and contrary to his own and general expectation. He will inaugurate many wise reforms, which, if gratefully and wisely accepted by the people, will bring great blessings upon them. His name will be honoured throughout the world.” She spoke much of the great trials that he was to undergo in defence of the Church, and of the special assistance Heaven would give him to sustain them, and also of the gift of miracles which would be bestowed on him during the latter years of his life. All that came to pass precisely as the Saint foretold, and the present generation seems to be seeing the beginning of the fulfilment of her closing prophecy: “At last, after many and varied trials and humiliations, the Church shall achieve, before the eyes of the world, such a glorious triumph that men will be struck silent with awe and admiration.”

The famous prophecy of St. Malachy, the Archbishop of Armagh, who died at Clairvaux in the arms of his friend, St. Bernard, in 1148, designated the title of Pius IX as “Crux de Cruce”—“Cross of a Cross”—and certainly that prediction, supposed to refer to the Cross of Savoy, was fulfilled!

Anna Maria Taigi’s mention of a “simple priest then beyond the sea” refers to the mission to Chile, undertaken by Pius IX when he was as yet only Father Mastai, the director of Tata Giovanni’s orphanage. It is an episode of his history so generally forgotten that it seems worth while to recall it briefly to the minds of Catholic readers. The Republic of Chile was just five years old—it concluded its victorious struggle with Spain for independence in 1818—when the government sent a respected prelate, Canon Cienfuegos, to Rome to ask Pius VII to reorganise ecclesiastical matters in Chile, where everything had been left in a very unsatisfactory condition after the separation from the Mother Country.

Pius VII gladly complied with the request. The mission would require delicate handling and he singled out a diplomatist prelate, Monsignor Muzi, then Auditor of the Nunciatura at Vienna, for its accomplishment. In order that his rank should be consonant with its dignity, Monsignor Muzi was made Archbishop of Philippi, and then appointed Vicar Apostolic of Chile. He asked that Father Mastai might accompany him as Auditor, a post corresponding to that of “Conseiller d’Ambassade” in a secular embassy; and another well-known ecclesiastic, Father Sallusti, was named as the secretary.

Long years afterwards, one of the “boys” described the last evening of Father Mastai at the Asilo. He had as yet said nothing to them of his approaching departure, but at supper they noticed that he seemed very sad. When the meal was over and they were about to leave the table, he motioned to them to sit down again, as he had something to say to them. Then he told them that the next day he must leave them, to travel far away on the business of the Church. There were a hundred and twenty boys, big and little, in the hall, and there broke from them one simultaneous cry of grief. Sobbing and wailing, they threw themselves upon him, the little ones climbing up into his arms and clinging to his knees, others catching at his garments as if to hold him back by force, and those who could not reach him through the press lifting up their voices in supplication that the “Caro Padre” would not leave them. The Father wept, too, as he caressed and embraced the “piccolini,” and, when at last he tore himself away and shut himself up in his room, a number of the older boys broke in and insisted on staying with him all night. The dear patient man did not resent thus being robbed of his rest; he let them have their way, and talked to them long and earnestly of their present duties and their future lives. He would return some day, and how eagerly he would enquire for every one by name, how rejoiced he would be at a good report, how immeasurably grieved at a bad one.

With the dawn he had to leave them, and, as the narrator said, “We were orphans more than ever before.”

Great as was the grief of “Tata Giovanni’s” boys on losing their beloved Director, it did not equal the despair and indignation of Countess Mastai when she learnt that her son had been picked out for a journey which was full of perils and hardships so late as twenty years ago, and in those early days was veritably appalling.

To the ardent young priest, this fact had only added to the readiness he felt in carrying out the Pope’s wishes; he asked nothing better than to suffer in such a cause, but his mother, without saying anything to him, flew to Cardinal Consalvi, then Secretary of State, and implored that the appointment might be cancelled. Pius VII, however, refused to yield to her entreaties, and, when Father Mastai came to receive his final blessing before departing, he told him of the Countess’s request and added, “I assured her that you would return safe and sound.”

The embassy was to embark at Genoa, and it was there, while waiting for the final preparations to be made, that its members received the sad news of the death of Pius VII. This caused delay, and it was only after the election of Leo XII and his confirmation of Archbishop Muzi’s powers that the mission finally sailed from Genoa, on the 5th of October, 1823. Ninety years ago! The world has shrunk since then; the voyage that I made in 1885 in three weeks took Monsignor Muzi and his companions three months to accomplish. The “good barque Eloïse,” manned by “thirty experienced seamen,” had been chartered for the expedition, but one’s heart aches to think of what those three good ecclesiastics must have suffered in one way and another on board of her. Very few Italians of their class are good sailors and all the horrors of seasickness were certainly theirs, combined with the unsavoury and unwholesome food that was all people had to depend upon during sea-journeys before the discovery of steam and cold storage. Storm after storm broke over the little vessel; she was nearly wrecked off Teneriffe; one dreadful night, the 5th of November, she was waylaid by pirates, who overhauled her from stem to stern seeking for plunder, and only abandoned her—in furious disgust—when Father Mastai had shown them that there was not a single article of value on board. Then came a sad encounter with a Brazilian slave trader, packed with unfortunate negroes, a sight most grievous and terrible to the kind-hearted priests; and then, after two long months’ sailing, a fearful storm which lasted eight days, during which the Eloïse was so beaten about that no one hoped to escape alive. It was all a searching dispensation for quiet, stay-at-home Italian gentlemen who had followed their pious way hitherto along the most familiar lines!

They reached Monte-Video on New Year’s Day, 1824, stopped a few days for repairs, and made Buenos Ayres soon after, their joy at finding themselves on terra firma much tempered by the extremely rude reception accorded to them by the civil authorities. But Buenos Ayres was merely the starting-point for the most difficult part of the journey, the crossing of the Andes. Had the good Countess Mastai-Ferretti had the slightest idea of what her cherished son was to encounter there, I believe she would have died of anxiety before his return! I only met one or two Europeans, when I was in Chile, who had accomplished the feat, and they told me that nothing would induce them to attempt it again. I have described some of the terrors of the passes in former works,[5] and will not enlarge upon them here. Suffice it to say that for two whole months Monsignor Muzi and Fathers Sallusti and Mastai rode through those appalling solitudes, over the bridle-paths cut in the face of the rock that towers thousands of feet above and sinks sheer down thousands of feet below, paths where one false step means death, and so narrow in some places that, if two parties meet, it is usual for them—if they are not the fighting sort—to decide on the spin of a coin which shall dismount, pitch its mules over the precipice, and crawl past the winners as best they can—to continue the journey on foot!

The resting-places are even now the haunts of outlaws and robbers. The members of the Roman Embassy of 1824 only escaped being murdered en masse, because, through some unforeseen occurrence, they changed the time of their departure from a hamlet called Desmochadas. Had they waited till the hour first fixed upon, they would have shared the fate of a party of merchants who, on that day, were massacred, to a man, by a band of robbers. It was Father Mastai who discovered—and stayed behind to take care of—a sick English officer, named Miller, forsaken in a wayside inn; and it was Father Mastai, the others said, who had during the whole journey sustained their courage by his unfailing fun and good-humour. It seems to me that this is not the least glorious note in all his wonderful record, and because few, even of those who most loved and venerated him in his later years, have ever heard of it I have written it here. The whole thing, somehow, is so absolutely Pius IX!

Very sore and weary, the travellers reached Santiago on the 17th of March, only to encounter every kind of obstacle and annoyance in the attempt to carry out the object of their mission. The government had changed, and the party in power had no desire to come to an understanding with the Holy See. The people, indeed, received the envoys most enthusiastically, but Chile in 1824 was apparently much what I found it in 1885—a country of ardent believers ruled by atheists. Let some expert explain the problem, I cannot! For seven months Monsignor Muzi remained in Santiago, perseveringly trying to clear matters up and reach some modus vivendi between Church and State. But his efforts were nullified by the hostility of the President and his supporters, and at last he had to acknowledge his defeat and withdraw from the conflict.

The Eloïse meanwhile had successfully rounded Cape Horn and reached Valparaiso, and on the 19th of October the Archbishop and his party embarked once more on the gallant little vessel and started for home. Of course no sailing vessel can pass through the twisting narrows and rocks of the Straits of Magellan, so for three weeks—surely the most miserable of their lives—those poor priests, children of Italy and the sun, shivered in the awful cold of those frozen regions, where the sea is the colour of cold steel, and the sailors, as they have often told me, come down from the deck at night with their garments frozen stiff, and have to work their way into them, still frozen stiff as boards, in the morning. My own travelling in that part of the world did not include the rounding of Cape Horn, but even the passage of the Straits, in a big liner, with the water smooth as glass, was such a freezingly wretched experience that, having made it once, the prospect of its repetition took something away from my eagerness to go home. But outside the Horn, with the Antarctic Ocean, unbroken from the South Pole, flinging its icy rollers against a little sailing vessel that took three weeks to beat up on the other side—that, the skippers have told me, furnishes merchant seamen with their best nightmares to their dying day! Most of the coal supply for the West Coast is carried by this route, and by the time it has reached the Horn the coal, loaded under the damp English skies, has ignited and the remainder of the trip is made with hatches battened down and the pleasing knowledge that a puff of air finding its way into the hold will send the whole mass into a blaze!

Yet, there is a little English colony that lives and flourishes in these cold seas some two hundred and fifty miles to the east of the Horn, and we, in England, wear its wool and eat its mutton quite habitually. I never could learn my geography properly until I began to travel round the world. From that time maps became a special recreation of mine, and I had, when travelling through the Straits of Magellan, thought with both curiosity and pity of the handful of islands so much more exposed than even we were in those comfortless days. I was told the place was a purgatory—that it was just possible to carry on life, and that no one stayed there who could help it. Some time afterwards, when we were established in Santiago, a card was brought up and I gazed at it for a moment in some bewilderment—“The Governor of the Falkland Islands!” Then it was true! Our indomitable fellow-countrymen had really added another mesh to the net of Empire which Great Britain has cast over the world. My reflections were interrupted by the entrance of a big, handsome man, who looked as if he had just come out of Yorkshire. His clear blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, and joyful bearing belied the sad tales I had heard, and when, in the course of conversation, I asked some timid questions about his frozen place of exile, he laughed in a way that was good to hear. Frozen? Exile? Why, he would not live anywhere else for the world! A grand climate, pleasant society, and better pasturage for sheep than could be found anywhere else! “Pasturage!” I exclaimed. “Do you mean to say that anything will grow in that latitude?” “Grow? I should think so!” he replied. “We get the back wash of the Gulf Stream down there, and our sheep can graze all winter in the open. Why, I have three trees, real trees, on Stanley Island! I wish you and Mr. Fraser would come and pay me a visit there. My wife and daughters would be so delighted to see you.” Then, turning to my husband, he continued: “Our flocks are getting too big for their feeding grounds, so I have come to ask the Chilean Government to rent us five hundred thousand acres in Patagonia for a supplementary run. The pasturage is not as good as that in the Falklands, but it will be better than nothing.”

Of course we instantly invited our visitor to dine. An English face was always a joy to look at where one saw so few, and this man brought the very atmosphere of the North Country with him. He told us many interesting details about his little domain, the management of which he took very seriously and evidently accomplished with much success. “Of course I could do more,” he said regretfully, “if it were not for the blind hostility of the Opposition.” “Does it reach so far?” I asked politely. “I should have thought there was quite enough to keep it busy at home.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the little crowd at Westminster,” he replied indignantly. “Please understand, Mrs. Fraser, that I have an opposition of my own!”

“I do congratulate you,” I said; “that is certainly a triumph! What Britisher could ask more?”

There is a little plant of which every Englishman carries the seeds about with him. It is called Love-of-the-soil. Give him a bit of land anywhere—the best or the worst, a vast fertile tract or a few miles of desert island; tell him it is his very own to do as he likes with, and, before you can turn round, every grain of its dust is sprouting with Love-of-the-soil. He sees, knows, loves only that spot. He will fight for it, work for it, cheat for it if need be, perhaps even slay; for to him it has taken on the sacred character of the mother country, it is his piece of England and woe to any one who tries to take it away from him! That is why English colonies succeed. And it is the lack of this passion for the land which makes bad colonists of men of other nationalities. The Americans are simply brutal about their possessions. Out here in the Northwest one is horrified at the general callousness. I have watched people making what we should call a home, breaking new land, building a charming house, working hard to make everything within and without as perfect as they know how. A cloud of dust shows up on the road, a motor-car full of “land grabbers” kicks and coughs and stinks at the gate; the next minute the hard-eyed hucksters are being shown into all the sacred arena of airy rooms, and flowering garden, are fingering, valuing, depreciating; there follows an hour or two of hard bargaining, and then your neighbour’s wife flies across lots to tell you, with shining eyes, “We’ve sold the place!” “Sold the place?” I cry. “Why, I thought it was to be your home!” “What does that matter?” she retorts, huffed, “I got my price! We can easily build another house that we shall like just as much.”

I suppose it is a form of the disease now diagnosed as Americanitis, the feverish restlessness that would rather “trek” anywhere than stay put for more than a year or two. But is a terrible disqualification for building a State. Since I have seen it at close quarters, I have often thought of the contrast presented by that handful of North Country shepherds and their descendants, in the Falklands,[6] so proud of doing their best with the best they could get, pleased with their drizzly climate (it rains two hundred and fifty days in the year), because it is so English, proud of their thriving little country, sending out their pelts and mutton by the once-a-month steamer, actually growing their pelargoniums and fuchsias in the open air, and so furiously interested in their miniature politics that the Government and the Opposition are ready to knock each other forty ways from Sunday every time they meet! Good luck and long life to you, my incorrigible brothers! The secret of success is certainly yours, and it all comes from the little plant called Love-of-the-soil.

4. In a former volume I stated that Pius IX had for a short time served in the Noble Guards. This was an error, for he never obtained admittance, although I believe a portrait of him in the uniform was extant in the earlier years of the Nineteenth Century. It may have been altogether a “fake” or else taken to please his father when there appeared to be some hope of the latter’s ambition being fulfilled.

5. “Reminiscences of a Diplomatist’s Wife” (Dodd, Mead & Co.); “The Looms of Time” (Isbister).

6. The Islands, about a hundred in number, but most of them very small, and uninhabited, have been the cause of sharp contention and have changed hands several times since their discovery in 1592—France, Spain, England, and the United States have variously claimed them. Twice the matter has been decided by an Englishman’s landing and running up the Union Jack. The last time this occurred was in 1833, when, in the middle of the quarrel, Captain Falkland took possession of them on his own responsibility. Great Britain has held them ever since as one of her recognised colonies. They are self-governing and have a population altogether of two thousand souls; the capital, Stanley, claiming nearly half of the number.

CHAPTER VI POPE PIUS IX

After his return from Chile, Father Giovanni Maria Mastai was appointed Director of the Ospizio di San Michele, a position which could not be called a great advancement in the eyes of the world, but which carried with it a most weighty burden of responsibility. Some idea of this charge can be grasped when we explain that the so-called “Hospital” embraced six separate large establishments: namely, an orphanage for boys, another for girls, both containing complete schools for general education as well as for the learning of trades and arts; a home for the aged poor, a “protectory” for unruly boys, a reformatory for fallen women—and a prison for political offenders. The endowments of the Ospizio, together with its earnings, rendered an income of fifty thousand dollars a year, then considered an ample sum for providing for the wants of some thousands of persons. It will readily be understood that this left little or nothing over for salaries to those in charge, but, fortunately, in those days these were not needed, as all the employés, except a few servants, were priests and religious, who gave their services for nothing except food and shelter.

In his own financial affairs, Father Mastai was the worst manager possible; he never kept any money longer than was needed to give it away; but where other funds were concerned he made no mistakes, and his administration was as wise and careful as possible. His friends and family seem to have been a little surprised when his labours and trials during the South American mission received no more public recognition than this appointment to a burdensome task, but he himself was delighted. He had looked back to the years spent with “Tata Giovanni’s” boys with homesick regret; the work at San Michele was of the same kind on a much larger scale, more orphans to train, more poor to cherish, more sinners to help and save, and his generous heart was fully satisfied. The Holy Father, Leo XII, watched the new Director closely during the two years he left him in charge. At the end of that short time the improvement in all the different departments of the Ospizio was fully evident, and its self-supporting funds had increased, in spite of the innovation introduced by the new Director, who ordained that a fair share of the inmates’ earnings should be set aside for their own after use and benefit.

Leo XII was now satisfied that he had not been mistaken in his judgment of Father Mastai’s abilities and virtues, so, without any intermediate promotion, on the 21st of May, 1827, he appointed him Archbishop of Spoleto, the Pope’s own native town. Great was the grief of the vast family at San Michele on learning the news, for whether as simple priest, powerful prelate, or Supreme Pontiff, Pius IX was always enthusiastically loved by all who approached him.

Spoleto, as we know it to-day—but how can I describe it? One magic pen has pictured the Umbrian cities with such divine felicity that the rest of us must be for ever mute. Read what Edward Hutton says about Spoleto—“a beautiful city of rose colour set on a high hill.”—“Spoleto, like a tall and sweet maiden,—kneeling at the head of her long valley under the soft sky.” Read all that that pure-souled genius has written about Umbria and Tuscany, and you will know whatever your mind can grasp of that which the poet and the mystic and the artist feel in that immortal region; my business is not with them, but with the “anima latina” of a holy, hard-working prelate sent in troublous times to govern a turbulent populace already inoculated with the fever of revolution, and preserving, in its murderous hatreds, the best traditions of the late Middle Ages.

This was what the new Archbishop saw before him as, with his two brothers, he approached Spoleto towards the end of June, 1827: “A violent party feud raging between two factions, finding its way into families, separating father from son, brother from brother, sister from sister. Even the clergy had allowed themselves to be drawn into the unhappy conflict, and, as a natural consequence, the interests of religion were suffering lamentably.”[7] So the new Archbishop had no light task before him. I fancy, however, that his was a nature which was happiest in strenuous effort. There are people, even in the modern world, who seem out of place unless they are leading a forlorn hope. We had a friend long years ago, the Marquis de Bâcourt, a delightful French diplomatist, with whom, after the vagrant manner of diplomatists, we foregathered in various parts of the world before meeting him again in Chile, which certainly just then was not a bed of roses for foreign representatives. I was bewailing our own luck and commiserating his, when he interrupted me by exclaiming: “Oh, but I am really enjoying myself! I love difficult and disagreeable affairs!”

Of these we know that Monsignor Mastai found many to adjust in his new charge, and that he was signally successful in smoothing them out. Within two years faction had died in the pretty Umbrian city on the hill, enemies were reconciled, order restored, and the clergy aroused to new zeal and regularity under his wise, strict rule. At the end of those two years he held the people’s hearts in his hands, and well it was for them that he did, for thus he was enabled to save the town and its inhabitants from the terrible danger which suddenly threatened to overwhelm Spoleto in 1830. Leo XII had died on the 10th of February of the preceding year, and had been succeeded by Pius VIII, whose beneficent reign was ended all too soon by death on the eve of All Saints’, 1830. The gentle old man had, during his short Pontificate, attacked and handled with vigour and wisdom some of the most important questions of the day, notably in his regulations for mixed marriages and in his stern condemnation of the secret societies; these had, during the last momentous year of his life, produced the harvest of revolution which convulsed Europe more or less from Warsaw to Rome; yet worse was to come, but Pius VIII was spared the trial of witnessing it. That was reserved for his successor, Gregory XVI, sturdy, imperturbable, broad-shouldered, bringing with him the breezes of the Julian Alps and the hard good sense of the Venetian from the mountains and the sea. He needed it all, for, as I have said elsewhere, the storm that had muttered so long broke loose even before his election; the henchmen of anarchy, who had long been secretly busy in the Papal States, started a revolution in Rome itself in February, 1830; this was promptly quelled, but the trouble in the more northerly provinces was very serious and the Pope had to appeal to Austria to subdue it.

Spoleto had by no means escaped the general infection, but the Archbishop had, by constant watchfulness and his great personal influence, succeeded in preventing any open outbreak of the revolutionary spirit which lurked there; what was his horror and that of the citizens when it became known that a body of four thousand insurgents, retreating before the Austrians, were approaching the town with the intention of holding it against their pursuers! The place was in a panic—the inhabitants already saw themselves trampled down and massacred in the bloody conflict that would take place—saw the stern punishment that the Austrians would inflict upon them for harbouring the desperate revolutionaries. It was in this emergency that Giovanni Maria Mastai showed the coolness of a statesman and the courage of a soldier. At the risk of his life he drove at full speed to the Austrian headquarters and insisted on interviewing the Commander. To the surprised General he explained that the armed insurgents who were demanding Spoleto’s hospitality at the point of the bayonet were strangers to her, that she was in no way responsible for them and that she disclaimed all part in their designs. This point being made clear, he undertook to bring the rebels to submission, single-handed, if the General would promise not to let his own men enter Spoleto. The promise was, naturally, most readily given, the irritated commander being only too glad to relinquish an unpleasant job. And then the Archbishop, getting into his carriage again, rushed off to intercept the revolutionaries in their march on the town.

To them he spoke only in words of tenderest pity. He said he knew that they had been misled and deceived by wicked men, that their hearts were not in this conflict, but really loyal to their sovereign, the Pope; he told them that he could sympathise with their present situation, brought about by despair at finding themselves far from their houses, without means of returning, and threatened with the reprisals of the Austrians. He showed them the hopelessness of the struggle into which they had been drawn, and promised them, if they would lay down their arms, not only a free pardon, but the means of returning to their homes. His fatherly kindness carried all before it. Touched and grateful, they surrendered their funny old muskets and cannon; the Archbishop went to his palace, scraped together all the money he had or could borrow on his own credit, and came back with twenty thousand francs which he distributed amongst them according to their needs, and had the joy of seeing them all depart, pacified and sober, for their respective provinces.

History does not say that the people of Spoleto suggested any refunding of that big sum of money, but they showed their gratitude and delight in very enthusiastic ways, illuminating the city, having processions and fireworks in honour of him who had obtained its deliverance, and cheering to the skies whenever he showed himself, all of which was doubtless most gratifying to their kind Pastor’s heart; but he was almost too busy to think much about such things at that moment, having been charged by the Secretary of State with the conduct of all civil matters in Umbria, the proper authorities—to a man—having fled at the approach of the Austrians.

Talking of those penniless rebels, I ought to say that there was one among them whom the Archbishop did not send home, because the man had no home to go to. So he brought him into his own house, kept him there in safety and comfort, and, regardless of what was sure to be said in Rome about his interceding for such a character, sent to beg the Pope to give him a passport which would take him across the frontier. The passport was granted, and the next time any communication passed between the charitable host and his quondam pensioner the former had become Pius IX and the latter Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.

In 1832 the whole province of Umbria was desolated by a destructive earthquake, in which a great number of lives were lost and many thousands of persons rendered homeless. Spoleto suffered severely and once more the good Archbishop was the comfort and mainstay of his people. He seemed to be everywhere at once and called up doctors, nurses, and provisions with miraculous celerity, finding money somehow for all the dreadful needs and sending aid of every kind to the more distant places where he could not go himself. Other pastors were doing all they could for their own flocks, but Monsignor Mastai’s zeal and charity were so conspicuous as to draw down the special and enthusiastic commendation of Gregory XVI, who immediately promoted him to the Archbishopric of Imola, a far more important See than that of Spoleto. Naturally the Spoleto people were frantic at the idea of losing him and sent a deputation of their most notable citizens to Rome to beg the Pope to change his mind. But they failed in their object, and at the appointed time their Archbishop received their last farewells—a tumult of tears and blessings—and set out for his new post, stopping on the road at Loreto to ask for Heaven’s assistance, as he had asked for it in his early youth, when his malady appeared to be barring his way to the priesthood.

He found even more to do at Imola than he had at Spoleto in the matters of reorganisation and reform, and he threw himself into the work with all the ardour of his brave energetic soul, encountering many trials, but coming victoriously through them all. Of course he made bitter enemies, for his boundless charity to the poor broke out in a blaze of indignation whenever he found that they were being oppressed or defrauded. In such cases instant retribution overtook the offender, and no amount of apparent contrition could ever obtain office for him again if it depended on the decision of the Archbishop.

The secret societies, following their usual programme, had decided to “remove” Monsignor Mastai without delay. He was sitting in his study one morning when his faithful old servant, Baladelli, who had accompanied him everywhere, entered to say that a lady, who seemed in a great hurry, begged him to grant her a few minutes’ “conversation.”

“Ask her to wait a little,” said the Archbishop, as he rose and went into his private chapel. Some time passed and the servant came and found his master on his knees.

“Monsignor, will you not speak to that lady now?” he asked.

“Tell her to wait a little longer,” was the reply.

The man retreated, to return more than once; Monsignor, still on his knees, always gave the same message, and at last Baladelli, after the manner of old servants, lost his temper and exclaimed: “For goodness’ sake, come and speak with that poor woman! She has been waiting for hours.”

Then the Archbishop looked around at him and said, very quietly, “I speak with the living, not with the dead.”

The frightened domestic rushed into the anteroom where the petitioner had been left, and beheld a tumbled heap on the floor. Calling his fellow-servants to help him, he raised it up. The heavy veil had slipped from the face. The “lady” was a man, with a great sharp knife concealed in his feminine garments. He was stone dead.

Monsignor Mastai was made a Cardinal (with the titular of the Church of St. Peter[8] and Marcellinus) on the 14th of December, 1840, to the great happiness of his mother, a widow since 1833. During her lifetime he made a point of going once or more every year to visit her at Sinigaglia in the old house where his childhood had been passed. He frequently was obliged to come to Rome on business, and so long as he was Archbishop of Spoleto, he lodged at the orphanage of Tata Giovanni on these occasions. That was no longer possible after he had been promoted to the more important See of Imola, as he was then expected to travel with a larger suite, for whom the Orphanage did not provide fitting quarters. He resented the expense of these more ostentatious journeys, complaining that the money they cost would have been better spent among his poor at Imola, but he had no choice in the matter and had to submit to custom and tradition.

A very unpleasant adventure marked the third year of his cardinalate. In the heat of the summer he and two of his colleagues in the Sacred College arranged to take a few weeks of rest in a small and lonely villa in a remote part of the country. They knew, of course, that the revolutionary agents were abroad and at work, but it had not occurred to any of the trio that their own illustrious persons might be designated as worthy objects of attack. But a certain Riotti, a Piedmontese, deep-dyed in conspiracy, conceived the brilliant idea of kidnapping the three prelates and holding them as hostages, to be ransomed at the price of his own immunity should his treasonable designs be discovered. So, in the dead of night this hero, with six of his fellow-conspirators, broke into the villa, and the unfortunate prelates were roused from their sleep to find themselves confronted with a band of desperate men armed to the teeth. The two other Cardinals were not fighters, but Giovanni Maria Mastai was. What weapons he used I know not—he had none at hand except his high courage and biting tongue, but the outcome was that the ruffians fled from his presence and were heard of no more. His companions said that it was entirely owing to his bravery that the whole party was saved.

One spring day at Imola, while the Carnival was roaring through the streets, the Archbishop was down on his knees in the Church praying for his people that they might not sin in their mirth. Alas! even his fervent prayers could not altogether avert that calamity! A sudden tumult of cries and footsteps came from the sacristy and he rushed thither to almost fall over a young man, who lay gasping in his blood on the pavement. At the same moment his pursuers broke in after him, three men with knives in their hands, furiously intent on finishing their victim. The Cardinal instantly placed himself before him and, holding up the gold cross which he wore on his breast, forbade them to come a step nearer. In a torrent of burning eloquence he reproached them with their atrocious cruelty and sacrilege of which they had been guilty, and ordered them to quit the Church. They stood for a moment cowed and broken, then they fled, and he turned to the poor boy on the ground. Very tenderly he knelt down beside him, and soothed and comforted him, pillowing his bleeding neck on his arm, while the attendants who had arrived on the scene ran for a physician. The latter came promptly, but said that the wound was mortal—there was nothing to be done. Then, still kneeling on the ground and holding the poor dying boy in his arms, the Cardinal helped him to make his confession, called one of the priests of the Church to administer the last Sacraments, and knelt there till the young soul passed away, comforted and at peace.

Where injuries or insults were offered to himself, Cardinal Mastai forgave as only the Saints can forgive. The chief magistrate of Imola, a hard and cruel man, had conceived the most bitter hatred of him for his gentle methods and broad, progressive views, and expressed his hostility with much violence. The Mayor’s wife, a good devout woman, was much distressed at his attitude, and sought by every means in her power to heal the one-sided feud. A child was born to her, and she secretly begged the Cardinal to volunteer to be its godfather—she was sure her husband’s heart would be softened at such an evidence of condescension and good-will! Nothing loath, the good Cardinal approached the Mayor, personally, and with much gentleness and humility asked if he would permit him to stand sponsor for the baby. Whereupon the Mayor flew into a passion and exclaimed: “You! You presume to suggest such a thing! You, who are a friend of malcontents and rebels! No, indeed! You are too liberal for me!” Then he turned his back on his Archbishop and left him—a suppliant refused!

The Archbishop accepted both the insult and the calumny without a word of protest. A month later he changed his name and assumed that of Pius IX. Learning that his old enemy was in Rome with his family at the time, he sent him word that, although he had refused to allow the Archbishop of Imola to stand godfather to his child, he might not feel the same objection to the Pope, who, if the infant were not yet baptised, would be glad to be its sponsor. En passant one is struck with wonder that, amid all the preoccupation and inevitable excitement of that great change in his life, Pius IX should have found time to think of the man at all. Naturally, he had conquered, and his old enemy could scarcely express his gratitude at receiving such an honour. Even then the Pope remembered him again, and very soon afterwards seized an opportunity of conferring on him a great material benefit. That is how the Saints forgive!

Naturally he had conquered, and the favour was received with almost unbelieving joy.

Oh, they were a good family, those Mastai-Ferrettis. After the accession of Pius IX, his brother, Cardinal Ferretti, a most wise and saintly man, acted as his Prime Minister for a time, before the revolution. His memory was greatly venerated in Rieti, of which place he was Cardinal Bishop. A terrible thing happened while he was there. One of the Churches was broken into at night, the Tabernacle violated, and the pyx containing the Blessed Sacrament stolen. On learning of this frightful sacrilege the next morning, the Cardinal called all his clergy together, and he and they, with bare feet and ropes round their necks, went in procession to the public square. The entire population gathered round them, and then the Cardinal, standing bareheaded and barefooted under the noonday sun, preached a sermon, taking for his text the cry of Mary Magdalene on Easter morning: “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.”

When the sermon ended the people were kneeling on the stones, sobbing like children. That night the door of the Church was left open, and the pyx was restored; its sacred contents were intact.

Pius IX early let his family know that they were to expect neither wealth nor promotion from his hands. One ambitious relation asked him for a title. “You have not the income to maintain it, my dear fellow,” the Pope replied, “and I shall not provide you with one. Stay as you are.” Another, a young nephew, was idling about Rome, giving himself no end of airs because his uncle was on the throne. His uncle sent him back to Sinigaglia to learn sense in obscurity. Yet the poorest and meanest could always obtain aid and sympathy from Pius IX. I remember seeing the people push forward their written petitions as he used to drive through the city or walk in the environs. The queer, often dirty, scraps of paper were received by one of the Cardinals or the chamberlain who accompanied the Pope on these occasions, and every one was examined, the circumstances verified, and genuine cases relieved within twenty-four hours. Only one class dreaded the approach of the Holy Father—neglectful or fraudulent officials. He relied on no reports of public or private institutions, but descended on them at all hours of the day or night, in person and without giving the slightest warning, to see for himself how things were being managed. Like Haroun-al-Raschid he would slip out alone, dressed as a layman, and dive unrecognised into hospitals, schools, and prisons, only revealing his rank when he could not obtain admittance otherwise; and where he found anything out of order, correction, and in serious cases heavy retribution, instantly followed. One night, dressed as a private gentleman, he was thus going through the wards of the great Hospital of Santo Spirito, where, as in most of the Roman hospitals, charitable visitors were always free to come and cheer or tend the sick. That night a poor French artist was dying, and he called for a priest. The attendants looked everywhere for the Almoner or Chaplain of the Institution, but he was not to be found. The Pope said, “I will take his place,” and to him the dying man made his confession, from him received the last Sacraments, and passed away, comforted and in peace. The next morning the Almoner was dismissed.

One day the Holy Father, walking in the Quirinal Gardens, passed a sentry on duty. The man silently held out a loaf of bread for his inspection. Pius IX took it, examined it, and asked one question, “Do you always get bread as bad as this?” “Always, Santo Padre,” was the reply. A sudden descent on the Commissariat department showed that he had spoken the truth. When the sun rose again the cheating commissary was repenting of his sins in prison. There is a beautifully practical side to autocratic government!

Justice had nothing to blush for in the Rome of those days, and the poor could obtain it as promptly and easily as the rich. There were three separate institutions devoted entirely to the legal defence and protection of persons who could not pay for the services of a lawyer. One was the Arch-Confraternity of St. Ives, thus named after the Saint still so dear to the people of Brittany, the lawyer who was a priest and who devoted all his talents to the defence and protection of the poor. But long before his time (he died on the 19th of May, 1303) St. Gregory had instituted in Rome seven official defenders of the poor, one for each Region of the city. They were called “defensori”; some eight hundred years later their official descendants, the College of Procurators, took the title of “the Rights of the Poor,” and there was also a civil office established by Urban VIII, of which the holder, who had to be a noble and a layman, took the title of “Advocate of the Poor,” exercising his powers in cases that came outside any ecclesiastical administration. The Congregation of St. Ives remained the great standby of the lower classes down to my own time. It was partly a religious sodality, comprising both prelates and lawyers, who met every Sunday for pious exercises, which were followed by a careful examination of such appeals as had been laid before them during the week. They took up all just and genuine claims and defended them at their own expense. Besides looking after the rights of their humble fellow-countrymen, they undertook the cases of all poor strangers who got into trouble in the city.

There was a third body, the Arch-Confraternity of San Girolamo, that devoted itself to the defence and aid of prisoners and, more especially, of poor widows. The gentlemen composing it—and they were the flower of the aristocracy, ecclesiastical and social—made it their business to assist impecunious prisoners in every possible way, paying their fines, if such had been imposed on them, and arranging matters with their creditors if they had been imprisoned for debt. The members had free access to all the prisons and they took their duties very seriously, some of their number examining the food every day of the year, and enquiring into all matters connected with the treatment of the prisoners. Indeed some of the most important prisons were confided to their sole charge. They did no end of good, particularly in bringing about amicable settlements of disputes which would otherwise have caused fierce litigation.

Our blessed Pius IX had a tender sympathy for poor debtors and often came to their assistance. He was constantly in money difficulties himself—as generous people so often are—during the earlier part of his career. When he became Archbishop of Spoleto he had to borrow a goodly sum, on his brother’s security, from a Roman money-lender to defray the expenses of his installation, and he was so recklessly charitable that again and again there was not wherewithal to buy food.

His old housekeeper at Spoleto used to weep over the bare shelves of her larder—everybody was fed, she declared, except her master and his household! It was hoped that things would be better when he moved to Imola, where the Episcopal revenue was double that of Spoleto, but the master’s ways were hopeless and he only laughed when his people remonstrated with him. There came a day at Imola when the distracted steward, ready to tear his hair, exclaimed: “Eminenza, there was a hundred dollars in the treasury this morning, and it is all gone! I have not a cent for the ‘spese’” (the current expenses); “what shall we do?”

The Cardinal reminded him that the good God had promised daily bread to His children. “That is true, Eminenza,” said the poor man, “but—I am in terrible difficulty, all the same!”

“Well,” said his master, “to-morrow is a fast day. I know you have some cheese in the house. Serve that for dinner.”

“But the next day, Eminenza?”

“Oh, I will take care to leave enough for the next day!” was the Cardinal’s reply.

On another occasion he was about to entertain a distinguished party at dinner. The gentlemen were already gathered in the drawing-room when their host was informed that a man wished to speak with him on urgent business. He excused himself and came into the dining-room, where he found one of his parishioners in frantic distress. He wanted a loan to save him from immediate bankruptcy. “I have not a single dollar in my possession, my poor friend,” said the Cardinal, “but——” He glanced round the room, where all his best plate was laid out in preparation for the coming feast, and pounced on a great gold soup tureen, a cherished gift from his mother. “Take this,” he said, putting it into the man’s hands, “it will pay your debts.”

With sublime carelessness he returned to his guests, and they and he soon began to wonder why dinner was not served. A long time passed, and then the steward, pale as death and with tears in his eyes, came and informed him that somebody had stolen the gold soup tureen! He had looked everywhere, searched the servants’ rooms—the household was in an uproar—but the tureen was gone!

“Oh, is that all?” he laughed. “I stole it myself! Get the old china one and let us eat.”

7. “A Popular Life of Pius IX,” Rev. Richard Brennan. (Benziger, 1877.)

8. St. Peter the exorcist, martyred with the Priest Marcellinus, under Diocletian. His name occurs in the Canon of the Mass.

CHAPTER VII CAPTIVITY OF POPE PIUS VII

One beautiful evening of early summer in the year 1810, the packet-boat plying between Genoa and Savona reached the latter port after a fair but exciting passage; for, albeit the sea was scarcely ruffled by the breeze—which in itself was barely sufficient to fill the sails—yet during the whole of the voyage from Genoa a couple of British frigates had accompanied the packet-boat, keeping however, much to the surprise of the voyagers, at a considerable distance and without manifesting any hostile intention. And when, at last, the packet-boat was safe at anchor in the harbour of Savona, the frigates likewise lay to, within about a cannon-shot of the land, and began, apparently, to make all snug for the night.

Among the passengers who now walked down the gang-plank of the packet-boat on to the quay, thankful for once to British eccentricity for its unaccountable generosity in letting them go their way unmolested, was a man, still young, with an expression of imperturbable good-nature not unmixed with a certain bland shrewdness. This person, after directing a servant, by whom he was accompanied, to have his baggage taken to an hotel—possibly the “Roma”—betook himself alone and on foot to the “Vescovado,” the palace of the Bishop of Savona, “a fairly large house,” as Napoleon had described it in a letter in which he had attempted to excuse himself for the choice of it as a residence for his prisoner, Pope Pius VII.

The traveller, on arriving at the door of the Vescovado, found his further way barred by a couple of gendarmes who were mounting guard there; to them, on their asking his business, he replied that he desired an interview with the Sovereign Pontiff, and requested that they would let him pass. For all answer they stared at him, open-mouthed, taking him for an eccentric; when their commander, a Colonel Thévenot, who chanced to be passing, took the matter out of their hands.

“Who are you, sir, and what do you want?” he enquired.

“I wish to see the Holy Father, as soon as possible,” replied the other. “Allow me”—handing the Colonel a visiting card inscribed:

“Le Chevalier de Lebzeltern,
Conseiller d’Ambassade
de
Sa Majesté l’Empereur d’Autriche et Roi
Apostolique de Hongrie.”

Having read the card, Thévenot glanced suspiciously at the owner of it; then, seeing that he had indeed to do with a serious person, he turned rather red in the face.

“Tut-tut, my dear sir, surely you cannot expect to obtain admission to the Pope in this rough-and-ready way,” he stammered. “It is really quite out of the question, you know,” with a wave of the hand to where, in the courtyard, a corporal’s guard of fusiliers was preparing to relieve the sentries posted in all the approaches of the building.

“Ah, the guard of honour, I suppose, for His Holiness,” returned the Austrian, with the vestige of a smile; whereat Colonel Thévenot’s equanimity gave way.

“Frankly, sir,” he broke out, “please understand that no living being is allowed to enter here without a written order from General Berthier, the commandant of the town.”

“Frankly, sir,” retorted Lebzeltern in his turn, “that does not apply to myself, and I am going to enter.”

Happily for all concerned, the situation was dispelled at that moment by the sound of heavy firing from the direction of the harbour, where the British frigates had suddenly come in closer towards the town in the intention of ascertaining the range of the French artillery, especially of some large cannon on a new fort. The orders of Napoleon himself, who was acquainted with this custom of the British, were positive in regard to such provocations; and it was strictly enjoined upon his officers to take no notice of them except in the event of a serious attack. Nevertheless, the garrison of Savona lost its head upon this particular occasion and opened an extensive fire upon the two inquisitive ships. As Lebzeltern described it:

“It was a splendid sight; the weather was superb, the sea like a mirror, the whole coast, as well as the English ships, being turned to gold in the sunset. On the side of Savona thundered the cannon, their smoke shot with flame; from the English, though, there came no sound except that of their bands playing their well-known air of, ‘Go to bed, go to bed, and get up as quickly as you can!’”

In the confusion of what the French imagined to be the preliminaries of an action, the gates of the Vescovado were closed, and Lebzeltern, thus forced to abandon his quest for the moment, turned his footsteps towards the hotel. There was nothing for it, as he saw, but to obtain General Berthier’s permission to see the Pope, with whom alone his mission to Savona was concerned. Having dined, therefore, he despatched a messenger to the Papal “maestro di camera,” Monsignor Doria, bearing a letter from Count Metternich, the Austrian Ambassador in Paris, under whose instructions he was acting, together with a formal request for an audience of the Holy Father.

Some explanation is necessary of the origin of Lebzeltern’s mission to Savona; and so I trust the reader will not take it amiss if I venture upon the attempt.

When, in the summer of 1809, Napoleon sent orders to Rome for the arrest of the Pope, he did so under the impulse of one of those blind rages of his which upset all the calculations of his wisest advisers, and which only ended in raising up insurmountable barriers in the way of his ultimate triumph. For years he had been angered by the Pope’s refusal either to close the ports of the Papal States against English ships and merchandise, or to expel the English residents in his dominions. In answer to the Emperor’s repeated demands, Pius VII had said that, as the Universal Spiritual Father of all the Christian family, he absolutely refused to close their home and his (i.e., the Papal States) against his English children. Whereupon, in 1807, Benevento and Pontecorvo were taken from the Papal States and erected into French Duchies for Talleyrand and Bernadotte, to be held by them as fiefs of the Empire. The next year, Rome itself was occupied by French troops, and the “legations” of Ancona, Urbino, Macerata, and Camerino seized by Napoleon’s orders; and, in 1809, the Eternal City was declared to be annexed to the Empire as the capital of the French département or county of Rome. Finally, in the night of July 5-6, 1809, Pope Pius VII was arrested by General Radet and taken as a prisoner to Savona.

Napoleon’s idea, in thus imprisoning the Pontiff and isolating him from his accustomed friends, counsellors, and surroundings, was to wring from him by suffering that compliance with the imperial diplomacy which the good old man had hitherto refused so uncompromisingly. To be sure, now that Rome and the Papal States were in the hands of his soldiers, the Emperor had no difficulty either in expelling or arresting the English residing there, or in closing the whole of Romagna to British merchandise; but, in his haste and anger, he had reckoned without the religious difficulties of the new situation.

To begin with, in thus laying violent hands upon the person of the Pope, he struck a blow not only at a fellow-Sovereign, but at the Head of the Catholic Church on earth; and, in so doing, wounded the whole of the Church in its tenderest feelings, stirring up against himself a resentment that knew no bounds, not only in France, Belgium, and Italy, but, also, in Spain and Austria; as well as throughout the Catholic parts of Germany and the Netherlands. Protests multiplied on every hand, becoming increasingly violent, until Napoleon was forced to admit to himself that he had made a terrible mistake, and that his glory and power were insufficient to seduce the souls of men from their religious allegiance to the successor of St. Peter. Moreover, the dangers and discomforts of his situation were rendered intolerable by a Bull of Excommunication issued against him in that summer of 1809, in the tour of his triumph over the Austrians at Wagram; which Bull was served upon him in person, whilst surrounded by his marshals, by a solitary ecclesiastic who, true to his mission, did not honour him with any kind of salutation, but merely delivered the parchment into the Emperor’s hand, turned his back upon him, and walked away. Napoleon, indeed, feigned to make light of the excommunication, asking of those about him whether the Pope expected the muskets to fall from the hands of his, the Emperor’s, soldiers; but, in his heart, he was greatly troubled. He had known for some time that such a Bull was on its way to him, but had contrived to evade the service of it on him. For Lebzeltern, himself, who was Secretary of the Austrian Embassy in Rome at the period of the Holy Father’s arrest, and who had long been a valued and intimate friend of Pius VII, had been entrusted with another such document at his departure from Rome on an order transmitted to him from Napoleon through General de Miollis, ordering him (albeit a foreign diplomatist) to quit French territory immediately. Bearing with him, therefore, the Bull of Excommunication, Lebzeltern had departed from Rome, being escorted on his way to Vienna as far as Klagenfurt in Styria by a French officer. On reaching Schönbrunn, however, he was arrested by the French military police; his baggage and, even, his person was submitted to a degrading search, and, at length, every other means of purloining the Bull having been tried in vain, Lebzeltern was threatened with being shot unless he gave up the document—for Napoleon would appear to have entertained a superstition that, if only he could escape from having the Bull served on him, its effect would be annulled! But nothing would induce Lebzeltern to reveal its hiding-place; and so he was sent off as a state prisoner to Munich, with a special recommendation to the Bavarian Government to treat him as harshly as possible. Having passed some months there, however, he was exchanged against a Baron d’Arétin, and came to Vienna, believing himself to be free at last; but now Wagram had been fought, and Napoleon was master there; and Lebzeltern was again arrested on a trumped-up charge of seeking to escape from giving satisfaction to a French officer in an affair of honour! Nor would Napoleon let him go until compelled to do so by the insistent demands of Metternich, who was just then negotiating the peace preliminaries at Altenburg. At long length, however, Lebzeltern was released, and joined the Austrian headquarters near Schönbrunn a few days before the signing of the treaty of Vienna; and it was he to whom Emperor Francis unburdened himself with tears in his eyes on the subject of the Treaty.

Soon afterwards, Lebzeltern went to Paris as Secretary of Embassy under Metternich; and when, in the late spring of 1810, Napoleon asked Metternich to find him a man to entrust with the errand of persuading the Holy Father to accede to his views (i.e., the removal of the Excommunication and the abdication of the Temporal Power in favour of the Napoleonic dynasty), Metternich recommended Lebzeltern as the one person qualified to speak to the Pope with any chance of being accorded a favourable hearing.

The whole hinge of the matter was the Pope’s renunciation of the Temporal Power; only in return for which would Napoleon (as he made perfectly clear to Metternich) allow the Pontiff to return to Rome, whence, alone, it was possible for Pius VII to direct the way of the Catholic Church. And, unless the Pope would surrender the patrimony of Peter, he should never see Rome again; and the Emperor would nominate another Pontiff in his stead. The position was certainly simple enough, according to Napoleon.

But Metternich had added, in private, a little word of his own in the ear of his estimable subordinate on the eve of the latter’s departure for Italy. “Do all,” said he, with a peculiar emphasis, “or else, do nothing.” And Lebzeltern, grasping the significance of the words, had bowed, smilingly, before withdrawing to prepare for the journey. He perfectly understood; what Metternich meant was that he was either to effect “in toto” what both of them knew to be impossible or else he was to effect nothing at all. That is to say, he was not to attempt any compromise by which the Pope might be hoodwinked into doing what Napoleon wanted; for it was perfectly certain that Pius VII would refuse to meet the Emperor’s views as laid down by the Emperor himself for transmission by Lebzeltern. And, as Metternich realised, the salvation, not only of Austria but of all Europe, depended upon the Pope’s holding out against Napoleon; for the only thing that must inevitably, sooner or later, bring about the Emperor’s downfall, was the sense of their outraged religion in the hearts of the vanquished.

After sending in his request for an audience to Monsignor Doria, Lebzeltern went to call upon General Berthier, who was the commandant of Savona and the Pope’s gaoler. Berthier had heard of his arrival, and began by telling Lebzeltern—who had told him that the object of his mission was to discuss some Austrian religious business with the Holy Father—that he could only be allowed to converse with Pius VII in the presence of witnesses. To this Lebzeltern replied that it was impossible for him to speak freely of the affairs of the Austrian Court in the presence of any third party whomsoever; that, according to Napoleon himself, the Pope was under no kind of restraint; and, lastly, that Napoleon both knew and approved of his, Lebzeltern’s, mission. But it was not until Lebzeltern threatened to go back to Paris immediately and to complain of the obstacle placed in his path that Berthier finally surrendered the point—albeit not without a violent scene in which he complained bitterly of the Emperor for placing him (as was true enough) in so equivocal a position by first forbidding him to allow any one to have access to the Pope without direct orders to do so from Paris, and then sending Lebzeltern thus (underhandedly and without as much as a line from any French official excepting a passport) to match, as it were, his, Berthier’s, intelligence against his obedience. Finally, he himself decided to give the preference to his intelligence.

So it was all of four days after his arrival at Savona that Lebzeltern was ushered by Monsignor Doria into the Pope’s presence.

At that time, Pius VII, although in his sixty-eighth year, looked considerably younger, his hair being still jet-black and abundant, and his dark eyes full of life and light. The smile, too, which rarely left his pale, kindly face, was peculiarly winsome in its frankness and its serenity. The only signs about him of what he had endured of late at the hands of the French administration were a weariness in his voice and a marked stoop like that of a very old or very tired man. On seeing Lebzeltern, though, he showed a greater animation and pleasure than he had done for many months; especially was he delighted to learn that their interview was to be an absolutely private one—for this he regarded as a great indulgence on the part of his gaolers, it being the first time in his captivity (then nearly a year old) that he had been allowed to speak with any except in the presence of a third party.

At first, records Lebzeltern, the Holy Father spoke of his sufferings in the journey from Rome and of all he had endured since being torn from the Eternal City; also, he expressed his sympathies for his visitor in what the latter had undergone of unjust imprisonment at the hands of the French and the Bavarians. In return[9] Lebzeltern, as he tells himself, gave the Pontiff an outline of public events since their last meeting in Rome, prior to the battle of Wagram—the Treaty of Vienna and its results; the progress of the war in Portugal; and the marriage of Napoleon to the Archduchess Marie-Louise. All of which events Lebzeltern, a professional diplomatist and an Austrian official, believed to be hitherto unknown to the Pope—wherein lies one of the most curious points of modern history. For, if Pope Pius VII was supposed, even by such men as Metternich and Lebzeltern, to be still, in May, 1810, in ignorance of the marriage of Napoleon to Marie-Louise, how can it be claimed that the Supreme Pontiff’s sanction had ever been given to that marriage? Apparently to Lebzeltern’s surprise, Pius VII had, however, actually learned of the imperial marriage through some secret channel: “... outwitting the watchfulness of his gaolers, he received news day by day...!” For, amongst other indignities, no letters were ever permitted to reach or issue from the Holy Father except such as had been approved by Berthier and by a certain Chabrol, Prefect of the “département” of Montenotte, by whom the Papal correspondence was always read and censored; so that it was evidently Napoleon’s purpose to keep his august prisoner in total ignorance of the majority of the world’s events.

Nevertheless, Pius VII spoke with no bitterness, but only with great grief of the French Emperor, expressing the most sorrowful tenderness towards the man whom he had crowned Emperor at Notre Dame a few years previously. And all he asked was that he might be allowed to go back to Rome in order to be able to do his duty by the Church as her Pastor.

At this point Lebzeltern made known the real object of his coming to Savona: namely, that Napoleon was anxious to come to an understanding with the Pope. To the latter this was, indeed, a most welcome surprise; but, almost immediately, he seemed to realise that he was suddenly in the presence of some sort of insidious temptation which was preparing to attack him. And here Lebzeltern, by turning the talk during some minutes to Austrian affairs, sought to give his listener time in which to recover from the first effects of his surprise. And so, for a while, they spoke of the dangers of a schism that threatened the German episcopate, so long deprived by Napoleon of the guidance of their Shepherd. And then, as the Pope began more clearly to divine the probable intentions of the Emperor towards him, he reverted to the subject of his captor:

“I want nothing for myself,” he said, by way of warning Lebzeltern that it would be of no use for him to offer any personal advantage to the Pope (as such) as the price of a reconciliation with Napoleon. “I am old, and have no need of anything; I have sacrificed all I had to my duty. I have nothing left to lose. Therefore, no personal consideration can make me turn aside from the narrow road along which the sacred voice of my conscience has so far led me. I want no pension; the alms of the faithful will suffice me.... All I insist upon—and with all my strength—is that I be allowed free communication with the Bishops and the faithful.” Once, too, he seemed uncertain of even the diplomatist’s own intentions towards him. “At Rome, my dear Lebzeltern,” he reminded him, “I opened my heart to you in the conviction that you were incapable of abusing my confidence ...”—speaking rapidly in Italian.

And now, as Lebzeltern felt, the moment had come when he could no longer defer the revelation of what it was that Napoleon proposed to the Pope as the only possible basis of an agreement between them—that is to say, the only price he would accept to let Pius VII out of prison. It was by no means easy, as he gives one to understand, for the young Austrian to do this thing; but, at length, he forced himself to the point. After assuring the Holy Father once more of his own devotion to him, as well as of that of Metternich and the Emperor Francis, Lebzeltern proceeded to explain that Napoleon had in no way abated his desire to be the lord of Rome, which had long been one of the principal objects of his ambition; also, that he had in no way changed his mind in regard to the Pope’s surrender of the Temporal Power; and that, although Napoleon would not insist upon a formal deed of renunciation on the part of Pius VII, yet, at the same time, he must insist that the Pope should maintain an attitude of absolute submission in the matter, an attitude which should in no way recall the past political position of the Papacy, and which at bottom should be, in fact, an acknowledgment of the suzerainty of the French Emperor.

The words were scarcely out of Lebzeltern’s mouth when the Pontiff took him up with an amazing energy for so delicate a man.

“Is not Napoleon already, de facto, the master of Rome?” he demanded. “Does he not parcel out my States as he pleases? Do not his troops already hold my ports, camp in my capital, and live at my expense? And all I can do is to oppose a few protests to his armed force. But I know him; he is a man who never really wants what he says he wants—and what he really wants he will never admit to a living soul beforehand.”

To which Lebzeltern, in order to restore the Pope’s equanimity, replied by telling him how Metternich, in speaking to Napoleon, had declared himself openly on the side of the Holy Father; and, moreover, had emphatically impressed upon the Emperor the unchangeable principles[10] of the Austrian Government in regard to the Catholic Church and its visible spiritual Head on earth.

“I should indeed be grateful for any help that Austria could give me,” said the Pope. “All I ask is that Napoleon will let me go back to Rome and that he will allow me to keep about me a sufficient number of people for the business of consistories and councils—and that my relations with the faithful may be free and unhampered. I have no means of compelling Napoleon to restore the dominions of which he has robbed me—very well, all I can do is to protest. Beyond that I can do nothing.”

Here Lebzeltern, it must be recorded, made some attempt to persuade the Holy Father to make what he called “sacrifices” in the interests of the distracted Church—but of what nature, precisely, he did not specify. But Pius VII, reading his mind, replied that the duty imposed upon him by his conscience of defending the rights of the Holy See and the patrimony of the Church—which patrimony he was bound by his oath as Pope to transmit intact, in so far as in him lay, to his successors—forbade his remaining silent under Napoleon’s iniquity: his silence would be understood, by his enemies, to be a tacit abdication of the Temporal Power, and would be considered by the faithful as a cowardly surrender.

From this point in the conversation the two men understood each other’s position and standpoint clearly—and yet, both did their best to avoid the blind-alley into which the talk was surely leading them.

“Let Napoleon only allow me to return to Rome,” pleaded the Pope—“the Catacombs will be enough for me, they have served as a shelter before now for other Pontiffs.... As to my sustenance, as I said before, the faithful will take care of it. No doubt Napoleon would offer me a revenue from the funds of the religious orders he has suppressed—in the same way that, when I went to Paris to crown him, he offered me some eighteen or twenty million francs of such stolen money—an unspeakable suggestion which I refused with horror and indignation! But, indeed, now that I think of it—how could I possibly hold my tongue as he proposes I should do, and not protest, while he would go on suppressing convents and religious orders under my very eyes, as well as introducing innovations that I could not pass over in silence without becoming his accomplice in the face of all Christendom?”

In response Lebzeltern submitted that, possibly, Napoleon’s malevolent dispositions towards the Church might be beneficially affected by the removal of the ban of excommunication under which he still lay.

“But Napoleon would be excommunicated without any Bull of mine,” replied the other. “For he is, ipso facto, as a persecutor of the Church, outside her pale. Even if I had never issued any such ban against him, he would still be excommunicated by his own acts.”

Lebzeltern now proposed that the Holy Father should write a letter to Napoleon, demanding with all gentleness and moderation to be set at liberty and allowed to resume his apostolic functions. “I would even ask his help to that end,” pursued the Austrian, “and I would publish the letter. Such a letter would in no way disparage the Vicar of Christ, ever ready to forgive sinners; and, at the same time, it would place Napoleon in an exceedingly embarrassing situation before the world. By so doing, your Holiness would infallibly destroy at a single blow those weapons of calumny which he is employing against you, and which he means to go on employing.”

“Listen, Lebzeltern. You know that I am willing to concede all that it is possible to concede; but where my conscience is concerned, you behold me perfectly resigned to remain as I am, a prisoner. If my captivity were a thousand times harsher—if I had, even, to mount the scaffold—I should not deviate by so much as a hair’s breadth from what my duty demands of me. And it would be an unworthy betrayal of that duty if I were to remove the ban of excommunication from Napoleon without good and sufficient reason. As to the letter you propose that I should write to him—a kind of encyclical, as it were—frankly I feel that, in sending such a thing to a man like Napoleon, who is capable of changing the wording of it, and then of publishing it to my detriment and his own ends, I should do wrong in taking so grave a risk without first consulting the Sacred College.”

And, on Lebzeltern’s arguing that it was the Pope’s duty to make the first move towards a reconciliation with the Emperor, Pius VII was silent for a moment, as though deliberating upon his next words. At last he spoke again:

“If Napoleon shows a desire to become reconciled to the Church, and if he will prove his sincerity by some deed, the thing can be arranged—and I assure you that no one is more desirous of it than I.”

And with that the first interview came to an end. Lebzeltern did not see the Pontiff again until two days later; on May 18, he found him in a condition of great fatigue from overwork (as may easily be understood when one remembers that the entire business of the Church had fallen upon the shoulders of the venerable Pontiff, deprived by Napoleon’s orders of assistance of any kind in the transaction of that stupendous task!) and having before him a letter recently received from Cardinal Fesch. In this letter the Cardinal had written of the Emperor’s intention—unless an agreement were speedily come to between himself and the Holy Father—of settling the question by choosing Bishops that would do his will from among the French clergy, Bishops who would administer their dioceses in accordance with Napoleon’s instructions alone and without any reference to the Pope. In answer, the Holy Father had condescended to write back to the Cardinal to say that the Emperor was evidently bent upon making impossible any reconciliation between them; and that any Episcopal Council that the Emperor might call together upon his own initiative would be absolutely null and void. Nevertheless, he, the Pope, being unwilling to refuse any chance of reconciliation, the Cardinal was to exhort Napoleon upon the subject; to assure him of his glory in this world and in the next if he would but sincerely become reconciled to the Church; and, equally, to threaten him with condign punishment upon himself and his dynasty, if he should persist in his persecution of the Church.

Lebzeltern now had to recognise that the Sovereign Pontiff had, in his heart, lost all confidence in Napoleon’s good intentions; for Pius VII now spoke of yet further pains and penalties that he had not made use of and which were still at his disposal. Lebzeltern, though, undiscouraged, only tried the harder to incline the Pope towards an understanding with the Emperor.

“If Napoleon will do something in favour of the Church, then, and not before, will I withdraw my excommunication of him,” replied the Pontiff. “To gain absolution, one must do penance——”

“Surely, Holy Father—but, generally speaking, the absolution precedes the penance”—a specious argument, this, of the diplomatist, seeing that the fruit of the absolution is dependent upon the performance of the penance.

All preliminaries being exhausted, it only remained for Lebzeltern to disclose the absolutely last possible basis of an understanding between the Pope and the Emperor.

“If the Emperor were willing to forego any formal act of abdication of the Temporal Power on the part of your Holiness,” he ventured, “might he count in return upon your absolute silence as to the past?”—By which Lebzeltern meant that the Pope should by his silence give a tacit sanction to all the things that Napoleon had done to the Church and her ministers—his imprisonment of the Pope and many of the Cardinals, his sequestration of countless Church moneys, his closing of the multitudes of religious houses, and his throwing of their occupants, destitute and homeless, upon the world.

“Out of the question,” said the Pope. “I could never feel sure of any pact with Napoleon.” Presently, however, he added: “The guarantee, though, of a third party to any treaty I might make with him would certainly ease my mind considerably—especially if Austria would furnish the guarantee.” And then, in an access of reconciliation, he continued: “I have already told you what I would be disposed to do on my side towards healing the breach between Napoleon and the Church. What more does he want of me? Does he wish me to recognise him as Emperor of the West? Very well, I am willing to do so. Does he wish me to crown him as such at Rome? Very well, again I am quite ready to do so. For that would not in any way be contrary to my conscience, provided only that he makes his peace with the Church and ceases from persecuting her; but I insist upon it that he shall respect her earthly Head in that Head’s unchangeable capacity as the spiritual chief of Christendom!”

Lebzeltern was, indeed, astounded at the Pope’s generosity.

“Most Holy Father,” he stammered, “you have given too much not to give just one little thing more—merely to allow your subjects to obey the present Government in the Papal States, and to order them expressly to do so.”

There followed a gesture of such pain on the part of the Sovereign Pontiff, expressing so eloquently his repugnance to this proposal, that Lebzeltern was penetrated with a shaft of regret for having made it. Moreover, as he says himself, “I trembled at the thought of all I had obtained from him!”

At the same time, Lebzeltern felt convinced of the uselessness of the Pope’s concessions. He knew that Napoleon, unless he could obtain the one thing on which his heart was set—the actual sovereignty of the Papal States, and that with the Pope’s consent and blessing,—would not for a moment consider anything else that might be offered him instead.

So Lebzeltern parted from the Holy Father for that day, his heart full of indefinable misgivings for the dark future in which the power of Napoleon loomed so vast and menacing, and in which there was no great light visible to him of the Church, save only here and there, so to speak, where the feeble red glow of a few distant, wide-scattered sanctuary-lamps starred the mirk of the new Europe.

On May 20, Lebzeltern went for the last time to the Vescovado, to take leave of the august prisoner within its walls.

On this last occasion of their meeting at Savona, the diplomatist found Pius VII in a very strange frame of mind. Not by any means inclined to withdraw the concessions he had made in the previous interview with Lebzeltern, but only regretting them bitterly; hoping they might not satisfy Napoleon and so be rejected by him. On Lebzeltern’s presenting for his consideration a written outline of the concessions in question, the Pontiff, after considering them a little while, rose suddenly from his chair and spoke as follows:

“I have made known to you, Lebzeltern, many of my most secret thoughts and sentiments which I would never have entrusted to another living man except my confessor; and I do not regret it, because I am perfectly certain that you will never abuse the confidence I have placed in you. Nevertheless, please bear in mind that I only authorise you to report of me to Napoleon and Metternich what I am now going to tell you, and which is just what you yourself have seen and heard—that I am perfectly resigned to God’s Will regarding me and that I humbly place my cause in His hands. Say that no consideration of any kind shall induce me to disobey my conscience and the Divine law. Tell them that I am calm and serene, and that all I ask of the Emperor—for whom I only hope and pray that he may be granted the grace to make his peace with our holy mother the Church—is that he will allow me the means of communicating freely with the faithful, and that he will no longer deprive them of the services of their father and servant. Tell the Emperor that I entreat him to remember that the glory of this world is in itself no passport to Heaven; that, albeit I yearn with all my heart to be reconciled with him, yet, that I will never be so at the price of my conscience. Assure him very earnestly that I have not the smallest personal feeling against him; that I forgive him with my whole heart all that he has done to me; and that nothing could hurt me more than that he should imagine me capable of harbouring resentments—which in themselves are forbidden by God and have no place either in my heart or in my inclination.”

Presently, among other things, he went on to speak of the private misgivings with which Napoleon’s character inspired him: “Between ourselves, Lebzeltern, I am convinced that Napoleon is not in good faith when he says that he wishes to become reconciled with me.... If only he would let me have some one here, at Savona, to help me in my work, which is really and truly overwhelming; moreover, there is a vast amount of specialist and technical business which I cannot possibly transact by myself without consulting my expert advisers. And, to make matters worse for me, my health and my eyesight are giving out; I do not feel that I shall be able to carry my burden of solitary labour very much longer; besides, it is bad for my temper, which I confess, frankly, I often have great difficulty in curbing.”

Nor is there anything wonderful in this when one remembers the Pope’s situation after being imprisoned nearly a year in the house of the Bishop of Savona, shut off from the Cardinals (of whom the only news he had was that they had been imprisoned and maltreated in French fortresses by order of Napoleon) and from the faithful. Alone with his doubts and difficulties and age and ill-health; and the insidious temptations put before him by the Emperor’s instruments (conscious, some of these, as was Fesch; unconscious, again, as was Lebzeltern)—what is there astonishing or blamable in this “great difficulty” so well and simply confessed by the most benignantly human Barnabo Chiaramonte?

Presently he spoke again, to utter a final warning to Napoleon:

“If Napoleon continues to make war upon religion (even although he does so under the guise of extending to it his hypocritical perfidious protection); if he attempts to have me dragged to Paris; if he goes on spreading the lie of my sacrificing the real interests of the Church to secondary matters and to worldly motives; if he persists in forcing me to more active reprisals, then—I shall have to use the last weapons that remain to me and which would make a stir in the world that he does not yet dream of. The only regret I should have in that case would be that some others—who have been less unkind to me than he—might suffer, too. As to the precise nature of those weapons, it is possible that their effect might be very different from anything you could imagine. But, make your mind easy; have no fear that I shall employ them unless I am absolutely obliged to do so. Do not be afraid of my doing anything precipitately, for I pray constantly for grace and strength sufficient to enable me to carry my cross patiently. But if you only knew the unvarying torment of my nights as well as of my days, Lebzeltern—the unceasing anguish of my solitude—you would not wonder at what must sometimes appear to you incomprehensible inconsistencies in my attitude towards many things—as must have been noticeable in the talks between us!”

And with that he dismissed Lebzeltern, who was as much moved as he; for they now shared the same conviction of the utter emptiness of Napoleon’s professions of a desire for reconciliation.

And, as it proved, the doors of Savona did not open for Pius VII until the next year, 1811—and then only to allow of his deportation to another prison at Fontainebleau, where he was to remain until Napoleon’s downfall. Once only did the Sovereign Pontiff weaken (with none but the purest of good intentions) when, in 1813, he consented, for a moment, to renounce the Temporal Power, in order that he might be allowed to go back to Rome, thence to direct the Church. But in vain, for Napoleon would not let him out of his hands, and Pius VII, perceiving the mistake he had made, announced to all whom it might concern his resumption of the inalienable dominions and Temporal Sovereignty of the Popes. And, in 1814, he returned to his rightful throne in the Vatican amid the rejoicings of his subjects.

But what must have been his reflections in regard to his oppressor during the five years (the exact duration of Napoleon’s crime against him) that were consumed in the terrific expiation of St. Helena? And his awe and amazement at the stupendous vindication of his trust in the providence of Heaven?—for, as the Italian saying has it, “God does not pay wages day by day, but only on Saturdays—and then He pays in full with interest!”

Pius VII’s own revenge on Napoleon took the form of offering safe and honoured homes, and the means to live, to his mother and his entire family after his downfall. Whereby many descendants of the Bonapartes are counted among the Roman nobles at this day.

9. “Le Pape Pie VII à Savone,” p. 83. H. Chatard. Plon, Nourrit et Cie. (Paris, 1887.)

10. “Unchangeable principles,”—unchangeable, that is to say, until, of course, 1870, since when——!

CHAPTER VIII IN SABINA

Castel Gandolfo—Its Gardens—The Sabine Hills—The Reverendo—An Expedition into the Hills—The Campagna in the Early Morning—“Our Lady of Good Counsel”—Ancient Præneste—Italy’s Landscape—Struggles of the Colonna—Destruction of Palestrina—Boniface’s Revenge and Expiation—Olevano, the Haunt of Artists—“Picturesque Utility”—The Wrong Train—Romance of a Pebble—The Work of the Saints.

We had chosen Castel Gandolfo for our summer quarters and had spent two delightful months in the Villa Brazzà, situated on the lower edge of the town, which climbed up the gentle slope behind, and having for ourselves the open view of all the Campagna below us, before. The house did not look large from the road, but very little of it showed itself to the road at all. When one had passed under the arched “portone,” one found a great rambling residence with a long terraced wing stretching down into the garden, and in the garden itself pavilions, grottoes, terraces, all bowered in flowers and so artistically disposed that every one seemed isolated and only approached by long winding walks delightfully shady and green. Where the chief sitting-room opened towards the garden there was a small terrace, completely shaded from the morning sun, with a fountain so disposed that it fell all down one wall like a waterfall, and round it clambered and waved the wreaths of a hundred creepers, ivy and stephanotis and jessamine and maidenhair fern, all wet and blooming in the gentle moisture of its spray. To the left the wing, in which my own rooms were situated, ran far down, affording shade and coolness; a stairway led up to its roof, where vast beds of petunias gave out their sweet perfume and were visited every evening at sunset by humming-bird moths, who fed on the honey in the white and purple chalices till they could scarcely fly away.

The house had been full of guests through July and August and the summer had been divinely bright and cool. Through it all I had looked, day after day, over towards the Sabine Hills, so remote and mysterious for all their nearness to Rome, and a great desire was upon me to penetrate into those blue fastnesses. They had been friends—at a distance—all my life, since I could remember anything, and probably before that, for the big eastern window of the room where I was born looked straight towards them, and doubtless their sun-smitten peaks were the first outside objects my eyes ever beheld. They are our Sibyls, in Rome. They reflect every change of sun and wind, and very early I learnt to tell the signs of the coming weather which they infallibly gave us.

I made up my mind to reach them at last, and with some difficulty persuaded my brother and my stepfather to come with me. We were joined by a friend, an elderly English clergyman, much loved by us and always known as the “Reverendo.” He came of exceedingly well-known people, but was a younger son with no money—and no encumbrances, and he had long amused us with his quaint ways. He was rather elderly, very tall, with a paganly handsome head—and a quiet way of saying incredible things that made me love him much, and work him hard, for I was a rather spoilt young person in those days and allowed myself unlimited whims, which my blessed family helped me to carry out in the most exemplary way. I always had a very tender spot for the “Reverendo,” and it became something uncomfortably near pity when I heard, from our servants, of certain straits to which he was put in order to appear properly at the little gatherings to which we were always inviting him. He lived a long way from our house, and his means quite forbade the luxury of cabs, so in all weathers he came on foot. The carefully turned-up evening trousers could be kept out of the mud, but not so the shoes below; so the Reverendo brought clean ones—and evening socks—with him. The porter’s lodge was just inside the porte cochère, and he would turn in there, regardless of what the inhabitants might be doing, sit down, pull off the condemned foot-gear, toss it into various corners, put on the clean things, and walk upstairs—all without a single word to the porter’s wife and children, who put him down, quite smilingly, as another “mad Englishman.” When the function upstairs was over he would reappear, change once more, and depart, always in perfect silence. But one evening Mrs. Porter told my maid she could have wept for the poor gentleman! He came in as usual, sat down and pulled off boots and socks, flung them away, and then discovered that he had forgotten to bring fresh ones. Quite meekly he gathered up the muddy articles, put them on, and disappeared into the night, to return, nearly an hour later, with his forgotten properties and go through the whole ceremony over again.

Like so many quiet, cultivated Englishmen whom circumstances more than taste have landed in the “Establishment” for life, he had the social instinct very strongly developed, loved bright society, and never refused an invitation. He caught gladly at the idea of riding through Sabina with us, and I knew that our expedition would be a success, which it might not have been without the little spice of interest that an outsider always brings into an otherwise too strictly family party.

So, one divine September morning we four rode forth, my dear mother almost crying at our temerity in facing the brigands who were then supposed to haunt the Eastern Hills. “Do bring back your ears with you!” was her parting recommendation, and I know that during the days of our absence she constantly dreaded receiving the grim packet of severed ears which the old-time brigands were in the habit of sending, with their little account for ransom, to the relatives of those they had captured. Years before, when we children were making expeditions from Rocca di Papa, we had, to our immense joy, been provided with big formidable-looking toy pistols, which we were enjoined to carry “in evidence”—so that the report might go about that the party was always strongly armed! The only brigand we ever caught sight of in our rambles through the lonely country would be an occasional outlaw who had escaped from the police to take hiding in the woods (where he was charitably maintained by his sympathising fellow-townsfolk) and who would scuttle away like a startled hare at the approach of a big party of young foreigners whose yells would probably reach to Rome itself if anybody interfered with them. The brigand of Romagna is, or was, a poor creature, very easily disposed of; his cousin in Calabria or Sicily is quite a different kind of person, a resolute, unscrupulous gentleman whom it is not at all pleasant to meet.

In one of his Roman books, Mr. Hare speaks of the unearthly beauty of the Campagna and its surrounding hills in the first moments of the dawn, and deplores the fact that so many travellers come and go away again without ever having risen early enough to see it. I think dear Mr. Hare made the discovery late in life himself, for, if I remember rightly, it was during a journey of exploration that we made together somewhere that the fact struck him—and I and my sister regarded him then as distinctly middle-aged. My poor Annie was always a late riser, and vehemently deprecated the unripe hours of the morning, as she did every other kind of discomfort; but to me they were hours of purest romance, and seldom have they seemed more perfect than on the day when I and my three cavaliers rode away from Castel Gandolfo through the woods towards Genazzano (not Genzano) where we were to halt on our way to Palestrina.

Have you ever ridden through deep chestnut woods when the sun is still so low that it only strikes the under branches of the trees, and creeps up their trunks like a rising bath of gold? When every dell is still a mist of cool emerald, and on the banks the level beams are kissing open the tightly whorled fronds of the fern, filling the tiny cups of the moss with topaz wine and turning its million-feathered spikelets into an upstanding frieze of fairy spears, each strung with a yellow pearl?

Where some stream has cut its way deep through the rich soil, the forget-me-nots have grown so high and thick that they almost meet across the water; their blue is too dreamy yet to reflect the sky; they look up to that with the calm unseeing innocence of a newborn child that as yet knows not day from night. Ah, look well then, for later in the day the jealous treetops will take all the light to themselves, and every lovely detail, below, only visible in that first fleeting hour, will be lost in the deep forest shadow that is neither light nor darkness, but all one quivering mysterious green.

We four rode through the woods silently, drinking in the crystal freshness of the air; and then, almost before we knew it, we were out in a blaze of heat, leaving the Alban Hills behind and crossing the plain that divides them from the Sabines, one of the old roads to Naples. In that first week of September it was like an unroofed hot-house, vines and corn and pomegranates crowding against each other till one would hardly have known where to get in the shears or the sickle; the dust from our horses’ feet rose in golden clouds as we went along, and everywhere was the whirr of wings and the long droning note of the cicala. We were glad enough to reach Genazzano and pause in the shade before the old Church; but we had had some difficulty in penetrating so far, the Piazza and every street leading to it being full of peasants, who had come in from all the surrounding district to pay their respects to the Madonna del Buon Consiglio, on this the 8th of September, our Blessed Lady’s birthday. Of course the greatest concourse takes place here on April the 25th, the especial feast of Our Lady of Good Counsel, but the people are always glad to repair to this famous sanctuary, and on the day we visited it the little town was full of the brilliant costumes which one very rarely sees now. The picture round which so much devotion centres is a very sweet one, rather Byzantine in character, as is natural, for it came to Italy from the other side of the Adriatic—miraculously transported, probably at the time when all that country came under Moslem rule. It was thus that the Holy House of Loreto, when the Holy places of Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Turks, was carried by the Angels to Christian shores, and thence to Italy, the dwellers near its last Eastern resting-place mourning despairingly round the deserted spot from which it disappeared between dark and dawn on the night of the 9th of December, 1294. I am writing of Genazzano and not of Loreto just now, but I must pause to remark that this miracle of the transportation of the house of the Blessed Virgin is far more clearly attested than many events in our own modern history; yet there are people, who would stake their lives on the truth of those events, who dismiss the miracle of Loreto with a smile of incredulity.

This picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel would not interest them. Yet I would advise even such persons to go and have a look at the beautiful copy of it in St. John Lateran’s. It is quite small, a half length or less; the Blessed Mother holds the Child in her arms, and he is reaching up to whisper in her ear; she listens, with her heart in her deep sweet eyes, and the “counsel” is stored up for the children who appeal to her in their perplexities. There is an exquisite expression of confidence and familiarity on both the celestial Faces. Our Holy Father Pius X has such a great devotion to Our Lady of Good Counsel that, as all Catholics know, he has added the invocation “Mater Boni Consilii, ora pro nobis,” to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.

From Genazzano we went on to Palestrina, arriving there in time to go and watch the sunset from the ruined terraces of the Temple of Fortune. The place has passed from hand to hand, used as a fortress at one time and another since the fourth century before Christ; but to me its interest never lay in those comparatively modern developments. It is the story of times lost in the mist of ages, when those first cyclopean blocks were fitted together without the aid of cement—when a race, whose only traces are these mute huge stones that suggest all and tell nothing, lived and fortified itself on this outpost of the mountains—that is the story that I want to hear. There at Palestrina, when the sun was sinking into the level gold of the sea—forty miles away, but so clear and calm—I leaned over the stone bulwark, red in the sunset, hot to my hand (had it not baked in four or five thousand years of sunshine?), and felt that unearthly thrill of a revelation palpitatingly near, yet still withheld. It has come only a few times in my life—once at Torcello, once among the lost tombs of Etruria, there at Palestrina, and in the great hall of the unmarked sepulchre of the last Ming Emperor in Pechilia. That was modern, indeed, a Seventeenth Century affair, but the ancient spirit was there—something that brooded over a lonely, mighty country, unchanged, untampered with, before the beginnings of history.

At Palestrina—or to give the place its right name, Præneste—the Emperors were mere upstarts; Camillus, who took it and made it an appanage of Rome four hundred years or so before this time—Marius and Sulla, and the Roman ladies who had summer villas here and left those amazing “vanity boxes” (such arsenals of cosmetics and beautifiers as surprise even our modern beauty-artists) behind them—all these seem vulgar intruders on that sacredly ancient ground.

For, of all the cities of Romagna, Præneste has, I think, the most perfect situation. It seems to have grown out of the wall of the hills to watch over the southern roads to Rome. Before it the Campagna stretches away to the sea and to the north, the horizon there brokenly outlined by the low Volscian and Ciminian Hills. Not so towards the sea; in the near distance a castle or a single tower breaks the plain, midway Rome shimmers like a net of pearls thrown down across the Tiber; but the West is the empty West always, left to the sun and the wind, with the wide Heavens above and that one long sword of light laid on its further bound where the tideless Mediterranean laps against the shore. To the south, at an almost direct angle, rise the Alban Hills, near, familiar, friendly, with their symmetrical volcanic slopes so restful to the eye; where they sink to the plain farthest from Palestrina the Appian Way leads on to Naples, and that is the way most of the world travels; but the more beautiful road is the one which leads, right past the foot of the Sabines, through the level valley which separates them from the Alban range, to Anagni and Valmontone and Frosinone, following the classic Liris as it takes an almost straight course through the garden it has ploughed and watered. Seen from the Campagna, the Albans seem to be a range running east and west, thrown up to make a frame and background for Rome; but travel down the Liris and you will realise that all we see from Rome, Monte Cavo, and his lesser brethren, with their scores of white towns, is simply the culmination of a long branch of the Apeninnes, set up like a screen between the central range and the fever-haunted seaboard called Maremma. When about two-thirds of the distance to Naples is accomplished, the range rises in the isolated peak of Rocca Monfina to the height of nearly four thousand feet and becomes merged in the central Apeninnes once more. The railway runs through now, but it is still a wild, remote country, very feudal in its ways, with half-ruined castles on every point of vantage, scowling down on a land that needs them no longer, where fighting has ceased, and the good soil that has had its way for centuries has brought forth those stores of corn and wine and oil which seem to be South Italy’s inalienable dower.

From Palestrina, looking down on that September evening, the bursting richness of it all seemed almost incredible. Right at the foot of the hills a deep, abandoned watercourse was a golden river of standing corn, bordered far on either side with dense greenery fringing off into vineyards so teeming with fruit that, seen from above, it was like a great mantle of dark amethyst patterned here and there, where the white grapes grew, with jade. The woody slopes of the Sabines sank into the rich carpet, and rose, away to the north, in stormy outlines, now softened into dreamy rose and lilac, against the clear evening sky. As the sun sank, even the cold silver of the olive trees, standing tier above tier on their shallow terraces, took on the flush, as if bathed in wine, and the darker foliage of oak and chestnut burned with sombre yet vivid intensity. Then the sun touched the sea—lingered, a ball of living crimson, for an instant, and plunged out of sight. One star hung its newborn silver against the paling west; another and another answered it, till all the dying blue overhead was pierced and patterned with the faint sparklets in their eternal dance. Then from behind the wall of peaks a broad fan of misty silver was thrown up against the sky, growing, spreading, washing purple and crimson to one untinted sheen; another moment, and the harvest moon heaved a golden shoulder over the crags, rolled up, rounded itself, and hung, a great honey-coloured globe, flooding the hills and the Campagna and the distant sea with calm, all-embracing effulgence.

At the time of my first visit to Palestrina I was still sufficiently attracted by the Middle Ages to find much romance in the struggles of the Colonnas and their contemporaries, struggles which dragged the harrow over the vast Temple of Fortune—reputed the biggest in the world,—threw its stones one upon another, and left the place merely a beautiful tomb. Since then, I confess, my interest has died away. I can feel no sympathy with the noble cut-throats—Sciarras, Colonnas, Orsinis—whose deeds are written in blood over every page of the time. I used to weep over the sufferings they inflicted on Boniface VIII, but, apart from the outrage on his sacred office, which can never be condoned, one cannot help feeling that he deserved something of what he got, and that, in spite of his high courage and notable intellect, he had treated those his enemies very basely and cruelly. His election in 1217 had been bitterly opposed by two Colonna Cardinals—Giacomo and Pietro—who were furious at the thought that the Papal chair should be filled by one of the Gaetonis of Anagni, the hereditary rivals and enemies of their own family. The election went through, in spite of them, and they, fearing the new Pope’s wrath, fled to Palestrina, taking every member of the family with them. This was an open declaration of war, and the Pope realised that there would be no peace for his realm till they were subdued. With truly mediæval promptitude, he at once confiscated all their estates and called on all good Christians to take up arms against them. Their other strongholds fell one by one into his hands, but Palestrina, with its tremendous defences and commanding position, resisted every attack of the besiegers. It seemed impregnable. Then Pope Boniface remembered that the most victorious and ruthless leader of the day, Guido de Montefeltro, was down on his knees in a convent at Ancona, praying to be forgiven some of his deeds of blood before death should call him to judgment. He commanded him to leave his retreat and come to give his advice as to the reduction of Palestrina. Very unwillingly the old soldier obeyed, and returned to that world which he had left just in time to save his wicked soul. He went and looked at the Colonna fortress, examined the defences with the eye of an expert, and returned to the Pope, who was at Rieti. He told him that there was no hope of taking Palestrina by force of arms. “What, then, am I to do?” cried Boniface. Guido knew, but was unwilling to say. The Pope insisted on his giving his opinion, and the crafty old fighter proffered the counsel for which Dante with some justice put him in Malebolge—“Prometter lungo e tenere corto!” “Promise much—fulfil little,” it would run in English.

Boniface instantly acted on the advice. The Colonnas were promised full forgiveness. They thought it wise to accept and submit. In all the habiliments of mourning repentance they issued from the stronghold they were never to see again, and came in a body to Rieti. The Pope received them, pronounced their crimes against himself forgiven, and kept them at Rieti as his guests. But prudence, as he apprehended it, forbade that he should leave that eyrie and refuge of rebellion standing for them to fly to the next time they picked a quarrel with him. So, while they were sunning themselves in his favour in the mountain city of the South, he secretly despatched a faithful friend, Ranieri, the Bishop of Pisa, to wipe Palestrina off the face of the earth. Nothing was to be spared, except the Cathedral. And very thoroughly did Ranieri do his work. Every vestige of the fortress and palace and the big town which had grown up with them was destroyed—“a plough was driven over the ruins, the ground was sown with salt, and even the famous marble staircase of a hundred steps, up which people could ride their horses into the palace,” was swept away.

Then the Colonnas, landless, homeless, penniless, understood how much the Pope’s forgiveness was worth, and they fled from his domains to nurse their wrongs and wait for revenge.

That came in good, or rather very evil, time, and Boniface paid in full during the awful days at Anagni, days so dreadful that one quarrels with Dante for not regarding them as sufficient expiation for the harassed Pontiff’s one great sin. He was driven into a quarrel with Philippe le Bel, the King of France, and Sciarra Colonna, the Head of the proscribed House, caught at the chance and offered his services to the French. In company with their leader, William de Nogaret, he broke into Anagni, Boniface’s own city where he had taken refuge, and, but for the opposition of Nogaret, he would, apparently, have murdered his great enemy on the spot.

Here Boniface showed all the valour of his race and place. He prepared to meet death with the dignity of a priest and the courage of a soldier. “If I am to die, I will die like a Pope,” he said. Every friend, every Cardinal and chaplain and courtier fled as the shout of “A Colonna, a Colonna!” rose from the lower streets of the mountain town. Not a soul was left in the palace but the Pope. He put on his pontifical vestments, placed the tiara on his head, and mounted his throne, where he sat like a statue, awaiting certain death. Colonna and Nogaret, with three hundred steel-clad men at their heels, clanked into the hall, and stood dumb for a moment at the sight of their great enemy, who neither spoke nor moved. Then they rushed upon him and Sciarra Colonna assailed him with a fiery torrent of abuse, his anger feeding on itself till it ran through him like a flame, and he struck the Pontiff on the face with his mailed hand. Nogaret protested—Boniface said no word. He meant to suffer for his sins in silence, because so had the Redeemer suffered for sins not His. They dragged the Pope from his throne, hustled him out into the Square, all black with the gaping, cowardly crowd of his own subjects, put him on a vicious horse with his face to the tail, and led him with outbursts of derision through the streets. Not a hand was raised to defend him, not a protest was heard. Then his conquerors brought him back to his palace and locked him up, without food or drink, for three miserable days, during which they sacked not only the palace, but every house in the town, riding away at last glutted with plunder, destroying what they could not carry off, and leaving literally nothing but bare walls behind them. Then, all danger being past, Boniface’s loving subjects bethought themselves of letting him out. They found him fainting from exhaustion, crying like a starved child for a morsel of bread and a cup of water. The women wept over him then, and ran to minister to his wants; not so much as a water-jar had been left in the palace, and they emptied their bronze concas into a wooden chest. Boniface died soon after, in Rome, broken-hearted, and the carnival of anarchy in high places, with its raging hate and its fury of bloodshed, went on for many a long year afterwards.

Truly, mediæval history makes depressing reading! How gladly the mind reverts from it to the dawn of the centuries, when men fought for their cities and their wives and children, but not for mere hatred of their kind. And what a relief it is to turn from the endless carnage of the later Middle Ages to the history that is not written in blood and that charms and dominates us still, the history of strange holy lives every pulse of which was an act of love to God and mankind. It is but a step from one to the other—from Boniface VIII and the Colonnas and the Orsinis to Benedict and Scholastica—from smitten Palestrina to cloistered Subiaco behind it in the hills.

On the way thither one stopped for a day in Olevano, to me the least Italian, the most completely “foreignised” spot in all that country. It has been for so many years the haunt of artists of every nationality that it has none left of its own. Its beauty there is no denying; it laughs in sunshine and prosperity, and for that, in these bad times, one is grateful to it. But it is no more Italian than a fine piece of staging at the Haymarket. The background is perfect, and the inhabitants are healthy and handsome, but the moment they see a traveller coming they throw themselves into paintable attitudes; all naturalness seems gone; everything and everybody is harnessed to the service of picturesque utility. The famous inn, about which Gregorovius and Mr. Hare raved so enthusiastically, resounds with Northern tongues and with that ear-splitting affliction known as German Italian. The walls are a visitors’ book, of untold price, where almost every notable artist of the last hundred years has left his signature in sketch or portrait. At every turn you are tripped up by easels, wet canvases, and artists’ umbrellas, and in the evening the beer flows freely and the jolly brotherhood talks about itself at the top of its German voice, till Italy—our shy, melancholy Italy—fades into the background, and a weary traveller trying to sleep, in one of the bedrooms which all open out of the central dining-room, is led to believe that he has taken the wrong train and been transported unawares to the scene of a “Kneipe” in Munich or Dresden.

Talking about “wrong trains” reminds me of an absurd incident that happened in England. A wayfarer who had taken a little more than was good for him wandered into Victoria Station, having quite forgotten the name of the place he wished to make for. But he could remember what it was not. Into every train that came along he climbed—and then asked the guard for what point it was bound. None of the answers satisfied him and he tumbled out on the platform again and again, wailing, “Wrong train! wrong train!” At last, however, he struck the right one, the guard’s answer to his query brought back the memory of his domicile, and, much relieved, he sank down against the cushions and began to smoke. At the first station on the road a clergyman got into the compartment, and the train steamed on. Harder and harder the reverend gentleman stared at his companion, who showed all too plainly the evidences of his spree. Pretty soon, just as they were pulling into another station, the Christian’s conscience bade him admonish his erring brother.

“My friend,” he began in solemn tones, “do you know where you are going to?” The overtaken one was all attention at once, and his monitor went on, “You are going straight to Hell!”

“Oh, Lord!” moaned the sinner on the opposite seat. “Wrong train again!” And he sprang out of the carriage and stood weeping on the platform while his one chance of getting home sped away from him into the night.

We were little troubled by railways in the Sabines in my young days; such innovations had not ever been contemplated, and all our travelling was done on horses or mules. It was rather a long ride from Olevano to Subiaco and I was very tired and stiff when our little party straggled into the road leading up to the town. But—what is youth without some impossible romance? My “romance” had marched that way the year before, with his company of Zouaves, condemned to garrison duty for three dreary months in the hills; and this (“parents, do you think you know your children?”) was the utterly idiotic motive which had made me drag my three unsuspecting men to Subiaco! I wanted to pick up a stone that had been touched by the adored one’s foot! Very gingerly I climbed down off my weary beast, selected a fine smooth pebble from the side of the road where I knew my idol must have passed, and, with much difficulty, scrambled up again. The pebble was afterwards polished, cut, and set in Etruscan gold, as a pendant, marked with a mystic inscription signifying a challenge to fate to lessen the ardour of my attachment; and when I found it among my trinkets, long years after my real fate had found and claimed me, I could have wept for the delicious rainbow-tinted sorrows of first youth!

But the treasure once secured, and the luxury of tears reserved for some future unoccupied moment, I gave myself up to the magic of the consecrated cleft in the hills, and, in spite of my own profound ignorance in those days, in spite of the sceptical attitude of my Presbyterian stepfather and the Anglican Reverendo, and my dear Marion’s bubbling fun and laughter—for he was a mere boy then, of the most irrepressible kind—the “Sacro Speco” made a profound impression on me.

It was as if a door leading out of some gay ballroom, all lights and flowers and dance music, had suddenly been opened and I had passed through it from the things of time to those of eternity. Fifteen hundred years were wiped out—I saw St. Benedict, the “beloved, called from the cleft in the rock,” praying, rejoicing, hiding from men to be alone with God. And that seems to me the most wonderful thing in the lives of the great Founders—they had not at first the smallest forethought of their mission. They only knew that they must save their souls in fear and trembling, and in blind humility they withdrew from all occasions of sin and prayed for purification. It forms a curious contrast to the life led by most of us who consider ourselves pretty decent Christians in the eyes of the world. Our question is, “How much pleasure and amusement can I get in without actually falling into mortal sin?” and many a dangerous permission we grant ourselves or wring from our unwilling directors, that refused would have prevented, or at least delayed, a hundred falls. It is so terribly easy to do what all the rest are doing—to go and see the problem play, read the interesting bad book, pay the visit at the country house where the old admirer will meet us and spread the old snares for our destruction and his own! We know all about it; it has happened so often; but we go ahead, telling our hearts the lie they know so well: “Oh, it doesn’t matter! I know just where to stop!” Steeped in affection to sin—with, at the best, ages of Purgatory awaiting us—we add every straw we can gather to our already huge burden and imagine we can lay it down with a good deathbed confession and slip into Paradise with the best!

Very different was the point of view of the great Saints. For one who was converted late in life, we read of scores to whom Perfection called in the very dawn of reason; and it is precisely these, who never committed a mortal sin in their lives, who were most severe with themselves—most nervous, as we should say—about their final salvation.

Their sight, never clouded by any consent to evil, saw even in the most trifling failings a heinous offence against the Divine Majesty, and Its infinite Purity, visible to them, made their own fallen nature black by contrast. So they took that nature in hand, these athletes (called Benedict, and Francis, and Anthony, and many another blessed name written in the “Libro d’Oro” of the recording Angel), and thought a lifetime would not be too much to give to the task of subduing it. And the Heavenly Father bade them go on and be of good courage; and never, till the predestined moment came, did He let them dream that their years of prayer and fasting were just a preparation for generalship in His army, that in humbly striving to save their own souls they were fitting themselves to save millions and millions of others. The first symptom one notices about them is their complete disregard of the natty little idol we call “respectability”—the Church calls it “human respect.” We quite understand that great men should kick it out of the way—whoever heard of Wellington or Kitchener asking, “What are people going to say?” Their gifts and their calling place them above the reach of considerations by which we ordinary mortals are content to regulate our actions. We admire, rave over, their splendid carelessness. But when it comes to the Saints we take our shrunken measure, try to fit it to their conduct, and shake our heads. Their whole-heartedness is eccentricity, they thought nothing of inflicting most damaging shocks on public opinion—what a pity! And if we see any of our acquaintances beginning to follow in their steps we look the other way, as if the poor dears had come out into the street half dressed. I wonder how many of her friends cared to bow to the late Countess of Denbigh when, a few years ago, she took Bridget’s place at the crossing near Farm Street and swept it diligently, and stretched out her blessed hand for the pennies, and never thought she was doing anything heroic—just keeping old Bridget’s crossing for her while she went to Mass! I believe the very Angels wanted to throw down their shining mantles for her to walk over when she went to Heaven—but I am sure some of her friends on earth thought she was putting them in a most embarrassing position.

Lady Georgiana Fullerton, in her “Life of Santa Francesca Romana,” has described very truly and sympathetically these—to us—puzzling stages in the development of saintship. They vary in degree, of course, in each individual case, but the same note runs through all: “Permission to labour first,—the result far distant, but clear; the vision of that result when once He had said, ‘Begin and work.’ To tarry patiently for that signal, to obey it unhesitatingly when once given, is the rule of the Saints. How marvellous is their instinct! how accordant their practice! First, the hidden life, the common life; the silence of the house of Nazareth; the carpenter’s shop; the marriage-feast, it may be, for some; and, at last, ‘the hour is come,’ and the true work for which they are sent into the world has to be done, in the desert or in the cloister, in the temple or in the market-place, on Mount Tabor or on Mount Calvary; and the martyr or the confessor, the founder or the reformer of a religious order, comes forth, and in an instant, or in a few years, performs a work at which earth wonders and angels rejoice.”

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Hugh FraserItalian Yesterdays, vol. 1

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