He was equally afraid to promise everything, and
to refuse everything. After a long hesitation, he promised in spite of
himself; then he absolved himself, for the sake of the future, from
the engagements he had made for the sake of the present.

Now he is out of humour with his people, with the French, and with
himself. He knows the nation is suffering, but he allows himself to be
persuaded that the misfortunes of the nation are indispensable to the
safety of the Church. Those about him take care that the reproaches of
his conscience shall be stifled by the recollections of 1848 and the
dread of a new revolution. He stops his eyes and his ears, and
prepares to die calmly between his furious subjects on one hand, and
his dissatisfied protectors on the other. Any man wanting in energy,
placed as he is, would behave exactly in the same manner. The fault is
not his, it is that of weakness and old-age.

But I do not undertake to obtain the acquittal of his Minister of
State, Cardinal Antonelli.

CHAPTER XI.

ANTONELLI.

He was born in a den of thieves. His native place, Sonnino, is more
celebrated in the history of crime than all Arcadia in the annals of
virtue. This nest of vultures was hidden in the southern mountains,
towards the Neapolitan frontier. Roads, impracticable to mounted
dragoons, winding through brakes and thickets; forests, impenetrable
to the stranger; deep ravines and gloomy caverns,--all combined to
form a most desirable landscape, for the convenience of crime. The
houses of Sonnino, old, ill-built, flung pell-mell one, upon the
other, and almost uninhabitable by human beings, were, in point of
fact, little else than depots of pillage and magazines of rapine. The
population, alert and vigorous, had for many centuries practised armed
robbery and depredation, and gained its livelihood at the point of the
carbine. New-born infants inhaled contempt of the law with the
mountain air, and drew in the love of others' goods with their
mothers' milk. Almost as soon as they could walk, they assumed the
_cioccie_, or mocassins of untanned leather, with which they learned
to run fearlessly along the edge of the giddiest mountain precipices.
When they had acquired the art of pursuing and escaping, of taking
without being taken, the knowledge of the value of the different
coins, the arithmetic of the distribution of booty, and the principles
of the rights of nations as they are practised among the Apaches