when the sun shall have absorbed all
the pestilence of the old soil, we will rebuild the city ten times more
beautiful and ten times larger than it has ever been. And what a city of
truth and justice it will at last be, the Rome that has been announced
and awaited for three thousand years, all in gold and all in marble,
filling the Campagna from the sea to the Sabine and the Alban mountains,
and so prosperous and so sensible that its twenty millions of inhabitants
after regulating the law of labour will live with the unique joy of
being. Yes, yes, Rome the Mother, Rome the Queen, alone on the face of
the earth and for all eternity!"

Pierre listened to him, aghast. What! did the blood of Augustus go to
such a point as this? The popes had not become masters of Rome without
feeling impelled to rebuild it in their passion to rule over the world;
young Italy, likewise yielding to the hereditary madness of universal
domination, had in its turn sought to make the city larger than any
other, erecting whole districts for people who had never come, and now
even the Anarchists were possessed by the same stubborn dream of the
race, a dream beyond all measure this time, a fourth and monstrous Rome,
whose suburbs would invade continents in order that liberated humanity,
united in one family, might find sufficient lodging! This was the climax.
Never could more extravagant proof be given of the blood of pride and
sovereignty which had scorched the veins of that race ever since Augustus
had bequeathed it the inheritance of his absolute empire, with the
furious instinct that the world legally belonged to it, and that its
mission was to conquer it again. This idea had intoxicated all the
children of that historic soil, impelling all of them to make their city
The City, the one which had reigned and which would reign again in
splendour when the days predicted by the oracles should arrive. And
Pierre remembered the four fatidical letters, the S.P.Q.R. of old and
glorious Rome, which like an order of final triumph given to Destiny he
had everywhere found in present-day Rome, on all the walls, on all the
insignia, even on the municipal dust-carts! And he understood the
prodigious vanity of these people, haunted by the glory of their
ancestors, spellbound by the past of their city, declaring that she
contains everything, that they themselves cannot know her thoroughly,
that she is the sphinx who will some day explain the riddle of the
univer