r in his room. Why go and catch a chill
by waiting at the station? She could send for a cab at half-past nine,
and as soon as it arrived she would send word to him and have his luggage
carried down. He might be easy as to that, and need trouble himself about
nothing.

When she had gone off Pierre soon sank into a deep reverie. It seemed to
him, indeed, as if he had already quitted Rome, as if the city were far
away and he could look back on it, and his experiences within it. His
book, "New Rome," arose in his mind; and he remembered his first morning
on the Janiculum, his view of Rome from the terrace of San Pietro in
Montorio, a Rome such as he had dreamt of, so young and ethereal under
the pure sky. It was then that he had asked himself the decisive
question: Could Catholicism be renewed? Could it revert to the spirit of
primitive Christianity, become the religion of the democracy, the faith
which the distracted modern world, in danger of death, awaits in order
that it may be pacified and live? His heart had then beaten with hope and
enthusiasm. After his disaster at Lourdes from which he had scarcely
recovered, he had come to attempt another and supreme experiment by
asking Rome what her reply to his question would be. And now the
experiment had failed, he knew what answer Rome had returned him through
her ruins, her monuments, her very soil, her people, her prelates, her
cardinals, her pope! No, Catholicism could not be renewed: no, it could
not revert to the spirit of primitive Christianity; no, it could not
become the religion of the democracy, the new faith which might save the
old toppling societies in danger of death. Though it seemed to be of
democratic origin, it was henceforth riveted to that Roman soil, it
remained kingly in spite of everything, forced to cling to the principle
of temporal power under penalty of suicide, bound by tradition, enchained
by dogma, its evolutions mere simulations whilst in reality it was
reduced to such immobility that, behind the bronze doors of the Vatican,
the papacy was the prisoner, the ghost of eighteen centuries of atavism,
indulging the ceaseless dream of universal dominion. There, where with
priestly faith exalted by love of the suffering and the poor, he had come
to seek life and a resurrection of the Christian communion, he had found
death, the dust of a destroyed world in which nothing more could
germinate, an exhausted soil whence now there could never grow aught but