that despotic papacy, the master of bodies as it was of souls. To his
distracted cry asking for a new religion, Rome had been content to reply
by condemning his book as a work tainted with heresy, and he himself had
withdrawn it amidst the bitter grief of his disillusions. He had seen, he
had understood, and all had collapsed. And it was himself, his soul and
his brain, which lay among the ruins.

Pierre was stifling. He rose, threw the window overlooking the Tiber wide
open, and leant out. The rain had begun to fall again at the approach of
evening, but now it had once more ceased. The atmosphere was very mild,
moist, even oppressive. The moon must have arisen in the ashen grey sky,
for her presence could be divined behind the clouds which she illumined
with a vague, yellow, mournful light. And under that slumberous glimmer
the vast horizon showed blackly and phantom-like: the Janiculum in front
with the close-packed houses of the Trastevere; the river flowing away
yonder on the left towards the dim height of the Palatine; whilst on the
right the dome of St. Peter's showed forth, round and domineering in the
pale atmosphere. Pierre could not see the Quirinal but divined it to be
behind him, and could picture its long facade shutting off part of the
sky. And what a collapsing Rome, half-devoured by the gloom, was this, so
different from the Rome all youth and dreamland which he had beheld and
passionately loved on the day of his arrival! He remembered the three
symbolic summits which had then summed up for him the whole long history
of Rome, the ancient, the papal, and the Italian city. But if the
Palatine had remained the same discrowned mount on which there only rose
the phantom of the ancestor, Augustus, emperor and pontiff, master of the
world, he now pictured St. Peter's and the Quirinal as strangely altered.
To that royal palace which he had so neglected, and which had seemed to
him like a flat, low barrack, to that new Government which had brought
him the impression of some attempt at sacrilegious modernity, he now
accorded the large, increasing space that they occupied in the panorama,
the whole of which they would apparently soon fill; whilst, on the
contrary, St. Peter's, that dome which he had found so triumphal, all
azure, reigning over the city like a gigantic and unshakable monarch, at
present seemed to him full of cracks and already shrinking, as if it were
one of those huge old piles, which, through the