st, especially when a man has
good points as Agostino certainly has. In a certificate, too, everything
depends on the words one uses."

He stubbornly clung to that idea; he could not conceive that a person
should refuse to soften the rigour of justice by an ingenious
presentation of the facts. However, on acquiring a certainty that he
would obtain nothing, he made a gesture of despair, his livid face
assuming an expression of violent rancour, whilst his black eyes flamed
with restrained passion.

"Well, well! each looks on truth in his own way," he said. "I shall go
back to tell his Eminence Cardinal Sanguinetti. And I beg your Eminence
not to be displeased with me for having disturbed your Eminence to no
purpose. By the way, perhaps the figs are not yet quite ripe; but I will
take the liberty to bring another basketful towards the end of the
season, when they will be quite nice and sweet. A thousand thanks and a
thousand felicities to your most reverend Eminence."

Santobono went off backwards, his big bony figure bending double with
repeated genuflections. Pierre, whom the scene had greatly interested, in
him beheld a specimen of the petty clergy of Rome and its environs, of
whom people had told him before his departure from Paris. This was not
the _scagnozzo_, the wretched famished priest whom some nasty affair
brings from the provinces, who seeks his daily bread on the pavements of
Rome; one of the herd of begowned beggars searching for a livelihood
among the crumbs of Church life, voraciously fighting for chance masses,
and mingling with the lowest orders in taverns of the worst repute. Nor
was this the country priest of distant parts, a man of crass ignorance
and superstition, a peasant among the peasants, treated as an equal by
his pious flock, which is careful not to mistake him for the Divinity,
and which, whilst kneeling in all humility before the parish saint, does
not bend before the man who from that saint derives his livelihood. At
Frascati the officiating minister of a little church may receive a
stipend of some nine hundred _lire_ a year,* and he has only bread and
meat to buy if his garden yields him wine and fruit and vegetables. This
one, Santobono, was not without education; he knew a little theology and
a little history, especially the history of the past grandeur of Rome,
which had inflamed his patriotic heart with the mad dream that universal
domination would soon fall to the portion of renascen