hose laugh the joys of earth ring out. Nereids
bathe in transparent water. Bacchantes roll, unveiled, in the warm grass.
Centaurs gallop by carrying lovely girls, faint with rapture, on their
steaming haunches. Ariadne is surprised by Bacchus, Ganymede fondles the
eagle, Adonis fires youth and maiden with his flame. And on and on passes
the weak, white old man, swaying on his low chair, amidst that splendid
triumph, that display and glorification of the flesh, which shouts aloud
the omnipotence of Nature, of everlasting matter! Since they have found
it again, exhumed it, and honoured it, that it is which once more reigns
there imperishable; and in vain have they set vine leaves on the statues,
even as they have swathed the huge figures of Michael Angelo; sex still
flares on all sides, life overflows, its germs course in torrents through
the veins of the world. Near by, in that Vatican library of incomparable
wealth, where all human science lies slumbering, there lurks a yet more
terrible danger--the danger of an explosion which would sweep away
everything, Vatican and St. Peter's also, if one day the books in their
turn were to awake and speak aloud as speak the beauty of Venus and the
manliness of Apollo. But the white, diaphanous old man seems neither to
see nor to hear, and the huge heads of Jupiter, the trunks of Hercules,
the equivocal statues of Antinous continue to watch him as he passes on!

However, Narcisse had become impatient, and, going in search of an
attendant, he learnt from him that his Holiness had already gone down. To
shorten the distance, indeed, the _cortege_ often passes along a kind of
open gallery leading towards the Mint. "Well, let us go down as well,"
said Narcisse to Pierre; "I will try to show you the gardens."

Down below, in the vestibule, a door of which opened on to a broad path,
he spoke to another attendant, a former pontifical soldier whom he
personally knew. The man at once let him pass with Pierre, but was unable
to tell him whether Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo had accompanied his
Holiness that day.

"No matter," resumed Narcisse when he and his companion were alone in the
path; "I don't despair of meeting him--and these, you see, are the famous
gardens of the Vatican."

They are very extensive grounds, and the Pope can go quite two and a half
miles by passing along the paths of the wood, the vineyard, and the
kitchen garden. Occupying the plateau of the Vatican hill, which the
med