st
lovely, most voluptuous, most passionate guise. Ah! that Pope, that old
man strolling with his Divinity of grief, humility, and renunciation
along the paths of those gardens of love, in the languid evenings of the
hot summer days, beneath the caressing scents of pine and eucalyptus,
ripe oranges, and tall, acrid box-shrubs! The whole atmosphere around him
proclaimed the powers of the great god Pan. How pleasant was the thought
of living there, amidst that magnificence of heaven and of earth, of
loving the beauty of woman and of rejoicing in the fruitfulness of all!
And suddenly the decisive truth burst forth that from a land of such joy
and light it was only possible for a temporal religion of conquest and
political domination to rise; not the mystical, pain-fraught religion of
the North--the religion of the soul!

However, Narcisse led the young priest away, telling him other anecdotes
as they went--anecdotes of the occasional _bonhomie_ of Leo XIII, who
would stop to chat with the gardeners, and question them about the health
of the trees and the sale of the oranges. And he also mentioned the
Pope's former passion for a pair of gazelles, sent him from Africa, two
graceful creatures which he had been fond of caressing, and at whose
death he had shed tears. But Pierre no longer listened. When they found
themselves on the Piazza of St. Peter's, he turned round and gazed at the
Vatican once more.

His eyes had fallen on the gate of bronze, and he remembered having
wondered that morning what there might be behind these metal panels
ornamented with big nails. And he did not yet dare to answer the
question, and decide if the new nations thirsting for fraternity and
justice would really find there the religion necessary for the
democracies of to-morrow; for he had not been able to probe things, and
only carried a first impression away with him. But how keen it was, and
how ill it boded for his dreams! A gate of bronze! Yes, a hard,
impregnable gate, so completely shutting the Vatican off from the rest of
the world that nothing new had entered the palace for three hundred
years. Behind that portal the old centuries, as far as the sixteenth,
remained immutable. Time seemed to have stayed its course there for ever;
nothing more stirred; the very costumes of the Swiss Guards, the Noble
Guards, and the prelates themselves were unchanged; and you found
yourself in the world of three hundred years ago, with its etiquette, its
c