long remain waste, so that it
might dry and become purified in the sun. In all the districts on either
side of the Tiber where extensive improvements have been undertaken you
find the same scenes. You follow some narrow, damp, evil-smelling street
with black house-fronts and overhanging roofs, and suddenly come upon a
clearing as in a forest of ancient leprous hovels. There are squares,
broad footways; lofty white carved buildings yet in the rough, littered
with rubbish and fenced off. On every side you find as it were a huge
building yard, which the financial crisis perpetuates; the city of
to-morrow arrested in its growth, stranded there in its monstrous,
precocious, surprising infancy. Nevertheless, therein lies good and
healthful work, such as was and is absolutely necessary if Rome is to
become a great modern city, instead of being left to rot, to dwindle into
a mere ancient curiosity, a museum show-piece.

That day, as Pierre went from the Trastevere to the Palazzo Farnese,
where he was expected, he chose a roundabout route, following the Via di
Pettinari and the Via dei Giubbonari, the former so dark and narrow with
a great hospital wall on one side and a row of wretched houses on the
other, and the latter animated by a constant stream of people and
enlivened by the jewellers' windows, full of big gold chains, and the
displays of the drapers' shops, where stuffs hung in bright red, blue,
green, and yellow lengths. And the popular district through which he had
roamed and the trading district which he was now crossing reminded him of
the castle fields with their mass of workpeople reduced to mendicity by
lack of employment and forced to camp in the superb, unfinished,
abandoned mansions. Ah! the poor, sad people, who were yet so childish,
kept in the ignorance and credulity of a savage race by centuries of
theocracy, so habituated to mental night and bodily suffering that even
to-day they remained apart from the social awakening, simply desirous of
enjoying their pride, indolence, and sunlight in peace! They seemed both
blind and deaf in their decadence, and whilst Rome was being overturned
they continued to lead the stagnant life of former times, realising
nought but the worries of the improvements, the demolition of the old
favourite districts, the consequent change in habits, and the rise in the
cost of food, as if indeed they would rather have gone without light,
cleanliness, and health, since these could only b