essantly tracked, condemned, executed, and yet still and ever erect.
As soon as their power asserts itself, their unpopularity begins and
gradually becomes universal. Hoots of execration arise around them,
abominable accusations, scandalous law cases in which they appear as
corruptors and felons. Pascal devotes them to public contempt,
parliaments condemn their books to be burnt, universities denounce their
system of morals and their teaching as poisonous. They foment such
disturbances, such struggles in every kingdom, that organised persecution
sets in, and they are soon driven from everywhere. During more than a
century they become wanderers, expelled, then recalled, passing and
repassing frontiers, leaving a country amidst cries of hatred to return
to it as soon as quiet has been restored. Finally, for supreme disaster,
they are suppressed by one pope, but another re-establishes them, and
since then they have been virtually tolerated everywhere. And in the
diplomatic self-effacement, the shade in which they have the prudence to
sequester themselves, they are none the less triumphant, quietly
confident of their victory like soldiers who have once and for ever
subdued the earth.

Pierre was aware that, judging by mere appearances, the Jesuits were
nowadays dispossessed of all influence in Rome. They no longer officiated
at the Gesu, they no longer directed the Collegio Romano, where they
formerly fashioned so many souls; and with no abode of their own, reduced
to accept foreign hospitality, they had modestly sought a refuge at the
Collegio Germanico, where there is a little chapel. There they taught and
there they still confessed, but without the slightest bustle or display.
Was one to believe, however, that this effacement was but masterly
cunning, a feigned disappearance in order that they might really remain
secret, all-powerful masters, the hidden hand which directs and guides
everything? People certainly said that the proclamation of papal
Infallibility had been their work, a weapon with which they had armed
themselves whilst feigning to bestow it on the papacy, in readiness for
the coming decisive task which their genius foresaw in the approaching
social upheavals. And thus there might perhaps be some truth in what Don
Vigilio, with a shiver of mystery, related about their occult
sovereignty, a seizin, as it were, of the government of the Church, a
royalty ignored but nevertheless complete.

As this idea occurre