arly had to deal
with the secular clergy, and learnt to know them well. A hierarchical
system which was still vigorously enforced maintained them in various
ranks and classes. Up above, around the Pope, reigned the pontifical
family, the high and noble cardinals and prelates whose conceit was great
in spite of their apparent familiarity. Below them the parish clergy
formed a very worthy middle class of wise and moderate minds; and here
patriot priests were not rare. Moreover, the Italian occupation of a
quarter of a century, by installing in the city a world of functionaries
who saw everything that went on, had, curiously enough, greatly purified
the private life of the Roman priesthood, in which under the popes women,
beyond all question, played a supreme part. And finally one came to the
plebeian clergy whom Pierre studied with curiosity, a collection of
wretched, grimy, half-naked priests who like famished animals prowled
around in search of masses, and drifted into disreputable taverns in the
company of beggars and thieves. However, he was more interested by the
floating population of foreign priests from all parts of Christendom--the
adventurers, the ambitious ones, the believers, the madmen whom Rome
attracted just as a lamp at night time attracts the insects of the gloom.
Among these were men of every nationality, position, and age, all lashed
on by their appetites and scrambling from morn till eve around the
Vatican, in order to snap at the prey which they hoped to secure. He
found them everywhere, and told himself with some shame that he was one
of them, that the unit of his own personality served to increase the
incredible number of cassocks that one encountered in the streets. Ah!
that ebb and flow, that ceaseless tide of black gowns and frocks of every
hue! With their processions of students ever walking abroad, the
seminaries of the different nations would alone have sufficed to drape
and decorate the streets, for there were the French and the English all
in black, the South Americans in black with blue sashes, the North
Americans in black with red sashes, the Poles in black with green sashes,
the Greeks in blue, the Germans in red, the Scots in violet, the Romans
in black or violet or purple, the Bohemians with chocolate sashes, the
Irish with red lappets, the Spaniards with blue cords, to say nothing of
all the others with broidery and bindings and buttons in a hundred
different styles. And in addition ther