to please everybody;
that Corona had refused to be pleased by a public ceremony; and that,
finally, the Cardinal, seeing himself hard pressed, had persuaded his
Holiness himself to express a wish that the marriage should take place in
the most solemn and public manner; wherefore Corona had reluctantly
yielded the point, and the matter was arranged. The fact was that the
Cardinal wished to make a sort of demonstration of the solidarity of the
Roman nobility: it suited his aims to enter into every detail which could
add to the importance of the Roman Court, and which could help to impress
upon the foreign Ministers the belief that in all matters the Romans as
one man would stand by each other and by the Vatican. No one knew better
than he how the spectacle of a religious solemnity, at which the whole
nobility would attend in a body, must strike the mind of a stranger in
Rome; for in Roman ceremonies of that day there was a pomp and
magnificence surpassing that found in any other Court of Europe. The
whole marriage would become an event of which he could make an impressive
use, and he was determined not to forego any advantages which might arise
from it; for he was a man who of all men well understood the value of
details in maintaining prestige.

But to the two principal actors in the day's doings the affair was an
unmitigated annoyance, and even their own great and true happiness could
not lighten the excessive fatigue of the pompous ceremony and of the
still more pompous reception which followed it. To describe that day
would be to make out a catalogue of gorgeous equipages, gorgeous
costumes, gorgeous decorations. Many pages would not suffice to enumerate
the cardinals, the dignitaries, the ambassadors, the great nobles, whose
magnificent coaches drove up in long file through the Piazza dei Santi
Apostoli to the door of the Basilica. The columns of the 'Osservatore
Romano' were full of it for a week afterwards. There was no end to the
descriptions of the costumes, from the white satin and diamonds of
the bride to the festal uniforms of the Cardinal Arch-priest's retinue.
Not a personage of importance was overlooked in the newspaper account,
not a diplomatist, not an officer of Zouaves. And society read the praise
of itself, and found it much more interesting than the praise of the
bride and bridegroom; and only one or two people were offended because
the paper had made a mistake in naming the colours of the hammer-clot