replied, that so many commissioners could be named, that the
work would soon be done.

And so the Council ended.

But I must, perforce, retrace my steps at this point to many other
matters, which I have left far behind me in going on at once to the end
of this financial labyrinth. And first let me tell what happened to that
monstrous personage, Alberoni, how he fell from the lofty pinnacle of
dower on which he had placed himself, and lost all consideration and all
importance in the fall. The story is mightily curious and instructive.

CHAPTER CIII

Alberoni had made himself detested by all Europe,--for all Europe, in one
way or another, was the victim of his crimes. He was detested as the
absolute master of Spain, whose guides were perfidy, ambition, personal
interest, views always oblique, often caprice, sometimes madness; and
whose selfish desires, varied and diversified according to the fantasy
of the moment, were hidden under schemes always uncertain and oftentimes
impossible of execution. Accustomed to keep the King and Queen of Spain
in chains, and in the narrowest and obscurest prison, where he allowed
them to communicate with no one, and made them see, feel, and breathe
through him, and blindly obey his every wish; he caused all Spain to
tremble, and had annihilated all power there, except his own, by the most
violent acts, constraining himself in no way, despising his master and
his mistress, whose will and whose authority he had utterly absorbed.
He braved successively all the powers of Europe, and aspired to nothing
less than to deceive them all, then to govern them, making them serve all
his ends; and seeing at last his cunning exhausted, tried to execute
alone, and without allies, the plan he had formed.

This plan was nothing less than to take away from the Emperor all that
the peace of Utrecht had left him in Italy; all that the Spanish house of
Austria had possessed there; to dominate the Pope and the King of Sicily;
to deprive the Emperor of the help of France and England, by exciting the
first against the Regent through the schemes of the ambassador Cellamare
and the Duc du Maine; and by sending King James to England, by the aid of
the North, so as to keep King George occupied with a civil war. In the
end he wished to profit by all these disorders, by transporting into
Italy (which his cardinalship made him regard as a safe asylum against
all reverses) the immense treasures he had pillaged an