he Card. Vicar to _his_ Confessor)
to give a roof to the couple because of the woman; also there was a
suspicion that the couple had not been married in church. All this P.
D. had learned when these people were still there, in the arch. But we
found them gone; and the strangest sight instead. In the immense
thickness of the gate a heap of reeds in a corner; and strewn all
about in this artificial grotto, old rusty utensils, a grater, a
strainer, broken pots, papers, rags, half-burnt logs, a straw hat, and
a walking stick! And over a kind of recess, on a plank, a little
shrine, two broken Madonnas picked out of some dust-heap, withered
flowers in a crock, and a sprig of olive, evidently of last Palm
Sunday! Poor little properties, so poor, so wretched that they had
remained unmolested, despised even by the poorest, safe at the end of
that blind road in that closed-up gate of Rome! That two human beings
in our day should have lived there for months, even years (for they
returned after an absence, the monk told us); lived, like some
anchorites of old, in the ruins, in a grotto made by human hands;
with the vineyards all round, and the shrubs and flowers waving from
the broken masonry! Their rags and shreds of paper littered the rank
grass and acanthus by the walled-up gate, where the little
Bramantesque temple stands, built by a French prelate under Julius
II., and inscribed "Au plaisir de Dieu." _Au plaisir de Dieu!_

Over the walls, the great bones of the Baths of Caracalla half hidden
by trees: and, closing the distance, St. Peters. We went into the
little damp church, with a twelfth-century campanile and well in the
rose-garden; a deserted little place, only a bit of opus Alexandrinum,
and a string of Cosmati work remaining, all the rest overlaid by the
frescoes and stuccoes of a seventeenth-century Rasponi. The grey
Franciscan who showed us round told us that a lady had given five
hundred francs for admission of the old man and woman of the gate at
the Petites Soeurs; but these required the religious marriage. About a
month ago the couple was married and taken off to the Petites Soeurs;
the day after the poor old man died! The old people had desired the
monks to distribute their bedding and rags to the poor, now they
themselves were provided for. And that is how the place came to be
abandoned. The old man told the monks he much preferred the arch to
the damp cellar where a greengrocer of Rome used to make him sleep.