chettis, the Muti Papazzurris, and now-a-days to the family of
About's charming and unhappy Tolla Ferraldi. Clement XI. had given or
lent it to the Elder Pretender: James III., as he was styled in Italy,
had settled in it about 1719 with his beautiful bride Maria Clementina
Sobieska, romantically filched by her Jacobites from the convent at
Innsbruck, where the Emperor Charles VI. had hoped to restrain her from
so compromising a match; here, in the year 1720, Charles Edward had been
born and had his baby fingers kissed by the whole sacred college; and
here the so-called King of England had died at last, a melancholy
hypochondriac, in 1766. The palace closes in the narrow end of the
square of the Santissimi Apostoli, stately and quiet with its various
palaces, Colonna, Odescalchi, and whatever else their names, and its
pillared church front. There is a certain aristocratic serenity about
that square, separated, like a big palace yard, from the bustling Corso
in front; yet to me there remains, a tradition of my childhood, a sort
of grotesque and horrid suggestiveness connected with this peaceful and
princely corner of Rome. For, many years ago, when the square of the
Santissimi Apostoli was still periodically strewn with sand that the
Pope might not be jolted when his golden coach drove up to the church,
and when the names of Charles Edward and his Countess were curiously
mixed up in my brain with those of Charles the First and Mary Queen of
Scots, there used to be in a little street leading out of the square
towards the Colonna Gardens, a dark recess in the blank church-wall, an
embrasure, sheltered by a pent-house roof and raised like a stage a few
steep steps above the pavement; and in it loomed, strapped to a chair,
dark in the shadow, a creature in a long black robe and a skull cap
drawn close over his head; a vague, contorted, writhing and gibbering
horror, of whose St. Vitus twistings and mouthings we children scarcely
ventured to catch a glimpse as we hurried up the narrow street, followed
by the bestial cries and moans of the solitary maniac. This weird and
grotesque sight, more weird and more grotesque seen through a muddled
childish fancy and through the haze of years, has remained associated in
my mind with that particular corner of Rome, where, with windows looking
down upon that street, upon that blank church-wall with its little
black recess, the palace of the Stuarts closes in the narrow end of the
square of