f birth. But his third title was
perhaps his most curious. It had been conferred upon him informally by
the populace of the Roman slum in which his titular church, St. Mary of
the Lilies, was situated: the little Uncle of the Poor.

As Italians measure wealth, Cardinal Udeschini was a wealthy man. What
with his private fortune and official stipends, he commanded an income
of something like a hundred thousand lire. He allowed himself five
thousand lire a year for food, clothing, and general expenses. Lodging
and service he had for nothing in the palace of his family. The
remaining ninety-odd thousand lire of his budget... Well, we all know
that titles can be purchased in Italy; and that was no doubt the price
he paid for the title I have mentioned.

However, it was not in money only that Cardinal Udeschim paid. He paid
also in labour. I have said that his titular church was in a slum. Rome
surely contained no slum more fetid, none more perilous--a region of
cut-throat alleys, south of the Ghetto, along the Tiber bank. Night
after night, accompanied by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio
Appolloni, the Cardinal worked there as hard as any hard-working curate:
visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish,
persuading the drunken from their taverns, making peace between the
combative. Not infrequently, when he came home, he would add a pair
of stilettos to his already large collection of such relics. And his
homecomings were apt to be late--oftener than not, after midnight; and
sometimes, indeed, in the vague twilight of morning, at the hour when,
as he once expressed it to Don Giorgio, "the tired burglar is just
lying down to rest." And every Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect
of Archives and Inscriptions sat for three hours boxed up in his
confessional, like any parish priest--in his confessional at St. Mary
of the Lilies, where the penitents who breathed their secrets into his
ears, and received his fatherly counsels... I beg your pardon. One must
not, of course, remember his rags or his sores, when Lazarus approaches
that tribunal.

But I don't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he was not
a prig. For all his works of supererogation, his life was a life of pomp
and luxury, compared to the proper saint's life. He wore no hair shirt;
I doubt if he knew the taste of the Discipline. He had his weaknesses,
his foibles--even, if you will, his vices. I have intimated that he was
fond o