er and Saint Peter's.

As you stand before the Papal palace, and especially as you enter it,
you are struck with its being a very dull monument. History enough was
enacted here: the great schism lasted from 1305 to 1370, during which
seven Popes, all Frenchmen, carried on the court of Avignon on
principles that have not commended themselves to the esteem of
posterity. But history has been whitewashed away, and the scandals of
that period have mingled with the dust of dilapidations and repairs. The
building has for many years been occupied as a barrack for regiments of
the line, and the main characteristics of a barrack--an extreme nudity
and a very queer smell--prevail throughout its endless compartments.
Nothing could have been more cruelly dismal than the appearance it
presented at the time of this third visit of mine. A regiment, changing
quarters, had departed the day before, and another was expected to
arrive (from Algeria) on the morrow. The place had been left in the
befouled and belittered condition which marks the passage of the
military after they have broken camp, and it would offer but a
melancholy welcome to the regiment that was about to take possession.
Enormous windows had been left carelessly open all over the building,
and the rain and wind were beating into empty rooms and passages, making
draughts which purified, perhaps, but which scarcely cheered. For an
arrival it was horrible. A handful of soldiers had remained behind. In
one of the big vaulted rooms several of them were lying on their
wretched beds, in the dim light, in the cold, in the damp, with the
bleak bare walls before them and their overcoats, spread over them,
pulled up to their noses. I pitied them immensely, though they may have
felt less wretched than they looked. I thought not of the old
profligacies and crimes, not of the funnel-shaped torture-chamber
(which, after exciting the shudder of generations, has been ascertained
now, I believe, to have been a mediaeval bakehouse), not of the tower of
the _glaciere_ and the horrors perpetrated here in the Revolution, but
of the military burden of young France. One wonders how young France
endures it, and one is forced to believe that the French conscript has,
in addition to his notorious good-humour, greater toughness than is
commonly supposed by those who consider only the more relaxing
influences of French civilisation. I hope he finds occasional
compensation for such moments as I saw tho