tian and
the confessor were standing close to the door. The Venetian submitted to
the same formalities as his two predecessors, hesitated as they had done
at the sight of the two strangers, but his confidence restored by the
order of the general, he revealed that the pope, terrified at the
power of the order, was weaving a plot for the general expulsion of the
Jesuits, and was tampering with the different courts of Europe in order
to obtain their assistance. He described the pontiff's auxiliaries,
his means of action, and indicated the particular locality in the
Archipelago where, by a sudden surprise, two cardinals, adepts of
the eleventh year, and, consequently, high in authority, were to be
transported, together with thirty-two of the principal affiliated
members of Rome. The Franciscan thanked the Signor Marini. It was by no
means a slight service he had rendered the society by denouncing this
pontifical project. The Venetian thereupon received directions to
set off in a quarter of an hour, and left as radiant as if he already
possessed the ring, the sign of the supreme authority of the society.
As, however, he was departing, the Franciscan murmured to himself:
"All these men are either spies, or a sort of police, not one of them a
general; they have all discovered a plot, but not one of them a secret.
It is not by means of ruin, or war, or force, that the Society of Jesus
is to be governed, but by that mysterious influence moral superiority
alone confers. No, the man is not yet found, and to complete the
misfortune, Heaven strikes me down, and I am dying. Oh! must the society
indeed fall with me for want of a column to support it? Must death,
which is waiting for me, swallow up with me the future of the order;
that future which ten years more of my own life would have rendered
eternal? for that future, with the reign of the new king, is
opening radiant and full of splendor." These words, which had been
half-reflected, half-pronounced aloud, were listened to by the Jesuit
confessor with a terror similar to that with which one listens to the
wanderings of a person attacked by fever, whilst Grisart, with a mind of
higher order, devoured them as the revelations of an unknown world, in
which his looks were plunged without ability to comprehend. Suddenly the
Franciscan recovered himself.

"Let us finish this," he said; "death is approaching. Oh! just now I
was dying resignedly, for I hoped... while now I sink in despair,