t
about two o'clock they set off for the museum, skirting the basilica by
way of the Piazza della Sagrestia. It was a bright, deserted, burning
district; and again, but in a far greater degree, did the young priest
experience that sensation of bare, tawny, sun-baked majesty which had
come upon him while gazing into the Court of San Damaso. Then, as he
passed the apse of St. Peter's, the enormity of the colossus was brought
home to him more strongly than ever: it rose like a giant bouquet of
architecture edged by empty expanses of pavement sprinkled with fine
weeds. And in all the silent immensity there were only two children
playing in the shadow of a wall. The old papal mint, the Zecca, now an
Italian possession, and guarded by soldiers of the royal army, is on the
left of the passage leading to the museums, while on the right, just in
front, is one of the entrances of honour to the Vatican where the papal
Swiss Guard keeps watch and ward; and this is the entrance by which,
according to etiquette, the pair-horse carriages convey the Pope's
visitors into the Court of San Damaso.

Following the long lane which ascends between a wing of the palace and
its garden wall, Narcisse and Pierre at last reached the Museum of
Antiquities. Ah! what a museum it is, with galleries innumerable, a
museum compounded of three museums, the Pio-Clementino, Chiaramonti, and
the Braccio-Nuovo, and containing a whole world found beneath the soil,
then exhumed, and now glorified in full sunlight. For more than two hours
Pierre went from one hall to another, dazzled by the masterpieces,
bewildered by the accumulation of genius and beauty. It was not only the
celebrated examples of statuary, the Laocoon and the Apollo of the
cabinets of the Belvedere, the Meleager, or even the torso of
Hercules--that astonished him. He was yet more impressed by the
_ensemble_, by the innumerable quantities of Venuses, Bacchuses, and
deified emperors and empresses, by the whole superb growth of beautiful
or August flesh celebrating the immortality of life. Three days
previously he had visited the Museum of the Capitol, where he had admired
the Venus, the Dying Gaul,* the marvellous Centaurs of black marble, and
the extraordinary collection of busts, but here his admiration became
intensified into stupor by the inexhaustible wealth of the galleries.
And, with more curiosity for life than for art, perhaps, he again
lingered before the busts which so powerfully resu