s poisoned, because he
was his dearest confidant, the counsellor to whom he always listened, and
whose wise advice was a guarantee of success."

Pierre's bewilderment was increasing, and, irritated by the impassibility
of Santobono, he addressed him direct. "It's idiotic, it's awful! Does
your reverence also believe in these frightful stories?"

But the priest of Frascati gave no sign. His thick, passionate lips
remained closed while his black glowing eyes never ceased to gaze at
Prada. The latter, moreover, was quoting other instances. There was the
case of Monsignor Nazzarelli, who had been found in bed, shrunken and
calcined like carbon. And there was that of Monsignor Brando, struck down
in his sacerdotal vestments at St. Peter's itself, in the very sacristy,
during vespers!

"Ah! _Mon Dieu_!" sighed Pierre, "you will tell me so much that I myself
shall end by trembling, and sha'n't dare to eat anything but boiled eggs
as long as I stay in this terrible Rome of yours."

For a moment this whimsical reply enlivened both the Count and Pierre.
But it was quite true that their conversation showed Rome under a
terrible aspect, for it conjured up the Eternal City of Crime, the city
of poison and the knife, where for more than two thousand years, ever
since the raising of the first bit of wall, the lust of power, the
frantic hunger for possession and enjoyment, had armed men's hands,
ensanguined the pavements, and cast victims into the river and the
ground. Assassinations and poisonings under the emperors, poisonings and
assassinations under the popes, ever did the same torrent of abominations
strew that tragic soil with death amidst the sovereign glory of the sun.

"All the same," said the Count, "those who take precautions are perhaps
not ill advised. It is said that more than one cardinal shudders and
mistrusts people. One whom I know will never eat anything that has not
been bought and prepared by his own cook. And as for the Pope, if he is
anxious--"

Pierre again raised a cry of stupefaction. "What, the Pope himself! The
Pope afraid of being poisoned!"

"Well, my dear Abbe, people commonly assert it. There are certainly days
when he considers himself more menaced than anybody else. And are you not
aware of the old Roman view that a pope ought never to live till too
great an age, and that when he is so obstinate as not to die at the right
time he ought to be assisted? As soon as a pope begins to fall into
secon