e enjoyers and intriguers whose appetite for the spoils of our
conquest has retarded everything. But I live again in my dear
grand-nephew Attilio, who represents the future, the generation of brave
and worthy men who will purify and educate the country. Ah! may some of
the great ones of to-morrow spring from him and that adorable little
Princess Celia, whom my niece Stefana, a sensible woman at bottom,
brought to see me the other day. If you had seen that child fling her
arms about me, call me endearing names, and tell me that I should be
godfather to her first son, so that he might bear my name and once again
save Italy! Yes, yes, may peace be concluded around that coming cradle;
may the union of those dear children be the indissoluble marriage of Rome
and the whole nation, and may all be repaired, and all blossom anew in
their love!"

Tears came to his eyes, and Pierre, touched by his inextinguishable
patriotism, sought to please him. "I myself," said he, "expressed to your
son much the same wish on the evening of the betrothal _fete_, when I
told him I trusted that their nuptials might be definitive and fruitful,
and that from them and all the others there might arise the great nation
which, now that I begin to know you, I hope you will soon become!"

"You said that!" exclaimed Orlando. "Well, I forgive your book, for you
have understood at last; and new Rome, there she is, the Rome which is
ours, which we wish to make worthy of her glorious past, and for the
third time the queen of the world."

With one of those broad gestures into which he put all his remaining
life, he pointed to the curtainless window where Rome spread out in
solemn majesty from one horizon to the other. But, suddenly he turned his
head and in a fit of paternal indignation began to apostrophise young
Angiolo Mascara. "You young rascal!" said he, "it's our Rome which you
dream of destroying with your bombs, which you talk of razing like a
rotten, tottering house, so as to rid the world of it for ever!"

Angiolo had hitherto remained silent, passionately listening to the
others. His pretty, girlish, beardless face reflected the slightest
emotion in sudden flashes; and his big blue eyes also had glowed on
hearing what had been said of the people, the new people which it was
necessary to create. "Yes!" he slowly replied in his pure and musical
voice, "we mean to raze it and not leave a stone of it, but raze it in
order to build it up again."

Or