vernment. He then served as
secretary to Mazzini, with whom he disagreed for reasons which clashed
with Ribalta's honor. Would passion for a woman have involved him in
such extravagance? In 1870 Ribalta returned to Rome, where he opened,
if one may apply such a term to such a hole, a book-shop. But he is an
amateur bookseller, and will refuse you admission if you displease him.
Having inherited a small income, he sells or he does not, following his
fancy or the requirements of his own purchases, to-day asking you twenty
francs for a wretched engraving for which he paid ten sous, to-morrow
giving you at a low price a costly book, the value of which he knows.
Rabid Gallophobe, he never pardoned his old general the campaign of
Dijon any more than he forgave Victor Emmanuel for having left the
Vatican to Pius IX. "The house of Savoy and the papacy," said he, when
he was confidential, "are two eggs which we must not eat on the same
dish." And he would tell of a certain pillar of St. Peter's hollowed
into a staircase by Bernin, where a cartouch of dynamite was placed.
If you were to ask him why he became a book collector, he would bid you
step over a pile of papers, of boarding and of folios. Then he would
show you an immense chamber, or rather a shed, where thousands of
pamphlets were piled up along the walls: "These are the rules of all
the convents suppressed by Italy. I shall write their history." Then he
would stare at you, for he would fear that you might be a spy sent
by the king with the sole object of learning the plans of his most
dangerous enemy--one of those spies of whom he has been so much in awe
that for twenty years no one has known where he slept, where he ate,
where he hid when the shutters of his shop in the Rue Borgognona were
closed. He expected, on account of his past, and his secret manner,
to be arrested at the time of the outrage of Passanante as one of the
members of those Circoli Barsanti, to whom a refractory corporal gave
his name.

But, on examining the dusty cartoons of the old book-stall, the police
discovered nothing except a prodigious quantity of grotesque verses
directed against the Piedmontese and the French, against the Germans and
the Triple Alliance, against the Italian republicans and the ministers,
against Cavour and Signor Crispi, against the University of Rome and the
Inquisition, against the monks and the capitalists! It was, no doubt,
one of those pasquinades which his customers w