blished in
the period between St. Peter and Gregory XVI, every pope lasts about
eight years, and these eight years, according to the character of the man
who is elected, are a period either of tranquillity or of disorder, of
justice or of venality, of peace or of war.

Never perhaps since the day when the first successor of St. Peter took
his seat on the, pontifical throne until the interregnum which now
occurred, had so great an agitation been shown as there was at this
moment, when, as we have shown, all these people were thronging on the
Piazza of St. Peter and in the streets which led to it. It is true that
this was not without reason; for Innocent VIII--who was called the father
of his people because he had added to his subjects eight sons and the
same number of daughters--had, as we have said, after living a life of
self-indulgence, just died, after a death-struggle during which, if the
journal of Stefano Infessura may be believed, two hundred and twenty
murders were committed in the streets of Rome. The authority had then
devolved in the customary way upon the Cardinal Camerlengo, who during
the interregnum had sovereign powers; but as he had been obliged to
fulfil all the duties of his office--that is, to get money coined in his
name and bearing his arms, to take the fisherman's ring from the finger
of the dead pope, to dress, shave and paint him, to have the corpse
embalmed, to lower the coffin after nine days' obsequies into the
provisional niche where the last deceased pope has to remain until his
successor comes to take his place and consign him to his final tomb;
lastly, as he had been obliged to wall up the door of the Conclave and
the window of the balcony from which the pontifical election is
proclaimed, he had not had a single moment for busying himself with the
police; so that the assassinations had continued in goodly fashion, and
there were loud cries for an energetic hand which should make all these
swords and all these daggers retire into their sheaths.

Now the eyes of this multitude were fixed, as we have said, upon the
Vatican, and particularly upon one chimney, from which would come the
first signal, when suddenly, at the moment of the 'Ave Maria'--that is to
say, at the hour when the day begins to decline--great cries went up from
all the crowd mixed with bursts of laughter, a discordant murmur of
threats and raillery, the cause being that they had just perceived at the
top of the chimney a