"A great man, General, if half one hears about him is true."
"Great?" said the American. "Yes, and no, Sir Evelyn, according as you
regard him. In the opinion of some of his followers the Baron Bonelli is
the greatest man in the country--greater than the King himself--and a
statesman too big for Italy. One of those commanding personages who
carry everything before them, so that when they speak even monarchs are
bound to obey. That's one view of his picture, Sir Evelyn."
"And the other view?"
General Potter glanced in the direction of a door hung with curtains,
from which there came at intervals the deadened drumming of voices, and
then he said: "A man of implacable temper and imperious soul, an infidel of hard and
cynical spirit, a sceptic and a tyrant."
"Which view do the people take?"
"Can you ask? The people hate him for the heavy burden of taxation with
which he is destroying the nation in his attempt to build it up."
"And the clergy, and the Court, and the aristocracy?"
"The clergy fear him, the Court detests him, and the Roman aristocracy
are rancorously hostile."
"Yet he rules them all, nevertheless?"
"Yes, sir, with a rod of iron--people, Court, princes, Parliament, King
as well--and seems to have only one unsatisfied desire, to break up the
last remaining rights of the Vatican and rule the old Pope himself."
"And yet he invites us to sit in his Loggia and look at the Pope's
procession."
"Perhaps because he intends it shall be the last we may ever see of it."
"The Princess Bellini and Don Camillo Murelli," said Felice's sepulchral
voice from the door.
An elderly aristocratic beauty wearing nodding white plumes came in with
a pallid young Roman noble dressed in the English fashion.
"You come to church, Don Camillo?"
"Heard it was a service which happened only once in a hundred years,
dear General, and thought it mightn't be convenient to come next time,"
said the young Roman.
"And you, Princess! Come now, confess, is it the perfume of the incense
which brings you to the Pope's procession, or the perfume of the
promenaders?"
"Nonsense, General!" said the little woman, tapping the American with
the tip of her lorgnette. "Who comes to a ceremony like this to say her
prayers? Nobody whatever, and if the Holy Father himself were to
say...."
"Oh! oh!"