"Your Holiness," said I, "has condescended to allow the humblest of your servants to hear your opinions on this matter; and it well becomes the warrior to speak freely on that combat, whose dangers he has himself encountered, and in which he has long since obtained the palm of victory!"
"You have a favourable opinion of me, Brother," said the Pope; "or do you look upon the Tiara, as the laurel crown, announcing my victory to the world?"
[The Editor has here left out two or three pages of this conversation, as it seems irrelevant to the general tenure of the narrative.]
Hereupon the Pope again rose from his chair. "Thou art an excellent orator, Brother Medardus," said he, "and hast spoken after my own heart—we shall, as I perceive, understand one another better ere long than we now do. Remain at Rome. In a few days you will be promoted to the dignity of Prior of the Capuchin Convent, where a situation is now vacant, and afterwards, perhaps, you will be chosen for my Father Confessor. Go then, behave yourself with more prudence in the churches, and think not of raising yourself to canonization. The calendar is already crowded!—Farewell!"
Our interview ended here, and by these last words of the Pope, I was not a little astonished, as indeed I had been by his whole behaviour throughout, which was completely at variance with the picture which I had previously drawn of him. I had imagined not only that he was a worthily appointed Vicegerent of Heaven on this earth, but that he was gifted with every virtue, and all mental energies. He had, on the contrary, falsely supposed that I was actuated by the base ambition of being looked on as a saint, and now wished to excite in my mind a desire for other temporal distinctions, which was, in truth, not less sinful.
Notwithstanding my perplexity and dissatisfaction, I was led to conform to what the Pope had enjoined, as to the intermission of my penitential exercises; and I wandered for some days idly through the streets of Rome, meditating chiefly on my past life, on the penitence which I had undergone, and the career which was yet before me.
On the last of these idle days, as I passed through the Spanish Square, there was a mob assembled round the stage of a puppet-player. My attention was at once attracted by the croaking voice of Pulcinello, and the laughter of the audience. The first act was ended as I came up—the curtain dropped, and the audience stood in anxious expectation of the second.
The little curtain again drew up. The youthful King David appeared with his sling and his sackful of pebbles. With the most ludicrous gestures, he proved that the monstrous giant should now be slain, and Israel rescued. Then there was heard a fearful hollow roaring and rustling under the stage, whereupon the giant mounted up, with a huge and most absurdly ill-proportioned head. How was I astonished, when, at my first glance of this giant's head, I recognized the features of my old friend Belcampo. Right under his head he had, by means of an ingenious apparatus, contrived to fit on a small body, conformable to those of the other puppets, while his own person was concealed by the stage drapery, which last served, at the same time, for the mantle of the giant. Goliah, with most hideous grimaces of visage and contortions of his dwarfish body, held a proud and threatening discourse, which King David only now and then interrupted by a shrill and contemptuous laughter.