The Roman Question

by Edmond About

Among these batches of ridiculous travellers, you are certain to find some ecclesiastics. Here is one from our own country. You have known him in France. Does not he strike you as being somewhat changed? Not in his looks, but his manner. Beneath the shadow of his own church tower, in the midst of his own flock, he used to be the mildest, the meekest, and most modest of parish priests. He bowed low to the Mayor, and to the most microscopic of the authorities. At Rome, his hat seems glued to his head. I almost think—Heaven forgive me!—it is a trifle cocked. How jauntily his cassock is tucked up! How he struts along the street! Is not his hand on his hip? Something very like it. The reason of this change is as clear as the sun at noon. He is in a kingdom governed by his own class. He inhales an atmosphere impregnated with clerical pride and theocratic omnipotence. Phiz! It is a bottle of champagne saluting him with the cork. By the time he has drunk all the contents of the intoxicating beverage, he will begin to mutter between his teeth that the French clergy does not get its deserts, and that we are a long time in restoring to it the property taken away by the Revolution.

I actually heard this argument maintained on board the steamer which brought me back to France. The principal passengers were Prince Souworf, Governor of the province of Riga, one of the most distinguished men in Europe; M. de la Rochefoucauld, attached to the French embassy; M. de Angelis, a highly educated and really distinguished mercante di campagna; M. Oudry, engineer of the Civita Vecchia railway: and a French ecclesiastic of a respectable age and corpulence. This reverend personage, who was nowise disinclined to argumentation, and who had just left a country where the priests are never wrong, took to holding-forth after dinner upon the merits of the Pontifical Government. I answered as well as I could, like a man unaccustomed to public speaking. Driven to my last entrenchments, and called upon to relate some fact which should not redound to the Pope's credit, I chose, at hazard, a recent event then known to all Rome, as it was speedily about to be to all Europe. My honourable interlocutor met my statement with the most unqualified, formal, and unhesitating denial. He accused me of impudently calumniating an innocent administration, and of propagating lies fabricated by the enemies of religion. His language was so sublimely authoritative, that I felt confounded, overpowered, crushed, and, for a moment, I asked myself whether I had not really been telling a lie.

The story I had related was that of the boy Mortara.

But I return to Rome and our travellers in the trumpery line. Those we overheard before are already gone. But their places have been quickly filled. They follow one another, like vapours rising from the ocean, and they are as much like one another as one sea-wave is to its predecessor. See them laying-in their stocks of Roman souvenirs at the shops in the Corso and the Via Condotti. Their selections are principally from the cheap rosaries, coarse mosaics, and gilt jewellery, and generally those articles of which a lot may be had for a crown-piece. They care little for what is really good in its way; all they want is something which can be bought nowhere but at Rome, and which will serve to their descendants as the evidence of their visit to the Eternal City. They haggle as if they were at market, and yet, when they get back to the 'Minerva,' they wonder they have so little to show for their money.

If they took home nothing worse than their cheap rosaries, I should not find fault with them; but they carry opinions and impressions. Don't tell them of the abuses which swarm throughout the kingdom of the Pope. They will bridle up, and answer that for their parts they never saw a single one. As the surface of things is smooth, at least in the best quarter of the town—the only quarter these good folks are likely to have seen—they assume, as a matter of course, that all is well. They have seen the Pope and the Cardinals in all their glory and all their innocence at the Sistine Chapel; and of course it is not on Easter Sunday, and in the eyes of the whole multitude, that Cardinal Antonelli occupies himself with his business or his pleasures. When Monsignore B—— dishonoured a young girl, who died of the outrage, and then sent her affianced bridegroom to the galleys, he did not select the Sistine Chapel as the theatre of his exploits.

You must not attempt to extract pity for the Italian nation from these foreign pilgrims of the Holy Week. The honest souls have marked the uncultivated waste which extends from Civita Vecchia to Rome, and they have at once inferred that the people are idle. They have been importuned for alms by miserable-looking objects in the streets, and they conclude that the lower class is a class of beggars.

The cicerone who took them about, whispered some significant words in their ears, and they are persuaded that every Italian is in the habit of offering his wife or his daughter to foreigners. You would astonish these profound observers immeasurably, if you were to tell them that the Pope has three millions of subjects who in no way resemble the Roman rabble.

Thus it happens that the flying visitor, the superficial traveller, the communicant of the Holy Week, the guest of the 'Minerva,' is a ready-made foe to the nation, a natural defender of the clerical government.

As for the permanent foreign visitors, if they be men enervated by the climate or by pleasure, indifferent to the fate of nations, strangers to political chicane, they will, in the natural order of events, become converted to the ideas of the Roman aristocracy, between a quadrille and a cup of chocolate.

If they be studious men, or men of action, sent for a specific object, charged to unravel certain mysteries, or to support certain principles, their conversion will be undertaken in due form.