Delighted at having done a good action, the General warmly thanked the Cardinal, and departed. Three months elapsed, and still no sworn guard made his appearance at the Jew's farm. The poor fellow, robbed more than ever, timidly applied again to the General, who once more took the field in his behalf. This time, in order to make the matter sure, he would not leave the Cardinal till he held in his own hand the permission, duly filled up and signed. The delighted Jew shed tears of gratitude as he read to his family the thrice-blessed name of the guard assigned to him. The name was that of a man who had disappeared six years back, and never been heard of since.
When the French officers next met the Jew, they asked him whether he was pleased with his sworn guard. He dared not say that he had no guard: the police had forbidden him to complain.
The Jews of Rome are the most unfortunate in the Papal States. The vicinity of the Vatican is as fatal to them as to the Christians. Far from the seat of government, beyond the Apennines, they are less poor, less oppressed, and less despised. The Israelitish population of Ancona is really a fine race.
It is not to be inferred from this that the agents of the Pope become converts to tolerance by crossing the Apennines.
It is not a year since the Archbishop of Bologna confiscated the boy
Mortara for the good of the Convent of the Neophytes.
Only two years ago the Prefect of Ancona revived the old law, which forbids Christians to converse publicly with Jews.
It is not ten years since a merchant of considerable fortune, named P. Cadova, was deprived of his wife and children by means as remarkable as those employed in the case of young Mortara, although the affair created less sensation at the time.
M.P. Cadova lived at Cento, in the province of Ferrara. He had a pretty wife, and two children. His wife was seduced by one of his clerks, who was a Catholic. The intrigue being discovered, the clerk was driven from the house. The faithless wife soon joined her lover at Bologna, and took her children with her.
The Jew applied to the courts of law to assist him in taking the children from the adulteress.
The answer he received to his application was, that his wife and children had all three embraced Christianity, and had consequently ceased to be his family.