“No, he boasted of not having any.”
“Doubtless he did have without suspecting it. With a man who had no veneration, what difference would it make whether there was one bad thing among a lot of good ones?”
The German with the green hat, who understood something of the conversation, was indignant at Cæsar’s irreverent ideas. He asked him if he understood Latin, and Cæsar told him no, and then, in a strange gibberish, half Latin and half Italian, he let loose a series of facts, dates, and numbers. Then he asserted that all artistic things of great merit were German: Greece. Rome, Gothic architecture, the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Velázquez, all German.
The snub-nosed young person, with his cape and his green hat with its cock-feather, did not let a mouse escape from his German mouse-trap.
The data of the befeathered German were too much for Cæsar, and he took his leave of the painters.
XVII. EVIL DAYS
Accompanied by Kennedy, Cæsar called repeatedly on the most auspicious members of the French clerical element living in Rome, and found persons more cultivated than among the rough Spanish monks; but, as was natural, nobody gave him any useful information offering the possibility of his putting his financial talents to the proof.
“Something must turn up,” he used to say to himself, “and at the least opening we will dive into the work.”
Cæsar kept gathering notes about people who had connections in Spain with the Black party in Rome; he called several times on Father Herreros, despite his uncle’s prohibition, and succeeded in getting the monk to write to the Marquesa de Montsagro, asking if there were no means of making Cæsar Moneada, Cardinal Fort’s nephew, Conservative Deputy for her district.