“Even if they were saints, they ate too,” replied the Canon, with his excellent good sense.
Cæsar had to agree that even if they were saints, they ate.
There was a French family at the hotel who were also thinking of going to see the Catacombs, and Don Calixto and Don Justo decided to go the same day with them. The French family consisted of a Breton gentleman, tall and whiskered, who had been at sea; his wife, who looked like a village woman; and the daughter, a slender, pale, sad young lady. They had with them, half governess, half maid, a lean peasant-woman with a suspicious air.
The young lady confessed to Cæsar that she had been dreaming of the Catacombs for a long while. She knew the description Chateaubriand gives of them in Les Martyres by heart.
The next day the French family in one landau, and Don Calixto with the Canon and Cæsar in another, went to see the Catacombs.
The French family had brought a fat, smiling abbé as cicerone.
Five persons couldn’t get inside the landau, and the Breton gentleman had to sit by the driver. Don Calixto offered him a seat in his carriage, but the Breton, who must have been obstinate as a mule, said no, that from the driver’s seat he enjoyed more of the panorama.
They halted a moment, on the abbé’s advice, at the Baths of Caracalla, and went through them. The cicerone explained where the different bathing-rooms had been and the size of the pools. Those cyclopean buildings, those high, high arches, those enormous walls, left Cæsar overcome.
One couldn’t understand a thing like this except in a town which had a mania for the gigantic, the titanic.
They left the baths and started along. They followed the Via di Porta San Sebastiano, between two walls. They left behind the imposing ruins of the Baths of Caracalla and various establishments for archeological reconstructions, and the carriage stopped at the gate of the Catacombs.