“I translated the phrase into English: ‘My heart burns with a great flame’; and Susanna repeated it several times, and begged me to write it in her card-case.
“Her friend skimmed some pages in Baedeker and said:
“‘It seems that the house of two saints martyred by Julian the Apostate is preserved here.’
“I assured them that that was an error. I happen to have been reading just a few days ago a book about Julian the Apostate, and it turns out that that Emperor was an admirable man, good, generous, brave, full of virtues; but the Christians had reason for calumniating him and they calumniated him. All Julian’s persecutions of Christians are logical repressions of people that were disturbing public order, and the phrase, Vencisti, Galileo, is a pious fraud. Julian was a philosopher, he loved science, hygiene, cleanliness, peace, in a world of hysterical worshipers of corpses, who wanted to live in ignorance, filth, and prayer.
“But Christianity, always a religion of hallucinated persons, of mystifiers, has never vacillated in singing the praises of parricides like Constantine, and in calumniating the memory of great men like Julian.
“Susanna and her friend considered that the question of whether Julian has been calumniated by history, or not, was of no importance.
“The truth is that I feel the same way.
“From the Via di Santi Giovanni e Paolo we came out into a small square by a church, which has a little marble ship in front of its porch. We saw that his street is named after the Navicella.”
A ROYAL IDYLL.
“By the side of the church of the Navicella, we passed the Villa Mattei, and Susanna wished to go in. What a beautiful property! What splendid terraces those in that garden are! What laurels! What lemon-trees! What old statues! What heavy shade of pines and live-oaks!