You have glanced through my diary of the road, you shall now read my letters to Madame Récamier, interspersed, as I announced, with pages of history. Alongside of these, you will find my dispatches. Here will appear distinctly the two men that exist in me.
To Madame Récamier
"Rome, 11 October 1828.
"I have crossed this beautiful country, filled with your memory; it consoled me, without being able to take from me the sadness of all the other memories that I encountered at every step. I have seen again that Adriatic Sea which I crossed more than twenty years ago, in what a disposition of soul! At Terni, I had stopped with a poor expiring woman. Finally I entered Rome. Its monuments, as I feared, appeared less perfect to me after those of Athens. My memory of the places, astonishing and cruel at once, had not allowed me to forget a single stone....
"I have seen no one yet, except the Secretary of State, Cardinal Bernetti[556]. To have somebody to talk to, I went to call on Guérin[557] yesterday, at sunset: he seemed delighted with my visit. We opened a window upon Rome and admired the horizon. It was the only thing that had remained, for me, such as I had seen it; either my eyes or the objects had changed, perhaps both[558]."
Leo XII.
The first moments of my sojourn in Rome were employed in official visits. His Holiness received me in private audience; public audiences are not customary and cost too dear. Leo XII., a prince of tall stature and of an air at once serene and melancholy, is dressed in a plain white cassock; he maintains no pomp, and keeps to a poor room, almost unfurnished. He eats scarcely anything; he lives, with his cat, on a little polenta. He knows that he is very ill and sees himself waste away with a resignation that partakes of Christian joy: he would be quite willing, like Benedict XIV., to keep his coffin under his bed. When I come to the door of the Pope's apartments, I am taken by a priest through dark passages to the refuge or sanctuary of His Holiness. He does not allow himself the time to dress, for fear of keeping me waiting; he rises, comes towards me, will never allow me to touch the ground with my knee to kiss the hem of his robe instead of his slipper, and leads me by the hand to the seat placed on the right of his own poor arm-chair. We sit down and talk.
Pope Leo XII.