A singular piece of buffoonery took place: de Brosses went to dine with some Englishmen at the Porta San Pancrazio; they had a mock election of a pope: a certain Sir Ashwood took off his wig and represented the dean of the cardinals; they sang Oremus, and Cardinal Alberoni was elected by the ballot of that orgy. The Protestant soldiers in the Constable de Bourbon's army nominated Martin Luther pope in the Church of St. Peter. Nowadays the English, who are at once the plague and the providence of Rome, respect the Catholic Religion which has permitted them to build a church outside the Porta del Popolo. The government and manners of the day would no longer suffer such scandals.

So soon as a cardinal is imprisoned in the conclave, the first thing he does is, with the aid of his servants, in the dark, to scratch at the newly blocked-up walls until they have made a little hole. Through this, during the night, they pass strings by means of which news is sent and received between the inside and the outside. For the rest, the Cardinal de Retz, whose opinion is above suspicion, after speaking of the miseries of the conclave in which he took part, ends his story with these fine words:

"We lived there, always together, with the same mutual respect and the same civility that are observed in the closets of kings; with the same politeness that obtained at the Court of Henry III.; with the same familiarity that is seen in the colleges; with the same modesty that prevails in noviciates, and the same charity, at least in appearance, that might exist among brothers wholly united."

I am struck, in finishing this epitome of a vast history, by the serious manner in which it commences and the almost burlesque manner in which it ends: the greatness of the Son of God opens the scene which, shrinking in proportion as the Catholic Religion moves farther from its source, ends in the littleness of the son of Adam. We scarcely find again the primitive loftiness of the Cross until we come to the decease of the Sovereign Pontiff: that childless, friendless pope, whose corpse lies neglected on its couch, shows that the man was reckoned as naught in the head of the evangelical world. Honours are rendered to the Pope as a temporal prince; as a man, his abandoned corpse is flung down at the door of the church where of old the sinner did penance.

Dispatches to Portalis.

Dispatches to M. Le Comte Portalis

"Rome, 17 February 1829.

"Monsieur le comte,

"I do not know whether the King will be pleased to send an extraordinary ambassador to Rome, or whether it will suit him to accredit me to the Sacred College. In the latter case, I have the honour to observe to you that I allowed M. le Duc de Laval, for his expenses for extraordinary service in a similar circumstance, in 1823, a sum which amounted, as far as I can remember, to 40,000 or 50,000 francs. The Austrian Ambassador, M. le Comte d'Apponyi[46], at first received from his Court a sum of 36,000 francs for the first requirements, a supplementary allowance of 7,200 francs per month over and above his ordinary salary during the sitting of the Conclave, and 10,000 francs for presents, chancery expenses, etc. I do not, monsieur le comte, pretend to compete in magnificence with His Excellency the Austrian Ambassador, as M. le Duc de Laval did; I shall hire no horses, carriages, nor liveries to dazzle the Roman mob; the King of France is a great enough lord to pay for the pomp of his ambassadors, if he wishes it: borrowed magnificence is wretched. I shall therefore go modestly to the Conclave with my ordinary footmen and in my ordinary carriages. It only remains for me to know whether the King will not think that, as long as the Conclave lasts, I shall be bound to keep up a display for which my ordinary salary will not be sufficient I ask nothing, I merely submit the question to your judgment and to the royal decision.

"I have the honour to be, etc."

"Rome, 19 February 1829.

"Monsieur le comte,

"I had the honour yesterday to be presented to the Sacred College and to deliver the little speech of which I sent you a copy in advance in my Dispatch No. 17, which left on Tuesday the 17th inst. by a special courier. I was listened to with the most auspicious marks of satisfaction, and the Senior Cardinal, the venerable Della Somaglia, replied to me in terms most affectionate towards the King and France.

"Having informed you of everything in my last dispatch, I have absolutely nothing new to tell you to-day, unless it be that Cardinal Bussi[47] arrived yesterday from Benevento. Cardinals Albani, Macchi[48], and Oppizzoni are expected to-day.

"The members of the Sacred College will lock themselves up in the Quirinal Palace on Monday evening the 23rd of this month. Ten days will then elapse to await the arrival of the foreign cardinals, after which the serious operations of the Conclave will commence, and, if they were to come to an understanding at once, the pope could be elected in the first week of Lent.

"I am, monsieur le comte, awaiting the King's orders. I presume that you dispatched a courier to me after M. de Montebello's arrival in Paris. It is urgent that I should receive either the announcement of an extraordinary embassy, or my new credentials together with the instructions of the Government.

"Are my five French cardinals coming? Politically speaking, their presence here is very little necessary. I have written to Monseigneur le Cardinal de Latil[49] to offer him my services in case he should decide to come,

"I have the honour to be, etc.

"P.S. I enclose a copy of a letter which M. le Comte de Funchal has written to me. I have not replied to this ambassador in writing; I only went to talk to him."

To Madame Récamier

"Rome, Monday 23 February 1829.

"Yesterday the Pope's obsequies were finished. The pyramid of 'paper' and the four candelabra were fine enough, because they were of immense proportions and reached up to the cornice of the church. The last Dies iræ was admirable. It is composed by an unknown man, who belongs to the pope's chapel, and who seems to me to possess a very different sort of genius from Rossini's. To-day we pass from sorrow to joy; we sing the Veni Creator for the opening of the Conclave; then we shall go every evening to see if the ballot-papers are burnt, if the smoke issues from a certain chimney: on the day on which there is no smoke, the pope will have been appointed, and I shall go to see you again; that is the whole business as it affects me. The King of England's speech is very insolent to France! What a deplorable expedition that Morean Expedition is! Are they beginning to see it? General Guilleminot wrote me a letter on the subject which made me laugh; he can only have written as he did because he presumed me to be a minister."

Letters to Madame Récamier.

"25 February.

"Death is here; Torlonia went yesterday evening after two days' illness; I have seen him lying all painted on his death-bed, his sword at his side. He lent money on pledges, but on such pledges! On antiquities, on pictures huddled promiscuously in an old, dusty palace. That was different from the shop in which the Miser put away 'a Bologna lute, fitted with all its strings, or nearly... the skin of a lizard three feet long... and a four-foot bedstead with slips in Hungarian point[50].'

"One sees nothing but dead people carried dressed-up through the streets; one of them passes regularly under my windows when we sit down to dinner. For the rest, everything proclaims the spring parting; people are beginning to disperse; they are leaving for Naples; they will come back a moment for Holy Week, and then separate for good. Next year there will be different travellers, different faces, a different society. There is something melancholy in this journey over ruins: the Romans are like the remains of their city; the world passes at their feet. I picture those persons going back to their families in the various countries of Europe, the young 'Misses' returning to the midst of their fogs. If, by chance, thirty years hence, one of them is brought back to Italy, who will remember to have seen her in the palaces whose masters shall be no more. St. Peter's and the Coliseum: that is all that she herself would recognise."

Dispatch to M. le comte Portalis

"Rome, 3 March 1829.

"Monsieur le comte,

"My first courier having reached Lyons, on the 14th of last month, at nine o'clock in the evening, you must have learned the news of the Pope's death, by telegraph, on the morning of the 15th. It is to-day the 3rd of March, and I am still without instructions and without an official reply. The newspapers have announced the departure of two or three cardinals. I had written to Paris to Monseigneur le Cardinal de Latil to place the Embassy Palace at his disposal; I have just written to him again at different points on his road to renew my offers.

"I am sorry to be obliged to tell you, monsieur le comte, that I notice some little intrigues here to keep the cardinals away from the Embassy, to lodge them where they might be placed more within reach of the influences which it is hoped to exercise over them.

"As far as I am concerned, this is a matter of indifference to me. I shall show Their Eminences all the services which depend upon myself. If they question me touching things which it is well that they should know, I shall tell them what I can; if you transmit the King's orders for them to me, I will communicate these to them; but, if they were to arrive here in a spirit hostile to the views of His Majesty's Government, if it were perceived that they were not in agreement with the King's Ambassador, if they held a language contrary to mine, if they went so far as to give their votes in the Conclave to some exaggerated man, if even they were divided among themselves, nothing would be more fatal. It would be better for the King's service that I should instantly hand in my resignation rather than present this public spectacle of our discords. Austria and Spain have a line of conduct with reference to their clergy which leaves no opening for intrigue. No Austrian or Spanish priest, cardinal or bishop, can have any other agent or correspondent in Rome than the ambassador of his Court himself; the latter has the right to remove from Rome, at a moment's notice, any ecclesiastic of his nationality who may obstruct him.

"I hope, monsieur le comte, that no division will take place, that Their Eminences the cardinals will have formal orders to submit to the instructions which I shall before long receive from you, and that I shall know which of them will be charged with the exercise of the exclusion, in case of need, and which heads that exclusion is to strike.

"It is very necessary that we should be on our guard; the last ballots revealed the awakening of a party. This party, which gave twenty or twenty-one votes to Cardinals Della Marmora[51] and Pedicini, forms what is known here as the Sardinian faction. The other cardinals, alarmed, want all to give their suffrages to Oppizzoni, a man both firm and moderate. Although an Austrian, that is to say, a Milanese, he coped against Austria at Bologna. He would be an excellent choice. The votes of the French might, by settling on one candidate or another, decide the election. Rightly or wrongly, these cardinals are believed to be hostile to the present system of His Majesty's Government, and the Sardinian faction is reckoning on them.

"I have the honour to be, etc[52]."

To Portalis and Récamier.