Envy of the common herd.
Never will our vanity recognise in a man even of genius aptitudes and the faculty of doing common things as well as they are done by a common mind. If you overpass the vulgar conception by a hairbreadth, a thousand imbeciles exclaim, "You're losing yourself in the clouds," delighted as they feel at dwelling underneath, where they insist upon thinking. Those poor envious people, by reason of their secret misery, kick against merit; they compassionately dismiss Virgil, Racine, Lamartine[130] to their verses. But, proud sirs, to what are we to dismiss you? To oblivion, which awaits you at twenty steps from your doors, while twenty verses of those poets will carry them to the furthermost posterity.
The first invasion of Rome by the French, under the Directorate, was infamous and accompanied by spoliation; the second, under the Empire, was iniquitous: but once accomplished, order reigned.
The Republic demanded of Rome, for an armistice, twenty-two millions, the occupation of the Citadel of Ancona, one hundred pictures and statues, and one hundred manuscripts, to be selected by the French commissaries. They especially wanted to have the busts of Brutus and Marcus Aurelius: so many people in France called themselves Brutus in those days, it was very simple that they should wish to possess the pious image of their putative father; but Marcus Aurelius, whose father was he? Attila, to go away from Rome, asked only a certain number of pounds of pepper and silk: in our day, she for a moment redeemed her liberty with pictures. Great artists, often neglected and unhappy, left their master-pieces to serve as a ransom for the ungrateful cities that slighted them.
The Frenchmen of the Empire had to repair the ravages which the Frenchmen of the Republic had committed in Rome; they also owed an expiation for the sack of Rome accomplished by an army led by a French Prince[131]: it was befitting that Bonaparte should set order in the ruins which another Bonaparte[132] had seen grow, and whose overthrow he described. The plan adopted by the French Administration for the excavation of the Forum was that which Raphael proposed to Leo X.: it caused to rise from the earth the three columns of the Temple of Jupiter Tonans; it laid bare the portico of the Temple of Concord; it exposed the pavement of the Via Sacra; it did away with the new buildings with which the Temple of Peace was encumbered; it removed the soil which covered the steps of the Coliseum, cleared the interior of the arena and brought to view seven or eight rooms in the Baths of Titus[133].
Elsewhere, the Forum of Trajan[134] was explored, the Pantheon, the Baths of Diocletian, the Temple of Patrician Modesty repaired. Funds were put aside for the maintenance, outside Rome, of the Walls of Falerii and the Tomb of Cæcilia Metella.
Repairing works were also undertaken for modern edifices: St. Paul's Without the Walls, which no longer exists[135], had its roofing repaired; St Agnes', San Martino ai Monti were protected against the weather. A portion of the roof and the pavement of St. Peter's was mended; lightning-conductors shielded the dome of Michael Angelo from the lightning. The sites were marked out of two cemeteries in the east and west of the city, and that on the east, near the Convent of San Lorenzo, was finished.
The French in Rome.
The Quirinal arrayed its external poverty in the luxury of porphyry and Roman marbles: designed as it was for the imperial palace, Bonaparte, before taking up his residence there, wanted to remove all traces of the abduction of the Pontiff, held captive at Fontainebleau. It was proposed to pull down the part of the city lying between the Capitol and Monte Cavallo, so that the triumpher might ride up to his Cæsarian abode through an immense avenue; events caused these gigantic dreams to fade away by destroying enormous realities.
Among the plans decided was that of building a series of quays, from Ripetta to Ripa Grande: the foundations of those quays would have been laid; the four blocks of houses between the Castle of Sant' Angelo and the Piazza Rusticucci were partly bought up and would have been demolished. A wide thoroughfare would thus have been opened on to the Square of St. Peter's, which would have been seen from the foot of the Castle of Sant' Angelo.