Quirinus says that probably it was De Banneville who represented to the Pope the serious effects that would be produced in France by this proceeding. So, on the evening of the 17th, instead of arranging for the acclamation of infallibility, the Pope was making the small amends of sending a private message to have a Mass celebrated, on the following morning, on behalf of a certain deceased Charles, in the Church of Santa Maria Traspontina. No public notice whatever was given of this service. The bishops were all shut up in a General Congregation. The Pope went privately, without any suite, sat hidden in a latticed "tribune," and then had it announced to the world that he had personally attended a Mass on behalf of Montalembert. When the exceedingly painful feeling he had caused began to appear, an attempt was made to turn the occasion to account by throwing the blame on Dupanloup. It was declared that it had been announced that he would deliver an oration, and indeed that the proposed function had been got up by him as a party demonstration. This gave Dupanloup the opportunity of writing[351]:—
This is an outrage at once upon the Holy Father, Monsignor De Mérode, the bishops, and myself. This entire tale, Sir, is false from the first word to the last. I did not appoint the service. I was not to officiate. I have had nothing whatever to do in distributing cards of invitation. Whatever may have been my profound and inviolable affection for M. De Montalembert, it belonged to the members of his family present in Rome, Monsignor De Mérode and the Count De Mérode, and not to me, to arrange the details of this religious ceremony. It is within my knowledge that in doing so they conformed to all the laws and formalities usual in Rome in similar cases.
The last statement was made to upset one of the excuses, that proper leave had not been asked for the service. So those false stories, at least, were stayed.
As the news spread in succession from place to place, the imaginations of Liberal Catholics all over Europe would restlessly wander up and down the Capitoline, seeing on that historical slope the signal given for their eternal disgrace in the Holy City. It was given too by an arrow shot from the Pontiff's own bow, and aimed at the shade of Montalembert. We do not profess to know what injury the imagination of such men might picture as having been done to the spirit that was gone, but those Christians who believe in a God who, not even in this world, much less in the great hereafter, trusts any child of man, though the least of all the little ones, to a Vicar—those who believe in a sacrifice which no man can repeat, prohibit, or buy, when they heard what had occurred, saw the spirit pass into the true temple, and outfly all the arrows of death. Oh, how benign is that light of immortality which shows us the spirits of the departed resting in the hands of their Father, altogether above dependence on the malice or the compassion, on the liberality or the avarice, on the devotion or the unbelief of living men; and which, with the same blessed beam, shows us the living protected from all possible malice, raised into independence of all possible goodwill of the dead, by a near and solicitous paternal Watcher. All the traffic of the markets of Purgatory, a traffic as low and demoralizing as any traffic can be, scarcely exposes the system which has sprung up around that invention so much as one broil like that which the traffickers raised around the soul of Montalembert—no, not around his soul, that was beyond their reach, only around his memory.
FOOTNOTES:
[338] Unitá Cattolica, March 10.
[339] Friedberg, p. 491.
[340] Tagebuch, p. 221.
[341] Tagebuch, p. 230.