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Little Bianca's father, or possibly her grandfather, must have been some such Jem, Jack, or Bob "of the Foundlings," and left no other patronymic to his race. Quinto Lalli fell in with the child one day in the dirty and miserable little town of Acquapendente, just on the Roman side of the frontier line dividing the Papal territory from Tuscany, as he was travelling from Florence to Rome.
He had gone back to landscapes, never winning any greater success than the simple admirations of wash-women and brickmakers who gathered around his easel in the suburbs of Madrid, whispering to each other that the gentleman who wore on his lapel the variegated button of his numerous Papal Orders, must be a famous old "buck," one of the great painters the papers talked about.
There now came a demand from Napoleon that henceforth there should be as many French cardinals as Roman, that the agents of hostile powers should be banished from the Papal States, and that the papal ports should be closed to England. The Emperor was weary, too, of the petty squabbles in connection with the Church, of the threats to excommunicate him and declare his throne vacant.
They offered me any thing I wanted. They offered me the title of Baron Atramonte. That knocked me, I tell you. Says I, I'm your man. So now you see me Baron Atramonte, captain in the Papal Zouaves, ready to go where glory waits me but fonder than ever of little Min. Oh, I tell you what, I ain't a bit of a brag, but I'm some here.
And as his glance returned yet once more to the window of the Vatican, and he fancied he could see a pale hand uplifted behind the glass panes, he thought of that papal benediction which Leo XIII gave from that height, over Rome, and over the plain and the hills, to the faithful of all Christendom.
His influence with the Pope procured the papal sanction for the invasion of England; and afterwards, in 1070, the Archbishopric of Canterbury was pressed upon him by William, which he held until his death in 1089, in the eighty-fourth year of his age. In some respects he dealt harshly with the English clergy, and connived at their wholesale deprivation.
The papal institution, notwithstanding the official letters, was to exist, unless the Pope chose to destroy it; and his Holiness, as we have seen, had sent the Archbishop of Sorrento, a few weeks before, to Brussels, for the purpose of concerting secret measures for strengthening the "Holy Office" in the provinces.
Mary's hopes were further raised by the rebellion of the Duke of Norfolk, whose marriage with the Scottish queen had been suggested in 1569. Letters from the papal agent, Rudolfi, were discovered, and, in June, 1572, Norfolk was put to death. Lennox had been killed in September, 1571, and his successor, the Earl of Mar, was approached on the subject of taking Mary's life.
In the words of a Papal writer in the government gazette of Venice: "The festival is to be celebrated in full vigour, except that no masks are allowed, as the fashion for them has lately gone out. There will be, however, disguises and fancy dresses, confetti, bouquets, races, moccoletti, public and private balls, and, in short, every amusement of the Carnival time."
At Avignon the popes were naturally deprived of some of the revenue which they had enjoyed from their Italian possessions when they lived at Rome. This deficiency had to be made up by increased taxation, especially as the expenses of the splendid papal court were very heavy.
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