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When the vault was almost finished the Pope returned to Bologna, where I went twice for money I needed, uselessly, and lost all my time, until he returned to Rome. I returned to Rome and set myself to work on the cartoons for the said vault, that is, for the ends and sides of the said Chapel of Sisto, hoping to have money to finish the work.
Pierre had also lately read that a French ambassador, D'Estree, Marquis de Coure, had resided at the Palazzo Sacchetti, and in 1638 had given some magnificent entertainments in honour of the birth of the Dauphin,* when on three successive days there had been racing from the Ponte Sisto to San Giovanni dei Fiorentini amidst an extraordinary display of sumptuosity: the street being strewn with flowers, and rich hangings adorning every window.
If the Paseo was gay, the streets of the city were gay also; the windows filled with faces and figures in full dress, with little groups of children at the feet of the grown people, like the two world-famous cherubs at the feet of the Madonna di San Sisto.
If, however, Infessura's picture of the convents of Rome is a faithful one, the cardinal was wise in hesitating to entrust his daughter to these saints. Nevertheless there certainly were convents which were free from immorality, such, for example, as S. Silvestre in Capite, where many of the daughters of the Colonna were educated, and S. Maria Nuova and S. Sisto on the Appian Way.
I met one yesterday, whose green eyes, great nose, thick lips, and sallow wrinkles, under a bonnet of fifteen years' standing, further clothed upon by a scant merino cloak and cat-skin tippet, would have cut a sorry figure in the gallery of the Vatican or the Louvre, and put the tranquil Madonna of San Sisto into a state of stunning antithesis; but if Saint Agnes or Saint Catharine was half as good as my saint, I am glad of it!
On that side indeed between the Ponte Sisto and the Ponte Sant' Angelo, the quays, which were to imprison the river within high, white, fortress-like walls, had not yet been raised, and the bank with its remnants of the old papal city conjured up an extraordinary vision of the middle ages.
It is with this new house, henceforth called San Domenico e Sisto, that one of my earliest recollections of conventual life is connected. The order is one which enjoins strict enclosure. In this order, and almost invariably in every other, a candidate is admitted at first as a postulant for a period of six months a sort of preliminary trial of her fitness for the religious life.
Is this enough to make you quiver, in Dresden, before the San Sisto, carried away by those divine eyes of the "Mother of Eternity," or rent with sorrow before the solemn eyes of the Child? Is this enough to fill you with tears of delight when you enter the Sistine Chapel and see St. John as he kneels with his unshed tears about the dead Christ? What is there wanting in the touch of your artist?
The wind lifted her loosened mantilla, billowing it out on one side, and as she stood with her hands pressed against her heart, she might, save for her empty arms, have been the eidolon of the Madonna di San Sisto.
Her own hope and firmest purpose, therefore, was, if such resistance to the higher authorities might in any way be possible to her, to avoid a marriage with Ludovico di Castelmare: if possible to her, she would fain escape from any marriage at all. If this should be altogether impossible, then the Duca di San Sisto, as well as anybody else.
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