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Or, perhaps, he had understood and sat rigid with terror. "Yes," said the tall priest, in the same low voice and in the same still posture, "yes, I am Flambeau." Then, after a pause, he said: "Come, will you give me that cross?" "No," said the other, and the monosyllable had an odd sound. Flambeau suddenly flung off all his pontifical pretensions.
Then he remembered Felsenburgh; and his heart sickened within him. Six days later, Percy rose as usual, said his mass, breakfasted, and sat down to say office until his servant should summon him to vest for the Pontifical mass. He had learned to expect bad news now so constantly of apostasies, deaths, losses that the lull of the previous week had come to him with extraordinary refreshment.
Kneeling on the vast place, and completely filling it, the multitude which had not been able to enter the Basilica waited for the Pontifical benediction.
There were a great number of the Pontifical police, or sbirri, as the Romans call them, scattered in knots of two or three about the Corso; there were also several mounted patrols of the Papal gendarmes. The police did everything in their power to excite the people, hustled the crowd in every direction, used the most opprobrious epithets, and pushed their way along with insulting gestures.
But his kinsman, Gregory V., whom he placed on the pontifical throne, was very soon compelled by the Romans to fly; his excommunications and religious thunders were turned into derision by them; they were too well acquainted with the true nature of those terrors; they were living behind the scenes.
At last, considering the disturbed state of Europe generally, he concluded that it was better for him to remain at Rome. A Pontifical ship, which had not been included in the articles of capitulation, awaited his orders in the waters of Civita Vecchia.
A separate province was assigned to him as his own territory, and besides his spiritual dignity, he became to a limited extent a temporal monarch. He is styled the Dalai Lama. The first Christian missionaries who proceeded to Thibet were surprised to find there in the heart of Asia a pontifical court and several other ecclesiastical institutions resembling those of the Roman Catholic church.
If the harms done by those contemptible wranglings about Peter's pence and benefices had been confined to depriving the pontifical exchequer of a revenue which was cheerfully granted by other nations to aid the Father of the Faithful, the result was to be regretted; but, after all, Christendom would not have suffered in a much more sensible quarter.
At other times the good Father made the mysterious announcement that on the next day Pallestri, the famous male soprano of the papal chapel, was going to sing; the Spanish lady got up early, leaving her husband still in bed, to hear the sweet voice of the pontifical eunuch whose beardless face appeared in shop windows among the portraits of dancers and fashionable tenors.
There is a slang of duchesses, witness this phrase contained in a love-letter from a very great lady and a very pretty woman of the Restoration: "You will find in this gossip a fultitude of reasons why I should libertize." Diplomatic ciphers are slang; the pontifical chancellery by using 26 for Rome, grkztntgzyal for despatch, and abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI. for the Due de Modena, speaks slang.
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