Gerald Fitzgerald, the Chevalier

"Gerald Fitzgerald" is an absorbing novel by Charles James Lever, an Irish editor and writer whose novels, set in post-Napoleonic Ireland and Europe, featured spirited, adventurous heroes.

Excerpt

"At the foot of the hill on which stands the Campidoglio at Rome, and close beneath the ruins that now encumber the Tarpeian rock, runs a mean-looking alley, called the Viccolo D'Orsi, but better known to the police as the 'Viccolo dei Ladri,' or 'Thieves' Corner'—the epithet being, it is said, conferred in a spirit the very reverse of calumnious."