Kitabı oku: «The Hill of Venus», sayfa 9

Francesco listened spellbound to the account of the duke's greatness. He had his own code of laws, and there was no appeal from his decision. In the ravine below, a torrent, thundering over moss-grown boulders, sang a fitting accompaniment to the duke's apotheosis. Far to the south Soracté towered against the gold of the evening sky. By his side a cistus was in bloom, its petals falling upon the long grass and the broken stone.

In the valley the peasantry were returning from Vespers. The silvery chimes of the Angelus, from some convent concealed in the forest deeps, smote the silence of evening. Deep to the confines of the dusky sky glimmered the far Tyrrhenian Sea, washing shores remote with sheets of foam. Black cliffs, craggy and solemn, frowned upon the sea. The far heights bristled with woodland, dark under the setting sun.

Not once did Francesco interrupt the guttural account his host gave of his campaigns, until the Duke of Spoleto referred to the Frangipani. Some evil fate seemed indeed to have predestined his meeting with the Lord of Astura, and while his late encounter with the brother of Raniero lacked the personal element, Francesco's intuition informed him that, sooner or later, the slumbering spark of an enduring hatred would be fanned into a devouring flame.

Francesco's apparently irrelevant question with regard to the origin of his host's acquaintance with the lords of Astura caused the Duke of Spoleto to utter a great oath.

"Ha!" he exclaimed, "and shall I not pluck out the heart of the devil, who – "

He suddenly checked himself.

"Though an avowed Ghibelline," he said, "I trust him not! His brother Latino lords it over Velletri: Archbishop and Grand Inquisitor in one, he deals out blessings and musty corn, while he mutters the prayer of the Fourth Innocent in the Lateran: Perdatis hujus Babylonii nomen et reliquias, progeniem atque germen, – a truly Christian prayer!"

"There is a third!" Francesco interposed with meaning.

"You know him?" shouted the duke. "A twig of the old tree, – a libertine, who would barter his soul for thirty pieces of silver! From yonder hill you may see their lair, suspended on a rock beyond the Cape of Circé."

The speaker suddenly paused and, turning to Francesco, gave a vicious pull at the latter's garb.

"Cast off your tatters," he roared, and the sound of his great voice reechoed through the glen. "Join us in a Devil's Ave! Your limbs were made for something better than to dangle in the noose of a Frangipani. Or, – if the garb is pleasing in your sight you may wear it over a suit of chain-mail and lead us in the fray with lance and shield! It will greatly promote our cause, – above and below!"

And the stout duke grasped Francesco by the shoulders, affectionately, and shook him till his bones creaked.

Francesco repressed the outcry which the pain drove to his lips. A spasm of deepest bitterness passed over his face, as he said:

"It may not be; – at least not now! I have a special mission to perform. The time may come – who knows? Then I will seek you in your forest glades. I have not always been that thing – a monk!"

The word had passed his lips beyond recall.

Rupert of Teck regarded him quizzically.

"Purge your own pasture and let the Devil take care of his own! Why subordinate your soul to chains forged of men?"

The day was waning when Francesco accompanied his host back to the ruin. An arched doorway with broken pillars led to a low room, roofed with rough timber. There was an improvised bed of bracken in one corner, where he was to rest for the night, for the Duke of Spoleto would not hear of his departure before dawn.

"It were perilous even for one familiar with the roads to traverse the forests at night; there are more rogues about than you wot of," he said. "On the morrow I will myself guide you to the road you seek!"

Francesco accepted the offer and hospitality of the Duke of Spoleto gratefully, for he was neither physically nor mentally disposed to continue his journey at once. They entered the ruin together, while the band of the duke chose their resting-place outside on the emerald greensward.

Night came apace with a round moon swimming in a sky of dusky azure, studded with a myriad glistening stars.

There was a great loneliness upon Francesco's soul.

He lay awake a long time. He heard the night wind in the forest trees and the occasional murmur of a voice, that seemed to be making a long prayer. He was moving in the world of men now. Yet all the love seemed to have left his life and all his struggles to have ended in bitterness. In the hour of his trial Ilaria had failed him, had hid her face from him behind the mask of scorn. He had little hope of sleep, for there were thoughts moving in his brain, tramping like restless sentinels to and fro. The night seemed full of ghostly voices crying to him out of the dark. He heard Ilaria's voice, even as he had heard it when she taunted him at Avellino; her laughter in the dells of Vallombrosa echoed in his heart. He remembered the days when he had heard her sing with the voice he loved so well; for him she would sing no more. He found himself wondering in his heart if she would weep if he died. Perhaps her scorn would melt away when she learned that he had gone from earth forever.

Francesco passed the greater part of the night open-eyed, for the memories of the past drove the sleep from his aching eyes. A soft breeze played in the branches of the giant oaks, and among the roses which clambered about the walls of the ruin. Slim cypresses streaked the misty grass, where a little pool caught the light of the moon.

Soon the dawn came, a silvery haze rising in the east. The cypresses caught the streaming light, gliding from tree to tree; in the meadows fluttered golden mists. The far woods glistened and seemed to tongue forth flame. A trumpet sounded. The duke's band rose to meet the sun.

After having partaken of a morning repast, such as the duke's stores afforded, Francesco took leave of his host, who assigned to him a guide, to conduct him to the broad highway to Rome. But, at parting, the burly duke admonished Francesco to break the fetters forged in hell and to turn to him in his hour of need.

The world was full of the splendor of the awakened day. The waves of the mountain torrent were touched with opalescent lights, as they swept through the gorge below.

Francesco's guide was a godly little man with a goat's beard and a nose like the snout of a pike. For a goatherd he was amazingly learned in matters of religion and in his knowledge of the names and attributes of the saints. He halted frequently, knelt down, prayed and kissed a little holly-wood cross that he carried. His beard wagged through long processions of the saints, but St. Joseph of Arimathæa was honored with his especial confidence.

Francesco had never seen such an example of secular godliness before, and began to be impatient with the old fellow, who bobbed down so frequently, looking like a goat squatting upon its haunches, and mumbling over a great beard. All this devotion was excellent in its way; but Francesco's religion was running into action, and the old man loitered and told the miles like beads upon his rosary.

He decided to rid himself of the fellow as soon as the goatherd had served his purpose, for this verminous piety was like the drawing of a dirty clout across the fresh flavor of a May morning.

Where four roads crossed, they parted, and Francesco, cantering along the high-road, little guessed that the wary duke had assigned to him this especial guide to disgust him with his own garb and calling.

CHAPTER VII
ROME!

THE chimes of the Angelus were borne to him on the soft breeze of evening, when, on the third day of his journey, Francesco caught sight of the walls and towers of Rome. As he drew rein on the crest of a low hill, the desolate brown wastes of the Campagna stretched before him, mile upon mile to northward, towards the impenetrable forests of Viterbo.

Before him rose the huge half-ruined wall of Aurelian, battered by Goth and Saracen and imperial Greek; before him towered the fortress-tomb of the former master of the world, vast and impregnable. Here and there above the broken crenelations of the city's battlements rose dark and massive towers, square and round, marking the fortified mansions of the Roman nobles.

In the evening light the towers seemed encircled as by a halo. The machicolated heights, the encircling ramparts, the stern tomb of the Emperor Hadrian rose proudly impregnable into the golden air of evening, a massive witness to the power of a Church, literally militant here below. Under the broad Aelian bridge, built centuries ago, rolled the turbid waves of the Tiber, and upon the bridge itself a stream of humanity, hardly less intermittent, was moving. Francesco, having buried his sword and shield under a grass-grown ruin beyond the city walls, rode dazed and wondering into the sun-kissed splendors of pontifical Rome.

Gradually the sun sank, the valley of the Tiber filled with golden lights, moving along little by little, travelling slowly up the emerald hillocks, covering the bluish mountains of Alba with a golden flush, crowning the thousand churches and palaces with a rosy sheen, then dying away into the pale, amber horizon, rosy where it touched the distant hills, bluish where it merged imperceptibly with the upper sky. Bluer and bluer became the hills, deeper and deeper that first faint amber. The valleys were filled with gray-blue mist, against which the Seven Hills stood out dark, cold and massive.

There was a sudden stillness, as when the last chords of a great symphony have died away. The yellow waters of the Tiber eddied sullen and mournful round the ship-shaped island, along by Vesta's temple, beneath the cypressed Aventine.

After having secured temporary lodging at a tavern bearing the sign of the Mermaid, over against the tower of Nona, near the bridge of San Angelo, Francesco wandered out into the streets of Rome.

The inn was old, as the times of Charlemagne, and was a favorite stopping-place for travellers coming from the north. The quarter was at that time in the hands of the powerful house of the Pierleoni, whose first Pope, Anacletus, had been dead a little over a century, and who, though they lorded the castle and many towers and fortresses in Rome, had not succeeded in imposing their anti-pope upon the Roman people against the will of Bernard of Clairvaux.

Francesco wandered through the crooked, unpaved streets, in and out of gloomy courts, over desolate wastes and open places. There was a crisis at hand in the strife of the factions. Every one went armed, and those who knelt to hear mass in a church, knelt with their backs to the wall.

At his inn, too, he had noted every one lived in a state of armed defence, against every one, including the host and other guests. And reasons were not lacking therefor, for Rome was in the throes of political convulsions and its walls resounded the battle-cry of Guelph and Ghibelline.

Howling and singing, a mob filled the streets southward to the Capitol, or even to the distant Lateran, where Marcus Aurelius on his bronze horse watched the ages go by. Across the ancient Aelian bridge Francesco stalked, under the haunted battlements of Castel San Angelo, where the ghost of Theodora was said to walk on autumn nights, when the south wind blew, and through the long wreck of the fair portico that had once extended from the bridge to the Basilica, till he saw glistening in the distance the broad flight of steps leading to the walled garden court of St. Peter's.

Here he rested among the cypresses, wondering at the vast bronze pine-cone and the great brass peacocks, which Symmachus had brought thither from the ruins of Agrippa's baths, in which the family of the Crescentii had fortified themselves during more than a hundred years.

For a long time Francesco sat there in mournful silence, drinking in the sun-steeped air of evening, and the scent of the flowers that grew here with the profusion of spring-time.

An indescribable sense of desolation came over him, as he thought of his happy childhood with its joys and griefs, as he thought of the spring-time of life, the days of Avellino, and of Ilaria. He sat here an outcast, an exile, one who had no further claim on the joys of the living, guiltless himself, the victim of another's sin. The soul of Rome, the Rome of Innocent and Clement, had taken hold of his soul, and, for a time, he dreamed himself away from the bleak present and the bleaker future. The past, with his father's sins, his own sorrows, the friendship of the Viceroy, the love of Ilaria, were now all infinitely far removed and dim. The future, whose magic mirror had once dazzled his senses, had faded like a departing vision into the blue Roman sky. Only the present remained, only the hour was his, the dreamy half-narcotic present with its mazy charms which enmeshed him, far from the reality, the Rome as it existed, where the Church was the World, and Rome herself meant some seven or eight thousand ruffians, eager always for a change, because it seemed that no change could be for the worse.

In the ancient Basilica of St. Peter's at least there was peace. The white-haired priests solemnly officiated day by day, morning and noon, and at Vespers more than a hundred voices sang the Vesper psalms in the Gregorian chant. Slim youths in violet and white swung silver censers before the high altar, and the incense floated in spiral clouds upon the sunbeams that fell slanting upon the antique floor.

Here, at least, as in many a cloister of the world, the Church was still herself, as she was and is and always will be; words were spoken and solemn prayers intoned that had been familiar to the lips of the apostles.

But they brought no consolation to Francesco's heart; his soul was not relieved by the solemn ceremony. With the rest of the worshippers he knelt unconsciously in the old cathedral; with the rest of the worshippers he chanted the responses and breathed anew the incense-laden air, which was to encompass him to his life's end.

Refreshed neither in body nor soul, he returned to the inn late at night. But he could not sleep. Opening wide the wooden shutters of his window, he looked out upon the Mausoleum of the Flavian Emperor, at the tide of the Tiber, which gleamed and eddied in the moonlight.

Life rose before him in a mystery, a mystery for him to solve by deeds. For a moment he felt that he must rise above his fate, that he was not idly to dream away his years, and the long dormant instinct of his race bade him defy the yoke which was about to be imposed upon him, not to evade it. Then his heart beat faster; his blood surged to his throat, and his hands hardened one upon the other as he leaned over the stone sill, and drew the night air sharply between his closed teeth.

And as a gentle breeze stirred the branches of the willows by the river brink, in it seemed to float a host of spirit armies, ghostly knights and fairy-maidens and the forecast shadows of things to come. Once before during the evening had this sensation gripped his soul, as with a solitary monk whom he chanced to meet, he had traversed the desolate regions of the Aventine in the sun's afterglow. And then, as now, there had come the rude awakening.

But from the monk he had learned that the Pontiff had fled from Rome before the approaching hosts of Conradino, and had betaken himself to Viterbo, while his champion, Charles of Anjou, had marched to southward, leaving the city to the Ghibellines and the imperial party of the Colonna.

End of Book the Second

Book the Third
THE BONDAGE

CHAPTER I
THE WHITE LADY

THE Piazza of St. John Lateran was alive with the rush and roar of a vast multitude, which congested the spacious square from the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme to the distant Esquiline hill, occupying every point of vantage, thronging the adjacent thoroughfares, crowding the long Via Merulana, and filling the ruins of temples, the interstices of fallen walls and roofless porticoes as far as the eye could reach.

All Rome seemed to be astir, all Rome seemed to have assembled to welcome the advent of the Swabian host, and in the keen delight of beholding Conradino, the fair-haired Hohenstauffen come to claim the fair lands of Constanzia, all petty-strife, contentions and party-rivalry seemed for the nonce to have been forgotten.

In reality, however, such was not the case.

So sudden had been Conradino's descent upon Rome that the Pontiff and his minion, Charles of Anjou, had precipitately fled from the city, ere the first German spear-points gleamed above the heights of Tivoli.

The Roman Ghibellines, at their head the great and powerful house of the Colonna, hated the Vulture of Provence as intensely as did the Pontiff, his one time champion, and welcomed with open arms the grandson of the Emperor Frederick II, their deliverer from an insufferable yoke, which had been as a blight upon Southern Italy.

Yet, notwithstanding the absence of the pontifical court, the absence of the Church militant, the institution which, when Europe was over-run with barbarian hordes, had preserved the ancient civilization, the power of the city was in evidence even though huddled affrighted amidst the majesty of imperial ruins. A memory, a dream, yet the power of a dream outlasting the ages, Rome still remained the mystic centre of civilization. —

With a sickly sense of curiosity not unmingled with awe, Francesco had mingled with the crowds.

The dream of his early youth was about to be realized: face to face he would behold the golden-haired Hohenstauffen, – yet at the thought his heart sank with a sense of dread. Dull misery had him in its grip. The keen pain of a false life, resentment of a fate imposed upon him by another's will, permeated every fibre of his being. In his dreams he would see the friends of his youth, pointing to him, the renegade; he would see Ilaria, standing off motionless, spiritless, regarding him from afar. If she at least had kept her faith! He felt himself encompassed by the folding wings of a great demon of despair.

This feeling pervaded him with a sickening gloom, in which he walked with drooping head and uncertain footsteps, – yet with the resolve to conquer in the end!

Life was no mere existence with Francesco. He loved light and air and freedom. To be in the great, real world, to feel its joys, its sunshine, to chafe under no conventional, no restraint, to know the fascination of recklessness, – that to him was life!

And about him it surged in blinding iridescence.

Notwithstanding the months of monastic life which lay behind him, he had not in any formal sense severed himself from the world. His renunciation of the joys of the senses had been not primary, as with the Franciscans, but, as always with those under Dominican influence, incidental on a choice of higher interests.

But the conscious choice of a beautiful existence was ever with him, and here, among the thousands giving vent to their joy, restrained by no dogma from voicing their gladness, loneliness crept cold among his heart-strings.

The scenes in which he, half absently, half resentfully, mingled, afforded a fine opportunity to study sacerdotal types. Now and then a scholarly countenance detached itself with startling effect from the coarser elements; now and then among the keen lines of such a countenance played the hovering, unmistakable light of a personal sanctity. There were men of the noblest, gentlest blood, from whom came the example of courtly manners, of polished speech and refined taste. Through the years of desolation and ruin, which war brought in its wake, they preserved art, literature and religion and infused into civilization the principles of self-sacrifice, charity and chastity. They declared a message that protested against violence and injustice. Francesco saw men among the priests, whose broad shoulders, singularly brilliant dark faces and magnificent poise formed a striking contrast to those upon whose features had settled the beautiful, soft calm of spotless seclusion.

Yet Francesco felt no need of such a refuge.

The espousals of piety and poverty, the inexplicable mysteries, martyrdoms, ascetic faces and haggard figures, which he had encountered upon entering the monastic life, the morbid enthusiasm and spiritual frenzy were repellent to him now, as they had been then. Sad-visaged penitents, men scourging themselves, prostrate in prayer, wrestling with demons, waked no responsive chord in his breast.

A splendid procession, with its gay dresses and colored pennons gleaming like a rainbow among the sombre garbs of monks and artisans, at this moment emerged from under the frowning portals of a sombre palace and swept into the sunlit square of St. John Lateran.

The cavalcade was headed by a cavalier superb in white velvet, riding abreast of a woman, tall and stately. They were followed by a company of young nobles, arrayed in festal splendor. The piazza resounded with the echo of their shouts and mirth, and the multitudes congested on the steps of the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme shouted loud acclaim, as they passed on their cantering steeds.

What were those stabbing pangs in Francesco's heart beneath the noonday brightness of the sky? Why did he wish, almost insanely, that he had not set foot in Rome?

The banners of the Frangipani waved proudly in the sun-fraught air, revealing their emblem of "The Broken Loaf," amidst velvet, gilt and tinsel.

As the cavalcade approached, every word, every tone, every accent was ringing perversely in his ears. The piazza with its maelstrom of humanity seemed to whirl and to scintillate about him, and the acclaim of the crowd surged in his ears like the dull roar of distant billows, as the procession came to a sudden stop at the fountain whence he had viewed its approach.

Shrinking beneath his cowl, yet unable to avert his gaze, Francesco stood leaning on the rim of the fountain.

He heard the voice of Ilaria as, dismounting without the aid of her companion, she requested a cup, having taken a sudden fancy to drink of the sparkling water.

The cup having been brought, she put her lips to it, then swiftly tossed the bright drops towards the sky, singing a little melody as she did so.

She had apparently not noted Francesco's presence, though his eyes had been riveted upon her from under the cowl, and his face was deadly pale. Hemmed in as he was by the crowds, he could not have receded, had he wished to; – thus he stood, looking upon the face of the woman he loved better than anything on earth, forgetting heaven and earth in doing so.

Stooping, she filled the cup once more and looked up at her companions with a smile.

"Who shall drink after me?" she laughed merrily.

Many a merry voice called out, as they eagerly crowded about her.

"Who but myself?" exclaimed Raniero Frangipani with a laugh, brushing the others away with perhaps a little more decision than was needed.

But suddenly Ilaria turned and deliberately advanced to the spot where Francesco stood, his cowl drawn deeply over his face.

"All men do my bidding to-day," she said in her low, vibrant voice, offering him the cup, while her eyes flung him a glittering challenge.

It was her most winsome self that looked at him, as she said:

"Drink to me!"

Dazed, he took the cup from her. In doing so, he touched her soft, white skin. The cold draught seemed to burn like fire as he sipped the clear water. Then, surprised by impulse, he flashed the drops upward, as he had seen her do.

Her laughter sounded shrill and high as broken glass, as the dislocated cowl revealed Francesco's features.

But she immediately regained her composure, and, without a hint in her voice of the taunt in the dells of Vallombrosa, she said, nodding, as if well pleased, and as if for his ear alone:

"The White Lady is well pleased. Is not this her altar?" But another had recognized the monk, when for a moment his cowl fell away from his face; and Raniero Frangipani was regarding him with dark malice.

As if to leave a sting in the memory of their meeting, Ilaria, returning to Raniero's side, gave the latter a smile so bewitching that his scowl vanished. Remounting with his help, she signalled for the cavalcade to proceed.

The pain in Francesco's heart rose, suffocating, once more as the procession swept onward.

How he had loved her! How he loved her now!

How shall a man be sure of what is hidden in his heart? He was a monk, – and she the wife of Raniero Frangipani.

How wondrous fair she was, glowing as a rose in the first flush of spring-time! How her sweet eyes had gleamed into his, with their subdued fire, half hidden under the long silken lashes!

For a moment he saw and heard nothing.

All sense of the present seemed to have vanished while the cavalcade faded from sight.

Now, from the gates beyond St. John Lateran, there burst forth the pomp and panoply of the North, with a flourish of trumpets, a gleaming of chain-mail, a sparkling of pennons.

Two heralds, on snow-white chargers, rode slowly through the gate, sounding their fanfares, their standards and particolored garbs displaying the Sun-Soaring Eagle of Hohenstauffen.

Then, on a black stallion, docile to the hand and impatient of the spur, Conradino of Swabia hove into sight, beside the friend of his youth, Frederick of Austria.

They rode in advance of the élite of the army, some two thousand men in gleaming chain-mail. Conrad and Marino Capecé followed hard on their heels with one thousand heavy infantry and a company of Saracen archers. Then came Galvano Lancia with the heavy armament, men from the North, carrying huge battle-axes in addition to their other weapons.

As they slowly advanced through the great square fronting the ancient Basilica, a great shout arose from the thousands who lined the thoroughfares, a counter-blast to the clangor of the clarions.

Then the whole host shouted, tossed up shield and lance, while trumpets and horns shrieked above the din.

On the steps of houses and churches, in casements, doors and windows, women waved kerchiefs and scarfs, their shrill acclaim mingling with the sounds of horn and bugle.

The tramping of thousands of steeds smote the bright air; shields and surcoats shone and shimmered under the sun-fraught Roman sky.

All the streets through which the armament passed were hung with garlands and tapestries, blazing with banners, festooned with flowers and gorgeous ornaments, re-echoing with peals of laughter and ribaldry and roaring music.

For the fickle Romans gave free rein to their joy of being rid of Anjou's presence, and the sober and pedantic Northmen viewed with amaze this manifestation of the Southern temperament, the reflex, as it were, of a clime which had lured to perdition so many of their own, who had not withstood the blandishments of the Sorceress.

And the Romans, revelling in their own exuberant gaiety, forgetful of yesterday, unmindful of the morrow, hailed with delight the iron-serried cohorts from beyond the Alps, – till the disappearing menace within their own walls would cause them to turn on their deliverers.

From the summits of his castle on the well-nigh impregnable heights of Viterbo, Pope Clement IV had witnessed the passing of the Swabian host, and his eyes, undimmed by age, had marked the persons and the quality of the leaders. And, turning to one of his attendants, who leaned by his side over the ramparts to scan more minutely the Northern armament, he had spoken the memorable words: "Truly, like two lambs, wreathed for the sacrifice, they are journeying towards their fate." —

To the casual observer, – if, indeed, there was such a one in the Rome of those days, – it must indeed have appeared a strange phenomenon that Conradino was surrounded almost entirely by Italians, with the exception of one or two leaders whose contingents the narrow and parsimonious policy of Duke Goerz of the Tyrol had not been able to shake in their loyalty, when he recalled his own contingents for want of pay.

But the popular enthusiasm swept everything before it, and Conradino's march to the Capitol, where he was to be tendered the keys of the city by the Senator of Rome, Prince Enrico of Castile, was one continuous triumph. —

As one in a dream, Francesco continued to gaze after the imperial cavalcade as it swept past with its gold and glitter and tinsel and the thunderous hoof-beats of a thousand steeds. As one in a dream, he kept gazing at the gold-embroidered mantles, the flash of dagger-hilts, the gleam of chain-mail, the waving plumes, the prancing steeds.

The procession swept by him, as the phantasmagoria of a dream; but, after it had passed, one apparition continued to stand forth.

He never forgot that face.

To him it was all that was beautiful and regal, framed in its soft, golden hair, with its tender blue eyes, its smiling lips. A slender youth, barely eighteen years of age, with the eyes of a dreamer, Conradino was possessed of an exaltation which blinded him to the perils of the situation, intoxicating his ambition, – a quaint combination of the mystic lore of his tunes, of which Francesco felt himself to be his other Ego.

The crowds had dispersed by degrees, sweeping in the wake of the Swabian host towards the Capitol.

And Francesco stared motionless into space.

Was he indeed cast out from the communion of the world, from the contact of the living?

Had a mocking fate but cast him on the shores of life, that he might stand idly by, watching the waves bounding, leaping over each other?

He felt as one enslaved, his will-power paralyzed.

Yonder, where the setting sun spun golden vapors round the summits of the Capitoline Hill, there was the trend of a high, self-conscious purpose, as revealed in the impending death-struggle for the highest ideals of mankind.

What had he to oppose it?

What great aim atoned for the agony of his transformation?

The restitution of papacy? The glory of the Church? The vindication of a crime? The toleration of a despot?