Mrs. Hugh Fraser

“ Napoleon’s star was still shining. France had taken him to her arms. Without the shedding of a single drop of blood he had regained the throne and, though all the world might be in arms against him, he had faith in himself, the faith that moveth mountains. Murat had resolved to go and join him, and, when the world war was over, and Napoleon’s foot was again upon the neck of his enemies, to return to Naples and drive Ferdinand into the sea and under it. ”

“ Before it the Campagna stretches away to the sea and to the north, the horizon there brokenly outlined by the low Volscian and Ciminian Hills. Not so towards the sea; in the near distance a castle or a single tower breaks the plain, midway Rome shimmers like a net of pearls thrown down across the Tiber; but the west is the empty west always, left to the sun and the wind, with the wide heavens above, and that one long sword of light laid on its farther bound where the tideless Mediterranean laps against the shore. ”

“ Here Boniface showed all the valour of his race and place. He prepared to meet death with the dignity of a priest and the courage of a soldier. “If I am to die, I will die like a Pope,” he said. Every friend, every Cardinal and chaplain and courtier fled as the shout of “A Colonna, a Colonna,” rose from the lower streets of the mountain town. Not a soul was left in the palace but the Pope. He put on his pontifical vestments, placed the tiara on his head, and mounted his throne, where he sat like a statue, awaiting certain death. ”

“ How much our Italy of Rome and Naples owes to the Apennines! How gratefully should lovers of romance and history regard that mighty chain that runs, an inland sea of crag and peak, forest and ravine, between shore and shore! Physically and morally, it is the backbone of the country, the fortress of tradition, the nurse of what our modern cant calls “plain living and high thinking.” ”

“ Benedict, the “beloved, called from the cleft in the rock,” praying, rejoicing, hiding from men to be alone with God. And that seems to me the most wonderful thing in the lives of the great founders—they had not at first the smallest forethought of their mission. They only knew that they must save their souls in fear and trembling, and in blind humility they withdrew from all occasions of sin and prayed for purification.
It forms a curious contrast to the life led by most of us who consider ourselves pretty decent Christians in the eyes of the world. ”

“ He felt a real remorse for the part which he had played, and the splendour of Napoleon’s lone-handed assault upon a world in arms appealed to every soldierlike instinct in him.
He did not forget his own ambition, though, and he desired to make himself so powerful that he could treat with either Austria or France upon terms of something like equality. It was Italy that he wanted. The great Powers would have their hands full now, and he hoped to be able to surprise the Germans while the armies of Europe were engaged with the Emperor. ”

“ The water laps gently at her feet, the sky arches blue overhead, and one can dream very good and happy dreams as one gazes up at her. But in San Marco, just as in the Doges’ Palace, one is teased by two things—the necessity of thought and appreciation, and that horrid sense one has in so many places in Italy of all the prying irreverence that expert—sceptic—heretics have brought to bear on it—as if the cleverest ant that ever crawled and builded underground could measure the courses of the stars! ”

“ Of her husband, who seems to have died before the story begins, we are told nothing; her whole existence was wrapped up in a quite unsanctified passion for a handsome pagan called Boniface, a man of generous heart, as the sequel shows, but a sensualist, like most of his class at that time. He adored Aglaë, and the two must have passed some enchanting hours wandering on the terraces of the Aventine villa, or sitting hand in hand to watch the sun sinking red into the distant sea. No thought of the future seems to have come to them there, nor any gleam of a scruple as to their way of life. ”

“ The details that have come down to us of that Apparition are somewhat less full than those of the one at Monte Gargano, but the subsequent history of the French sanctuary, which stood for just a thousand years as an impregnable fortress, is connected, right through, with humanity as the lonely shrine of the South has never been. Its name alone is like a war-cry—“Saint Michel au Péril de la Mer,” Saint Michael of the Peril of the Sea—and bespeaks the invincible ally of the race that was once the ardent apostle of Christianity and its most valiant champion. ”

“ There were no lengths to which Duke Charles was not prepared to go in order to attain his aim and to satisfy the ambition that devoured him; no crime, however frightful, from the contemplation of which he shrank as a means to his end. Cost what it might, he would be King of Naples and of Jerusalem. The chroniclers describe him as a pale man with close-cropped hair and a thick beard; and, when agitated, he had a trick of frowning. Charles of Durazzo had felt greatly aggrieved at the bestowal of Joan’s hand in marriage upon Andrew of Hungary ”

“ Knowledge brings the desire for purification from sin, original or actual; and now the church, the symbol of the soul, must be purified. The Bishop mingles wine with water, to denote the Humanity and the Divinity of Christ; to these he adds ashes to commemorate His death, and salt as an emblem of His resurrection; the mystic flood is poured in waves over the altar, and thence all down the pavement of the church, while hundreds of acolytes scale the ladders placed against the walls and the mystic liquid runs down them in glistening sheets to mingle with the mimic ripples on the floor. ”

“ When about two-thirds of the distance to Naples is accomplished the range rises in the isolated peak of Rocca Monfina to the height of nearly 4,000 feet and becomes merged in the central Apennines once more. The railway runs through now, but it is still a wild, remote country, very feudal in its ways, with half-ruined castles on every point of vantage, scowling down on a land that needs them no longer, where fighting has ceased, and the good soil that has had its way for centuries has brought forth those stores of corn and wine and oil which seem to be South Italy’s inalienable dower. ”

“ He had come at a moment when Corsica was in the throes of a civil war of its own, between the followers of the Bourbons, the adherents of Napoleon, and a party who, sitting on the fence between, called themselves Independents. Many of Murat’s old-time companions in arms had been natives of Corsica, and, the Napoleonists and Independents being in the majority, they called upon Joachim to help them crush the remainder and rule over the island afterwards. This was the sort of invitation which the fiery cavalryman was always only too ready to accept, and his heart soared into the heavens! ”

“ Suffice it to say that for two whole months Monsignor Muzi and Fathers Sallusti and Mastai rode through those appalling solitudes, over the bridle paths cut in the face of the rock that towers thousands of feet above and sinks sheer down thousands of feet below, paths where one false step means death, and so narrow in some places that if two parties meet it is usual for them—if they are not the fighting sort—to decide on the spin of a coin which shall dismount, pitch its mules over the precipice and crawl past the winners as best they can—to continue the journey on foot! ”

“ It is a city of ghosts, big-eyed, hard-featured Byzantine ghosts; the great mosaics are full of their portraits, and, with all the beauty of gold and colour, there is something sinister and deathly in those tall, straight figures, stiff of gesture, rapacious of eye—likenesses caught unawares of people who in their hearts prized power and wealth above all other things in this life or the next. ”