secret, unsuspected decay
of their timbers, at times fall to the ground in one mass.

A murmur, a growling plaint rose from the swollen Tiber, and Pierre
shivered at the icy abysmal breath which swept past his face. And his
thoughts of the three summits and their symbolic triangle aroused within
him the memory of the sufferings of the great silent multitude of poor
and lowly for whom pope and king had so long disputed. It all dated from
long ago, from the day when, in dividing the inheritance of Augustus, the
emperor had been obliged to content himself with men's bodies, leaving
their souls to the pope, whose one idea had henceforth been to gain the
temporal power of which God, in his person, was despoiled. All the middle
ages had been disturbed and ensanguined by the quarrel, till at last the
silent multitude weary of vexations and misery spoke out; threw off the
papal yoke at the Reformation, and later on began to overthrow its kings.
And then, as Pierre had written in his book, a new fortune had been
offered to the pope, that of reverting to the ancient dream, by
dissociating himself from the fallen thrones and placing himself on the
side of the wretched in the hope that this time he would conquer the
people, win it entirely for himself. Was it not prodigious to see that
man, Leo XIII, despoiled of his kingdom and allowing himself to be called
a socialist, assembling under his banner the great flock of the
disinherited, and marching against the kings at the head of that fourth
estate to whom the coming century will belong? The eternal struggle for
possession of the people continued as bitterly as ever even in Rome
itself, where pope and king, who could see each other from their windows,
contended together like falcon and hawk for the little birds of the
woods. And in this for Pierre lay the reason why Catholicism was fatally
condemned; for it was of monarchical essence to such a point that the
Apostolic and Roman papacy could not renounce the temporal power under
penalty of becoming something else and disappearing. In vain did it feign
a return to the people, in vain did it seek to appear all soul; there was
no room in the midst of the world's democracies for any such total and
universal sovereignty as that which it claimed to hold from God. Pierre
ever beheld the Imperator sprouting up afresh in the Pontifex Maximus,
and it was this in particular which had killed his dream, destroyed his
book, heaped up all those rui