iety came back to him, with even a little gentle
irony: "You don't know, I suppose, what it was that took my fancy in your
book--for, in spite of all my protests, I have read it twice. Well, what
pleased me was that Mazzini himself might almost have written it at one
time. Yes! I found all my youth again in your pages, all the wild hope of
my twenty-fifth year, the new religion of a humanitarian Christ, the
pacification of the world effected by the Gospel! Are you aware that,
long before your time, Mazzini desired the renovation of Christianity? He
set dogma and discipline on one side and only retained morals. And it was
new Rome, the Rome of the people, which he would have given as see to the
universal Church, in which all the churches of the past were to be
fused--Rome, the eternal and predestined city, the mother and queen,
whose domination was to arise anew to ensure the definitive happiness of
mankind! Is it not curious that all the present-day Neo-Catholicism, the
vague, spiritualistic awakening, the evolution towards communion and
Christian charity, with which some are making so much stir, should be
simply a return of the mystical and humanitarian ideas of 1848? Alas! I
saw all that, I believed and burned, and I know in what a fine mess those
flights into the azure of mystery landed us! So it cannot be helped, I
lack confidence."

Then, as Pierre on his side was growing impassioned and sought to reply,
he stopped him: "No, let me finish. I only want to convince you how
absolutely necessary it was that we should take Rome and make her the
capital of Italy. Without Rome new Italy could not have existed; Rome
represented the glory of ancient time; in her dust lay the sovereign
power which we wished to re-establish; she brought strength, beauty,
eternity to those who possessed her. Standing in the middle of our
country, she was its heart, and must assuredly become its life as soon as
she should be awakened from the long sleep of ruin. Ah! how we desired
her, amidst victory and amidst defeat, through years and years of
frightful impatience! For my part I loved her, and longed for her, far
more than for any woman, with my blood burning, and in despair that I
should be growing old. And when we possessed her, our folly was a desire
to behold her huge, magnificent, and commanding all at once, the equal of
the other great capitals of Europe--Berlin, Paris, and London. Look at
her! she is still my only love, my only consolat