from that room where
he was for ever imprisoned, the old soldier beheld the slow crumbling of
all his hopes, and fell into dismal melancholy, full of unacknowledged
fear for the future. Now that the intoxication of action no longer dimmed
his eyes, now that he spent his long and empty days in thought, his
vision became clear. Italy, which he had desired to see so powerful, so
triumphant in her unity, was acting madly, rushing to ruin, possibly to
bankruptcy. Rome, which to him had ever been the one necessary capital,
the city of unparalleled glory, requisite for the sovereign people of
to-morrow, seemed unwilling to take upon herself the part of a great
modern metropolis; heavy as a corpse she weighed with all her centuries
on the bosom of the young nation. Moreover, his son Luigi distressed him.
Rebellious to all guidance, the young man had become one of the devouring
offsprings of conquest, eager to despoil that Italy, that Rome, which his
father seemed to have desired solely in order that he might pillage them
and batten on them. Orlando had vainly opposed Luigi's departure from the
ministry, his participation in the frantic speculations on land and house
property to which the mad building of the new districts had given rise.
But at the same time he loved his son, and was reduced to silence,
especially now when everything had succeeded with Luigi, even his most
risky financial ventures, such as the transformation of the Villa
Montefiori into a perfect town--a colossal enterprise in which many of
great wealth had been ruined, but whence he himself had emerged with
millions. And it was in part for this reason that Orlando, sad and
silent, had obstinately restricted himself to one small room on the third
floor of the little palazzo erected by Luigi in the Via Venti
Settembre--a room where he lived cloistered with a single servant,
subsisting on his own scanty income, and accepting nothing but that
modest hospitality from his son.

As Pierre reached that new Via Venti Settembre* which climbs the side and
summit of the Viminal hill, he was struck by the heavy sumptuousness of
the new "palaces," which betokened among the moderns the same taste for
the huge that marked the ancient Romans. In the warm afternoon glow,
blent of purple and old gold, the broad, triumphant thoroughfare, with
its endless rows of white house-fronts, bore witness to new Rome's proud
hope of futurity and sovereign power. And Pierre fairly gasped when