the building frenzy, the passion for marble, the
boastful desire to build and leave his monument of glory to future
generations. After the Caesars and the Popes had come the Italian
Government, which was no sooner master of the city than it wished to
reconstruct it, make it more splendid, more huge than it had ever been
before. It was the fatal suggestion of the soil itself--the blood of
Augustus rushing to the brain of these last-comers and urging them to a
mad desire to make the third Rome the queen of the earth. Thence had come
all the vast schemes such as the cyclopean quays and the mere ministries
struggling to outvie the Colosseum; and thence had come all the new
districts of gigantic houses which had sprouted like towns around the
ancient city. It was not only on the castle fields, but at the Porta San
Giovanni, the Porta San Lorenzo, the Villa Ludovisi, and on the heights
of the Viminal and the Esquiline that unfinished, empty districts were
already crumbling amidst the weeds of their deserted streets. After two
thousand years of prodigious fertility the soil really seemed to be
exhausted. Even as in very old fruit gardens newly planted plum and
cherry trees wither and die, so the new walls, no doubt, found no life in
that old dust of Rome, impoverished by the immemorial growth of so many
temples, circuses, arches, basilicas, and churches. And thus the modern
houses, which men had sought to render fruitful, the useless, over-huge
houses, swollen with hereditary ambition, had been unable to attain
maturity, and remained there sterile like dry bushes on a plot of land
exhausted by over-cultivation. And the frightful sadness that one felt
arose from the fact that so creative and great a past had culminated in
such present-day impotency--Rome, who had covered the world with
indestructible monuments, now so reduced that she could only generate
ruins.

"Oh, they'll be finished some day!" said Pierre.

Narcisse gazed at him in astonishment: "For whom?"

That was the cruel question! Only by dint of patriotic enthusiasm on the
morrow of the conquest had one been able to indulge in the hope of a
mighty influx of population, and now singular blindness was needed for
the belief that such an influx would ever take place. The past
experiments seemed decisive; moreover, there was no reason why the
population should double: Rome offered neither the attraction of pleasure
nor that of gain to be amassed in commerce and industr