his own personality served to increase the
incredible number of cassocks that one encountered in the streets. Ah!
that ebb and flow, that ceaseless tide of black gowns and frocks of every
hue! With their processions of students ever walking abroad, the
seminaries of the different nations would alone have sufficed to drape
and decorate the streets, for there were the French and the English all
in black, the South Americans in black with blue sashes, the North
Americans in black with red sashes, the Poles in black with green sashes,
the Greeks in blue, the Germans in red, the Scots in violet, the Romans
in black or violet or purple, the Bohemians with chocolate sashes, the
Irish with red lappets, the Spaniards with blue cords, to say nothing of
all the others with broidery and bindings and buttons in a hundred
different styles. And in addition there were the confraternities, the
penitents, white, black, blue, and grey, with sleeveless frocks and capes
of different hue, grey, blue, black, or white. And thus even nowadays
Papal Rome at times seemed to resuscitate, and one could realise how
tenaciously and vivaciously she struggled on in order that she might not
disappear in the cosmopolitan Rome of the new era. However, Pierre,
whilst running about from one prelate to another, frequenting priests and
crossing churches, could not accustom himself to the worship, the Roman
piety which astonished him when it did not wound him. One rainy Sunday
morning, on entering Santa Maria Maggiore, he fancied himself in some
waiting-room, a very splendid one, no doubt, but where God seemed to have
no habitation. There was not a bench, not a chair in the nave, across
which people passed, as they might pass through a railway station,
wetting and soiling the precious mosaic pavement with their muddy shoes;
and tired women and children sat round the bases of the columns, even as
in railway stations one sees people sitting and waiting for their trains
during the great crushes of the holiday season. And for this tramping
throng of folks of small degree, who had looked in _en passant_, a priest
was saying a low mass in a side chapel, before which a narrow file of
standing people had gathered, extending across the nave, and recalling
the crowds which wait in front of theatres for the opening of the doors.
At the elevation of the host one and all inclined themselves devoutly,
but almost immediately afterwards the gathering dispersed. And indeed why
l