PROLOGUE


The day from which I reckon the beginning of all those adventures which
occupied me in the Courts of England and France and elsewhere, was the
first day of May in the year sixteen hundred and seventy-eight--the day,
that is, on which my Lord Abbot carried me from St. Paul's-without-the-
Walls to the Vatican Palace, to see our Most Holy Lord Innocent the
Eleventh.

It had been a very hot day in Rome, as was to be expected at that
season; and I had stayed in the cloister in the cool, as my Lord Abbot
had bidden me, not knowing whether it would be on that day or another,
or, indeed, on any at all, that His Holiness would send for me. I knew
that my Lord Abbot had been to the Vatican again and again on the
business; and had spoken of me, as he said he would, not to the Holy
Father only, but to the Cardinal Secretary of State and to others; but I
did not know, and he did not tell me, as to whether that business had
been prosperous; though I think he must have known long before how it
would end. An hour before _Ave Maria_, then, he sent to me, as I walked
in the cloisters, and when I came to him, told me, all short, to dress
myself in my old secular clothes, as fine as I could, and to be ready to
ride with him in half an hour, because our Most Holy Lord had consented
to receive me one hour after _Ave Maria_. He said nothing more to me
than that; he did not tell me how I was to bear myself, nor what I was
to say, neither as I stood in his cell, nor as we rode as fast as we