many from all points of the world, has not that sense of the odd been
obliterated by the multiplicity of singular and anomalous types stranded
and sheltering there? You will find there revolutionists like boorish
Ribalta, who is ending in a curiosity-shop a life more eventful than the
most eventful of the sixteenth century.

Descended from a Corsican family, this personage came to Rome when very
young, about 1835, and at first became a seminarist. On the point of
being ordained a priest, he disappeared only to return, in 1849, so rabid
a republican that he was outlawed at the time of the reestablishment of
the pontifical government. He then served as secretary to Mazzini, with
whom he disagreed for reasons which clashed with Ribalta's honor. Would
passion for a woman have involved him in such extravagance? In 1870
Ribalta returned to Rome, where he opened, if one may apply such a term
to such a hole, a book-shop. But he is an amateur bookseller, and will
refuse you admission if you displease him. Having inherited a small
income, he sells or he does not, following his fancy or the requirements
of his own purchases, to-day asking you twenty francs for a wretched
engraving for which he paid ten sous, to-morrow giving you at a low price
a costly book, the value of which he knows. Rabid Gallophobe, he never
pardoned his old general the campaign of Dijon any more than he forgave
Victor Emmanuel for having left the Vatican to Pius IX. "The house of
Savoy and the papacy," said he, when he was confidential, "are two eggs
which we must not eat on the same dish." And he would tell of a certain
pillar of St. Peter's hollowed into a staircase by Bernin, where a
cartouch of dynamite was placed. If you were to ask him why he became a
book collector, he would bid you step over a pile of papers, of boarding
and of folios. Then he would show you an immense chamber, or rather a
shed, where thousands of pamphlets were piled up along the walls: "These
are the rules of all the convents suppressed by Italy. I shall write