could annihilate the past--for instance, the Seven Years' War, or
the French Revolution--though any one who believed in Him would
acknowledge Him to be omnipotent, so would it be unreasonable for
the faithful to expect that the Pope could always guard himself
from poison. Then, after looking at me for a moment stedfastly,
and taking another sip, he told me that popes had frequently done
impossibilities; for example, Innocent the Tenth had created a
nephew; for, not liking particularly any of his real nephews, he
had created the said Camillo Astalli his nephew; asking me, with a
he! he! "What but omnipotence could make a young man nephew to a
person to whom he was not in the slightest degree related?" On my
observing that of course no one believed that the young fellow was
really the Pope's nephew, though the Pope might have adopted him as
such, the man in black replied, "that the reality of the nephewship
of Camillo Astalli had hitherto never become a point of faith; let,
however, the present pope, or any other pope, proclaim that it is
necessary to believe in the reality of the nephewship of Camillo
Astalli, and see whether the faithful would not believe in it. Who
can doubt that," he added, "seeing that they believe in the reality
of the five propositions of Jansenius? The Jesuits, wishing to
ruin the Jansenists, induced a pope to declare that such and such
damnable opinions, which they called five propositions, were to be
found in a book written by Jansen, though, in reality, no such
propositions were to be found there; whereupon the existence of
these propositions became forthwith a point of faith to the
faithful. Do you then think," he demanded, "that there is one of
the faithful who would not swallow, if called upon, the nephewship
of Camillo Astalli as easily as the five propositions of
Jansenius?" "Surely, then," said I, "the faithful must be a pretty
pack of simpletons!" Whereupon the man in black exclaimed, "What!