thousand lire of his budget . . . Well, we all know that
titles can be purchased in Italy; and that was no doubt the
price he paid for the title I have mentioned.

However, it was not in money only that Cardinal Udeschim paid.
He paid also in labour. I have said that his titular church
was in a slum. Rome surely contained no slum more fetid, none
more perilous--a region of cut-throat alleys, south of the
Ghetto, along the Tiber bank. Night after night, accompanied
by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio Appolloni, the Cardinal
worked there as hard as any hard-working curate: visiting the
sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish,
persuading the drunken from their taverns, making peace between
the combative. Not infrequently, when he came home, he would
add a pair of stilettos to his already large collection of such
relics. And his homecomings were apt to be late--oftener than
not, after midnight; and sometimes, indeed, in the vague
twilight of morning, at the hour when, as he once expressed it
to Don Giorgio, "the tired burglar is just lying down to rest."
And every Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect of Archives and
Inscriptions sat for three hours boxed up in his confessional,
like any parish priest--in his confessional at St. Mary of the
Lilies, where the penitents who breathed their secrets into his
ears, and received his fatherly counsels . . . I beg your
pardon. One must not, of course, remember his rags or his
sores, when Lazarus approaches that tribunal.

But I don't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint; I am sure he
was not a prig. For all his works of supererogation, his life
was a life of pomp and luxury, compared to the proper saint's