money, ambition and appetite, running riot with the most ferocious
egotism, beneath the quarrels of those leaders of the Church who ought
only to have contended together in love for the poor!

And then Pierre's mind revolted against that supremely odious and idiotic
Index. He now understood how it worked, from the arrival of the
denunciations to the public posting of the titles of the condemned works.
He had just seen the Secretary of the Congregation, Father Dangelis, to
whom the denunciations came, and who then investigated the affair,
collecting all documents and information concerning it with the passion
of a cultivated authoritarian monk, who dreamt of ruling minds and
consciences as in the heroic days of the Inquisition. Then, too, Pierre
had visited one of the consultive prelates, Monsignor Fornaro, who was so
ambitious and affable, and so subtle a theologian that he would have
discovered attacks against the faith in a treatise on algebra, had his
interests required it. Next there were the infrequent meetings of the
cardinals, who at long intervals voted for the interdiction of some
hostile book, deeply regretting that they could not suppress them all;
and finally came the Pope, approving and signing the decrees, which was a
mere formality, for were not all books guilty? But what an extraordinary
wretched Bastille of the past was that aged Index, that senile
institution now sunk into second childhood. One realised that it must
have been a formidable power when books were rare and the Church had
tribunals of blood and fire to enforce her edicts. But books had so
greatly multiplied, the written, printed thoughts of mankind had swollen
into such a deep broad river, that they had swept all opposition away,
and now the Index was swamped and reduced to powerlessness, compelled
more and more to limit its field of action, to confine itself to the
examination of the writings of ecclesiastics, and even in this respect it
was becoming corrupt, fouled by the worst passions and changed into an