he had seen and learnt since his arrival in Rome, the disillusions, the
rebuffs which he had experienced, all the many points of difference
between existing reality and imagination, whereby his dream of a return
to primitive Christianity was already half shattered. And in particular
he remembered the hour which he had spent on the dome of St. Peter's,
when, in presence of the old city of glory so stubbornly clinging to its
purple, he had realised that he was an imbecile with his idea of a purely
spiritual pope. He had that day fled from the furious shouts of the
pilgrims acclaiming the Pope-King. He had only accepted the necessity for
money, that last form of servitude still binding the Pope to earth. But
all had crumbled afterwards, when he had beheld the real Rome, the
ancient city of pride and domination where the papacy can never be
complete without the temporal power. Too many bonds, dogma, tradition,
environment, the very soil itself rendered the Church for ever immutable.
It was only in appearances that she could make concessions, and a time
would even arrive when her concessions would cease, in presence of the
impossibility of going any further without committing suicide. If his,
Pierre's, dream of a New Rome were ever to be realised, it would only be
faraway from ancient Rome. Only in some distant region could the new
Christianity arise, for Catholicism was bound to die on the spot when the
last of the popes, riveted to that land of ruins, should disappear
beneath the falling dome of St. Peter's, which would fall as surely as
the temple of Jupiter had fallen! And, as for that pope of the present
day, though he might have no kingdom, though age might have made him weak
and fragile, though his bloodless pallor might be that of some ancient
idol of wax, he none the less flared with the red passion for universal
sovereignty, he was none the less the stubborn scion of his ancestry, the
Pontifex Maximus, the Caesar Imperator in whose veins flowed the blood of
Augustus, master of the world.