The Borgias | Page 6

the streets of Rome. The authority had then

devolved in the customary way upon the Cardinal Camerlengo, who
during the interregnum had sovereign powers; but as he had been
obliged to fulfil all the duties of his office--that is, to get money coined
in his name and bearing his arms, to take the fisherman's ring from the
finger of the dead pope, to dress, shave and paint him, to have the
corpse embalmed, to lower the coffin after nine days' obsequies into the
provisional niche where the last deceased pope has to remain until his
successor comes to take his place and consign him to his final tomb;
lastly, as he had been obliged to wall up the door of the Conclave and
the window of the balcony from which the pontifical election is
proclaimed, he had not had a single moment for busying himself with
the police; so that the assassinations had continued in goodly fashion,
and there were loud cries for an energetic hand which should make all
these swords and all these daggers retire into their sheaths.
Now the eyes of this multitude were fixed, as we have said, upon the
Vatican, and particularly upon one chimney, from which would come
the first signal, when suddenly, at the moment of the 'Ave Maria'--that
is to say, at the hour when the day begins to decline--great cries went
up from all the crowd mixed with bursts of laughter, a discordant
murmur of threats and raillery, the cause being that they had just
perceived at the top of the chimney a thin smoke, which seemed like a
light cloud to go up perpendicularly into the sky. This smoke
announced that Rome was still without a master, and that the world still
had no pope; for this was the smoke of the voting tickets which were
being burned, a proof that the cardinals had not yet come to an
agreement.
Scarcely had this smoke appeared, to vanish almost immediately, when
all the innumerable crowd, knowing well that there was nothing else to
wait for, and that all was said and done until ten o'clock the next
morning, the time when the cardinals had their first voting, went off in
a tumult of noisy joking, just as they would after the last rocket of a
firework display; so that at the end of one minute nobody was there
where a quarter of an hour before there had been an excited crowd,
except a few curious laggards, who, living in the neighbourhood or on
the very piazza itself; were less in a hurry than the rest to get back to

their homes; again, little by little, these last groups insensibly
diminished; for half-past nine had just struck, and at this hour the
streets of Rome began already to be far from safe; then after these
groups followed some solitary passer-by, hurrying his steps; one after
another the doors were closed, one after another the windows were
darkened; at last, when ten o'clock struck, with the single exception of
one window in the Vatican where a lamp might be seen keeping
obstinate vigil, all the houses, piazzas, and streets were plunged in the
deepest obscurity.
At this moment a man wrapped in a cloak stood up like a ghost against
one of the columns of the uncompleted basilica, and gliding slowly and
carefully among the stones which were lying about round the
foundations of the new church, advanced as far as the fountain which,
formed the centre of the piazza, erected in the very place where the
obelisk is now set up of which we have spoken already; when he
reached this spot he stopped, doubly concealed by the darkness of the
night and by the shade of the monument, and after looking around him
to see if he were really alone, drew his sword, and with its point
rapping three times on the pavement of the piazza, each time made the
sparks fly. This signal, for signal it was, was not lost: the last lamp
which still kept vigil in the Vatican went out, and at the same instant an
object thrown out of the window fell a few paces off from the young
man in the cloak: he, guided by the silvery sound it had made in
touching the flags, lost no time in laying his hands upon it in spite of
the darkness, and when he had it in his possession hurried quickly
away.
Thus the unknown walked without turning round half-way along the
Borgo Vecchio; but there he turned to the right and took a street at the
other end of which was set up a Madonna with a lamp: he approached
the light, and drew from his pocket the object he had picked up, which
was nothing else than a