Above Whom, The Virgin, On A Kind Of Blue Divan,
Promised To Restore The Patient.
In another case, a lady was in
the very act of being run over, immediately outside the city walls,
by a sort of piano-forte van.
But the Madonna was there again.
Whether the supernatural appearance had startled the horse (a bay
griffin), or whether it was invisible to him, I don't know; but he
was galloping away, ding dong, without the smallest reverence or
compunction. On every picture 'Ex voto' was painted in yellow
capitals in the sky.
Though votive offerings were not unknown in Pagan Temples, and are
evidently among the many compromises made between the false
religion and the true, when the true was in its infancy, I could
wish that all the other compromises were as harmless. Gratitude
and Devotion are Christian qualities; and a grateful, humble,
Christian spirit may dictate the observance.
Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of
which one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy
barrack: while gloomy suites of state apartments, shut up and
deserted, mock their own old state and glory, like the embalmed
bodies of kings. But we neither went there, to see state rooms,
nor soldiers' quarters, nor a common jail, though we dropped some
money into a prisoners' box outside, whilst the prisoners,
themselves, looked through the iron bars, high up, and watched us
eagerly. We went to see the ruins of the dreadful rooms in which
the Inquisition used to sit.
A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes,--
proof that the world hadn't conjured down the devil within her,
though it had had between sixty and seventy years to do it in,--
came out of the Barrack Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with
some large keys in her hands, and marshalled us the way that we
should go. How she told us, on the way, that she was a Government
Officer (concierge du palais a apostolique), and had been, for I
don't know how many years; and how she had shown these dungeons to
princes; and how she was the best of dungeon demonstrators; and how
she had resided in the palace from an infant,--had been born there,
if I recollect right,--I needn't relate. But such a fierce,
little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil I never beheld. She
was alight and flaming, all the time. Her action was violent in
the extreme. She never spoke, without stopping expressly for the
purpose. She stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung
herself into attitudes, hammered against walls with her keys, for
mere emphasis: now whispered as if the Inquisition were there
still: now shrieked as if she were on the rack herself; and had a
mysterious, hag-like way with her forefinger, when approaching the
remains of some new horror--looking back and walking stealthily,
and making horrible grimaces--that might alone have qualified her
to walk up and down a sick man's counterpane, to the exclusion of
all other figures, through a whole fever.
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