This brief was, as I said, concealed from all but the five cardinals who were to carry out the sentence until 17th August. On that day the Catholic Powers were officially informed of the signing of the brief. At nine o'clock that evening a band of officials and guards entered the metropolitan house attached to the Gesù, and ordered Ricci to summon all his subjects to the refectory. They knew--some of them had witnessed the same scene in Spain and Portugal--that their hour had come, but they must have been deeply pained at the wording of the brief, which was read to them. Their proud Society added to that list of degenerate congregations which the Vatican had been compelled to abolish! They were forbidden to leave the house until secular costumes were provided for them, and the notaries put the papal seal on their documents. The same evening, or on the next day, the brief was read in the other Italian houses, and, as the couriers sped to the north, the disastrous tidings slowly spread gloom and despair throughout the Jesuit world as far as Holland and Poland. The grief of the Jesuits was not less intense than the rejoicing of their opponents. A laughing crowd stormed the chancellory for copies of the brief, but few copies had been printed, and its drastic clauses only gradually became known. Then came the long and stirring period when the news of the response of the Jesuits came in from every quarter. The Roman Jesuits quietly left their homes, day by day, as secular clothes were provided for them. The Pope provided, not only for them, but for the Portuguese ex-Jesuits, as Portugal refused to fulfil its promise, and had every effort made to find situations for them in the service of the Vatican, the secular clergy, or the educational world. Many merely changed their garments, and continued to be the confessors of noble ladies or the tutors of their sons. Large numbers of them lived in community, on their joint pensions, awaiting the death of Clement XIV. and the restoration of the Society. The chief trouble in Italy was that offensive anonymous pamphlets were printed in vast quantities and circulated, and were in some instances traced to the Jesuits; and that Ricci and his assistants, who remained in the central house, were detected in a treacherous correspondence with the insurgents in distant regions, and imprisoned in the fortress of S. Angelo, where the unhappy Ricci died two years afterwards. Rome was not indisposed to laugh at anti-Jesuits as well as Jesuits. No doubt the gossips of the city told each other the fables which Jesuits reproduced in later years, and their apologist gives as "history"--for instance, that the diamonds which had adorned the statue of the Madonna in the Gesù were publicly worn afterwards by the mistress of one of the prelates charged with the execution of the sentence--but the pro-Jesuit faction at Rome was completely silenced.