St. Francis certainly never contemplated that his beggarly cell would ever be surrounded by the rich marbles and bronze work against which his life was a protest. He never imagined, I am sure, that in spite of his prayer for poverty, his Order would become rich and influential and that this, the site of his abstinence, would be occupied by one of the most ornate churches in Italy. It is curious how barnacle-wise the spirit of materiality invariably encrusts the ideal! Christ died on the cross for the privilege of worshiping God “in spirit and in truth” after he had preached the sermon on the mount,--and then you have the gold-incrusted, power-seeking, wealth-loving Papacy, with women and villas and wars of aggrandizement and bastardy among the principal concomitants. And following Francis, imitating the self-immolation of the Nazarene, you have another great Order whose churches and convents in Italy are among the richest and most beautiful. And everywhere you find that lust for riches and show and gormandizing and a love of seeming what they are not, so that they may satisfy a faint scratching of the spirit which is so thickly coated over that it is almost extinguished. Or it may be that the ideal is always such an excellent device wherewith to trap the unwary and the unsophisticated. “Feed them with a fine-seeming and then put a tax on their humble credulity” seems to be the logic of materialism in regard to the mass. Anything to obtain power and authority! Anything to rule! And so you have an Alexander VI, Vicar of Christ, poisoning cardinals and seizing on estates that did not belong to him: leading a life of almost insane luxury; and a Medicean pope interested in worldly fine art and the development of a pagan ideal. CHAPTER XXXVI PERUGIA We returned at between seven and eight that night. After a bath I sat out on the large balcony, or veranda, commanding the valley, and enjoyed the moonlight. The burnished surface of the olive trees, and brown fields already being plowed with white oxen and wooden shares, gave back a soft glow that was somehow like the patina on bronze. There was a faint odor of flowers in the wind and here and there lights gleaming. From some street in the town I heard singing and the sound of a mandolin. I slept soundly. At breakfast,--coffee, honey, rolls and butter,--my Abbé gave me his card. He was going to Florence. He asked the hotel man to say to me that he had had a charming time and would I not come to France and visit him? “When I learn to speak French,” I replied, smiling at him. He smiled and nodded. We shook hands and parted. After breakfast I called a little open carriage such as they use in Paris and Monte Carlo and was off for Spello; and he took an early omnibus and caught his train.