When we met Monseigneur Duchesne at the house of Count Ugo Balzani, or in the drawing-room of the French Embassy, all that showed, at first, was the witty ecclesiastic of the old school, an abbe of the eighteenth century, _fin_, shrewd, well versed in men and affairs, and capable of throwing an infinity of meaning into the inflection of a word or the lift of an eyebrow. I remember listening to an account by him of certain ceremonies in the catacombs in which he had taken part, in the train of an Ultramontane Cardinal whom he particularly disliked. He himself had preached the sermon. A member of the party said, "I hear your audience were greatly moved, Monsignore." Duchesne bowed, with just a touch of irony. Then some one who knew the Cardinal well and the relation between him and Duchesne, said, with _malice prepense_, "Was his Eminence moved, Monsignore?" Duchesne looked up and shook off the end of his cigarette. "_Non, Monsieur_," he said, dryly, "his Eminence was not moved--oh, not at all!" A ripple of laughter went round the group which had heard the question. For a second, Duchesne's eyes laughed, too, and were then as impenetrable as before. My last remembrance of him is as the center of a small party in one of the famous rooms of the Palazzo Borghese which were painted by the Caracci, this time in a more serious and communicative mood, so that one realized in him more clearly the cosmopolitan and liberal scholar, whose work on the early Papacy, and the origins of Christianity in Rome, is admired and used by men of all faiths and none. Shortly afterward, a Roman friend of ours, an Englishman who knew Monseigneur Duchesne well, described to me the impressions of an English Catholic who had gone with him to Egypt on some learned mission, and had been thrown for a time into relations of intimacy with him. My friend reported the touch of astonishment in the Englishman's mind, as he became aware of the religious passion in his companion, the devotion of his daily mass, the rigor and simplicity of his personal life; and we both agreed that as long as Catholicism could produce such types, men at once so daring and so devout, so free, and yet so penetrated with--so steeped in--the immemorial life of Catholicism, the Roman Church was not likely to perish out of Europe.