Their opponents proved to be stronger. I shall have occasion hereafter to tell something of the course that matters subsequently took. But now I will return to the point where I broke off—to the Peace Congress at Rome. XXXI THE CONGRESS IN ROME Frame of mind · Life together in the Hotel Quirinal · General Türr and his career · Little revolution against Bonghi · Alsace-Lorraine · The Grelix couple · Baron Pirquet · Opening festival on the Capitol · Ruggero Bonghi as chairman · Weighty words · Founding of the Bern Central Bureau · Echoes · The monthly _Die Waffen nieder_ is launched · A. H. Fried · “The Important Thing” To Rome! No one can undertake the journey to the Eternal City without being overcome by a certain feeling of awe. There vibrates in the soul a diapason of historic and æsthetic tones, of memories of antiquity and the Renaissance; pictures rise of Forum and Vatican, of gladiators and cardinals, of palaces and churches, of entrancing gardens and dazzling treasures of art. We also, both of us, quivered with this peculiar _frisson_ of joyous expectation when we found ourselves in the train that bore us Romewards. My Own naturally felt it with especial force, for he was to see the Eternal City for the first time. And this frame of mind was still more intensified by the object of our journey,—a congress, a Peace Congress. That was history too, only not ancient history, but the most modern; strictly speaking, the history of a future at whose gates one could as yet only knock; but what a new and beautiful world lay behind these gates!—And was I actually on my way thither as the delegate of a society which I myself had called into existence, and should I there—in the Capitol—meet and take counsel with statesmen from all climes? Was it not an unheard-of temerity, or, in simpler terms, a piece of impudence? It had all come about so quickly; I had acted under such an irresistible impulse, under the compulsion of an eager will, but also under the protection of that naïveté which consists in ignorance of difficulties and hindrances, and which helps forward every hazardous undertaking better than deliberation and experience.