The Princess, an ardent devotee, was solely struck by this supreme project, this crowning of the edifice, the chimerical grandeur of which was in keeping with the disorderly imagination which prompted her to throw away her millions in good works of colossal and useless luxury. The French Catholics had just been startled and irritated by the treaty which the Emperor had concluded with the King of Italy, and by which he pledged himself, under certain conditions, to withdraw the French troops from Rome. It was very certain that this meant the abandonment of Rome to Italy; and the Catholics already saw the Pope driven away, reduced to soliciting alms, and wandering through the cities of Europe leaning on a beggar's staff. But what a prodigious _dénouement_ that would be: the Pope again finding himself Pontiff and King at Jerusalem, installed and sustained there by a bank in which the Catholics of the whole universe would regard it an honour to become shareholders! It was so beautiful a conception that the Princess declared it the grandest idea of the century, worthy to incite the enthusiasm of any well-born person possessed of faith. Success seemed to her absolutely certain, and her esteem for the engineer Hamelin, whom she treated with consideration, knowing him to be a constant worshipper, increased. Nevertheless, she flatly refused to go into the affair; she intended to remain faithful to her oath to restore her millions to the poor, without ever deriving from them a single copper of interest, for she desired that this money, the fruit of gambling, should be lost, drunk up by poverty, like some poisoned water that must disappear. The argument that the poor would profit by the speculation did not touch her; it even irritated her. No, no! the accursed source must be dried up, exhausted; she had undertaken no other mission.