It would be puerile to question the sincerity of the author of those lines at this point. For, like Luther, who also promised his submission to Rome, the Abbé de Lamennais meant to persevere in the Catholic faith. If, later, his orthodoxy wavered; if, upon closer view of Rome and her cardinals, his faith in the Vicar of Christ and the visible representation of the Church gave way, we should rather accuse the pagan form under which the religion of Christ was presented to him, as in the case of the monk of Eisleben, when he visited the Eternal City. When I reach that period in my life, I will relate my own feelings, and will give my long conversations on the subject with Pope Gregory XVI. The three pilgrims of _l'Avenir,_ the Abbé de Lamennais, the Abbé Lacordaire and the Comte Charles de Montalembert, started, then, for Italy, not quite, as one of their number expressed it, with travellers' staffs in their hands, but animated with sincere faith and with sorrow in their hearts. They did not leave behind them the dream of eleven months without feeling deep regret; _l'Avenir_ had, in fact, lasted from 16 October 1830 to 17 September 1831. We will not relate the travelling impressions of the Abbé de Lamennais, for the author of the _Essai sur l'indifférence_ was not at all the man to notice external impressions. He passed through Italy with unseeing eyes; all through that land of wonders he saw nothing beyond his own thoughts and the object of his journey. Ten years later, when prisoner at Sainte-Pélagie, and already grown quite old, Lamennais discovered a corner in his memory still warm with the Italian sunshine; by a process of photography, which explains the character of the man we are dealing with, the monuments of art and the country itself were transferred to a plate in his brain! It needed meditation, solitude and captivity, just as the silvered plate needs iodine, to bring out of his memory the image of the beautiful things he had forgotton to admire ten years previously. On this account, he writes to us in 1841, under the low ceiling of his cell-- "I begin to see Italy.... It is a wondrous country!"