The ignorant traveller had forgotten the essential formality. But, although instructed, he still persisted in trying to obtain an audience of the Pope gratis; by paying, he felt he should be truckling with simony. The editors of _l'Avenir_ had remained for three months unrecognised in the Holy City, waiting until the Pope should condescend to consider a question which was keeping half Catholic Europe in suspense. The Abbé Lacordaire had decided to return to France; the Comte de Montalembert made preparations for setting out for Naples; M. de Lamennais alone remained knocking at the gates of the Vatican, which were more inexorably closed than those of Lydia in her bad days. Father Ventura, then general of the Theatine, received the illustrious French traveller at Santo-Andrea della Valle. "I shall never forget," says M. de Lamennais in his _Affaires de Rome_, "those peaceful days I spent in that pious household, surrounded by the most exquisite care, amongst those instructively good and religious people devoted to their duty and aloof from all intrigue. The life of the cloister-regular, calm and, as it were, set apart and self-contained-holds a kind of _via media_ between the purely worldly life and that of the future, which faith reveals to us in but shadowy outlines, and of which every human being possesses within himself a positive assurance." Finally, after many solicitations, the Abbé de Lamennais was received in private audience by Gregory XVI. He went to the Vatican, climbed the huge staircase often ascended and descended by Raphael and by Michael Angelo, by Leo X. and Julian II.; he crossed the high and silent chambers with their double rows of superposed windows; at the end of that long, splendid and desolate palace he reached, under the escort of an usher, an ante-chamber, where two cardinals, as motionless as statues, sat upon wooden seats, solemnly reading their breviary. At the appointed moment the Abbé de Lamennais was introduced. In a small room, bare, upholstered in scarlet, where a single armchair denoted that only one man had the right to sit there, a tall old man stood upright, calm and smiling in his white garments. He received M. de Lamennais standing, a great honour! The greatest honour which that divine man could pay to another man without violating etiquette. Then the Pope conversed with the French traveller about the lovely sunshine and the beauties of nature in Italy, of the Roman monuments, the arts and ancient history; but of the object of his journey and his own special business in coming there, not a a single word. The Pope had no commission at all for that: the question was being considered somewhere in the dark by the cardinals appointed to inquire into it, whose names were not divulged. A petition had been addressed to the Court of Rome by the editors of _l'Avenir_; and this petition must necessarily lead to some decision, but all this was shrouded in the most impenetrable mystery.