I had paid my first debt, the debt of entrance to the Villa Medici. Night was to bring other trials. The dining room of the pensionnaires, which I found so pleasant the next day, was transformed into a den of bandits. The servants, who ordinarily wore the green livery of the Emperor, were dressed as monks with short blunderbusses across their shoulders and with pistols in their belts. Their false noses were modeled by a sculptor and were painted red. The pine table was stained with wine and covered with dirt. Our seniors wore proud and haughty looks, but this did not prevent them, at a given signal, from telling us that while the food was simple, all lived in the most fraternal harmony. Suddenly, after a discussion of art which was carried on facetiously, there was a hub-bub and amid frightful shouts all the plates and bottles went flying through the air. At a signal from one of the supposed monks there was instant silence and we heard the voice of the oldest pensionnaire, Henner, saying gravely, "Here all is harmony." It was well that we knew we were the butts for jokes. I was a little embarrassed. I did not dare to move, and I sat with my head down, staring at the table, where I read the name of Herold, the author of the _Pré aux Clercs_, cut with a knife when he was a pensionnaire at this same Villa Medici. CHAPTER V THE VILLA MEDICI As I had foreseen and gathered from the meaning looks which the pensionnaires exchanged, another joke, the masterpiece of the hazing, was arranged for us. We had hardly left the table when the pensionnaires wrapped themselves in the huge capes that were fashionable in Rome at the time and obliged us, before we went to rest in the rooms assigned to us, to take a constitutional (Was it really necessary?) to the Forum, the ancient Forum which all our memories of school recalled to us. We knew nothing of Rome by night, or by day for that matter, but we walked on surrounded by our new school fellows who acted as guides. It was a January night and very dark, and favorable for the schemes of our cicerones. When we got near the Capitol, we could scarcely distinguish the outlines of the temples in the hollows of the famous Campo Vaccino. Their reproductions in the Louvre are still one of the masterpieces of Claude Lorrain. In those days, under the rule of His Holiness Pope Pius IX, no official excavations had been begun even in the Forum. The famous place was only a heap of stones and shafts of columns buried in the weeds on which herds of goats browsed. These pretty creatures were watched over by goatherds in large hats and wrapped in great black cloaks with green linings, the ordinary costume of the peasant of the Roman campagna. They were armed with long pikes to drive off the wild cattle which splashed about in the Ostian marshes.