They went by way of Geneva, Turin, Parma, and Florence, and arrived in Rome. His Holiness received the travellers with the most gracious and fatherly of welcomes, surrounded by all the members of the Sacred College. After a while he conducted the visitors to the gardens, where he paused on the brink of a great pond, containing fish of all kinds, some of them carp two hundred years old. Presently one of the cardinals rang a bell hanging to a post near the water’s edge, and all the fishes came swimming with lightning rapidity, their heads lifting high above the surface of the water, and a page approached with two baskets, one filled with bread-crumbs, the other with grain. These dainties the pope threw into the pond to his favourites, who snapped up every morsel in a trice. Then the bell rang again, the fish twisted and turned joyously for a little while, as if to display their gratitude and satisfaction, and then disappeared. De Santeuil remarked that the fish set a fine example to the religious Orders, observing so excellently as they did, the rule of silence, and drinking nothing but water. The observation was not very cordially received by either the pope or his cardinals, and in any case, de Santeuil, who did not then obtain the permission to use his hymns, was inclined to blame the fishes. Some grace was accorded the hymns later; but the Consistory was of opinion that they bore a flavour of paganism. Ninon, on returning from the Holy City to Paris, found Corneille at the point of death. Memories now were her best consolation, and though she had not been eight months away from Paris, she found as many changes on her return, as if she had been absent a century. The king, to begin with, had become converted, and the Court had followed suit. Everyone was occupied with the concerns of his future salvation. The king had cut off his moustache, and the courtiers had all shaved their upper lips. As His Majesty had decided that a grey wig would add to his air of respectability, everybody had powdered their hair. Hitherto, hair-powder had been used by women only. Hair had become so enormously expensive, that moderately-supplied purses had to be content with a thin kind of crape puffed into curls. The _justaucorps_, after having developed into a cassock kind of garment, was now a coat, and the nether clothes Ninon considered to have grown disgracefully ugly in shape.