Lastly, the third faction comprises the immovable men, old men who will not or cannot go either forwards or backwards: among these old ones is Cardinal Vidoni[563], a kind of gendarme of the Treaty of Tolentino: tall and fat, with a red face, and a skull-cap worn on one side. When you tell him that he has a chance of the Papacy, he replies, "_Lo santo Spirito sarebber dunque ubriaco!_" He plants trees at Ponte-Mole, where Constantine made the world Christian. I see those trees when I leave Rome by the Porta del Popolo to return by the Porta Angelica. The moment he catches sight of me at a distance, the cardinal shouts, "_Ah! ah! Signor Ambasciadore di Francia!_" and then flies out against the men who plant his pines. He does not follow the cardinalist etiquette; he goes out accompanied by a single footman in a carriage to his fancy: people forgive him everything, content to call him Madama Vidoni[564]. My ambassadorial colleagues are Count Lützow, the Austrian Ambassador, a polished man; his wife sings well, always the same air, and is always talking of her "little children;" the learned Baron Bunsen[565], the Prussian Minister, and friend of Niebuhr[566] the historian (I am in treaty with him to have the lease of his palace on the Capitol cancelled in my favour); Prince Gagarin, the Russian Minister, exiled among the past grandeurs of Rome by reason of banished loves: if he was preferred by the beautiful Madame Narischkine[567], who for a moment inhabited my hermitage at Aulnay, there must be some charm in his bad temper; we prevail rather through our defects than our good qualities. M. de Labrador[568], the Spanish Ambassador, a faithful man, talks little, walks about alone, thinks a great deal, or does not think at all, I cannot make out which. Old Count Fuscaldo represents Naples as winter represents spring. He has a great cardboard placard on which he studies, through his spectacles, not the rose-fields of Pæstum, but the names of suspicious foreigners to whose passports he must not put his visa. I envy him his palace (the Farnese), an admirable unfinished structure, crowned by Michael Angelo, painted by Annibale Carracci, aided by his brother Agostino, and sheltering under its portico the sarcophagus of Cæcilia Metella, who has lost nothing by the change of mausoleum. Fuscaldo, ragged in mind and body, is said to have a mistress. The Comte de Celles[569], Ambassador of the King of the Netherlands, was married to Mademoiselle de Valence[570], who is now dead. He has had two daughters by her, who are consequently great-grand-daughters of Madame de Genlis. M. de Celles has remained a prefect because he used to be one; his character is that medley of the gossip, the petty tyrant, the recruiting sergeant and the steward which one never loves. If you meet a man who, instead of acres, yards and feet, talks to you of hectares, metres and decimetres, you have laid your hand on a prefect. [Sidenote: My ambassadorial colleagues.]