"'No, no,' he said; 'it will be over in a few days.'" "ROME, _Thursday_, 12 _February_ 1829. "I read your newspapers. They often give me pain. I see in the Globe that Monsieur le Comte Portalis is, according to that journal, my declared enemy. Why? Do I ask his place? He is taking too much pains; I do not so much as think of him. I wish him all possible prosperity; but yet, if it were true that he wanted war, he would find me there. People seem to me to be talking nonsense about everything, both about the immortal Mahmud and the evacuation of the Morea. "In the most probable event, this evacuation will put back Greece under the yoke of the Turks, with the loss to us of our honour and forty millions. There is a prodigious amount of wit in France, but we lack judgment and common-sense; two phrases make us drunk, we are led with words, and what is worse is that we are always ready to disparage our friends and exalt our enemies. Besides, is it not curious that they should make the King, in his Speech[717], use my own language on 'the agreement of the public liberties and the Royalty,' and that they should have found such fault with me for using that language? And the men who make the Crown speak thus were once the warmest partizans of the censorship! For the rest, I am going to see the election of the Head of Christianity; this spectacle is the last great spectacle that I shall witness in my life[718]; it will close my career. "Now that pleasures have ceased in Rome, business is commencing. I shall be obliged, on the one hand, to write of all that happens to the Government and, on the other, to fulfil the duties of my new position. I must compliment the Sacred College and attend the funeral of the Holy Father, to whom I had become attached because he was but little loved, and the more so in that, fearing that I should find an enemy in him, I found a friend who, from the chair of St. Peter, formally gave the lie to my 'Christian' calumniators. Then the French cardinals are going to come down upon me. I have written to make representations at least touching the Archbishop of Toulouse[719]. "In the midst of all this stir, the Poussin monument is being executed; the excavation is successful; I have found three fine heads, a draped female torso, a funeral inscription by a brother to a young sister, which touched me. "Talking of inscriptions, I told you that the poor Pope had made his on the day before that on which he was taken ill, predicting that he was soon going to die. He has left a writing in which he recommends his indigent family to the Roman Government: only those who have loved much have such great virtues." [Footnote 500: This book was written in Rome in 1828 and 1829, and revised in February 1845.--T.]