"One sees nothing but dead people carried dressed-up through the streets; one of them passes regularly under my windows when we sit down to dinner. For the rest, everything proclaims the spring parting; people are beginning to disperse; they are leaving for Naples; they will come back a moment for Holy Week, and then separate for good. Next year there will be different travellers, different faces, a different society. There is something melancholy in this journey over ruins: the Romans are like the remains of their city; the world passes at their feet. I picture those persons going back to their families in the various countries of Europe, the young 'Misses' returning to the midst of their fogs. If, by chance, thirty years hence, one of them is brought back to Italy, who will remember to have seen her in the palaces whose masters shall be no more. St. Peter's and the Coliseum: that is all that she herself would recognise." DISPATCH TO M. LE COMTE PORTALIS "ROME, 3 _March_ 1829. "MONSIEUR LE COMTE, "My first courier having reached Lyons, on the 14th of last month, at nine o'clock in the evening, you must have learned the news of the Pope's death, by telegraph, on the morning of the 15th. It is to-day the 3rd of March, and I am still without instructions and without an official reply. The newspapers have announced the departure of two or three cardinals. I had written to Paris to Monseigneur le Cardinal de Latil to place the Embassy Palace at his disposal; I have just written to him again at different points on his road to renew my offers. "I am sorry to be obliged to tell you, monsieur le comte, that I notice some little intrigues here to keep the cardinals away from the Embassy, to lodge them where they might be placed more within reach of the influences which it is hoped to exercise over them.