Repairing works were also undertaken for modern edifices: St. Paul's Without the Walls, which no longer exists[135], had its roofing repaired; St Agnes', San Martino ai Monti were protected against the weather. A portion of the roof and the pavement of St. Peter's was mended; lightning-conductors shielded the dome of Michael Angelo from the lightning. The sites were marked out of two cemeteries in the east and west of the city, and that on the east, near the Convent of San Lorenzo, was finished. [Sidenote: The French in Rome.] The Quirinal arrayed its external poverty in the luxury of porphyry and Roman marbles: designed as it was for the imperial palace, Bonaparte, before taking up his residence there, wanted to remove all traces of the abduction of the Pontiff, held captive at Fontainebleau. It was proposed to pull down the part of the city lying between the Capitol and Monte Cavallo, so that the triumpher might ride up to his Cæsarian abode through an immense avenue; events caused these gigantic dreams to fade away by destroying enormous realities. Among the plans decided was that of building a series of quays, from Ripetta to Ripa Grande: the foundations of those quays would have been laid; the four blocks of houses between the Castle of Sant' Angelo and the Piazza Rusticucci were partly bought up and would have been demolished. A wide thoroughfare would thus have been opened on to the Square of St. Peter's, which would have been seen from the foot of the Castle of Sant' Angelo. The French make walks wherever they go: at Cairo, I have seen a great square which they had planted with palm-trees and surrounded with cafés bearing names borrowed from the cafés of Paris; in Rome, my fellow-countrymen created the Pincio; you reach it by a flight of stairs. Going down this flight the other day, I saw a carriage pass in which was seated a woman still possessed of a certain youth: with her fair hair, the badly-outlined contour of her figure, the inelegance of her beauty, I took her for a fat, white stranger from Westphalia; it was Madame Guiccioli: nothing could go less well with the memory of Lord Byron. What matter? The daughter of Ravenna (of whom, for the rest, the poet was tired when he resolved to die) will none the less go, conducted by the Muse, to take her place in the Elysian Fields, adding one more to the divinities of the tomb. The western portion of the Piazza del Popolo was to have been planted in the space occupied by work-yards and shops; from the end of the open place one would have seen the Capitol, the Vatican and St. Peter's beyond the quays of the Tiber: in other words, Ancient and Modern Rome. Lastly, a wood, created by the French, rises to-day to the east of the Coliseum; one never meets anybody there: although it has shot up, it has the look of a brush-wood growing at the foot of a tall ruin. Pliny the Younger[136] wrote to Maximus: