In Rome--for this scene took place in a shop at the end of one of the most ancient streets of the Eternal City, a few paces from the Place d'Espagne, so well known to tourists--in the city which serves as a confluent for so many from all points of the world, has not that sense of the odd been obliterated by the multiplicity of singular and anomalous types stranded and sheltering there?
You will find there revolutionists like boorish Ribalta, who is ending in a curiosity-shop a life more eventful than the most eventful of the sixteenth century.
Descended from a Corsican family, this personage came to Rome when very young, about 1835, and at first became a seminarist.

On the point of being ordained a priest, he disappeared only to return, in 1849, so rabid a republican that he was outlawed at the time of the reestablishment of the pontifical government.

He then served as secretary to Mazzini, with whom he disagreed for reasons which clashed with Ribalta's honor.

Would passion for a woman have involved him in such extravagance?
In 1870 Ribalta returned to Rome, where he opened, if one may apply such a term to such a hole, a book-shop.

But he is an amateur bookseller, and will refuse you admission if you displease him.
Having inherited a small income, he sells or he does not, following his fancy or the requirements of his own purchases, to-day asking you twenty francs for a wretched engraving for which he paid ten sous, to-morrow giving you at a low price a costly book, the value of which he knows.
Rabid Gallophobe, he never pardoned his old general the campaign of Dijon any more than he forgave Victor Emmanuel for having left the Vatican to Pius IX.