They deserve it all, since they were not killed to the last man on the steps of the Vatican when the Italians took the city.

We should have done it, we who had no popes among our grand-uncles, if we had not been busy fighting elsewhere.

But it is none the less pitiful to see the hammer of the appraisers raised above a palace with which is connected centuries of history.

Upon my life, if I were Prince d'Ardea--if I had inherited the blood, the house, the titles of the Castagnas, and if I thought I should leave nothing behind me of that which my fathers had amassed--I swear to you, Dorsenne, I should die of grief.

And if you recall the fact that the unhappy youth is a spoiled child of eight-and-twenty, surrounded by flatterers, without parents, without friends, without counsellors, that he risked his patrimony on the Bourse among thieves of the integrity of Monsieur Hafner, that all the wealth collected by that succession of popes, of cardinals, of warriors, of diplomatists, has served to enrich ignoble men, you would think the occurrence too lamentable to have any share in it, even as a spectator.