In the beginning of the year 1865 people crossed the Alps in carriages; the Suez Canal had not been opened; the first Atlantic cable was not laid; German unity had not been invented; Pius IX.

reigned in the Pontifical States; Louis Napoleon was the idol of the French; President Lincoln had not been murdered,--is anything needed to widen the gulf which separates those times from these?
The difference between the States of the world in 1865 and in 1885 is nearly as great as that which divided the Europe of 1789 from the Europe of 1814.
But my business is with Rome, and not with Europe at large.

I intend to tell the story of certain persons, of their good and bad fortune, their adventures, and the complications in which they found themselves placed during a period of about twenty years.

The people of whom I tell this story are chiefly patricians; and in the first part of their history they have very little to do with any but their own class--a class peculiar and almost unique in the world.
Speaking broadly, there is no one at once so thoroughly Roman and so thoroughly non-Roman as the Roman noble.

This is no paradox, no play on words.