The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales - Richard Garnett
"I shall hardly trust myself upon these stairs again," he remarked, "unless
under the escort of your Holiness's terrier."
"Take him, my son, and a cruse of holy water to boot," the Pope responded.
"Now, how go things in the city?"
"As ill as may be, your Holiness. Not a saint stirs a finger to help us.
The country-folk shun the city, the citizens seek the country. The
multitude of enemies increases hour by hour. They set at defiance the
anathemas fulminated by your Holiness, the spiritual censures placarded in
the churches, and the citation to appear before the ecclesiastical courts,
although assured that their cause shall be pleaded by the ablest advocates
in Rome. The cats, amphibious with alarm, are taking to the Tiber. Vainly
the city reeks with toasted cheese, and the Commissary-General reports
himself short of arsenic."
"And how are the people taking it?" demanded Alexander. "To what cause do
they attribute the public calamity?"
"Generally speaking, to the sins of your Holiness," replied the Cardinal.
"Cardinal!" exclaimed Alexander indignantly.
"I crave pardon for my temerity," returned Barbadico. "It is with
difficulty that I force myself to speak, but I am bound to lay the
ungrateful truth before your Holiness. The late Pope, as all men know, was
a personage of singular sanctity."
"Far too upright for this fallen world," observed Alexander with unction.
"I will not dispute," responded the Cardinal, "that the head of Innocent
the Eleventh might have been more fitly graced by a halo than by a tiara.
But the vulgar are incapable of placing themselves at this point of view.
They know that the rats hardly squeaked under Innocent, and that they swarm
under Alexander. What wonder if they suspect your Holiness of familiarity
with Beelzebub, the patron of vermin, and earnestly desire that he would
take you to himself? Vainly have I represented to them the unreasonableness
of imposing upon him a trouble he may well deem superfluous, considering
your Holiness's infirm health and advanced age. Vainly, too, have I pointed
out that your anathema has actually produced all the effect that could
have been reasonably anticipated from any similar manifesto on your
predecessor's part. They won't see it. And, in fact, might I humbly advise,
it does appear impolitic to hurl anathemas unless your Holiness knows that
some one will be hit. It might be opportune, for example, to excommunicate
Father Molinos, now fast in the dungeons of St. Angelo, unless, indeed, the
rats have devoured him there. But I question the expediency of going much
further."
"Cardinal," said the Pope, "you think yourself prodigiously clever, but you
ought to know that the state of public opinion allowed us no alternative.
Moreover, I will give you a wrinkle, in case you should ever come to be
Pope yourself. It is unwise to allow ancient prerogatives to fall entirely
into desuetude. Far-seeing men prognosticate a great revival of
sacerdotalism in the nineteenth century, and what is impotent in an age of
sense may be formidable in an age of nonsense. Further, we know not from
one day to another whether we may not be absolutely necessitated to
excommunicate that fautor of Gallicanism, Louis the Fourteenth, and before
launching our bolt at a king, we may think well to test its efficacy upon a
rat. _Fiat experimentum._ And now to return to our rats, from which we have
ratted. Is there indeed no hope?"
"_Lateat scintillula forsan_," said the Cardinal mysteriously.
"Ha! How so?" eagerly demanded Alexander.
"Our hopes," answered the Cardinal, "are associated with the recent advent
to this city of an extraordinary personage."
"Explain," urged the Pope.
"I speak," resumed the Cardinal, "of an aged man of no plebeian mien or
bearing, albeit most shabbily attired in the skins, now fabulously cheap,
of the vermin that torment us; who, professing to practise as an herbalist,
some little time ago established himself in an obscure street of no good
repute. A tortoise hangs in his needy shop, nor are stuffed alligators
lacking. Understanding that he was resorted to by such as have need of
philters and love-potions, or are incommoded by the longevity of parents
and uncles, I was about to have him arrested, when I received a report
which gave me pause. This concerned the singular intimacy which appeared to
subsist between him and our enemies. When he left home, it was averred, he
was attended by troops of them obedient to his beck and call, and spies had
observed him banqueting them at his counter, the rats sitting erect and
comporting themselves with perfect decorum. I resolved to investigate the
matter for myself. Looking into his house through an unshuttered window, I
perceived him in truth surrounded by feasting and gambolling rats; but when
the door was opened in obedience to my attendants' summons, he appeared to
be entirely alone. Laying down a pestle and mortar, he greeted me by name
with an easy familiarity which for the moment quite disconcerted me, and
inquired what had procured him the honour of my visit. Recovering myself,
and wishing to intimidate him:
"'I desire in the first place,' I said, 'to point out to you your grave
transgression of municipal regulations in omitting to paint your name over
your shop.'
"'Call me Rattila,' he rejoined with unconcern, 'and state your further
business.'
"I felt myself on the wrong tack, and hastened to interrogate him
respecting his relations with our adversaries. He frankly admitted his
acquaintance with rattery in all its branches, and his ability to deliver
the city from this scourge, but his attitude towards your Holiness was so
deficient in respect that I question whether I ought to report it."
"Proceed, son," said the Pope; "we will not be deterred from providing for
the public weal by the ribaldry of a ratcatcher."
"He scoffed at what he termed your Holiness's absurd position, and affirmed
that the world had seldom beheld, or would soon behold again, so ridiculous
a spectacle as a Pope besieged by rats. 'I can help your master,' he
continued, 'and am willing; but my honour, like his, is aspersed in the
eyes of the multitude, and he must come to my aid, if I am to come to his.'
"I prayed him to be more explicit, and offered to be the bearer of any
communication to your Holiness.
"'I will unfold myself to no one but the Pope himself,' he replied, 'and
the interview must take place when and where I please to appoint. Let him
meet me this very midnight, and alone, in the fifth chamber of the
Appartamento Borgia.'
"'The Appartamento Borgia!' I exclaimed in consternation. 'The saloons
which the wicked Pope Alexander the Sixth nocturnally perambulates,
mingling poisons that have long lost their potency for Cardinals who have
long lost their lives!'
"'Have a care!' he exclaimed sharply. 'You speak to his late Holiness's
most intimate friend.'
"'Then,' I answered, 'you must obviously be the Devil, and I am not at
present empowered to negotiate with your Infernal Majesty. Consider,
however, the peril and inconvenience of visiting at dead of night rooms
closed for generations. Think of the chills and cobwebs. Weigh the
probability of his Holiness being devoured by rats.'
"'I guarantee his Holiness absolute immunity from cold,' he replied, 'and
that none of my subjects shall molest him either going or returning.'
"'But,' I objected, 'granting that you are not the Devil, how the devil,
let me ask, do you expect to gain admittance at midnight to the
Appartamento Borgia?'
"'Think you I cannot pass through a stone wall?' answered he, and vanished
in an instant. A tremendous scampering of rats immediately ensued, then all
was silence.
"On recovering in some measure from my astounded condition, I caused strict
search to be made throughout the shop. Nothing came to light but
herbalists' stuff and ordinary medicines. And now, Holy Father, your
Holiness's resolution? Reflect well. This Rattila may be the King of the
Rats, or he may be Beelzebub in person."
Alexander the Eighth was principally considered by his contemporaries in
the light of a venerable fox, but the lion had by no means been omitted
from his composition.
"All powers of good forbid," he exclaimed, "that a Pope and a Prince should
shrink from peril which the safety of the State summons him to encounter!
I will confront this wizard, this goblin, in the place of his own
appointing, under his late intimate friend's very nose. I am a man of many
transgressions, but something assures me that Heaven will not deem this a
fit occasion for calling them to remembrance. Time presses; I lead on;
follow, Cardinal Barbadico, follow! Yet stay, let us not forget temporal
and spiritual armouries."
And hastily providing himself with a lamp, a petronel, a bunch of keys, a
crucifix, a vial of holy water, and a manual of exorcisms, the Pope passed
through a secret door in a corner of his chamber, followed by the Cardinal
bearing another lamp and a naked sword, and preceded by the dog and the two
cats, all ardent and undaunted as champions bound to the Holy Land for the
recovery of the Holy Sepulchre.
II
The wizard had kept his word. Not a rat was seen or heard upon the
pilgrimage, which was exceedingly toilsome to the aged Pope, from the
number of passages to be threaded and doors to be unlocked. At length the
companions stood before the portal of the Appartamento Borgia.
"Your Holiness must enter alone," Cardinal Barbadico admonished, with
manifest reluctance.
"Await my return," enjoined the Pontiff, in a tone of more confidence than
he could actually feel, as, after much grinding and grating, the massive
door swung heavily back, and he passed on into the dim, unexplored space
beyond. The outer air, streaming in as though eager to indemnify itself for
years of exile, smote and swayed the flame of the Pope's lamp, whose feeble
ray flitted from floor to ceiling as the decrepit man, weary with the way
he had traversed and the load he was bearing, tottered and stumbled
painfully along, ever and anon arrested by a closed door, which he unlocked
with prodigious difficulty. The cats cowered close to the Cardinal; the dog
at first accompanied the Pope, but whined so grievously, as though he
beheld a spirit, that Alexander bade him back.
Supreme is the spell of the _genius loci_. The chambers traversed by the
Pope were in fact adorned with fair examples of the painter's art, mostly
scriptural in subject, but some inspired with the devout Pantheism in which
all creeds are reconciled. All were alike invisible to the Pontiff, who,
with the dim flicker of his lamp, could no more discern Judaea wed with
Egypt on the frescoed ceiling than, with the human limitation of his
faculties, he could foresee that the ill-reputed rooms would one day
harbour a portion of the Vatican Library, so greatly enriched by himself.
Nothing but sinister memories and vague alarms presented themselves to his
imagination. The atmosphere, heavy and brooding from the long exclusion of
the outer air, seemed to weigh upon him with the density of matter, and to
afford the stuff out of which phantasmal bodies perpetually took shape and,
as he half persuaded himself, substance. Creeping and tottering between
bowl and cord, shielding himself with lamp and crucifix from Michelotto's
spectral poniard and more fearful contact with fleshless Vanozzas and
mouldering Giulias, the Pope urged, or seemed to urge, his course amid
phantom princes and cardinals, priests and courtesans, soldiers and
serving-men, dancers, drinkers, dicers, Bacchic and Cotyttian workers of
whatsoever least beseemed the inmates of a Pontifical household, until,
arrived in the fifth chamber, close by the, to him, invisible picture of
the Resurrection, he sank exhausted into a spacious chair that seemed
placed for his reception, and for a moment closed his eyes. Opening them
immediately afterwards, he saw with relief that the phantoms had vanished,
and that he confronted what at least seemed a fellow-mortal, in the ancient
ratcatcher, habited precisely as Cardinal Barbadico had described, yet, for
all his mean apparel, wearing the air of one wont to confer with the
potentates of the earth on other subjects than the extermination of rats.
"This is noble of your Holiness--really," he said, bowing with mock
reverence. "A second Leo the Great!"
"I tell you what, my man," responded Alexander, feeling it very necessary
to assert his dignity while any of it remained, "you are not to imagine
that, because I have humoured you so far as to grant you an audience at an
unusual place and time, I am going to stand any amount of your nonsense and
impertinence. You can catch our rats, can you? Catch them then, and you
need not fear that we shall treat you like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. You
have committed sundry rascalities, no doubt? A pardon shall be made out
for you. You want a patent or a privilege for your ratsbane? You shall have
it. So to work, in the name of St. Muscipulus! and you may keep the tails
and skins."
"Alexander," said the ratcatcher composedly, "I would not commend or
dispraise you unduly, but this I may say, that of all the Popes I have
known you are the most exuberant in hypocrisy and the most deficient in
penetration. The most hypocritical, because you well know, and know that I
know that you know, that you are not conversing with an ordinary
ratcatcher: had you deemed me such, you would never have condescended to
meet me at this hour and place. The least penetrating, because you
apparently have not yet discovered to whom you are speaking. Do you really
mean to say that you do not know me?"
"I believe I have seen your face before," said Alexander, "and all the more
likely as I was inspector of prisons when I was Cardinal."
"Then look yonder," enjoined the ratcatcher, as he pointed to the frescoed
wall, at the same time vehemently snapping his fingers. Phosphoric sparks
hissed and crackled forth, and coalesced into a blue lambent flame, which
concentrated itself upon a depicted figure, whose precise attitude the
ratcatcher assumed as he dropped upon his knees. The Pope shrieked with
amazement, for, although the splendid Pontifical vestments had become
ragged fur, in every other respect the kneeling figure was the counterpart
of the painted one, and the painted one was Pinturicchio's portrait of Pope
Alexander the Sixth kneeling as a witness of the Resurrection.
Alexander the Eighth would fain have imitated his predecessor's attitude,
but terror bound him to his chair, and the adjuration of his patron St.
Mark which struggled towards his lips never arrived there. The book of
exorcisms fell from his paralysed hand, and the vial of holy water lay in
shivers upon the floor. Ere he could collect himself, the dead Pope had
seated himself beside the Pope with one foot in the grave, and, fondling a
ferret-skin, proceeded to enter into conversation.
"What fear you?" he asked. "Why should I harm you? None can say that I ever
injured any one for any cause but my own advantage, and to injure your
Holiness now would be to obstruct a design which I have particularly at
heart."
"I crave your Holiness's forgiveness," rejoined the Eighth Alexander, "but
you must be aware that you left the world with a reputation which
disqualifies you for the society of any Pope in the least careful of his
character. It positively compromises me to have so much as the ghost of a
person so universally decried as your Holiness under my roof, and you would
infinitely oblige me by forthwith repairing to your own place, which I take
to be about four thousand miles below where you are sitting. I could
materially facilitate and accelerate your Holiness's transit thither if you
would be so kind as to hand me that little book of exorcisms."
"How is the fine gold become dim!" exclaimed Alexander the Sixth. "Popes in
bondage to moralists! Popes nervous about public opinion! Is there another
judge of morals than the Pope speaking _ex cathedra_, as I always did? Is
the Church to frame herself after the prescriptions of heathen
philosophers and profane jurists? How, then, shall she be terrible as an
army with banners? Did I concern myself with such pedantry when the Kings
of Spain and Portugal came to me like cats suing for morsels, and I gave
them the West and the East?"
"It is true," Alexander the Eighth allowed, "that the lustre of the Church
hath of late been obfuscated by the prevalence of heresy."
"It isn't the heretics," Borgia insisted. "It is the degeneracy of the
Popes. A shabby lot! You, Alexander, are about the best of them; but the
least Cardinal about my Court would have thought himself bigger than you."
Alexander's spirit rose. "I would suggest," he said, "that this haughty
style is little in keeping with the sordid garb wherein your Holiness,
consistent after death as in your life, masquerades to the scandal and
distress of the faithful."
"How can I other? Has your Holiness forgotten your Rabelais?"
"The works of that eminent Doctor and Divine," answered Alexander the
Eighth, "are seldom long absent from my hands, yet I fail to remember in
what manner they elucidate the present topic."
"Let me refresh your memory," rejoined Borgia, and, producing a volume of
the Sage of Meudon, he turned to the chapter descriptive of the employments
of various eminent inhabitants of the nether world, and pointed to the
sentence:
"LE PAPE ALEXANDRE ESTOYT PRENEUR DE RATZ." [*]
[Footnote: _Pantagruel_, Book XI. ch. 30.]
"Is this indeed sooth?" demanded his successor.
"How else should Francois Rabelais have affirmed it?" responded Borgia.
"When I arrived in the subterranean kingdom, I found it in the same
condition as your Holiness's dominions at the present moment, eaten up by
rats. The attention which, during my earthly pilgrimage, I had devoted to
the science of toxicology indicated me as a person qualified to abate the
nuisance, which commission I executed with such success, that I received
the appointment of Ratcatcher to his Infernal Majesty, and so discharged
its duties as to merit a continuance of the good opinion which had always
been entertained of me in that exalted quarter. After a while, however,
interest began to be made for me in even more elevated spheres. I had not
been able to cram Heaven with Spaniards, as I had crammed the Sacred
College--on the contrary. Truth to speak, my nation has not largely
contributed to the population of the regions above. But some of us are
people of consequence. My great-grandson, the General of the Jesuits, who,
as such, had the ear of St. Ignatius Loyola, represented that had I adhered
strictly to my vows, he could never have come into existence, and that the
Society would thus have wanted one of its brightest ornaments. This
argument naturally had great weight with St. Ignatius, the rather as he,
too, was my countryman. Much also was said of the charity I had shown to
the exiled Jews, which St. Dominic was pleased to say made him feel ashamed
of himself when he came to think of it; for my having fed my people in time
of dearth, instead of contriving famines to enrich myself, as so many
Popes' nephews have done since; and of the splendid order in which I kept
the College of Cardinals. Columbus said a good word for me, and Savonarola
did not oppose. Finally I was allowed to come upstairs, and exercise my
profession on earth. But mark what pitfalls line the good man's path! I
never could resist tampering with drugs of a deleterious nature, and was
constantly betrayed by the thirst for scientific experiment into practices
incompatible with the public health. The good nature which my detractors
have not denied me was a veritable snare. I felt for youth debarred from
its enjoyments by the unnatural vitality of age, and sympathised with the
blooming damsel whose parent alone stood between her and her lover. I thus
lived in constant apprehension of being ordered back to the Netherlands,
and yearned for the wings of a dove, that I might flee away and be out of
mischief. At last I discovered that my promotion to a higher sphere
depended upon my obtaining a testimonial from the reigning Pope. Let a
solemn procession be held in my honour, and intercession be publicly made
for me, and I should ascend forthwith. I have consequently represented my
case to many of your predecessors: but, O Alexander, you
seventeenth-century Popes are a miserable breed! No fellow-feeling, no
_esprit de corps. Heu pietas! heu prisca fides_! No one was so rude as your
ascetic antecessor. The more of a saint, the less of a gentleman.
Personally offensive, I assure you! But the others were nearly as bad. The
haughty Paul, the fanatic Gregory, the worldly Urban, the austere Innocent
the Tenth, the affable Alexander the Seventh, all concurred in assuring me
that it was deeply to be regretted that I should ever have been emancipated
from the restraints of the Stygian realm, to which I should do well to
return with all possible celerity; that it would much conduce to the
interests of the Church if my name could be forgotten; and that as for
doing anything to revive its memory, they would just as soon think of
canonising Judas Iscariot."
"And therefore your Holiness has brought these rats upon us, enlisted, I
nothing doubt, in the infernal regions?"
"Precisely so: Plutonic, necyomantic, Lemurian rats, kindly lent by the
Prince of Darkness for the occasion, and come dripping from Styx to squeak
and gibber in the Capitol. But I note your Holiness's admission that they
belong to a region exempt from your jurisdiction, and that, therefore, your
measures against them, except as regards their status as belligerents, are
for the most part illegitimate and _ultra vires_."
"I would argue that point," replied Alexander the Eighth, "if my lungs were
as tough as when I pleaded before the Rota in Pope Urban's time. For the
present I confine myself to formally protesting against your Holiness's
unprecedented and parricidal conduct in invading your country at the head
of an army of loathsome vermin."
"Unprecedented!" exclaimed Borgia. "Am I not the modern Coriolanus? Did
Narses experience blacker ingratitude than I? Where would the temporal
power be but for me? Who smote the Colonna? Who squashed the Orsini? Who
gave the Popes to dwell quietly in their own house? Monsters of
unthankfulness!"
"I am sure," said Alexander the Eighth soothingly, "that my predecessors'
inability to comply with your Holiness's request must have cost them many
inward tears, not the less genuine because entirely invisible and
completely inaudible. A wise Pope will, before all things, consider the
spirit of his age. The force of public opinion, which your Holiness lately
appeared to disparage, was, in fact, as operative upon yourself as upon any
of your successors. If you achieved great things in your lifetime, it was
because the world was with you. Did you pursue the same methods now, you
would soon discover that you had become an offensive anachronism. It will
not have escaped your Holiness's penetration that what moralists will
persist in terming the elevation of the standard of the Church, is the
result of the so-called improvement of the world."
"There is a measure of truth in this," admitted Alexander the Sixth, "and
the spirit of this age is a very poor spirit. It was my felicity to be a
Pope of the Renaissance. Blest dispensation! when men's view of life was
large and liberal; when the fair humanities flourished; when the earth
yielded up her hoards of chiselled marble and breathing bronze, and
new-found agate urns as fresh as day; when painters and sculptors vied with
antiquity, and poets and historians followed in their path; when every
benign deity was worshipped save Diana and Vesta; when the arts of
courtship and cosmetics were expounded by archbishops; when the beauteous
Imperia was of more account than the eleven thousand virgins; when
obnoxious persons glided imperceptibly from the world; and no one
marvelled if he met the Pope arm in arm with the Devil. How miserable, in
comparison, is the present sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry,
and its periwigs and its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the
florid impotence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art! Pope
Alexander! I see in the spirit the sepulchre destined for _you_, and I
swear to you that my soul shivers in my ratskins! Come, now! I do not
expect you to emulate the Popes of my time, but show that your virtues are
your own, and your faults those of your epoch. Pluck up a spirit! Take
bulls by the horns! Look facts in the face! Think upon the images of Brutus
and Cassius! Recognise that you cannot get rid of me, and that the only
safe course is to rehabilitate me. I am not a candidate for canonisation
just now; but repair past neglect and appease my injured shade in the way
you wot of. If this is done, I pledge my word that every rat shall
forthwith evacuate Rome. Is it a bargain? I see it is; you are one of the
good old sort, though fallen on evil days."