the vestry now is, it looked like a gigantic needle shooting up from the
middle of truncated columns, walls of unequal height, and half-carved
stones.

On the right of this building, a ruin from its cradle, arose the Vatican,
a splendid Tower of Babel, to which all the celebrated architects of the
Roman school contributed their work for a thousand years: at this epoch
the two magnificent chapels did not exist, nor the twelve great halls,
the two-and-twenty courts, the thirty staircases, and the two thousand
bedchambers; for Pope Sixtus V, the sublime swineherd, who did so many
things in a five years' reign, had not yet been able to add the immense
building which on the eastern side towers above the court of St.
Damasius; still, it was truly the old sacred edifice, with its venerable
associations, in which Charlemagne received hospitality when he was
crowned emperor by Pope Leo III.

All the same, on the 9th of August, 1492, the whole of Rome, from the
People's Gate to the Coliseum and from the Baths of Diocletian to the
castle of Sant' Angelo, seemed to have made an appointment on this
piazza: the multitude thronging it was so great as to overflow into all
the neighbouring streets, which started from this centre like the rays of
a star. The crowds of people, looking like a motley moving carpet, were
climbing up into the basilica, grouping themselves upon the stones,
hanging on the columns, standing up against the walls; they entered by
the doors of houses and reappeared at the windows, so numerous and so
densely packed that one might have said each window was walled up with
heads. Now all this multitude had its eyes fixed on one single point in
the Vatican; for in the Vatican was the Conclave, and as Innocent VIII
had been dead for sixteen days, the Conclave was in the act of electing a
pope.