Rome is the town of elections: since her foundation down to our own
day--that is to say, in the course of nearly twenty-six centuries--she
has constantly elected her kings, consuls, tribunes, emperors, and popes:
thus Rome during the days of Conclave appears to be attacked by a strange
fever which drives everyone to the Vatican or to Monte Cavallo, according
as the scarlet-robed assembly is held in one or the other of these two
palaces: it is, in fact, because the raising up of a new pontiff is a
great event far everybody; for, according to the average established in
the period between St. Peter and Gregory XVI, every pope lasts about
eight years, and these eight years, according to the character of the man
who is elected, are a period either of tranquillity or of disorder, of
justice or of venality, of peace or of war.

Never perhaps since the day when the first successor of St. Peter took
his seat on the, pontifical throne until the interregnum which now
occurred, had so great an agitation been shown as there was at this
moment, when, as we have shown, all these people were thronging on the
Piazza of St. Peter and in the streets which led to it. It is true that
this was not without reason; for Innocent VIII--who was called the father
of his people because he had added to his subjects eight sons and the
same number of daughters--had, as we have said, after living a life of
self-indulgence, just died, after a death-struggle during which, if the
journal of Stefano Infessura may be believed, two hundred and twenty
murders were committed in the streets of Rome. The authority had then
devolved in the customary way upon the Cardinal Camerlengo, who during
the interregnum had sovereign powers; but as he had been obliged to
fulfil all the duties of his office--that is, to get money coined in his
name and bearing his arms, to take the fisherman's ring from the finger
of the dead pope, to dress, shave and paint him, to have the corpse