embalmed, to lower the coffin after nine days' obsequies into the
provisional niche where the last deceased pope has to remain until his
successor comes to take his place and consign him to his final tomb;
lastly, as he had been obliged to wall up the door of the Conclave and
the window of the balcony from which the pontifical election is
proclaimed, he had not had a single moment for busying himself with the
police; so that the assassinations had continued in goodly fashion, and
there were loud cries for an energetic hand which should make all these
swords and all these daggers retire into their sheaths.

Now the eyes of this multitude were fixed, as we have said, upon the
Vatican, and particularly upon one chimney, from which would come the
first signal, when suddenly, at the moment of the 'Ave Maria'--that is to
say, at the hour when the day begins to decline--great cries went up from
all the crowd mixed with bursts of laughter, a discordant murmur of
threats and raillery, the cause being that they had just perceived at the
top of the chimney a thin smoke, which seemed like a light cloud to go up
perpendicularly into the sky. This smoke announced that Rome was still
without a master, and that the world still had no pope; for this was the
smoke of the voting tickets which were being burned, a proof that the
cardinals had not yet come to an agreement.

Scarcely had this smoke appeared, to vanish almost immediately, when all
the innumerable crowd, knowing well that there was nothing else to wait
for, and that all was said and done until ten o'clock the next morning,
the time when the cardinals had their first voting, went off in a tumult
of noisy joking, just as they would after the last rocket of a firework
display; so that at the end of one minute nobody was there where a
quarter of an hour before there had been an excited crowd, except a few
curious laggards, who, living in the neighbourhood or on the very piazza