Afterward, as order was born out of chaos, and he began to thread his
way among the centuries, this first vision lost something of its
intensity; yet it was always, to the last, through the eye that Rome
possessed him. Her life, indeed, as though in obedience to such a
setting, was an external, a spectacular business, from the wild
animation of the cattle-market in the Forum or the hucksters' traffic
among the fountains of the Piazza Navona, to the pompous entertainments
in the cardinals' palaces and the ever-recurring religious ceremonies
and processions. Pius VI., in the reaction from Ganganelli's democratic
ways, had restored the pomp and ceremonial of the Vatican with the
religious discipline of the Holy Office; and never perhaps had Rome been
more splendid on the surface or more silent and empty within. Odo, at
times, as he moved through some assemblage of cardinals and nobles, had
the sensation of walking through a huge reverberating palace, decked out
with all the splendours of art but long since abandoned of men. The
superficial animation, the taste for music and antiquities, all the
dilettantisms of an idle and irresponsible society, seemed to him to
shrivel to dust in the glare of that great past that lit up every corner
of the present.

Through his own connections, and the influence of de Crucis, he saw all
that was best not only among the nobility, but in that ecclesiastical
life now more than ever predominant in Rome. Here at last he was face to
face with the mighty Sphinx, and with the bleaching bones of those who
had tried to guess her riddle. Wherever he went these "lost adventurers"
walked the streets with him, gliding between the Princes of the Church
in the ceremonies of Saint Peter's and the Lateran, or mingling in the
company that ascended the state staircase at some cardinal's levee.

He met indeed many accomplished and amiable ecclesiastics, but it seemed