presence of no less than 120,000 holy persons--to wit, 22 archbishops,
116 bishops, 65,500 ordained priests, 31,800 monks, and 23,600 nuns.
Some of these ecclesiastics, like the Bishop of Capaccio, were notable
brigand-chiefs.

It must be confessed that the French were sufficiently coldblooded in
their reprisals. Colletta himself saw, at Lagonegro, a man impaled by
order of a French colonel; and some account of their excesses may be
gleaned from Duret de Tavel, from Rivarol (rather a disappointing
author), and from the flamboyant epistles of P. L. Courier, a
soldier-scribe of rare charm, who lost everything in this campaign.
"J'ai perdu huit chevaux, mes habits, mon linge, mon manteau, mes
pistolets, mon argent (12,247 francs). . . . Je ne regrette que mon
Homere (a gift from the Abbe Barthelemy), et pour le ravoir, je
donnerais la seule chemise qui me reste."

But even that did not destroy the plague. The situation called for a
genial and ruthless annihilator, a man like Sixtus V, who asked for
brigands' heads and got them so plentifully that they lay "thick as
melons in the market" under the walls of Rome, while the Castel Sant'
Angelo was tricked out like a Christmas tree with quartered corpses--a
man who told the authorities, when they complained of the insufferable
stench of the dead, that the smell of living iniquity was far worse.
Such a man was wanted. Therefore, in 1810, Murat gave _carte blanche_
to General Manhes, the greatest brigand-catcher of modern times, to
extirpate the ruffians, root and branch. He had just distinguished
himself during a similar errand in the Abruzzi and, on arriving in
Calabria, issued proclamations of such inhuman severity that the
inhabitants looked upon them as a joke. They were quickly undeceived.
The general seems to have considered that the end justified the means,