Immediately after the taking of the city in 1870, three distinct parties declared themselves, to wit, the Clericals or Blacks, the Monarchists or Whites, and the Republicans or Beds.  All three had doubtless existed for a considerable time, but the wine of revolution favoured the expression of the truth, and society awoke one morning to find itself divided into camps holding very different opinions.

At first the mass of the greater nobles stood together for the lost temporal power of the Pope, while a great number of the less important families followed two or three great houses in siding with the Royalists.  The Republican idea, as was natural, found but few sympathisers in the highest class, and these were, I believe, in all cases young men whose fathers were Blacks or Whites, and most of whom have since thought fit to modify their opinions in one direction or the other.  Nevertheless the Red interest was, and still is, tolerably strong and has been destined to play that powerful part in parliamentary life, which generally falls to the lot of a compact third party, where a fourth does not yet exist, or has no political influence, as is the case in Rome.

For there is a fourth body in Rome, which has little political but much social importance.  It was not possible that people who had grown up together in the intimacy of a close caste-life, calling each other “thee” and “thou,” and forming the hereditary elements of a still feudal organisation, should suddenly break off all acquaintance and be strangers one to another.  The brother, a born and convinced clerical, found that his own sister had followed her husband to the court of the new King.  The rigid adherent of the old order met his own son in the street, arrayed in the garb of an Italian officer.  The two friends who had stood side by side in good and evil case for a score of years saw themselves suddenly divided by the gulf which lies between a Roman cardinal and a Senator of the Italian Kingdom.  The breach was sudden and great, but it was bridged for many by the invention of a fourth, proportional.  The points of contact between White and Black became Grey, and a social power, politically neutral and constitutionally indifferent, arose as a mediator between the Contents and the Malcontents.  There were families that had never loved the old order but which distinctly disliked the new, and who opened their doors to the adherents of both.  There is a house which has become Grey out of a sort of superstition inspired by the unfortunate circumstances which oddly coincided with each movement of its members to join the new order.  There is another, and one of the greatest, in which a very high hereditary dignity in the one party, still exercised by force of circumstances, effectually forbids the expression of a sincere sympathy with the opposed power.  Another there is, whose members are cousins of the one sovereign and personal friends of the other.