his wife to have been of a
    susceptible age and an attractive exterior, so long as he himself
    made no objection to her driving out with the old Duke, nobody
    else had any right to interfere—­and other similar appeals to
    common sense, he at once requested the interference of the French
    Ambassador.  This was promptly and effectively given.  The
    incarceration of the peccant dame was brief; and a shower of
    ridicule fell upon the Pontifical head.  But the Sovereigns of Rome
    are accustomed to, and regardless of, such irreverent
    demonstrations.—­TRANSL.

13:  Louis Veuillot, article of the 10th of September, 1849.

14:  The principal market in Rome is held in this Piazza.

15:  The Basilica of St. Paul without the walls.

16:  The rubbio is a measure both of land and of quantity.

17:  Monsignore Nicolai was a good practical agriculturist.  He had a
    sort of model farm, known as the Albereto Nicolai, near the
    Basilica of St. Paul Without the Walls.  He was an able
    administrator, and a man of superior attainments; and had he only
    possessed common honesty, he would have been in time a great
    man—­as greatness is understood in Rome.  He was a Prelato di
    Fiochetto, and held the post of Uditore della R.C.  Apostolica,
    one of the four high offices which necessarily lead to Red Hats. 
    Moreover, he was marked by Gregory XVI for the promotion, and had
    actually ordered his scarlet apparel.  But unfortunately Monsignore
    Nicolai affected the good things of this life over-much.  He was a
    bon vivant, and a viveur.  He loved money, and he was utterly
    unscrupulous as to the means by which he obtained it.  His career
    in the direction of the Sacred College was cut short, when he was
    very near its attainment, by a scandalous transaction, in which,
    although he was nearly eighty years of age, he played the
    principal part.  He colluded with a notary, named Bachetti, to
    falsify the will of one Vitelli, a wealthy contractor, inserting
    in the place of the testator’s two orphan nieces that of his own
    natural son.  The affair having been dragged to light, Gregory
    XVI. deprived him of his office, and he ended his days in disgrace
    and retirement.  His fondness for worldly pelf clung to him in his
    very last moments.  A short time before he expired, he ordered some
    gendarmes to be brought into his bedroom, and charged them to
    watch over his property, lest anything should be stolen after he
    had ceased to breathe, and before the representatives of the law
    could take possession.