A city so respectful to the past, so faithful to the worship of bygone recollections, is the natural asylum of sovereigns fallen from their thrones.  It is to Rome that they come to foment their contusions, and to heal the wounds of their pride.  They live there agreeably, surrounded by the few followers who have remained faithful to them.  A miniature court, assembled in their antechamber, crowns them in private, hails them on rising with epithets of royalty, and pours forth incense in their dressing-room.  The Roman nobility, and foreigners of distinction, live with them in an unequal intimacy, humbling themselves in order that they may be raised; and sowing a great deal of veneration to reap a very light crop of familiarity.  The Pope and his Cardinals, upon principle, are lavish of attentions which they would perhaps refuse them on the throne.  In short, the king who has been the most battered and shaken by his fall, and the most ill-used by his ungrateful subjects, has but to take refuge in Rome, and by the double aid of a vivid imagination and a well-filled purse, he may persuade himself that he is still reigning over an absent people.

The reverses of royalty which ended the eighteenth and commenced the nineteenth centuries, sent to Rome a colony of crowned heads.  The modifications which European society has undergone have more recently brought many less illustrious guests, not even members of the aristocracy of their own country.  It is certain that for the last fifty years, wealth, education, and talent have shared the rights formerly belonging to birth alone.  Rome has seen foreigners arriving in travelling carriages who were not born great,—­distinguished artists, eminent writers, diplomatists sprung from the people, tradesmen elevated to the rank of capitalists, men of the world who are in their place everywhere, because everywhere they know how to live.  The best society did not receive them without submitting them to careful inquiry, in order to ascertain that they brought no dangerous doctrines; and then it seemed to say to them:  “You cannot be our relations—­be our masonic brothers!”

I have said that the Roman princes are, if not without pride, at least without arrogance.  This observation extends to the princes of the Church.  They welcome a foreigner of modest condition, provided he speaks and thinks like themselves upon two or three capital questions, has a profound veneration for certain time-honoured lumber, and curses heartly certain innovations.  You must show them the white paw of the fable, if you wish them to open their doors to you.

On this point they are immovable.  They will not listen to rank, to fortune, or even to the most imperious political necessities.  If France were to send them an ambassador who failed to show them the white paw, the ambassador of France would not get inside the doors of the aristocratic salons.  If Horace Vernet were named director of the Academy, neither his name nor his office would open to him certain houses where he was received as a friend previously to 1830.  And why?  Because Horace Vernet was one of the public men of the Revolution of July.