ensuring good results,” to those of the native women who had hitherto failed to produce offspring.  The system worked well.  With some trifling but reprehensive fluctuations, the birth-rate and the death-rate remained even; things were at a standstill; a fact which caused His Highness to be compared, by a courtly panegyrist, to Joshua who bade the sun arrest his march across the heavens.  Another of these gentlemen calls the Duke’s action a “triumph of art over nature,” adding, not without a grain of malice, that “never have the generative capacities of mankind adapted themselves with more conspicuous success to the shape of an unnecessary wall.”  Monsignor Perrelli, unfortunately, has nothing whatever to say on the subject.  For reasons which will appear anon, he is remarkably silent on all that concerns the reign of his great contemporary.

Even so the Prince was not satisfied.  The fastness was yet imperfect; he disliked the variegated hues of the buildings—­they reminded him of the garish brilliance in the lower town.  Something different had to be contrived.  He took thought and, being a man of taste and a decorist where picturesque effects were concerned, decreed that the entire place—­walls, houses, the two convents (Benedictine and Carthusian), the church, and even stables and pigsties—­was to be painted a uniform pink:  “pink,” he ordained, “without the slightest admixture of blue.”  He desired, in fact, a kind of rose or flesh colour, a particular tint which, he foresaw, would look well among the luscious verdure of the surroundings.  His behest, as usual, was obeyed without much loss of time.

Then he surveyed his work, and saw that it was good.  He had created a gem.  The Old Town was a symphony in emerald and coral.

So it remained.  The inhabitants grew to be proud of their rosy citadel; it was an unwritten law among them that every new house should adapt itself to this tone.  For the rest, there was not much building done after his death, with the exception of a few isolated villas that sprang up, despite his old commands, in the neighbourhood.  And the decline in population once more set in.  Men forsook the place—­all save the peasantry who tilled the surrounding fields.  Towers and battlements crumbled to earth; roadways heaved uneasily with grassy tufts that sprouted in the chinks of the old paving-blocks.  Sometimes at decline of day a creaking hay-waggon would lumber along, bending towards a courtyard in whose moss-grown recesses you discerned stacks of golden maize and pumpkins; apples and plum-trees, nodding drowsily over walls, littered the streets with snowy blossoms or fallen leaves.  Commercial life was extinct.  The few remaining shopkeepers wore an air of slumberous benevolence.  The very stones suggested peace.  A mellow and aristocratic flavour clung to those pink dwellings that nestled, world—­forgotten, in a green content. . . .