"At Rimini,çoisRené I met neither Francesca nor the other shade, her companion, ‘ who seemed so light before the wind:'
"Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia have brought me to Ancona over roads and bridges left by the Augustuses. In Ancona they are to-day keeping the Pope's[537] birthday; I hear the music from Trajan's[538] triumphal arch: a double sovereignty of the Eternal City."
"We have come to sleep at Loretto. The territory offers a perfectly-preserved specimen of the Roman _colonia._ The peasant farmers of Our Lady are in easy circumstances and seem happy; the peasant-women, handsome and gay, wear a flower in their hair. The Prelate Governor gave us his hospitality. From the top of the steeple and the summit of some of the eminences of the city one enjoys smiling vistas over the plains, Ancona and the sea. In the evening we had a storm. I took pleasure in watching the _valentia muralis_ and the fumitory beloved by the goats bow before the wind on the old walls. I walked under the double galleries erected after Bramante's[539] designs. Those pavements will be beaten by the autumn rains, those blades of grass will shiver at the breath of the Adriatic long after I shall have passed away.
"At midnight, I had retired to a bed eight feet square, hallowed by Bonaparte; a night-light hardly illumined the darkness of my room; suddenly, a little door opened, and I saw a man enter mysteriously, bringing with him a veiled woman. I raised myself on my elbow and looked at them; he approached my bed and lost no time, bowing down to the ground, in offering me a thousand excuses for thus disturbing the rest of His Excellency the Ambassador: but he was a widower; he was a poor steward; he wished to marry his _ragazza_, here present: unfortunately he fell somewhat short of the dowry. He lifted up the orphan's veil: she was pale, very pretty, and kept her eyes lowered with becoming modesty. This family man looked as though he wanted to go away and leave the affianced bride with me to finish her story. In this urgent danger, I did not ask the obliging and unhappy man, as the good knight asked the mother of the young girl of Grenoble, if she was a maid; very much flurried, I took some pieces of gold off the table by my bed and gave them, to do credit to the King my master, to the _zitella_, 'whose eyes were not swollen by dint of weeping.' She kissed my hand with infinite gratitude. I did not utter a word, and, upon my falling back on my immense couch, as though I wanted to sleep, the vision of St. Anthony disappeared. I thanked my patron saint, St. Francis, whose feast it was; I remained in the darkness, half smiling, half regretting, and rapt in a profound admiration of my virtues.