Rome by Matthew Kneale

Author:Matthew Kneale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2017-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

Rome, 1849

CHAPTER SIX

FRENCH

I

THESE DAYS THE QUIRINAL PALACE in the heart of Rome is a busy place. Tall uniformed Corazziere – the personal guards of the president of Italy – shepherd tourists and school groups through security checks and into the state rooms, to the gardens and the stables, to see the palace’s paintings, its grand chandeliers, and its collection of antique plates and clocks. If they are lucky, visitors may catch a whiff of haute cuisine prepared for foreign dignitaries, or even glimpse the president as he passes through the courtyard in his official car.

It was a very different place on the evening of 24 November 1848, when the French ambassador, the duc d’Harcourt, approached in his carriage. Then it was not a presidential but a papal palace. It was also a place where something bad had happened recently. One of the main doors was scorched black and a good number of windows had been shattered. There would have been a discernible tension in the air as Harcourt’s carriage was stopped and he presented himself, not to members of the pope’s Swiss Guards, as would have been the case only a few days earlier, but to soldiers of the National Guard. These were Rome’s citizens in uniform and they were less concerned with protecting the pope than with making sure he did not leave. They were his jailers. Harcourt, as a friend of the pope, would have been viewed with suspicion.

But they let him into the palace. He was escorted up the grand stairway to the papal apartments where Pope Pius IX was waiting. Considerately – and unwisely – the National Guards allowed the door to be closed so Harcourt and the pope could talk in private. It was a strange sort of discussion. For a short time the National Guardsmen outside would have heard the voices of both men, but then only Harcourt’s, speaking loudly enough for them both. By now Pope Pius had slipped into an adjoining room, where he hurriedly changed from his papal robes into the vestments of an ordinary priest. Putting on a pair of dark glasses he, together with a papal servant, Benedetto Filippani, left Harcourt talking to himself and as Filippani lit the way with a small, flickering candle they hurried through the shadow-filled halls of the palace. John Francis Maguire, who wrote an account of events a few years later, describes what happened next:

As they passed through one of the apartments, the taper was suddenly extinguished, and both the pope and his attendant were left in total darkness. To proceed further without light was impossible; so Filippani was obliged, in order to re-light the taper, to return to the same cabinet in which the French Ambassador had been purposely left waiting. On seeing Filippani return, the Duke was seized with astonishment and terror, believing that some untoward occurrence had occasioned the extinction of the taper, and deranged the entire plan of escape.1

But the duc d’Harcourt need not have worried. Filippani relit his candle, hurried back to Pius and led him to the oval stairway on the far side of the palace.

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