“If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I should rather believe in God than in the devil; power combined with goodness has always more possibilities than the spirit of evil.”

“Yes; but God wants one to do penance in this world.”

“Are you always thinking of your indulgences?” replied Belvidero.  “Well, I have a whole existence in reserve to repent the faults of my first life.”

“Oh, if that is your idea of old age,” cried the Pope, “you are in danger of being canonized.”

“After your elevation to the papacy, one may expect anything.”

And then they went to watch the workmen engaged in building the huge basilica consecrated to St. Peter.

“St. Peter is the genius who gave us our double power,” said the Pope to Don Juan, “and he deserves this monument.  But sometimes at night I fancy that a deluge will pass a sponge over all this, and it will need to be begun over again.”

Don Juan and the Pope laughed.  They understood each other.  A fool would have gone next day to amuse himself with Julius II at Raphael’s house or in the delightful Villa Madama; but Belvidero went to see him officiate in his pontifical capacity, in order to convince himself of his suspicions.  Under the influence of wine della Rovere would have been capable of forgetting himself and criticising the Apocalypse.

When Don Juan reached the age of sixty he went to live in Spain.  There, in his old age, he married a young and charming Andalusian.  But he was intentionally neither a good father nor a good husband.  He had observed that we are never so tenderly loved as by the women to whom we scarcely give a thought.  Dona Elvira, piously reared by an old aunt in the heart of Andalusia in a castle several leagues from San Lucas, was all devotion and meekness.  Don Juan saw that this young girl was a woman to make a long fight with a passion before yielding to it, so he hoped to keep from her any love but his until after his death.  It was a serious jest, a game of chess which he had reserved for his old age.

Warned by his father’s mistakes, he determined to make the most trifling acts of his old age contribute to the success of the drama which was to take place at his deathbed.  Therefore, the greater part of his wealth lay buried in the cellars of his palace at Ferrara, whither he seldom went.  The rest of his fortune was invested in a life annuity, so that his wife and children might be interested in keeping him alive.  This was a species of cleverness which his father should have practiced; but this Machiavellian scheme was unnecessary in his case.  Young Philippe Belvidero, his son, grew up a Spaniard as conscientiously religious as his father was impious, on the principle of the proverb:  “A miserly father, a spendthrift son.”