There had been long cypress alleys which at sunset had glowed with rose and gold, where he had in his few leisure hours builded up such visions for the future as illumined the unknown years to the eyes of an Ignatius, a Hildebrand, a Lacordaire, a Bossuet.  On the place where those grand avenues had stretched their green length in the western light, and the seminarist had paced over the sward, there were now long, dreary lines of brick and stone, the beaten dust of roadways, the clang and smoke of engines:  as the gardens had passed away so had passed his ambitions and visions; as the cypresses had been ground to powder in the steam mill, so was he crushed and effaced under an inexorable fate.  The Church, intolerant of individuality, like all despotisms, had broken his spirit; like all despotisms the tyranny had been blind.  But he had been rebellious to doctrine; she had bound him to her stake.

He would have been a great prelate, perhaps even a great Pope; but he would have been also a great reformer, so she stamped him down into nothingness under her iron heel.  And for almost a score of years she had kept him in Ruscino, where he buried and baptized the old and new creatures who squirmed in the dust, where any ordinary country priest able to gabble through the ritual could have done as well as he.  Some few of the more liberal and learned dignitaries of the Church did indeed think that it was waste of great powers, but he had the Sacred College against him, and no one ventured to speak in his favour at the Vatican.  He had no pious women of rank to plead for him, no millionaires and magnates to solicit his preferment.  He was with time forgotten as utterly as a folio is forgotten on a library shelf until mildew eats its ink away and spiders nest between its leaves.  He had the thirty pounds a year which the State pays to such parish priests; and he had nothing else.

He was a tall and naturally stately man, but his form was bent by that want of good food which is the chronic malady of many parts of Italy.  There was little to eat in Ruscino, and had there been more there would have been no one who knew how to prepare it.  Bread, beans, a little oil, a little lard, herbs which grew wild, goat’s milk, cheese, and at times a few small river fish; these were all his sustenance:  his feasts and his fasts were much alike, and the little wine he had he gave away to the sick and the aged.  For this reason his high stature was bent and his complexion was of the clear, yellow pallor of old marbles; his profile was like the Caesarian outline on a medallion, and his eyes were deep wells of impenetrable thought; his finely cut lips rarely smiled, they had always upon them an expression of bitterness, as though the apple of life in its eating had been harsh and hard as a crab.

His presbytery was close to his church, a dreary place with only a few necessaries and many books within it, and his only servant was an old man, lame and stupid, who served also as sacristan.