You did not meet a soul,
you did not see a light in any window, and the glimmering gas lamps, few
and far between, seemed powerless to pierce the gloom. On either hand the
doors were barred and bolted, and not a sound, not a breath came from
within. Even when, after a long interval, you passed a lighted wine-shop,
behind whose panes of frosted glass a lamp gleamed dim and motionless,
not an exclamation, not a suspicion of a laugh ever reached your ear.
There was nothing alive save the two sentries placed outside the prison,
one before the entrance and the other at the corner of the right-hand
lane, and they remained erect and still, coagulated, as it were, in that
dead street.
* Afterwards Louis XIV.--Trans.
Pierre's interest, however, was not merely confined to the Via Giulia; it
extended to the whole district, once so fine and fashionable, but now
fallen into sad decay, far removed from modern life, and exhaling a faint
musty odour of monasticism. Towards San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, where
the new Corso Vittorio Emanuele has ripped up every olden district, the
lofty five-storeyed houses with their dazzling sculptured fronts
contrasted violently with the black sunken dwellings of the neighbouring
lanes. In the evening the globes of the electric lamps on the Corso shone
out with such dazzling whiteness that the gas lamps of the Via Giulia and
other streets looked like smoky lanterns.
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