. A vagabond courtier; from the memoirs and letters of Baron Charles Louis von Pöllnitz. welled with prideat having made the Pope. . Among the illustratedlampoons which were rife during the vacancy of theHoly See, one showed the Cardinal at a window of theConclave, aiming with a gun at the Holy Spirit, whowas flying around in the form of a dove. The very afternoon of his elevation the aged Pope,who had taken the name of Clement XTI, received hisfirst visitors in audience. They were the Pretender andhis wife, called here, writes Pollnitz, the King andQueen of England, and he conversed with them
. A vagabond courtier; from the memoirs and letters of Baron Charles Louis von Pöllnitz. welled with prideat having made the Pope. . Among the illustratedlampoons which were rife during the vacancy of theHoly See, one showed the Cardinal at a window of theConclave, aiming with a gun at the Holy Spirit, whowas flying around in the form of a dove. The very afternoon of his elevation the aged Pope,who had taken the name of Clement XTI, received hisfirst visitors in audience. They were the Pretender andhis wife, called here, writes Pollnitz, the King andQueen of England, and he conversed with them sometime. Then came the Cardinals to do homage, andthen followed endless audiences and ceremonies; thecity was illuminated, bonfires blazed, and the guns ofS. Angelo thundered. Four days later our Baron saw the Pope crownedat S. Peters, and minutely describes the great ceremony,which lasted five hours. He was in the suite of thePrince of Waldeck, who was making a long stay inRome, and he sat in a box on the left of the papalthrone, with the leading Roman ladies and distinguished. THE VAGRANT 375 foreigners. Facing them in a box with a grille werethe English Royalties and their sons and Court, on theright of the throne. Pollnitz specially mentioned thatneither the throne, nor the dais on which it stood, wascovered with precious stones, as described by Missonin his book of Italian travel. The throne was notmagnificent, and S. Peters itself only hung with reddamask embroidered in gold, as at all great was the place and the congregation, not the splendourof the decorations, which made the ceremony, simplein itself, so striking. In August Pollnitz saw also the picturesque ceremonyof the Presentation of the Hackney, the richly capari-soned white horse which the King of Naples sendsas tribute to the Pope. For several days followedfetes, torchlight processions, fireworks. Never, even atVersailles, had Pollnitz seen anything finer than theilluminations of the gallery of t
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectcourtsandcourtiers
