THE EMPEROR AND THE CARDINAL.
NOTHING could illustrate better the changed position of Rome in its relation with earthly Powers, than the account of the last comedietta performed at Compiegne. For ages the Papacy and the thrones have stood opposed to each other as representatives of Intellect and of Force. The figures with which of all others the student of history is best acquainted are those of the armed king and the cowled priest—the king all bluster and violence, the priest turning aside opposition with smiling, subtle inflexibility. For ages no diplomacy could equal that of Rome, no monarch hope for victory in a civil contest with the Pope, no statesman confront obstacles with the unmoved calmness of a great Ro- man cardinal. The European ideal of intellectual strength is Hildebrand ; of statesmanlike power, Richelieu ; of the craft which controls by soothing mankind, Cardinal Mazarin. The State, whenever it fought the Pope, was expected to have re- course to violence from the proved impossibility of winning in any more intellectual mode. The speech of silver, the deep design, the covert meaning, all that we now describe by the comprehensive monosyllable "tact," was predicated of a cardinal as instinctively as redness of gold, or fairness of some great " ladye." To this moment a scene in a drama in which statesmanlike guile was on the side of the king and ir- resolute feebleness on that of the cardinal would suggest to most critics an inartistic inversion of the true order of things.
Compiegne has inverted them, nevertheless. On the 27th of October, Monseigneur Billiet, the Archbishop of Savoy, attended at Compiegne to receive his Cardinal's hat from the hands of the Emperor, and priest and monarch com- menced for the thousandth time the courteous but virulent war of tact. The priest spoke as he would, and the monarch replied as he would, and no man who reads the query and the retort doubts that the intellectual strength was on the side of the throne. Italian and priest, the new Cardinal was none the less hopelessly defeated in the very field which the Roman Court boasts as so exclusively her own. His questions were parried, his insinuations overruled, his compliments turned into reasons for the very course they were prepared to avert. A Cardinal on a throne is the nearest approach we know to the attitude of Napoleon during the ceremonial, and the phenomenon is full of omen for the temporal power. Thought has long pronounced on the other side ; popular favour is all for the boldest assailants of the Papacy, physical force just condescends to uphold the Holy Seat on the edge of a precipice, and now the astuteness which for ages has been the Papal substitute for wisdom has passed over to the ranks of the enemy. The Papacy had sore work to hold its own against Bourbons ; with a Mazarin on the Bourbon throne it is hopelessly overmatched. The contest be- gan with the presentation of the Latin Brief, authorizing the Emperor to bestow the Cardinal's hat. In it the Pope alluded clearly to the " vicissitudes but too well known which he had undergone," and announced the concession not only as one due to the virtues of the Archbishop of Chambery, but to the claims of another " who boasts the title of Eldest Son of the Church." The object, of course, was to elicit some word of pity for the Holy Father, some promise which Rome could use as a new barrier against Italian de- mands. It must have been with an inward smile that the Emperor accepted all these assurances as most gratifying, declared that accord between himself and the Holy See was most necessary, and hinted that this " accord could not better be manifested than by the kind adoption of suggestions always made after mature consideration" (par P adoption bienveillante de propositions toujoums faits: avec maturate). The Roman Church in England once made that very reply to another sovereign also called Pontius Pilate. Henry the Eighth, too, asked, like the Pope, for "accord," and was told, as Napoleon now tells the Holy Father, that accord was the wish of the Church, and would be achieved at once if Parliament would only accede to propositions always maturely considered. Nothing is changed, except that in the nineteenth century it is the sovereign who makes the reply which the Church made in the sixteenth. Richelieu might have been proud of the dexterity which in three lines accepts a compliment from the Pope, heartily sympathizes in his wish for accord, and tells him that the way to secure his desire is to accede to well- matured propositions—such as, for example, a resignation of the temporal power.
Nor was the Emperor less happy in his reply to the Car- dinal than he had been in his retort on the Pope. Mgr. Billiet thanked his sovereign in the name of Savoy for his own investiture, recounted the services Napoleon had per- formed to the Catholic Church in China, Cochin China, Polynesia, and Syria, and boldly concluded by assuring him that, " by protecting the venerable Pius IX., as Charlemagne protected Adrian I., he would deserve the approval and applause of the whole Catholic world." The Emperor of course could not reject such a compliment, yet to accept it was to bind himself before the Catholic world to a continuance of the Roman Protectorate. Every word had doubtless been studied, and many a statesman might have fallen into the trap. The Emperor, however, kindly patted the Archbishop, extolled his own love for Savoy, and calmly accepted the " appreciation of his efforts for the good of religion and "— not the protection of the Pope, but—" the prosperity of the newly annexed provinces." All, therefore, that the Church has gained by this carefully considered scene, is a menacing refusal to pledge the faith of France to continue the protec- tion which the Church so greatly desires. The Vatican, beaten in the field and defeated in diplomacy, is now van- quished in the battle of tact.
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