They recalled the fact that this Sixtus who was dying as the head of Christendom had been born a poor gardener's son. Such dramatic contrasts exercise great sway over the Roman mind - superstition and fancy played with the story, and strange rumors drifted about concerning an unholy bargain which Sixtus was said to have made for power. Here, before the palace which he had built, the silent crowds gathered to await his end; and when, as the old pontiff drew his last breath, that terrific thunderstorm broke over the Quirinal, men shuddered and fled, saying and believing that the Prince of Darkness had come in person for the soul of the monk whom he had made Pope. Kindly old Sixtus! It was well that he could not know how the poor whom he had always remembered would remember him!

Across the Monte Cavallo, to pause before the balcony of the Quirinal, came in 184o that extraordinary funeral cortege which carried the body of Lady Gwendolin Talbot, Princess Borghese, to be laid in the Borghese chapel in S. Maria Maggiore. At seven in the evening of October 3o, by torchlight, amid a silence so profound that the low prayers of the priests were distinctly audible, the procession moved slowly along the three-quarters of a league from the Borghese Palace to the church of S. Maria Maggiore. Soldiers with reversed arms, mounted dragoons, mourning carriages, religious societies, priests, prelates, and all the Roman poor, comprised the train. The funeral car was drawn, not by horses but by forty Romans dressed in deep mourning. Flowers were thrown upon the bier from the palaces along the Corso, and when the procession reached Monte Cavallo and paused before the Quirinal, from the balcony over the entrance Pope Gregory XVI gave his final blessing to the beautiful young princess, dead at twenty-two, and saint if ever there has been one. All the poor of Rome felt that they had lost a friend and benefactress, the like of whom would not come again. Later, when Prince Borghese wished to know the names of those who had drawn the funeral car, he was only told that they were Romans!

Up the slopes of Monte Cavallo in February, 1798, came with their tricolored cockades the soldiers of the French Revolutionary Army. They entered the Quiri­nal and called upon Pope Pius VI to renounce the tem­poral power. The eighteenth-century pontiff calmly refused to comply with this preposterous demand. That refusal lost him the tiara and brought about his death eighteen months later in a French fortress.