No one is very much to blame for anything, I suppose, and very
likely Pius IX. had not voluntarily disappointed his countrymen, who may
have expected too much. But then the French had been there fifteen
years, and were to be there another fifteen years yet. Now they are
gone, with the archbishop's red coach, and the complaisant grocer, and
the young man of twenty-seven in Via del Gambero, and the rest of the
things that the sun looked on and will look on the like of again, no
doubt, in our monotonous round of him.
To-day, instead of the red legs of the French soldiers, you see the blue
legs of the Italian soldiers, and instead of the fierce faces of their
officers, the serious, intelligent, mostly spectacled faces of the
Italian officers, in sweeping cloaks of tender blue verging on lavender.
They are soldierly men none the less for their gentler aspect, and
perhaps something the more; and a better thing yet is that there are
comparatively few of them. There are few of the privates also, far fewer
than the priests and the students of the ecclesiastical schools, who
dress like priests and go dashing through the streets in files and
troops.
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