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supplied by the band of a French regiment.
The time, I need scarcely say, was that of the early years of the French occupation of the city, to which France made it her boast that she had brought back the Pope.
As I chronicle these small personal adventures of mine, I am constrained to blush at their insufficiency.
I write as if I had forgotten the wonderful series of events which had come to pass between my first visit to Rome and this second tarrying within its walls.
In the interval, the days of 1848 had come and gone.
France had dismissed her citizen king, and had established a republic in place of the monarchy.
The Pope of Rome, for centuries the representative and upholder of absolute rule, had stood before the world as the head of the Christianity which liberalizes both institutions and ideas.
In Germany the party of progress was triumphant.
Europe had trembled with the birth-pangs of freedom.
A new and glorious confederacy of states seemed to be promised in the near future.
The tyrannies of the earth were surely about to meet their doom.
My own dear eldest son was given to me in the spring of this terrible and splendid year of 1848.
When his father wrote ‘Dieudonne’ under the boy's name in the family Bible, he added to the welcome record the new device, ‘Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.’
The first Napoleon had overthrown
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