And, despite his physical decay, he retained an extraordinary head--the head of an apostle and martyr, at once noble and tragic in its expression, and encompassed by bristling snowy hair and beard.
"The Pope," he growled; "I've never spoken badly of the Pope.

Yet it's his fault if tyranny continues.

He alone in '49 could have given us the Republic, and then we shouldn't have been as we are now." Ambrogio had known Mazzini, whose vague religiosity remained in him--the dream of a Republican pope at last establishing the reign of liberty and fraternity.

But later on his passion for Garibaldi had disturbed these views, and led him to regard the papacy as worthless, incapable of achieving human freedom.

And so, between the dream of his youth and the stern experience of his life, he now hardly knew in which direction the truth lay.