Chapter 6.1. The Retreat of the Lover.
Chapter 6.III. The Flowers Amidst the Tombs.
Chapter 6.IV. We Obtain What We Seek, and Know it Not.
Chapter 7.I. Avignon.—The Two Pages.—The Stranger Beauty.
Chapter 7.II. The Character of a Warrior Priest—an Interview—the
Chapter 7.III. Holy Men.—Sagacious Deliberations.—Just Resolves.—And
Chapter 7.IV. The Lady and the Page.
Chapter 7.V. The Inmate of the Tower.
Chapter 7.VI. The Scent Does Not Lie.—The Priest and the Soldier.
On descending the stairs, Nina was met by Alvarez.
Chapter 7.VII. Vaucluse and its Genius Loci.—Old Acquaintance Renewed.
Chapter 7.VIII. The Crowd.—The Trial.—The Verdict.—The Soldier and
Chapter 7.IX. Albornoz and Nina.
Chapter 8.II. Adrian Once More the Guest of Montreal.
Chapter 8.III. Faithful and Ill-fated Love.—The Aspirations Survive the
Chapter 9.I. The Triumphal Entrance.
Chapter 9.III. Adrian’s Adventures at Palestrina.
Chapter 9.IV. The Position of the Senator.—The Work of Years.—The
Chapter 9.VI. The Events Gather to the End.
Chapter 10.I. The Conjunction of Hostile Planets in the House of Death.
Chapter 10.II. Montreal at Rome.—His Reception of Angelo Villani.
Chapter 10.III. Montreal’s Banquet.
Chapter 10.IV. The Sentence of Walter de Montreal.
Chapter 10.VIII. The Threshold of the Event.
Chapter The Last. The Close of the Chase.
Preface
to
The First Edition of Rienzi.
I began this tale two years ago at Rome. On removing to Naples, I threw it aside for “The Last Days of Pompeii,” which required more than “Rienzi” the advantage of residence within reach of the scenes described. The fate of the Roman Tribune continued, however, to haunt and impress me, and, some time after “Pompeii” was published, I renewed my earlier undertaking. I regarded the completion of these volumes, indeed, as a kind of duty;—for having had occasion to read the original authorities from which modern historians have drawn their accounts of the life of Rienzi, I was led to believe that a very remarkable man had been superficially judged, and a very important period crudely examined. (See Appendix, Nos. I and II.) And this belief was sufficiently strong to induce me at first to meditate a more serious work upon the life and times of Rienzi. (I have adopted the termination of Rienzi instead of Rienzo, as being more familiar to the general reader.—But the latter is perhaps the more accurate reading, since the name was a popular corruption from Lorenzo.) Various reasons concurred against this project—and I renounced the biography to commence the fiction. I have still, however, adhered, with a greater fidelity than is customary in Romance, to all the leading events of the public life of the Roman Tribune; and the Reader will perhaps find in these pages a more full and detailed account of the rise and fall of Rienzi, than in any English work of which I am aware. I have, it is true, taken a view of his character different in some respects from that of Gibbon or Sismondi. But it is a view, in all its