Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe — Read

While the dwarves were diverting themselves as aforesaid, their rulers were in council together. And one day Sir Francis Bertram found no closed doors at the Vatican. He was granted an audience which was friendly and unofficial and secret: so secret in fact that no news of it "transpired. " It was treated as the return visit of an Englishman to an Englishman. He came in an electric brougham, quite unattended. No one noted that he brought a small dispatch-box with him: or that he did not carry it away with him: but some of the senior cardinals, who kindly came to discuss the latest effusions of the Daily Anagraph with Hadrian in the evening, found His Holiness brimful of gaiety. They remarked that the visit of the ambassador had done Him no end of good. His bearing was vivid, serene, and youthful: His conversation was witty, limpid, facile: no one would have taken Him for the person described in the newspapers. He read those which obligingly were handed to him: but showed no emotion whatever, although very eager expert eyes searched for some trace from which to lead theories and hypotheses. Nor did He utter any comment. He read: He laid down the paper; and resumed the conversation. Before Their Eminencies withdrew, He summoned the Sacred Consistory to meet at noon on the morrow; and that was the only noteworthy event of the evening.

Hadrian mounted the throne; and the vermilion college displayed itself before Him. A pigskin kit-bag, which a gentleman-of-the-secret-chamber had placed by the pontifical footstool before the doors were locked, did not escape the notice of the more observant. The Pontiff Himself was in singularly good form: and this was incomprehensible, for He carried in His hand a copy of the very newspaper which everyone had read and retched-over. That He should be so aggressively cheerful, so vividly dominant, with that in His hand, was considered hardly decorous. Even among those who firmly were determined to force themselves to believe in Him, that He should not bend His neck to the smiter now, did not tally at all with conceptions of propriety. With these sentiments, Their Eminencies composed themselves to listen.