midnight
Rome surely contained no slum more fetid , none more perilous -- a region of cut-throat alleys , south of the Ghetto , along the Tiber bank . Night after night , accompanied by his stout young vicar , Don Giorgio Appolloni , the Cardinal worked there as hard as any hard-working curate : visiting the sick , comforting the afflicted , admonishing the knavish , persuading the drunken from their taverns , making peace between the combative . Not infrequently , when he came home , he would add a pair of stilettos to his already large collection of such relics . And his homecomings were apt to be late -- oftener than not , after midnight ; and sometimes , indeed , in the vague twilight of morning , at the hour when , as he once expressed it to Don Giorgio , `` the tired burglar is just lying down to rest . '' And every Saturday evening the Cardinal Prefect of Archives and Inscriptions sat for three hours boxed up in his confessional , like any parish priest -- in his confessional at St. Mary of the Lilies , where the penitents who breathed their secrets into his ears , and received his fatherly counsels ... I beg your pardon . One must not , of course , remember his rags or his sores , when Lazarus approaches that tribunal . But I do n't pretend that the Cardinal was a saint ; I am sure he was not a prig .