"At four I rode, with my dear wife, to the Vatican, where his Holiness resides. On the floor above are the apartments of Cardinal Antonelli. I had to ascend 190 steps, a most splendid marble staircase. The steps were easy to ascend, being very broad and low. The person in waiting took my card, and enquired if I wished to see his Eminence. This, I said, I hoped to do some other day. I then drove to the Palazzo Colonna and left my card for the French Ambassador, to whom we are all so much indebted for his most zealous endeavours on behalf of young Mortara."
In the evening Signor Tagliacozzo came in to report on two other attempts made by some of the Roman populace to cause trouble to the Hebrew community. In two different Synagogues, he said, arrangements had been made to hide a child there, with a view of raising the alarm outside the moment the door should be closed, and then falling upon the Jews and accusing them of intended murder. "By the mercy of heaven," he said, "these plans were frustrated, and in each case the lost child was found."
"The director of the police," he continued, "sent to the President of the Deputies of the Jews at Rome, and informed him of the discovery of the missing children." Meanwhile many of the Jews had been afraid to pursue their daily avocations in the city, several having been ill-treated by the ignorant people, who pelted them with stones, injuring two or three very severely. Signor Tagliacozzo observed that the Jews had had a miraculous escape, for on the beadle closing the doors of one of the Synagogues on Friday evening last he observed a child under a seat in one of the corners, as if asleep. He turned the child out, but could get no satisfactory explanation as to how he came into the Synagogue, or why he remained after all the people had left.
About half-an-hour after the beadle had locked up the Synagogue, the people in the Jewish quarter were alarmed by the noise of a concourse of women and children, and some men, with officers of the police, saying that the Jews had concealed in the Synagogue or house adjoining a Christian child, to sacrifice it and use its blood in their Passover cakes. The woman whose child was supposed to be stolen shrieked dreadfully, and led the officers of the justice, in the first instance, to the house, and then to the Synagogue, to the very spot where the child had been found. Had the beadle not seen the child, as no doubt was the expectation of those who hatched the plot, the lives of hundreds of innocent persons would have been sacrificed. In another Synagogue a child endeavoured to enter on a Friday evening, when all the service was over and the doors were being locked, but was fortunately also discovered by the beadle, and driven away.