The Saint

by Antonio Fogazzaro

I am not satisfied with your letters; I will tell you why sometime, but not now. It is too difficult to write here. The mist is rolling down from the uplands high above the spring, and a cold west wind is blowing. I must be careful of my health on Carlino’s account, and this is another sacrifice, for I hate my health!

Later.

Noemi, could you not contrive to let the enclosed half-sheet of paper, upon which I have written in pencil, fall into his hands? You hesitate to tell him how obedient I am; could you not, at least, help me to let him know it in this way?

I am not satisfied with your letters, first of all because they are too short. You know how eager I am to hear all about him. He is a guest in the same house with you; at Subiaco he can surely not know how to employ his time, and you sum up everything in two or three words!—He is better. He reads a great deal. He has been working in the kitchen-garden. Perhaps he will spend the summer with us. He writes.—And you have never yet told me what malady he is really suffering from, what he reads, where he will go if he does not spend the summer with you, whether he writes letters or books, and what you talk about together, for it is not possible that you never talk together. Do not repeat your excuse that the less you speak of him, the better it is for me. That is a convenient excuse you have invented, but it is foolish, because, whether you talk to me of him or not, it is all the same. My hopes are quite dead; they will not revive. Then write me long letters, I am sure he wishes to convert you, that you have very serious talks together, and that is why you tell me so little about him. It would not be a very glorious achievement to convert you, for you are sentimental in matters of religion; you do not possess that clear, cold, and positive insight which is, unfortunately, natural to me, and which I wish I did not possess.

When do you intend to return to Belgium? Do not your affairs there need your attention? You once mentioned an agent in whom you had little confidence. We shall probably travel in August. At least, that is what Carlino says at present, but he changes his mind very easily. I should like to visit Holland with you, in September. Good-bye! Please write. If he reads much you might get him to lend you a book, and leave the half-sheet of paper in it as a book-mark, At any rate, find some way. That or something else; you are a woman! Contrive some means, if you love me! But I really believe you no longer love me at all! You would confess it if you told the truth! However, there is a lady at this hotel who is in love with me! Laugh, if you like, but it is true. She lives in Rome. Her husband is Under-Secretary of State. She is determined that I shall spend next winter in Rome. It will depend upon Carlino. This lady lays siege to him; he lets himself be besieged, and neither resists nor capitulates. Good-bye. Write, write, and again write!

NOEMI TO JEANNE (from the French)

I did still better! In my presence, my brother-in-law cited from memory a Latin passage which impressed him, concerning certain monks of ancient times, before Christ. He begged Giovanni to write it down for him. We were in the olive-grove above the villetta, seated on the grass. I immediately passed a pencil to Giovanni, and the half-sheet of paper, with the blank side uppermost. He wrote, and Maironi took the paper, read the Latin passage, and put the sheet into his pocket, without looking at the other side. It was an act of treason, and I have been guilty of treason for love of you. Will you ever doubt me again?

What can I tell you about his illness which I have not told you already? He was troubled with fever for about two weeks. One day the physician would pronounce it typhoid, and the next he would say it was not. At last the fever left him, but his strength has not returned completely; he is very thin; he seems to have some persistent, internal ailment; the doctor is very particular about the quality of his food; he has changed his way of living, eats meat and drinks a little wine. Yesterday a friend of Giovanni’s came from Rome to see him; the famous Professor Mayda, Giovanni begged him to examine Maironi, and to advise him. He recommended some waters, which Maironi will certainly not take. I feel I know him well enough to be sure of that. However, during the last week he has improved rapidly. In the morning and evening he works a little in the kitchen-garden. This morning he rose very early, and what should he do but take it into his head to wash down the stairs! Yesterday Maria scolded the old servant because the stairs were not clean. When the old woman, who sleeps at Subiaco, arrived at seven o’clock, she found Maironi had done the work for her. My sister and my brother-in-law reproached him; Giovanni was almost severe, perhaps because he is so different from Maironi, and would never think of touching a broom, even if he lived in a cloud of cobwebs! What does Maironi read? He has never but once spoken to me of what he reads, and then only for a moment, as I shall tell you later. I wrote you that perhaps he would spend the summer with us, for I know Maria and Giovanni wish it. I now have a presentiment that he will not stay, but will go to Rome. This, however, is only my impression; I have no positive knowledge.

As to his wishing to convert me, I do not know whether it would be an easy task or not, or whether Maironi thinks anything about it. You will notice that I call him Maironi in writing to you; in speaking to him I call him simply Benedetto, for that is his wish. I am sure Giovanni once thought of converting me. He found it so easy that he never speaks of it to me now. I should not think the same of Maironi. I believe that to him Christianity means, above all things, actions and life according to the spirit of Christ, of the risen Christ who lives for ever among us, of whom we have, as he puts it, the experience. It seems to me that the object of his religious mission is, not the placing of the creed of one Christian Church before another, although there is no doubt the holiness of the life he leads is strictly Catholic. Whenever I have heard him speak of dogmas, with Giovanni, it has never been to discuss the difference between Church and Church, but rather to expound certain formulas of faith, and to show what a strong light emanates from them when they are expounded in a certain way. Giovanni himself is past-master at this, but when Giovanni speaks you are impressed above all, by the immense store of knowledge his mind contains; when Maironi speaks you feel that the living Christ is in his heart, the risen Christ, and he fires you! In order to be perfectly, scrupulously sincere, I will tell you that although I do not think he intends to convert me, still I am not very sure of this. One day we were in the olive-grove. He and Giovanni were discussing a German book on the essence of Christianity, which, it seems, has made a stir, and was written by a Protestant theologian. Maironi observed that, when this Protestant speaks of Catholicism, he does so with a most honest intention of being impartial, but that, in reality, he does not know the Catholic religion. His opinion is that no Protestant does really know it; they are all of them full of prejudices, and believe certain external and remediable abuses in its practices to be essential to Catholicism. There was a basket of apricots standing near, and he chose one which had been very fine, but which was beginning to rot. “Here,” said he, “is an apricot, which is slightly rotten. If I offer this apricot to one who does not know, but who wishes to be amiable, he will tell me that part of it is indeed firm and good, but that, unfortunately, part of it is diseased, and therefore, though he much regrets it, he cannot accept it. Thus this illustrious Protestant speaks of Catholicism. But if I offer my apricot to one who knows, he will accept it even if it be entirely rotten; and he will plant the immortal seed in his own garden, in the hope of raising fine, healthy fruit.” These remarks he addressed to Giovanni, but his eyes sought mine continually. I must add that at Jenne also, he told me to learn to understand Catholicism. At any rate, if I remain a Protestant, it will not be because I do or do not understand, but rather in obedience to my most sacred feelings.

My dear Jeanne, there is something else I must tell you plainly. I have a suspicion that you are jealous, I believe you do not realise the inexpressible grief you would cause me, if this were really the case. I fear you do not realise the immense gravity of the offence it would be, first to him and then to me. Now I am going to open my heart to you. I should reproach myself if I did not do so, dear friend, reproach myself on your account, on his, and on my own. As to him, he is kind and gentle to all with whom he comes in contact, especially to the humble, and you might even be jealous of the old woman who comes from Subiaco to do the rough work in the house. With Maria and myself he shows his kindness and gentleness silently rather than in words. With us he is quiet, simple, and affable; he does not appear to wish to avoid us, but it has never happened that he has remained alone with either of us. In his eyes I am a soul, and souls are to him exactly what the tiniest plants in my father’s great garden were to him; he would have liked to protect them from frost with the warmth of his own heart, and make then grow and flower by communicating his own vitality to them. But I am a soul like any other soul, the only difference perhaps being, that he deems me further removed from the truth, and consequently more exposed to frost. But this is not apparent in his bearing.