[74] Vita, p. 56b, c. Her words as printed there are: “Io non vorrei grazia ne misericordia [nella presente vita] ma giustizia e vendetta del malfattore.” But the words I have bracketed are certainly a gloss; for she is speaking here out of the fulness of her feeling, without the intrusion of reflection. And as regards temporal punishment in the other life, and the soul’s attitude towards it there, she says in the Trattato, p. 180b: “Know for certain, that of the payment required from those souls (in Purgatory), there is not remitted even the least farthing, this having been thus established by the divine justice.… Those souls have no more any personal choice, and can no more will anything but what God wills.”
[75] Dialogo, pp. 203a, 208b.
[76] From the authenticated copies of the entries in the Cartulary, prefixed to the MS. Life of the Saint in the Biblioteca della Missione Urbana, Genoa, Nos. 30, 8, 14; and from careful copies of the still extant original Wills made for me by Dre. Ferretto, of the Archivio di Stato, Genova.
[77] Benedicti XIV, De servorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canonisatione, ed. Padua, 1743, Vol. II, p. 239a.
[78] Vita, pp. 56c; 3c; 95c; 124c, 125b; 122b.
[79] I have followed here, for my terminus a quo, Vallebona rather than the Bollandists (who prefer 1474 for the date of her conversion), because the ten years required between her marriage in January 1463 and her conversion, have fully elapsed by March 1473, and because the earlier we place her conversion, the larger is the number of lonely convert years that we can find room for, and the more nearly accurate her own allegation of twenty-five years of such loneliness becomes. If we follow the chronology given in the text we get a thoroughly understandable sequence: Catherine’s conversion, March 1473; Giuliano’s bankruptcy, summer of that year; his conversion under the joint influence of her zeal and of his misfortune; the decision of the couple to settle in the midst of the poor and suffering, whom they were now determined to serve, and the execution of this decision, between Michaelmas and Christmas of the same year.
[80] Vallebona, p. 55.
[81] Lived 1550-1614, worked heroically amongst the poor and pestilential sick, founded the Order of the Fathers of a Good Death, and was himself at Genoa, already gravely ill, in 1613.
[82] Vallebona, pp. 55, 56, shows, from Giuliano’s still extant will of 1497, how this income from his property in the Island of Scios alone amounted to about 30,000 modern Italian lire. We shall study the instructive growth of legend in the matter of Catherine’s “poverty” later on.
[83] Vita, p. 122b.