In another version he was living an ordinary life in his ‘villa,’ not in a penitential cell, when the king’s daughter lost her way at the hunt. After the crime he was seized with compunction, and went out into the Campagna, living only on the herbs he could gather with his mouth, like an animal, and vowing that he would never again raise his head to Heaven till God gave him some token that He had forgiven him.
After eight years the king found him when out hunting, and, taking him for some kind of beast, put him in the stables. The little prince who was just born was taken by to the church to be baptised about this time; and, as they carried him back past the stables, he said aloud, ‘Rise, Giovanni, for God hath forgiven thy sins.’ Every one was very much astonished to hear him speak, and they sent for Giovanni and asked him to explain what it meant.
The rest as in the other versions.
[I have repeatedly come across this story, but without any material variation from one or other of the versions already given. It would be curious to trace how St. John Chrysostom’s name ever became connected with it. Though famous for his penitential life as much as for his eloquence, and though the four years he passed in the cells of the Antiochian cenobites were austere enough, yet his memory is stained by no sort of crime. So far from it, he was most carefully brought up by a widowed mother, whose exemplary virtues are said to have occasioned the exclamation from the Saint’s master, ‘What wonderful women have these Christians!’—Butler’s ‘Lives.’ There is something like its termination in that of ‘The Fiddler in Hell.’—Ralston’s ‘Russian Folk Tales,’ pp. 299, 300. The years of voluntary silence, and the finding of the silent person by a king out hunting, enter into many tales otherwise of another class, as in ‘Die Zwölf Brüder’ (the Twelve Brothers), Grimm, p. 37, and ‘Die Sechs Schwäne’ (the Six Swans), p. 191.]
DON GIOVANNI.
We had another Giovanni who had done worse things even than these, and who never became a penitent at all. Don Giovanni he was called. Everybody in Rome knew him by the name of Don Giovanni.
Among the other bad things he did, he killed a great man who was called the Commendatore; and though he had the crime of murder on his conscience he took no account of it, but swaggered about with an air of bravado as if he cared for no one.