‘Yes, yes! that’s a fact; that is not old wives’ nonsense,’[6] was the chorus which greeted this enunciation.[7]
[‘I, too, know a fact of that kind which most certainly happened, for I know Maria Grazia to whom it happened well, before she went to live at Velletri,’ said one of them.]
[1] ‘La serpe bianca;’ ‘serpe’ is of both genders, but is most commonly used in the feminine as in the common saying ‘allevarsi la serpe in seno,’ to nurture a serpent in one’s bosom. [↑]
[2] ‘Per far legna.’ ‘Fare’ is brought in on all occasions. Bazzarini gives 59 closely printed columns of instances of its various uses; here it means to cut wood for burning; ‘legno’ is wood; ‘legna,’ wood for burning. [↑]
[4] S. Agostino is the favourite with the people of all the churches of Rome. [↑]
[5] ‘Brutti assassini.’ In a country where the cultus of ‘il bello’ has been so well understood, ‘ugly’ has naturally come to be used as a term of deepest reproach. [↑]
[6] ‘Si, si, questo è positivo, non è donnicciolara, è positivo.’ [↑]
[7] This kind of spell seems analogous to one of which a curious account is preserved by Menghi (Compendio dell’Arte Essorcista, lib. ii. cap. xl.), which I quote, because it has a local connexion with Rome, and there are not many such. An inhabitant of Dachono in Bohemia, he says, brought his son, a priest, to Rome in the Pontificate of Pius II. (1458–64) to be exorcised, as all relief failed in his own country; a woman whom he had reproved for her bad life had bewitched him, adding, ‘that the spell (maldicio) was imposed on him by her under a certain tree, and if it was not removed in the same way, he could not otherwise be set free; and she would not reveal under what tree it was.’ The spell acted upon him only at such times as he was about to exercise his sacred ministry, and then it impeded his actions, forced him to put his tongue out at the cross, &c. &c. ‘The more earnest the devotion with which I strive to give myself to prayer,’ he said, ‘so much the more cruelly the devil rends me’ (mi lacera). In St. Peter’s, the narrator goes on to say, is a column brought from the Temple of Solomon, by means of which many possessed persons have been liberated, because our Lord had leant against it when teaching there, and it was thought that this might be sufficiently potent to represent the fatal tree. He was brought to it, however, in vain. Being tied to it, and asked to point out the spot where Christ had touched it, the spirit which possessed him replied by making him bite it on a certain spot with his teeth and say, ‘Qui stette, qui stette,’ (here He stood) in Italian, although he did not know a word of the language, and was obliged to inquire what the words he had uttered meant. But the spell, nevertheless, was not got rid of thus. It was then understood that the spirit must be of that kind of which Christ had said ‘he goeth not out except by prayer and fasting;’ and a pious and venerable bishop, taking compassion on the man, devoted himself to prayer and fasting for him all through Lent; and thus he was delivered and sent back to his own country rejoicing. [↑]