A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 1 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

HER ECSTASIES.

"Whenever the remembrance of her sacred husband,"—by which phrase thousands of times repeated in the course of his work, the monk always alludes to our Saviour,—"became a little refreshed in that holy mind, she withdrew herself as much as she could from her corporal senses; and her extremities, that is to say, her hands and her feet became contracted and deadened; her fingers first. Then her limbs became so strongly fixed both in themselves, and attached to the places which they touched, that it would have been more possible to break them to pieces than to remove them in any wise. The eyes also were perfectly closed; and the neck was rendered so rigid, that it was not a little dangerous to her to touch her neck at such moments."

The frequency and duration of these attacks appear to have increased. At a later period[12] of his narrative, Father Raymond tells us that "the inferior and sensitive part of her nature abandoned her for the greater part of her time, and left her deprived of sensation. Of which," he says, "we are assured a thousand times by seeing and touching her arms and her hands so rigidified, that it would have been easier to break the bone, than remove them from the position in which they were. The eyes were completely shut; the ears did not hear any sound however great, and all the bodily senses were entirely deprived of their proper action."

These passages will leave little doubt on the minds of any who have witnessed the phenomena of catalepsy, that Catherine was habitually subject to attacks of that complaint. The hint to be derived from the writer's declaration, that she threw herself into this state "as much as she could," is worthy of notice; and will not seem surprising to those who have studied this form of disease. Those also, who have watched the physical phenomena of animal magnetism, will not fail to remark the similarity of the facts recorded of Catherine, to those they have been accustomed to observe.

For several years of her life after her profession, and previous to 1376, we find various undated intimations of her being in different cities of Tuscany; and Father Raymond has recorded her complaints, that people both secular and of "the order," had been scandalised by her frequent travelling, whereas she had never gone any whither, she declares, except for the salvation of souls. But when it is remembered what travelling was in those days, and that to go from Siena to Florence, Pisa, or Lucca, was to cross the frontier of her own country, and traverse the dominions of foreign and often hostile states, it seems strange, that a young girl of obscure origin, and necessarily with small pecuniary resources at her command, should have found the means of travelling about the world, accompanied, as she appears always to have been, by a suite of confessors and other ecclesiastical followers. To render these journeyings yet more difficult and puzzling, we find contemporary mention of her frequent illness. She is again and again confined to her bed by fever, and "her ordinary infirmities," and "accustomed sufferings;"—a state of things that would seem to put out of the question for her the wandering mendicant friar's ordinary inexpensive mode of locomotion.

THE PAPAL SEE AT AVIGNON.

Not a word, however, is to be found throwing light on any such difficulties; and they must be left to the reader, as they present themselves. It may be noted, however,—rather, though, to the increase than to the lessening of the strangeness of the circumstances,—that by special Papal Bull she was permitted to carry with her a portable travelling altar, and the confessors who accompanied her were specially licensed to absolve all such penitents as came to the Saint for spiritual advice and edification.

In the year 1376 Catherine was in her twenty-ninth year; and we then come to the most important and most remarkable incident in her career. At that time Gregory XI., the last of seven French popes, who had succeeded one another in the chair of St. Peter, was living at Avignon, where for the last seventy-three years the Papal Court had resided to the infinite discontent and considerable injury of Italy. To put an end to this absenteeism, and bring back the Pontiff, and all the good things that would follow in his train, was the cherished wish of all good Italians, and especially of all Italian churchmen. Petrarch had urgently pressed Gregory's predecessor, Urban V., to accomplish the desired change; Dante had at an earlier period laboured to accomplish the same object. But it was not altogether an easy step to take. The French Cardinals who surrounded the Pope at Avignon were of course eager to keep him and the Court in their own country. The King of France was equally anxious to detain him. The French Pope's likings and prejudices of course pointed in the same direction. Rome too was very far just then from offering an agreeable or inviting residence. The dominions of the Church were in a state of almost universal rebellion. The turbulence of the great Roman barons was such, that going to live among them seemed as safe and as pleasant as finding a residence in a den of ruffians.

Thus all the representations of the Italian Church, and all the spiritual and temporal interests, which so urgently needed the ruler's presence in his dominions, had for some years past not sufficed to bring back the Pope to Rome. Under these circumstances Catherine, the obscure Sienese dyer's illiterate daughter, determined to try her powers of persuasion and argument on the Pontiff, and proceeded to Avignon for that purpose in the summer of 1376. In the September of that same year, the Pope set out on his return to Rome! The dyer's daughter succeeded in her enterprise, and moved the centre of Europe once more back again to its old place in the eternal city!