Read Ebook: Italian Yesterdays vol. 2 by Fraser Hugh Mrs

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OF VOL. II

SAINTS OF THE CHURCH 1

A Friend in Rome--A Story of Two Ways of Loving--Agla? and Boniface--Become Christians--A New Life--Boniface Endures Terrible Tortures--Martyrdom--Death of Agla?--Church of St. Boniface--Alexis, the Pilgrim--His Travels--Return to Rome--A Ragged Beggar--His Death and Burial in St. Boniface's Church--St. Alexis' Monastery--Trials of the Church After Constantine--Rome's Lowest Ebb--Growth of the Spiritual City--Benedict the Blessed, and Scholastica.

FOUNDER OF MONASTICISM 15

Norcia in the Sabines--A Matrona--The Twins, Benedict and Scholastica--Benedict Goes to Rome--Conversion of Placidus--Benedict's Retirement to La Mentorella--Life in a Cave--Temptations--Visit of St. Francis--Benedict's Ministering--Real Founder of Monastic Life--Growth of His Order--Placidus and Maurus--St. Benedict's Personality and Conversions--His Ideal of the Religious Life--His Greatest Miracles--His Sister, Scholastica--The Last Day Together--His Ascension.

ST. GREGORY THE GREAT 37

Birth and Lineage of St. Gregory--Path from the World to the Cloister--Prayer, Study, and Charity--His Cat--A Prophecy--A Cardinal Deacon--Mission to Constantinople--Eutyches' Heresy--Rome in Pestilence--Gregory Elected Pope--His Unbelievable Accomplishments--His Life as Pope--Championship of the Oppressed--Bond with English-speaking People--The Great Procession During the Pestilence--Gregory's Successors.

MEMORIES OF THE PANTHEON 52

EARLY LIFE OF FATHER MASTAI 70

IN SABINA 131

Castel Gandolfo--Its Gardens--The Sabine Hills--The Reverendo--An Expedition into the Hills-The Campagna in the Early Morning--"Our Lady of Good Counsel"--Ancient Praeneste--Italy's Landscape--Struggles of the Colonna--Destruction of Palestrina--Boniface's Revenge and Expiation--Olevano, the Haunt of Artists--"Picturesque Utility"--The Wrong Train--Romance of a Pebble--The Work of the Saints.

PEOPLE OF THE HILLS 152

The Apennines--View from a Peak--Real Hospitality--Polenta--Woods of Sabina--A Hill Family--The Cook--A Queer Adventure--People of the South--A Night Festival in the Abruzzi--The Journey--The Old Organ--Marion Crawford's Boys--Juvenile Theatricals.

A STORY OF VENICE 172

A Follower of the Condottieri--The Raw Recruit--Division of the Dukedom of Milan--Carmagnola's Turn--Growth in Wealth and Power--Disaffection--Venice Acquires His Services--War with Milan--A Leisurely Campaign--Carmagnola at the Height of His Glory--Fortune Turns Against the Venetians--Stirrings of Suspicion--Reception in Venice--The Senate Chamber--Growing Dusk--The Attack--End of His Part in the World--Another Story of the North--St. Raniero, the Patron of Pisa--The Power of Temperance.

QUEEN JOAN OF NAPLES 191

A Conspicuous Feminine Sinner--Marriage of State--Her Beauty--Her Hungarian Husband--Petrarch and the Monk--Joan's Ascent to the Throne--The Naples Succession--Her Favourites--The Churches of Naples--Joan's Lovers--Factions of Naples--Charles of Durazzo--A Bold Proposal--Charles' Ambitious Plots--War of the Factions--Disappearance of Maria--Becomes the Wife of Charles--Joan's Horror.

A MEDIAEVAL NIGHTMARE 208

Pact Between Charles and Andrew of Hungary--Joan's Homage to the Papal Legate--Andrew Ignored--Arrival of Andrew's Mother--Andrew Upheld by the Pope--His Reprisals--"The Man Must Die"--The Queen's Conspiracy--Last Meeting of Charles and Andrew--The Hunting Expedition--The Banquet in the Monastery--The Murder--Tempest Breaks over Joan's Head--An Evil Blow at Charles--Trial of Andrew's Murderers--A Nightmare of Cruelty and Fear.

THE VAMPIRE-MONARCH FROM HUNGARY 233

Charles' Further Acts as Dictator--Rise of the Favoured Louis of Taranto--Civil War--A Scheme of the Empress of Constantinople--Interference of the King of Hungary--The Empress Again to the Rescue--Hungary's Advance--Death of the Empress--Flight of the Neapolitan Nobles--Joan and Her Husband in Provence--Charles' Well-merited Fate--The King of Hungary's Vengeance--Government by Execution.

END OF JOAN'S CAREER 246

Joan Detained at Aix--Greeted as a Queen--Joan Pronounced Innocent--Plans to Regain Naples--Sale of a City--Return to Naples--Indecisive War--Proposal for Personal Conflict--Flight of the Royal Family--Maria's Narrow Escape--Hungarians Repulsed--Pope Clement as Intermediary--Departure of the King of Hungary--Festivity in Naples--Death of Louis and Joan's Further Marital Adventures--Joan in Trouble--Her Untimely End.

NAPLES UNDER MURAT 263

Beauty of Naples--Figures of Its History--St. Januarius--Murat, King of Naples--Achievements as King--The Carbonari--England's Promises--Napoleonic Diplomacy--Rise of the Bourbons--Alliance with Austria--Murat's Indecision--Distrust of the Allies--Murat's Statesmanship--Talleyrand's Diplomacy--Naples, the Gay--Conspiracy in the Palace--The Escape from Elba--Ideal Government--War Against Murat--Advance of the Austrians--Murat Driven to Naples--Interview with His Wife--Last Instructions to His Ministers--Escape.

MURAT'S LAST DAYS 299

Naples in Anarchy--Entrance of Austrians--Murat's Repulse by Napoleon and by Louis--His Demon of Ill-luck--Ship-wrecked--Aid in Corsica--Emperor of Austria's Proposal--Attempt Against Naples--Murat Betrayed into Ferdinand's Hands--Murat's "Trial"--Letter to His Wife--Before His "Judges"--A Brave Death--Ferdinand, the "Butcher King."

ITALIAN SEAS 315

Our Moods and the Seas--Memories in Landscapes--The Healing of the Sea--A Vision in the Bay of Naples--Marion Crawford's Yacht Expected--The Family Together at Leghorn--Lady Paget--A Bathing Scene--Hugh Fraser--"Spannocchi" for Dinner--The Avenging Boatman--Livorno, An Anomaly--Sunset on the Mare Ligure--Bay of Spezia, a Splurge of Colour and Light--A Hail Storm in Venice--The Joy of a Gondola--Moods of Venice--A Giorgione Beauty--The Nurseries of Venice--Her Shops--Saints and Heresies of the Thirteenth Century.

SOUTHERN SHORES 339

Melancholy Ravenna--Early Byzantine Architecture--Forests of Stone-pine--Smiles and Tears--The Need of a Little Misfortune--Monte Gargano--Millions of Spanish Merinos--Primaeval Forest--A Forest Miracle--Church of the Apparition of St. Michael--Other Apparitions of the Archangel--The Revelation to St. Aubert--The Great Round Church--Order of the Knights of St. Michael--A "Maiden" Fortress of France.

SAINTS OF THE CHURCH

My friend was Irish, "pur sang," and her appreciations were extremely individual ones; things that other people felt obliged to rave about left her quite cold; but, when she had caught and joined the links of some beautiful story that the world had overlooked or forgotten, she became a veritable flame of enthusiasm, and every tiny detail and souvenir she could connect with it had to be sought out and stored in the big warm shrine of her heart. I think, though I am not certain, that she knew the story of the house on the Aventine before she came to Rome. Anyway, it was she who took me there, and we went over story and house together, and were exceedingly loath to come away when the Ave Maria rang over the city and all respectable people turned their faces homewards.

Here is the story, a story of two ways of loving. It is in two parts, and I only learnt the first long after I was familiar with the second. The beginning takes us back to the last years of the Third Century, to the oft-mentioned reign of Diocletian. At that time, although the Aventine had never been one of the most distinguished quarters of Rome, it contained a few dwellings of nobles, who, doubtless, overlooked the mass of poorer houses that swarmed about its base, for the sake of the view, both over the city and towards the sea, from which comes always the pleasant west wind that we Romans love. I have spoken of the palace of the good Marcella, where in her old age she was so roughly treated by Alaric's Goths; before Marcella's time there lived another noble lady on the Aventine, with very different ideas as to the conduct of life. Her name was Agla?, not a Roman name, and I fancy she must have come of Greek parentage, although she is spoken of as a noble Roman matron. Of her husband, who seems to have died before the story begins, we are told nothing; her whole existence was wrapped up in a quite unsanctified passion for a handsome pagan called Boniface, a man of generous heart, as the sequel shows, but a sensualist, like most of his class at that time. He adored Agla?, and the two must have passed some enchanting hours wandering on the terraces of the Aventine villa or sitting hand in hand to watch the sun sinking red into the distant sea. No thought of the future seems to have come to them there, nor any gleam of a scruple as to their way of life. Youth and beauty and love were theirs; this world was sweet, and they had never heard of another.

Then something happened. We are not told what it was--perhaps some miracle witnessed by Boniface at the martyrdom of some obscure Christian, one of those miracles which so often converted a crowd of brutal, mocking bystanders into Christians on the spot. Whatever it was, it rent his soul, summoned his intelligence, and claimed him for ever. If Agla? was not with him at the moment, he must have rushed to her for one last visit to tell her of it, for her conversion was simultaneous, and sudden as his own. From that moment the lovers renounced each other for the love of Christ, and the remainder of their lives was devoted to atoning for their guilt in the past. Agla?, in her lonely palace, gave herself up to prayer and penance; Boniface at once joined himself to the band of Christians who made it their business to gather up and bury the bodies of the martyrs. In no other way could he assuage the tumult of pain and repentance that filled his heart at the remembrance of his sins. Diocletian's persecution was not confined to Rome, but was raging in many other parts of the Empire, notably in Asia Minor, and thither Boniface travelled with some devoted companions, in order to help and cheer the poor Christians in their sufferings.

On arriving at Tarsus, St. Paul's city, he got separated from his fellow-travellers, and, wandering around, found that a great number of the Faithful were being cruelly tormented that day, in divers ways, for the name of Christ, and his heart was both torn with compassion for their pains and admiration for their heroism. Approaching them, he kissed their chains and encouraged them to endure these passing tortures for the sake of Him who would so quickly and splendidly reward them by an eternity of joy. Of course he was at once arrested, and the tormentors seem to have tasked their ingenuity in inventing agonies for him to bear. His sins of the flesh were expiated by having his whole body ploughed with hooks of iron, and by spikes of wood run in under his nails and on his limbs; he had spoken sinful words; they poured molten lead into his mouth; he had sinned in the lust of the eyes and the pride of life; the executioners plunged him head downwards in a cauldron of boiling pitch. But from this the Lord delivered him. When they drew him forth, his eyes were clear, his brow unscarred, and he looked once more--his last look--on the fair world where he had been so sinfully happy, and through it all he praised God aloud, saying, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, I thank Thee!" Then came the order--so usual when all the torments had failed and the dear spirit still clung to the lacerated body--"Behead him!"

As the axe fell, there was a terrific earthquake, and many of the bystanders were converted then and there, but no one was allowed to touch his body. Meanwhile his friends, who had been seeking for him everywhere, learnt of his martyrdom, and came to gather up his remains. But a strict watch had been set, and it was only after paying five hundred pieces of silver that they could obtain possession of the dear corpse. With love and tears, they anointed it with precious balms and wrapped it in costly coverings and transported it to Rome. During these months Agla? had been living a life of such whole-hearted repentance that our dear Lord had taken her into great grace; and now, by an exquisite, Divine bit of indulgence--one of those flashes of hot sympathy that come straight from the Sacred Human Heart of Him in Heaven to some poor, broken human heart on earth--He sent an Angel to tell her that her Boniface's body was returning to Rome and that she could go and meet it. So Agla?, in her sombre penitential dress, her beautiful face covered with a veil, went forth, and, at a given place, saw the little procession approaching from the sea. There was no danger for her in looking at the beloved features now. Very quiet and strong she seems to have been as she met the wayfarers, bade them pause with their holy burden, and then led them back to her own house. There, where he and she had loved and sinned, she received him, who was to leave her no more. Those who had brought him told her of his glorious end, and she thanked the Lord for it again--for the Angel had not let her wait so long for the story. And when she had shown her gratitude by most loving hospitality and precious gifts to those who had brought his body, they went away and left her alone with her beloved. Ask any loving woman what she did then! Which of us would not place our dear tortured dead in our hall of honour, and burn sweet spices round them, and light tall tapers, and fill the place with every fragrance and loveliness that the garden has to give?

All this, we may be sure, Agla? did for Boniface; but she did that from which most women are debarred. She turned her palace into a Church for his tomb, and prayed near it till she died, and then the poor and suffering, who had been her one care from the day of her conversion, came there and prayed for her soul. But we know that that went straight to Heaven.

So there stood the Church of St. Boniface, and, some two hundred years later, a most noble Roman family had established their own palace close to it, and the Church, as we know it, now includes a part of the house of Alexis. For this is where a great saint grew to manhood, the loved son of rich and affectionate parents. Alexis had every gift of mind, with beauty of countenance and strength of body; and, when the time was ripe, his father and mother betrothed him to a bride of their choosing, good and sweet, and very fair to see. In this they had, for the first time, met with stubborn opposition from the boy, who had never opposed them before. He told them that he had vowed himself to a single life for God's service, and that no earthly bride, however beautiful, should make him swerve from that allegiance. But they, like many other good parents, persisted in their project, convinced that they knew what was good for their son; and the preparations for his marriage went merrily forward, each day but adding to the young man's grief and perplexity. Rome was Rome still; he could protest, but he had to obey his father's direct commands, and obey he did; but his vow had been made to a still higher authority, and he meant to keep it, and prayed for grace and guidance to do so, nor were grace and guidance refused him, who, as the Breviary puts it, "was of Rome's noblest, but nobler yet through his great love for Christ."

On the night of his wedding, when the feasting and singing and congratulating were over, and the matrons conducted the bride, probably a child of thirteen or fourteen, to the lighted, perfumed bridal chamber, Alexis would not so much as touch her hand, but, like one Galahad of another time and clime, bade her farewell and departed, having received from God a special command to go on a pilgrimage to the "illustrious Churches of the Universe." He left all behind, riches and servants, and even his name, and for seventeen long years, with no companion but the Lady Poverty, wandered, a nameless poor pilgrim, through all the Holy Places, praising the Redeemer for His great mercies and praying for the hastening of the Kingdom of Heaven.

At the end of those seventeen years, he was one day praying fervently before an image of the Blessed Virgin in the great Church at Edessa, when a voice came from the image, proclaiming his name and rank. The people were greatly excited and wished to show him honour, both for his own sake and because Our Lady Herself seemed to wish it. But Alexis knew better. That strange, sweet voice had not rung in his ears to lure him back to things of earthly pride, and for him the disclosure of his identity was the command to depart from that land. He fled, and boarded the first ship he could find to carry him away from Syria. He never asked the vessel's destination; it was enough for him that he was obeying a command, but he was being led back to where the second phase of his spiritual career awaited him--in his old home in Rome.

As the ship sped north and west, and one by one the lovely Greek islands seemed to come floating towards him, like opals on the shifting sapphire of the sea, he still kept silence, still prayed and praised. What cared he whither her course was set? The white sails might have been angel's wings--so sure was Alexis that God was leading him. Then, when the Apennines swam up blue from the bluer water, and scents of violet and orange blossom were wafted out to greet the wanderer, he knew that this was Italy--and home. Still he spoke not--questioned not; past the isles of the Sirens, past Circe's Promontory, still on, past all that shore of coral and pearl, of palm and ilex and olive, with Vesuvius' dark smoke hanging like a menace in the background, the little Syrian galley held her way, and at last the helmsman turned her prow to the land, the sails were all furled but one; the enormous oars worked her up against a rushing yellow current till the long quay was reached, and with a rattling of chains the weary galley slaves shipped their oars and bent down to look, each through his little opening, at "the port of Rome."

With the merchants and the free seamen, Alexis stepped on shore, and gazed at the city of his birth. He had been brought back--for what? Blindly, joyfully, obediently, he had gone forth, to fare alone with God, and alone with God he was still to be. An hour or so later a haggard mendicant stood at the gate of a palace on the Aventine, asking for charity. That was never refused in that house, and the servants brought him in, showed him a dark corner under a stairway close to the entrance, where they told him he might sleep, and gave him some scraps of food. Humbly and gratefully he accepted it all; he heard them speak of the master and the mistress and the "widow" of the eldest son who was long since dead; and that day or the next he must have seen his father and mother, and the maid who had never been a wife, passing through the courtyards or lingering in the garden. God's ways are not our ways. When He covets the love of certain souls for Himself, He will not share it with any one, and that Divine jealousy leads the chosen soul through hard paths. The hearts that love God intensely are the very ones that are the most loving of their fellows, especially of all who hold close to them in the sacred ties of family affection. But these ties have to be snapped on earth when the Divine Lover so wills--and Saints like Alexis, and poor sinners like the rest of us, have to leave the broken ends in His Hands, knowing that the pain we are made to cause our dear ones is as necessary for them as that which we suffer is for us, and that every pang of theirs is a golden strand in the garment of their immortality. Alexis' parents had sinned against him and Heaven in trying to force him to break his vow of virginity; their son had long forgiven them, but Heaven in its mercy was allowing them to expiate their sin here instead of hereafter, and, through their obstinacy, the young girl who might, wedded to another spouse, have become a joyful mother of children, had to spend her life in their sad house, waiting upon them, and with the prospect of a very lonely age before her when they should have passed away.

We may be sure that many and many a time Alexis longed to emerge from his despised obscurity and comfort them all three, but it was not for that God had brought him back. The command of silence was never lifted, and so the son--the heir--lived on, a ragged beggar, laughed at and also abused by his father's servants, praying in St. Boniface's Church by day, sleeping in the cranny under the stairs at night, allaying his hunger by the scraps the servants threw him, and always blessing them and praising God, who thus satisfied His own servant's hunger for poverty and suffering and humiliation. This second trial, this exile of the heart, lasted also seventeen years. At that time the very existence of Rome was threatened by Alaric the Goth; once and twice, he had turned from its gates laden with the ransom exacted for not entering them; he was threatening to approach again, and this time he had sworn to enter and destroy. The population was crowding the Churches to pray for deliverance, when a mysterious voice rang out in each separate Church, "Seek ye the man of God, that he may pray for Rome!" Terror fell upon the suppliant masses, and none dared speak or move. Then the same voice cried, "Seek in the house of Euphemian."

Then Innocent buried him in the Church of St. Boniface, and it was called both by his name and that of Alexis for many years. Both their bodies rest there, and a chapel was thrown out at one side to take in the stairway, which, now covered with glass, remains to this day. Both Boniface and Alexis had travelled and prayed and suffered in the East, and their Church came to be a heritage of both East and West; for, five hundred years after the July day on which Alexis died, a great monastery called after him and built close to the Church on the hill of the "house of Euphemian," sheltered monks of the Basilian and Benedictine orders at the same time, an innumerable spiritual family "to replace the fair family he had renounced to this world."

Alexis surely prayed for his native city, but all the prayers of all her Saints could not avert the trials that were to visit on Rome her past sins. Constantine the Great believed that he had left the Church in the West impregnable in strength and assured of peace; and for nearly three centuries after his death she was forced to fight for her existence almost as stubbornly as she had during the three centuries preceding it. In 361, only twenty-four years after the death of Constantine, Julian the Apostate reversed his edicts and strained every nerve to re?stablish the worship of the Olympian deities. Paganism was dead, and he failed in his iniquitous efforts to restore animation to its corpse, but much suffering did he bring to the Church, and it was only at the price of blood that she conquered in the end. After Julian came the Barbarians--Alaric, Genseric, Odoacer, Totila--during the short space of one hundred and thirty years Rome was taken and ravaged five separate times, so that when, in 553, Narses, the prototype of Napoleon, abolished the Senate and annexed the city to the Eastern Empire, she had reached the lowest point in her history and was scarcely regarded as a prize even by the Lombards, when, in response to the invitation of Narses himself, they overran Italy from the Alps to the sea, only to be finally expelled by Charlemagne some two hundred years later.

But the Church had realised the truth of the saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. The high courage that had come unscathed through such appalling conflicts rose gallant and audacious in its certainty of final victory, and, at the very moment when Rome seemed to be annihilated, decreed to it such a triumph as the world had never seen before.

In 568, just a year after Narses, to gratify a personal spite, had invited the hornet swarm of Lombards to cross the Alps, he died in the city he had insulted. We must remember that there were two Romes: the corporeal city, depopulated and impoverished, despoiled and dying--the city of the government of the once proud "Senatus Populusque Romanus," which had failed signally at every point, and had crawled to the feet of every conqueror; and the spiritual city, ruled by strong and holy men, who patiently went on with their invisible building, adding stone to stone with such calmness and patience that in contemplating their work one is almost led to believe that they were unconscious of the material ruin around them. During the forty years that followed the death of Narses there was growing up in Rome a phalanx of learned and holy ones to replace the leaders who had been found wanting, and we of to-day are still the inheritors and possessors of the treasures they amassed. While the grass grew unchecked in the streets and all who could migrated to happier lands; while commerce and war turned aside from the now worthless prize, and the poor tethered their few goats and sheep in the courtyards of the great ruined houses, the Benedicts, the Gregorys, the Bonifaces, with their clear-eyed, disciplined cohorts, were building the Liturgy, building the monastic orders, building the polity that guides and rules the Church and the Faithful to-day. Nothing escaped them; whether it were a question of the right antiphon for one of the psalms of a Nocturn, the placing on the Index some doubtful legend of a Saint , the annihilation of some startling new heresy which was raising its poisonous head, or the question of bringing Constantinople to its senses by bold remonstrance with the Emperor--to every detail was brought the thoroughness and directness of trained minds, the compelling force of superior courage and invincible intellect.

And this work had been going on silently and infallibly from the moment that official persecution ceased. Through sieges and invasions, desertions and desolations, the mills of God were grinding the grain and filling the great storehouses with golden wealth. In 480, in the little town of Nursia, high among the fastnesses of the Abruzzi, where the snow lay thick in winter, as in the Alps, there was born to the lord of the place a son, who was christened Benedict--"the Blest," and a little daughter, whom the father, a great admirer of learning, called Scholastica. When these two passed away, sixty-three years later, Literature and Saintliness were throned in Europe, and hold their thrones still in the innumerable fortresses manned by the spiritual descendants of the Nursian twins. Outside the Church few, comparatively, knew their names when they died. Learning and piety would scarcely exist for us had they not lived.

FOUNDER OF MONASTICISM

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