she was formally met by the principal men of the city. The Florentine
Republic had itself invited her to come to their assistance. At the
same time pure enthusiasm would have effected nothing. Consummate
intelligence only could move the Florentines. Each Bull that came from
the French Court, and from a pope with every personal interest in a
foreign country, newly exasperated them. Catherine watched warily,
judging character and manipulating it, until Guelfs and Ghibellines,
acute in unfailing antagonisms, equally authorized her to commence
peace negotiations at Avignon. Catherine immediately started for
France. Stephen Marconi went with her, and the actual journey must
have filled her with many unavoidable pleasures. To begin with, she
loved the country. In addition, the gypsy travelling of the day
entailed perpetual chance incidents and unexpected humanizing
makeshifts. A week of gentle progress among Italian scenery would keep
the joy of life stirring in most people, if only unawares.
At Avignon her story becomes, even more than before, the dramatic
triumph of personality. When she came nobody wanted her. The cardinals
had strong reasons for not wishing an ascetic's influence in the
palace; Gregory, inert and ailing, flinched at the thought of a person
noted for arousing qualities. She was received, notwithstanding, with
ceremony. At her first audience, Gregory sat dressed in full
canonicals, and surrounded by the entire conclave of cardinals, like a
brilliant jewel in a purple case. Catherine behaved meekly, though in
all likelihood her thoughts were less quiet than usual. For the papal
residence was a gorgeous place; there were galleries, marble
staircases, colonnades, magnificent gardens, elegant fountains. The
ultimate possibility of luxury lay before Catherine's sober eyes, the
very air itself being perfumed.
This was sufficient to have perturbed her, for a markedly unclerical
influence emanated from so much comfort. But the women who filled the
palace jarred still more emphatically. Their sumptuous persons were
obviously at home--the very atmosphere indicated femininity. A large
number were, in fact, mistresses of the cardinals; the rest, relatives
and friends of the Pope, who had been granted apartments in the palace.
Gregory's own morals have never been questioned. He sanctioned, by
ignoring them, the scandals of his household, but his own life was that
of an innocent and cultivated gentleman, with a liking for expensive
living. Raynaldus, in his "Ecclesiasticus Annals," says that he was of
an affectionate and domestic nature, loving his own people, and, in
fact, too much led by them, especially in the matter of benefices. His
private life was above reproach,--chaste, kindly, and generous. A
scholarly man, he delighted in the society of other scholars. At Rome
he instantly remitted all the duties on corn, hay, wine, etc., which
the clergy had previously levied, and which fell most heavily on the
poor people. But the troubles and anxieties that followed his return
to Italy, added to an internal disease, from which he had for some time
suffered, brought about his death at the age of sixty-seven.
This internal disease had something to do with the gentle inertia of
Gregory's conduct. Once roused by Catherine to a certitude as to where
his duty lay, he did it regardless of every personal inclination and
affection.
But at the commencement of Catherine's visit, the question was solely
how best to deal with the disaffected Florentines. The issue did not
prove gratifying. The Government had promised Catherine to send
ambassadors to Avignon, suing for peace. New dissensions leaping up
between Guelfs and Ghibellines, none were sent, and negotiations
collapsed. In the mean time the ladies at Avignon had grown interested
in the attenuated sister, who passed them constantly on her way to and
from an audience. They started primarily with the frank indifference
of society women to another of a lower class. But indifference became
painful interest when in a few days it was breathed tempestuously that
this pale woman had come almost solely in order to persuade the Pope
to return to the Vatican at Rome. Scared and disordered, the papal
ladies ceased to look insolent; they set themselves instead to
conciliate the "Mantellate" woman. Led by the Pope's sister, the
Countess Valentinois, they made religion fashionable. Discarding all
dancing, they instituted afternoon parties for pious conversation. The
Countess Valentinois also visited Catherine in her own room, and after
a few days, whenever Catherine went to the chapel to pray, she found
all the court ladies following her example. Raymond, never very
perspicacious, owns to being moved by "such unexpected signs of
grace." He even admired the lovely gowns and misleading courteseys of
the seemingly repentant ladies. Clearly a little susceptible,
Catherine's churlish indifference greatly annoyed him. As her
confessor, he had the opportunity of chiding her for this
incivility--it was painful to see such pretty, graceful creatures
repulsed so sternly. But Catherine upon this subject was adamant, and
merely replying that had he the smallest inkling of the true
dispositions of these mistresses of the cardinals, he would be nothing
less than horrified.
Raymond, one imagines, still privately clung to a more pacific opinion;
but if the story generally attributed to the Pope's niece is true, his
eyes were soon opened to the real sanctity of these ladies. Catherine
had fallen into one of the trances frequent with her when at prayer.
Elys de Beaufort Turenne happened to be kneeling conveniently near, and
the opportunity to expose a spurious absorption thrilled her with
pernicious pleasure. The temptation was too exceptionable to resist,
and bending over, she presently ran a big pin into the Mantellate's
toe. The joke, as far as she was concerned, spurted into no more life
than saturated fireworks. Catherine never stirred--unaware of the
incident until afterwards. But Raymond realized for the future that
some courtesies are means of concealment only.
The women of the Pope's household were not alone in disliking
Catherine. The cardinals objected to her as strongly. She had come to
labour against everything pleasing in their lives. Those won over,
besides, praised immoderately, and the instinct to strike a balance is
natural and intuitive.
Her spiritual pretensions had not even, as far as they were concerned,
been proved to be genuine. They solicited from the Pope, therefore, an
interview with the Mantellate nun, in which the soundness of her
theology might be tested. This encounter lasted from noon until late
in the evening, during the whole of which time they endeavoured to
confuse her into foolishness. But Catherine had a very clear brain and
a very quick one. She knew her subject, and, being a clever woman, in
a few minutes also, roughly, the temperaments of the men she was
dealing with. The thought is a purely personal one, but it is
difficult not to believe that she enjoyed the excitement. Catherine
was humble through instinct, but she must have realized that she was
considerably more capable than most people. Stephen Marconi, present
during the interview, says that two of them were enticed over almost
immediately, and took sides with Catherine against their own party.
The questions put, however, were anything but easy to deal with. Among
other points they queried how she knew that she was not really in the
subtle clutches of Satan; it was no uncommon trick for the Evil One to
change himself into an angel of light, or sham to be a vision of
Christ himself. All this time her extraordinary manner of life might
be simply a cunning prelude to damnation.
Catherine neither wavered nor deliberated; her calm was gracious and
simple; she was exquisitely willing to be interrogated. The cardinals
gave in; the struggle over, they had even the grace to admit that
"they had never met a soul at once so humble and so illuminated."
Gregory, inherently a gentleman, afterwards apologized to Catherine
for having permitted her to be molested by them, and from that time
her troubles with the cardinals at any rate terminated.
Gregory himself had from the beginning been openly impressed by her.
She left Avignon before the actual journey to Rome was made, but her
passionately eager persuasions were the fire at which Gregory's
conscience chiefly ignited. For his household became desperate and
loquacious at the mere suggestion. Gregory also had been born in
France; all his roots were in the genial soil of Avignon. But
Catherine would not let the matter rest. In a yearning and courageous
letter, beginning, "Holy Father, I, your miserable little daughter
Catherine," she urged him to be overborne by nobody against doing his
duty, for if God was with him, nobody could be against him.
Gregory went, and in a man old, fearsome, and extremely out of health,
the action has an element of greatness. For the reputation of Rome,
constantly reiterated by those about him, was very much like that of a
den of wild beasts. Ser Amily, a provincial poet, who gives a rhymed
description of the journey from Avignon, says, further, that all the
physicians and astrologers prophesied a fatal termination to the
expedition, but adds that they had apparently misread the
constellations, as after some terrifying storms they sailed for the
rest of the way upon a tranquil sea.
The fatal termination merely tarried somewhat, though the entrance
into Rome proved a triumphant pageant. The streets had been laid with
carpets, white flowers rained from every window--no welcome could have
looked more cordial or inspiriting. The entry once over, however,
Gregory found himself alone in an inimical country. Catherine wrote
encouraging letters to him to discard all fears and strenuously to do
all he could. But Gregory _had_ done all he could. Rome, depraved and
indocile, required a sterner nature at its head. He was ill and
overtired, and fourteen months after having reached Italy, died,
lonely and disheartened, at the age of sixty-seven.
Urban VI., by birth a peasant, short, squat, unpolished, succeeded
him. The election was instantly unpopular. Half the people desired a
French pope, residenced at Avignon and keeping French interests
uppermost. The rest writhed under the truculent uncouthness of the
new Pope, hating him personally. Matters became so envenomed that the
most acutely aggrieved presently declared his election to have been
illegal, and proceeded to place another pope at Avignon, known as
Clement VII.
There were, in consequence, two popes--one at Rome, and the other in
France. Both claimed supreme authority, and the confusion produced by
them brought the papacy very near to the ridiculous. Then commenced,
according to Muratori, a long series of terrible scandals in the
Church. The result was unceasing private and public dissensions,
incessantly culminating in murder. Urban excommunicated Clement and
his cardinals. Clement, on his part, excommunicated Urban and his
followers. The same benefices were conferred on different persons by
the rival popes, each appointing his own bishop to every vacant see.
Urban had been one of the cardinals during Catherine's momentous stay
at Avignon, and knowing his character, she wrote him after his
election some very wistful counsel. The necessity of behaving
benevolently was like a cry wrung out of her involuntarily; again and
again, in different phraseology, she begged him to "restrain a little
those too quick movements with which nature inspires you."
This puts matters prettily--with an innate tact of feeling. Urban, in
reality, was a man destitute of pleasant impulses. Fundamentally
irritable, he possessed no control of utterance. Towards the cardinals
his manners were inexcusable. He shouted the word "Fool!" at them upon
the least hint of contradiction: over a difference of opinion he
blurted furiously, "Hold your tongue; you don't know what you are
talking about." Having determined to put down the rampant cupidity and
immorality of these same cardinals, he raided their palaces as the
quickest method of exposing them. On the other hand, he was a man of
absolute probity, austerity, and courage. Petrarch had several times
attacked the gluttony of high ecclesiastics. Urban ordered that one
course only was ever to be seen upon the table of any prelate
whatsoever, and adhered to the rule himself even upon occasions of
hospitality. The following incident is a good example of his courage.
As a result of the schism and his own extreme unpopularity, the people
of Rome broke into open rebellion. The mob rushed to storm the
Vatican. At the first rumour the household had fled to take refuge in
other places. Only Urban refused to move, and remained alone in the
great empty palace. When the mob stormed the doors and made for the
Pope, they found him sitting motionless upon the throne, dressed in
full pontifical splendour and holding the cross in solemn defiance in
one upraised hand. The sight of his immovable figure, dramatic,
repellent, denunciatory, broke the nerve of the impressionable Romans.
They saw before them the representative of God, and with incoherent
noises, fearful of eternal wrath, they fled, leaving the rigid figure
impassive as an image, alone once more.
It was with Urban that Catherine went through the last exciting
interview of her life. The impression left by her personality at
Avignon must have been considerable, for when the election of Clement
VII. took place and divided the Church into two disordered and
querulous factions, the man who could not support a single adverse
suggestion actually sent for Catherine to come and help him render the
people of Rome at least loyal to the true Head of the Church.
Catherine, though by now very frail in body, set out immediately,
taking twenty helpful people with her, but, for some reason not given,
leaving Stephen Marconi behind. Then, when she had got to Rome, and
had recovered from the exhaustion of the journey, Urban insisted that
she should give an address upon the schism before the entire assembly
of cardinals.
She could only have looked a rather wan and paltry object set against
the lace and silk and breadth of the well-fed cardinals. She was by
this time nothing but a narrow line of black draperies and a thin
white face. But the moment she began to speak the old warmth leapt
into her voice, and the nun became more deeply rich in colour than all
the scarlet and purple she fronted. Catherine never lost her head or
her courage. She was there to rouse the sluggish morals of the
cardinals, but she was quite aware that Urban stood almost as much in
need of improvement as they did. With admirable clarity she laid
stress upon the fact that the only weapons suitable for a pope were
patience and charity. Urban owned neither, but the pluck and eloquence
of the woman reached some responsive feeling, and he praised her then
and there in a generous abundance of phrases. Unfortunately he did
nothing else, and the following Christmas Catherine sent him another
cajoling reminder--the kind of reminder only a subtle woman, and one
with charming ways in private life, would have thought of. She
preserved some oranges, coated them with sugar, and having gilded
them, sent them to the Pope. With the present came a note, explaining
that in the preserving all the acidity of the orange had been drawn
out, and that, like the orange, the fruit of the soul, when prepared
and sweetened and gilded on the outside with the gold of tenderness,
would overcome all the evil results of the late schism, or, as with a
careful selection of an unhurtful word, she put it--"the late
mischance."
Urban had previously empowered her to invite to Rome in his name
whoever she considered would be useful to the divided Church in its
hour of need. Among those Catherine wrote to William of England and
Anthony of Nice, two friends, who lived in a pleasant convent at
Lecceto, a few miles from Siena. A quaint correspondence resulted, for
the two old men were sadly shaken in their comfortable habits by
Catherine's letter. Yet the letter itself was a singularly good one.
She states in it plainly that the Church was in such dire necessity
that the time had come to give up all questions of peace and solitude
in order to succour her.
There were few characters that Catherine could not understand;
certainly she understood her two friars perfectly. For the peace and
quiet of their country retreat, where they sat and talked in the shady
woods, had made them absolutely flabby of spirit. The thought of
change and bustle flustered them from head to foot. Catherine had to
write again, and this time she wrote with some directness that this
was a crisis when character became visibly tested, and when there was
no mistaking who really were the true servants of God, and who were
merely seekers of a way of life personally congenial to them. These
latter, she said, seemed to think that God dwelt in one particular
place, and could not be found in any other. This letter must have
harried the two old gentlemen sadly. Friar Anthony came to Rome at
last, and though it is not clear whether Friar William accompanied him
or not, it is probable that, when one gave in, both did.
Catherine endured great fatigue in Rome; it drained the remnant of
strength left in her. Nevertheless she sent a letter from there to
Stephen that was still almost playful. It is in this letter that
occurred the winning petulance concerning the rumours of Stephen's
conversion. How little she could do without him issued again in a
still later epistle, when she wrote to him, "Have patience with me."
At this time she was ill, in pain, tired to breaking-point with the
Roman risings against the Pope. The schism had spread rapidly. Queen
Joanna of Naples, to whom Catherine wrote regrettably stern letters,
had flung her influence upon the side of Clement. Urban grew so
uncertain that there was talk of sending Catherine--nearly dead
through the strain already--to Paris, as the only ambassador likely to
draw the French king over to the true Pontiff. She wrote instead, and
while her letter was on its way, Charles V. joined the Anti-pope
party.
When Rome, at least, had grown comparatively reconciled to Urban,
Catherine returned to Siena. She was thirty-three, and the radiance
that had magnetized men into contemplating even death with
tranquillity, if she was only with them, had to a great extent gone
out of her. Nevertheless, her correspondence shows that she never lost
her fine discernment of character. Some of her letters are still
masterpieces of practical understanding.
For a short time still she lived quietly with the men and women who
loved and made much of her, though had she for a second realized how
subtly indulged she was, a panic of dismay would have shaken her
strenuous spirit. Physical strength, however, was almost exhausted.
She suffered greatly, and with a touching foolishness--touching
because of its presence in so much wisdom--she repeated again and
again that God permitted demons to distress her, and, in consequence,
bent her failing strength to wrestle with their torments. That a
natural disease was killing her did not seem credible to imagination.
Nevertheless, except during intolerable pain, her expression continued
pathetically joyous. When she was well enough they carried her out
into a neighbouring garden, lent for her use. Catherine never, after
the first excesses of her childhood, repudiated out-of-door pleasures.
She died in 1380, surrounded by a very passion of regret and
tenderness. On her death-bed she confessed quaintly that in the early
days of her spiritual career she had yearned for solitude, but that
God would have none of it. Each creature possessed a cell in their own
souls, where the spirit could live as solitarily and as enclosed in
the world as out of it.
Stephen Marconi was with her when she died, and just before the end
she entreated him to enter the Order of the Carthusians. Neri she
begged to become a hermit. The injunction for a moment appears to lack
her usual intuition. Yet it was probably the result of a very deep
understanding. Neri's nerves may have been more tranquil when not
played upon by other people.
To the last she prayed, dying peacefully towards the "hour of Sext,"
one Sunday evening, according to Stephen, the body until her burial
retained a wonderful beauty and fragrance.
Her last request to the latter was reverently complied with, and for
the future he carried on, with the grace of nature that made him so
lovable, the most endearing of his dead friend's labours--he became
famous as a healer of feuds. The cult of Catherine's memory gave a
sentimental happiness to his days. He remembered her with the painful
delight of a faithful lover. Nothing in their companionship had been
too trivial for a living recollection. Being elected Father Superior
to his monastery, he "invariably added the delicacy of beans to the
fare of his religious on Easter Day." He did this because one Easter
Day he had dined with Catherine on beans, there having been nothing
else in the house, and as Friar Bartholomew puts it, "the remembrance
of that dinner stuck fast to the marrow of his spine." As an old man,
Stephen still cherished the smallest details of her life, and on one
occasion, at the sudden recall of some little incident illustrative
of her loving-kindness, he burst abruptly into tears, seeming as if
his heart would break. The brothers were obliged to lead him gently to
a seat out-of-doors, where a freshening wind restored him.
Neri also did as she wished. But his life as a hermit did not
interfere with his literary labours, nor did it by any means leave him
without society. Once he seems to have gone out of his mind for a
time. Stephen mentions in one letter that he was told that he had been
_alienato_, but that it is evident, since he had now heard from him,
that he had recovered.
An account of his death, written by a monk to a certain friend of the
dead man, Ser Jacomo, and given in the English version in Miss Drane's
life of Catherine, is sufficiently unusual to quote. It falls to the
lot of few people to have their deaths recorded in quite such a
superfluity of phrases.
"Dearest Father of Christ,
"My negligence--I need say no more--but yet with grief and
sorrow I write to you, how our Father and our comfort, and our
help, and our counsel, and our support, and our refreshment,
and our guide, and our master, and our receiver, and our
preparer, and our writer, and our visitor, and he who thought
for us, and our delight, and our only good, and our entertainer;
and his meekness, and his holy life, and his holy conversation,
and his holy teachings, and his holy works, and his holy words,
and his holy investigations. Alas, miserable ones, alas poor
wretches, alas orphans, where shall we go, to whom shall we have
recourse? Alas, well may we lament, since all our good is
departed from us! I will say no more, for I am not worthy to
remember him, yet I beg of you that, as it is the will of God,
you will not let yourself be misled by the news; know then alas,
I don't know how I can tell you--alas, my dear Ser Jacomo, alas,
my Father and my brother, I know not what to do, for I have lost
all I cared for. I do not see you, and I know not how you are.
Know then that our love and our father--alas, alas, Neri di
Landoccio, alas, took sick on the 8th of March, Monday night,
about daybreak, on account of the great cold, and the cough
increasing, he could not get over it, alas. He passed out of his
life, confessed, and with all the sacraments of the Holy Church,
and on the 12th of March was buried by the brethren of Mount
Olivet, outside the Porta Tufi, and died in the morning at the
Aurora at break of day."
According to the writer, Neri did not die until some hours after he
had been buried at the Porta Tufi!