Ubertino wrung his hands and his eyes were again veiled with tears. “Don’t say that, William. How can you confound the moment of ecstatic love, which burns the viscera with the perfume of incense, and the disorder of the senses, which reeks of sulphur? Bentivenga urged others to touch a body’s naked limbs; he declared this was the only way to freedom from the dominion of the senses, homo nudus cum nuda iacebat, naked they lay together, man and woman.”

“Et non commiscebantur ad invicem, but there was no conjunction.”

“Lies! They were seeking pleasure, and they found it. If carnal stimulus was felt, they did not consider it a sin if, to satisfy it, man and woman lay together, and the one touched and kissed the other in every part, and naked belly was joined to naked belly!”

I confess that the way Ubertino stigmatized the vice of others did not inspire virtuous thoughts in me. My master must have realized I was agitated, and he interrupted the holy man.

“Yours is an ardent spirit, Ubertino, both in love of God and in hatred of evil. What I meant is that there is little difference between the ardor of the seraphim and the ardor of Lucifer, because they are always born from an extreme igniting of the will.”

“Oh, there is a difference, and I know it!” Ubertino said, inspired. “You mean that between desiring good and desiring evil there is a brief step, because it is always a matter of directing the will. This is true. But the difference lies in the object, and the object is clearly recognizable. God on this side, the Devil on that.”

“And I fear I no longer know how to distinguish, Ubertino. Wasn’t it your Angela of Foligno who told of that day when her spirit was transported and she found herself in the sepulcher of Christ? Didn’t she tell how first she kissed his breast and saw him lying with his eyes closed, then she kissed his mouth, and there rose from those lips an ineffable sweetness, and after a brief pause she lay her cheek against the cheek of Christ and Christ put his hand to her cheek and pressed her to him and - as she said - her happiness became sublime?”

“What does this have to do with the urge of the senses?” Ubertino asked. “It was a mystical experience, and the body was our Lord’s.”

“Perhaps I am accustomed to Oxford,” William said, “where even mystical experience was of another sort.”

“All in the head.” Ubertino smiled.

“Or in the eyes. God perceived as light, in the rays of the sun, the images of mirrors, the diffusion of colors over the parts of ordered matter, in the reflections of daylight on wet leaves. Isn’t this love closer to Francis’s when he praises God in His creatures, flowers, grass, water, air? I don’t believe this type of love can produce any snare. Whereas I’m suspicious of a love that transmutes into a colloquy with the Almighty the shudders felt in fleshly contacts.”

Our most urgent need at present is to speak English well. [Mr. Palmer] loses not a single opportunity of giving us useful suggestions and of correcting us when we make mistakes. In general we speak only English, the English and Americans being in the majority on the packet. Although I was already able to ask for bread in this tongue, I now realize the difference between a superficial acquaintance with a language and a thorough study of it. It is of the last importance for us to have English on the tips of our fingers, to understand its idiom, to be aware of all its fine distinctions; and to appreciate all its shades of expression; otherwise we shall not be certain to understand what we are told. … There is also in the vessel a most agreeable and gracious American girl, Miss Edwards, who is most useful for our purpose, and who gives us our English lesson with great regularity. This lesson consists ordinarily of long and more or less insignificant conversations, during which she corrects all the errors and mistakes we make. In spite of her 18 years, her fresh complexion, her kindness, and all the charms of her person, our relations are altogether brotherly. The expression is apt for she is really a sister to me. She is not in the least flirtatious, which is not without its fortunate side, as she is really pretty and very spirituelle. The other Americans with us are in general very worth while, especially the Scarmehorn [Schermerhorn] family, whose name I have not yet been able to catch exactly and do not promise to reproduce correctly.

‘You are worse than the Devil, Minorite,” Jorge said. “You are a clown, like the saint who gave birth to you all. You are like your Francis, who de toto corpore fecerat linguam, who preached sermons giving a performance like a mountebank, who confounded the miser by putting gold pieces in his hand, who humiliated the nuns’ devotion by reciting the Miserere instead of the sermon, who begged in French, and imitated with a piece of wood the movements of a violin player, who disguised himself as a tramp to confound the gluttonous monks, who flung himself naked in the snow, spoke with animals and plants, transformed the very mystery of the Nativity into a village spectacle, called the lamb of Bethlehem by imitating the bleat of a sheep. It was a good school. Was that Friar Diotisalvi of Florence not a Minorite?”

“Yes.” William smiled. “The one who went to the convent of the preachers and said he would not accept food if first they did not give him a piece of Brother John’s tunic to preserve as a relic, and when he was given it he wiped his behind and threw it in the dung-heap and with a stick rolled it around in the dung, shouting: Alas, help me, brothers, because I dropped the saint’s relic in the latrine!”

“This story amuses you, apparently. Perhaps you would like to tell me also the one about that other Minorite Friar Paul Millemosche, who one day fell full length on the ice; when his fellow citizens mocked him and one asked him whether he would not like to lie on something better, he said to the man: ‘Yes, your wife.’ That is how you and your brothers seek the truth.”

“That is how Francis taught people to look at things from another direction.’

In his ancient castle, the privileged finds it easier to respect himself, he can remain for a longer period of time in ecstasy before the portraits of his ancestors and become intoxicated in a leisurely fashion, drinking of the honor of having descended from men who lived in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. He does not suspect that such an accomplishment might be shared by every family. … Frequently, and with all possible modesty, he opens this portrait gallery — so often the source of his sweetest dreams — for the edification of strangers. Quickly does he pass by his father or grandfather (for some reason these words offend the dignity of the privileged tongue). The most distant ancestors are best; they are closest to his heart and to his vanity.