The Well of Saint Clare | Page 2

thought, his look of old Silenus purged at the baptismal
font, the play of his passions at once keen and refined, the strange,
alluring personality that informed the whole man. Assiduous at the
library, he was also a frequent visitor to the marketplace, halting for
choice in front of the peasant girls who sell oranges, and listening to
their unconventional remarks. He was learning, he would say, from
their lips the true Lingua Toscana.
All I knew of his past life, about which he never spoke, was that he was
born at Viterbo, of a noble but miserably impoverished family, that he
had studied the humanities and theology at Rome, as a young man had
joined the Franciscans of Assisi, where he worked at the Archives, and
had had difficulties on questions of faith with his ecclesiastical
superiors. Indeed I thought I noticed myself a tendency in the Father

towards peculiar views. He was a man of religion and a man of science,
but not without certain eccentricities under either aspect. He believed in
God on the evidence of Holy Scripture and in accordance with the
teachings of the Church, and laughed at those simple philosophers who
believed in Him on their own account, without being under any
obligation to do so. So far he was well within the bounds of orthodoxy;
it was in connection with the Devil that he professed peculiar opinions.
He held the Devil to be wicked, but not absolutely wicked, and
considered that the fiend's innate imperfection must always bar him
from attaining to the perfection of evil. He believed he discerned some
symptoms of goodness in the obscure manifestations of Satan's activity,
and without venturing to put it in so many words, augured from these
the final redemption of the pensive Archangel after the consummation
of the ages.
These little eccentricities of thought and temperament, which had
separated him from the rest of the world and thrown him back upon a
solitary existence, afforded me amusement. He had wits enough; all he
lacked was common sense and appreciation of ordinary everyday things.
His life was divided between phantoms of the past and dreams of the
future; the actual present was utterly foreign to his notions. For his
political ideas, these came simultaneously from antique Santa Maria
degli Angeli and the revolutionary secret societies of London, and were
a combination of Christian and socialist. But he was no fanatic; his
contempt for human reason was too complete for him to attach great
importance to his own share in it. The government of states appeared to
him in the light of a huge practical joke, at which he would laugh
quietly and composedly, as a man of taste should. Judges, civil and
criminal, caused him surprise, while he looked on the military classes
in a spirit of philosophical toleration.
I was not long in discovering some flagrant contradictions in his mental
attitude. He longed with all the charity of his gentle heart for the reign
of universal peace. Yet at the same time he had a penchant for civil war,
and held in high esteem that Farinata degli Uberti, who loved his native
Florence so boldly and so well that he constrained her by force and
fraud, making the Arbia run red with Florentine blood the while, to will

and think precisely what he willed and thought himself. For all that, the
Reverend Father Adone Doni was a tender-hearted dreamer of dreams.
It was on the spiritual authority of St. Peter's chair he counted to
establish in this world the kingdom of God. He believed the Paraclete
was leading the Popes along a road unknown to themselves. Therefore
he had nothing but deferential words for the Roaring Lamb of
Sinigaglia and the Opportunist Eagle of Carpineto, as it was his custom
to designate Pius IX and Leo XIII respectively.
Agreeable as was the Reverend Father's conversation to me, I used, out
of respect for his freedom of action and my own, to avoid showing
myself too assiduous in seeking his society inside the city walls, while
on his side he observed an exquisite discretion towards myself. But in
our walks abroad we frequently managed to meet as if by accident. Half
a league outside the Porta Romana the high road traverses a hollow
way between melancholy uplands on either hand, relieved only by a
few gloomy larches. Under the clayey slope of the northern escarpment
and close by the roadside, a dry well rears its light canopy of open
ironwork.
At this spot I would encounter the Reverend Father Adone Doni almost
every evening, seated on the coping of the well, his hands buried in the
sleeves of his gown, gazing out with mild surprise into the night. The
gathering dusk still left it possible to make out