ld be explained that his wife being in a
lunatic asylum, Maironi, artist and dreamer, had fallen in love with
a beautiful woman separated from her husband, Jeanne Dessalle, who
professed agnostic opinions. Recalled to a sense of his faith and his
honour by an interview with his wife, who sent for him on her death-bed,
he was plunged in remorse, and disappeared wholly from the knowledge
of friends and relatives after depositing in the hands of a venerable
priest, Don Giuseppe Flores, a sealed paper describing a prophetic
vision concerning his life that had largely contributed to his
conversion. Three years are supposed to have passed between the close of
the _Piccolo Mondo Moderno_ and the opening of _Il Santo_, when Maironi
is revealed under the name of Benedetto, purified of his sins by a life
of prayer and emaciated by the severity of his mortifications, while
Jeanne Dessalle, listless and miserable, is wandering around Europe
with Noemi d'Arxel, sister to Maria Selva, hoping against hope for the
reappearance of her former lover."

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION (BY WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER)

CHAPTER

I.--LAC D'AMOUR

II.--DON CLEMENTE

III.--A NIGHT OF STORMS

IV.--FACE TO FACE

V.--THE SAINT

VI.--THREE LETTERS

VII.--IN THE WHIRLPOOL OF THE WORLD

VIII.--JEANNE

IX.--IN THE WHIRLWIND OF GOD

Introduction

By William Roscoe Thayer

Author of "The Dawn of Italian Independence"

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO AND HIS MASTERPIECE

I

Senator Fogazzaro, in _The Saint_, has confirmed the impression of
his five and twenty years' career as a novelist, and now, through
the extraordinary power and pertinence of this crowning work, he has
suddenly become an international celebrity. The myopic censors of the
_Index_ have assured the widest circulation of his book by condemning it
as heretical. In the few months since its publication, it has been
read by hundreds of thousands of Italians; it has appeared in French
translation in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ and in German in the
_Hochland_; and it has been the storm centre of religious and literary
debate. Now it will be sought by a still wider circle, eager to see what
the doctrines are, written by the leading Catholic layman in Italy, at
which the Papal advisers have taken fright. Time was when it was the
books of the avowed enemies of the Church--of some mocking Voltaire,
some learned Renan, some impassioned Michelet--which they thrust on the
_Index_; now t