her no doubt came often the son of Bernardone, leading one of those
_farandoles_ which you may see there to this day: from his very babyhood
he was a prince among the children.

Thomas of Celano draws an appalling picture of the education of that
day. He describes parents inciting their children to vice, and driving
them by main force to wrong-doing. Francis responded only too quickly to
these unhappy lessons.[15]

His father's profession and the possibly noble origin of his mother
raised him almost to the level of the titled families of the country;
money, which he spent with both hands, made him welcome among them. Well
pleased to enjoy themselves at his expense, the young nobles paid him a
sort of court. As to Bernardone, he was too happy to see his son
associating with them to be niggardly as to the means. He was miserly,
as the course of this history will show, but his pride and self-conceit
exceeded his avarice.

Pica, his wife, gentle and modest creature,[16] concerning whom the
biographers have been only too laconic, saw all this, and mourned over
it in silence, but though weak as mothers are, she would not despair of
her son, and when the neighbors told her of Francis's escapades, she
would calmly reply, "What are you thinking about? I am very sure that,
if it pleases God, he will become a good Christian."[17] The words were
natural enough from a mother's lips, but later on they were held to have
been truly prophetic.

How far did the young man permit himself to be led on? It would be
difficult to say. The question which, as we are told, tormented Brother
Leo, could only have suggested itself to a diseased imagination.[18]
Thomas of Celano and the Three Companions agree in picturing him as
going to the worst excesses. Later biographers speak with more
circumspection of his worldly career. A too widely credited story
gathered from Celano's narrative was modified by the chapter-general of
1260,[19] and the frankness of the early biographers was, no doubt, one
of the causes which most effectively contributed to their definitive
condemnation three years later.[20]

Their statements are in no sense obscure; according to them the son of
Bernardone not only patterned himself after the young men of his age, he
made it a point of honor to exceed them. What with eccentricities,
buffooneries, pranks, prodigalities, he ended by achieving a sort of
celebrity. He was forever in the streets with his companions, compellin