sleepless sense of the omnipresence of Christ as Love, and of this Love filling all things that aspire and thirst after it, as spontaneously as the liberal air and the overflowing mother’s breast fill and feed even the but slightly aspiring or the painfully labouring lungs and the eager, helpless infant mouth; swift, tender, warm, whole-hearted affection for this outwardly poor and disfigured, but inwardly rich and beautiful fellow-creature and twin-vessel of election; an underlying virile elasticity of perseverance and strenuous, cheerful, methodical laboriousness; all these things are clearly there.
Only when everything had again returned to its normal condition did she once more restrict herself to the administrative work of the Hospital.[120]
VIII. Catherine and Ettore Vernazza, 1493-1495.
It must have been during this epidemic of 1493 that Catherine first got to know, or at least first to work with, a man hardly less remarkable than herself.
1. Ettore’s family, marriage, and philanthropic work.
The Genoese notary Ettore Vernazza, Catherine’s junior by some twenty-three years, (as in the cases of his still greater contemporaries and compatriots, Columbus, Pope Julius II, and Andrea Doria, the year of his birth remains uncertain, but is probably 1470,) was a scion of the ancient house of Vernaccia, which derived its name from a wine-producing village on the Eastern Riviera. A Riccobono Vernaccia had been Chancellor of Genoa, as far back as 1345. Ettore, the first of the family to write his name Vernazza, was the son of the Notary Pietro Vernaccia and of Battistina Spinola, his wife. A sister of his, Marietta, married into the Fieschi family.[121] And if Catherine really did go among the pestiferous sick, she can hardly have failed to meet Ettore, now twenty-three years old. For his eldest daughter, the Augustinian Canoness, the Venerable Battista Vernazza, a most careful writer and one full of a life-long vivid remembrance of her father, in an account of Ettore, written by her in Genoa in 1581 (she was born in 1497, four years after the event she describes), tells of “a great compassion which he had conceived when still very young, at the time that the pestilence raged in Genoa, and when he used to go around to aid the poor, and when he found that, by means of a preparation of cassia, he could bring them back from (certain) death to life.”[122]
2. Ettore’s character; Catherine’s chief biographer.
Ettore was, and he kept and made himself, and rare graces fashioned him ever increasingly into, a man of fine and keen, deep and world-embracing mind and heart, of an overflowing, ceaseless activity, and of a will of steel. To him, the earliest and perhaps up to the end the most intimate, certainly the most perceptive, of Catherine’s disciples and chroniclers, we owe the transmission of many of the reminiscences of her conversion and early strivings (no doubt primarily derived from her own self), and of probably more than half of such authentic sayings and discourses of hers, as were recorded contemporaneously with their utterance. Indeed all that remains to us of written testimony, contemporaneous in this strict sense of the word, and that is other than legal documents, can, up to 1499, be safely attributed to him. And all such constituents of the now sadly mixed up, and most varyingly valuable, materials and successive layers of the Vita ed Opere as can with probability be assigned to his composition, are characterized by a remarkable clearness and consistency, restraint and refinement, elasticity and freshness of spiritual apprehension and sympathy. Thus Ettore’s influence back upon the formation of Catherine’s literary image and of our entire, especially of our authentic, conception of her, was predominant, and her influence upon his whole life was decisive; and hence his life can be rightly taken as an indefinite extension and new application and necessary supplementation of her own life and doctrine. I shall then, for both these reasons, try and work up what we can recover concerning the successive stages of his intercourse with Catherine and of the growth of his own life up to her death, into the corresponding vicissitudes of her remaining years.
It must have been two years later (1495) that Vernazza became her disciple; and probably some two or three years still further on, that Ettore began to keep (no doubt at first only quite occasional) records of her Sayings and Doings.[123]
IX. Catherine’s Health breaks down, 1496; other Events of the Same Year.
The year 1496 is marked by various events external and internal.
1. Three external changes.
In June, or some time before, Vernazza marries the beautiful Bartolommea Ricci, of the distinguished family of that name. On the 17th of June Giuliano sells his Palace in the Via St. Agnese. And, probably at Midsummer, perhaps at Michaelmas, Catherine, forced to do so by increasing physical infirmities, resigns her office of Matron.[124]
2. End of the extraordinary Fasts.
Catherine “was now no more able to have a care of the government of the Hospital or of her own little house” (within its precincts) “owing to her great bodily weakness. She would now find it necessary, after Communion, to take some food to restore her bodily strength, and this even if it was a fast day.” We thus get the beginning of a third period with regard to such fasting powers. In the first, she had done as all the world, but had been able to keep all the Church fasts and abstinences. In the second, she had, during Lent and Advent, eaten little or nothing, and had, during the remainder of the time, lived as she had done before. And now, for the rest of her life, her eating and fasting are entirely fitful and intermittent, and she has to abandon all (at least systematic) attempts to keep even the ordinary Church fasts and abstinences.
If we are determined to insist on the accuracy of the “twenty-three Lents and twenty-two Advents” of her extraordinary fasts affirmed already by MS. “A,” we shall have to understand this present inability to fast as applying, till after Lent 1496, only to the times outside of Lent and Advent, since this fasting period cannot be made to begin earlier than Lent 1476. I take it that in this, as certainly in most other cases, there was, in reality, a much more gradual transition than the Vita accounts would lead one to expect.
3. She continues within the Hospital precincts. Her two maid-servants.
Catherine had ceased to be Matron, but she did not leave the ample precincts of the Hospital; indeed she continued in the separate little house, which she had, probably since 1490, been occupying with Giuliano. But it will be better to describe her abode a little later on, when we can be quite sure as to its identity.
She had now, as I think had been the case since soon after she had left her Palace, two maids in her service: the widow and Franciscan Tertiary, Benedetta Lombarda, who appears, already then as an old and valued servant, in Giuliano’s will of October 1494, and who never left Catherine till her death; and a younger, unmarried maid, either Mariola Bastarda or a certain Antonietta. Argentina del Sale, too, will have often, perhaps continually, been about Catherine, aiding her in various ways; but she will not as yet have been living under the same roof with her. As we shall find, this little perfervid and untrained intelligence became the instrument, or at least the occasion, of the introduction of the largest legendary incident into the ultimate Vita of her mistress.
X. Events of 1497.
The next year, 1497, is marked by two events, of all but contradictory import and effect.
1. Birth of Tommasina (Battista) Vernazza.
On April 15 Vernazza’s first child, a daughter, is born; and Catherine is her God-mother and holds her at the Font. Dottore Tommaso Moro, a learned lawyer friend of Ettore, is the God-father, and the child is given his name and is called Tommasina. What would Catherine have felt or said had she foreseen the vicissitudes—they will occupy us in due course—through which this, her fellow God-parent, was to pass, during the storms of that Religious Revolution which were to break out so soon after her death? She would, we may be sure, have at all events been glad at the action and influence of her God-daughter