indulgence in the far-away grottos to which he was dragging you, but you
always ended by going with him, thinking that none but a Frenchman could
be possessed by a devotion so fervent and so imprudent.

Thank you, pious anchorites of Greccio, thank you for the bread that you
went out and begged when I arrived at your hermitage benumbed with cold
and hunger. If you read these lines, read here my gratitude and also a
little admiration. You are not all saints, but nearly all of you have
hours of saintliness, flights of pure love.

If some pages of this book give you pain, turn them over quickly; let me
think that others of them will give you pleasure, and will make the name
you bear, if possible, still more precious to you than it now is.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] The mendicant orders were in their origin a true
_International_. When in the spring of 1216 St. Dominic
assembled his friars at Notre Dame de la Prouille, they were
found to be sixteen in number, and among them Castilians,
Navarese, Normans, French, Languedocians, and even English and
Germans.

Heretics travelled all over Europe, and nowhere do we find them
checked by the diversity of languages. Arnold of Brescia, for
example, the famous Tribune of Rome, appeared in France and
Switzerland and in the heart of Germany.

[2] The Reformation only substituted the authority of the book