same author. All needful information of this kind is conveyed in the
following paragraph, for which we are indebted to Mrs. Crawford's
article, "The Saint in Fiction," which appeared in _The Fortnightly
Review_ for April, 1906:

"Readers of Fogazzaro's earlier novels will recognise in Piero Maironi,
the Saint, the son of the Don Franco Maironi who, in the _Piccolo Mondo
Antico_, gives his life for the cause of freedom, while he himself is
the hero of the _Piccolo Mondo Moderno_. For those who have not read
the preceding volumes it should 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