lower love and scorning the loveless asceticism of the monk. The Church
encouraged its priest to be "a fribble and a coxcomb"; and a fribble and
a coxcomb, by his own confession, Caponsacchi became. But the vanities
he mingled with never quite blinded him. He walked in the garden of the
Hesperides bent on great adventure, plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit
and feasted to satiety, but yet he scorned the achievement, laughing at
such high fame for hips and haws.[53] Then suddenly flashed upon him the
apparition, in the theatre, of

"A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad."

[Footnote 53: _Caponsacchi_, 1002 f.]

The gaze burnt to his soul, and the beautiful, sad, strange smile
haunted him night and day; but their first effect was to crush and
scatter all thoughts of love. The young priest found himself haunting
the solemn shades of the Duomo instead of serenading countesses; vowed
to write no more canzonets, and doubted much whether Marini were a
better poet than Dante after all. His patron jocularly charged him with
playing truant in Church all day long:--

"'Are you turning Molinist?' I answered quick:
'Sir, what if I turned Christian? It might be.'"

The forged love-letters he instantly sees through. They are the
scorpion--blotch feigned to issue miraculously from Madonna's mouth. And
then Pompilia makes her appeal. "Take me to Rome!" The Madonna has
turned her face upon him indeed, "to summon me and signify her choice,"
and he at once receives and accepts