LETTERS WRITTEN FROM ROCCA D'ORCIA

These informal little notes were written probably in the autumn of 1377 while Catherine was making a visit to the feudal stronghold of the Salimbeni family, about twenty-three miles from Siena, among the foothills of Monte Amiata. The young "populana" was admitted to the intimate counsels of these great nobles, leaders of the opposition to the popular government with which her own sympathies would naturally have lain. It must have been a new experience to the town-bred girl -- life in this castle-eyrie among the hills, where mercenary troops and rude peasants thronged the courtyard, and manners, one surmises, must have been at once more artful and more brutal than among her bourgeois friends. We hear of picturesque scenes, where men and women afflicted of demons are brought writhing into her presence, to be welcomed, cared for, and healed. She had the comfort of the company of several confessors; the first of these letters shows them labouring with homely eagerness, quaintly expressed, for the religious welfare of the wild soldiery. Absorbed, as ever, in the inward life, Catherine was as tranquilly at home here in the mountains, among the great ladies of the Salimbeni family, as in Siena or in the papal court.

Meantime, good Monna Lapa grumbled as of old over the separation from her daughter; and evidently Catherine's sister mantellate were also disconsolate. She writes them very gently, very simply, trying to reconcile them by the reminder of like sorrows borne by that first group of disciples to whom she and her friends loved to compare themselves. To her beloved Alessa she expresses herself more freely, giving just the details of health and mental state that intimate love would crave. These were sad days in her private life; for she had parted from Fra Raimondo, who had been called to other service. Her words to Alessa reflect her sadness, and also her entire submission. It is noticeable that she respects the secrets of her hosts with dignity, giving no hint on the matters that occupied her beyond the reticent statement to her mother: "I believe that if you knew the circumstances you yourself would send me here."

This is not the only time by any means that Catherine had to meet similar complaints. Wherever she bore her strong vitality, limitless sympathy and peculiar charm, new friends gathered around her and clung to her with an unreasoning devotion that cried out in exacting hunger for her presence, and often proved to her a real distress. For Catherine, swiftly responsive as she was to individual affections, perfect in loyalty as she always showed herself, moved, nevertheless, in a region where unswerving service of a larger duty might at any moment force her to refuse to gratify, at least in outward ways, the personal claim. This was very hard for her friends to understand; one is sorry for them. At the same time, one feels more than a little pathos in her efforts to bring these simpler minds into understanding sympathy with that high sense of vocation which underlay all her doings: "Know, dearest mother, that I, your poor little daughter, am not put on earth for anything else than this; to this my Creator has chosen me. I know you are content that I should obey Him." But Monna Lapa never was quite content -- not to the very end.