François Mauriac - Saint Margaret of Cortona

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

Too Young and Too Pretty

ONE DAY IN THE YEAR 1273 A WOMAN IN mourning, holding a little boy by the hand, knocked at the door of the Franciscan convent of the Celle, two and a half miles from Cortona. She must have walked a long time to get to this wild gorge hollowed out in Mount Sant-Egidio where a torrent almost spatters the cells of the Minorites with its spray.

The porter was moved on seeing this exhausted woman whose gold and pearl chains were perhaps still binding her hair. He went off in a hurry to get the superior. The unknown woman asked not for alms but the garb of penitence. The first tears of repentance added to her eyes a grace which could not escape the Brother Superior, despite a short, quickly averted look, for he dismissed her with a very gentle word (but it was to weigh heavily on the destiny of this Margaret), My daughter, you are too young and too pretty.

Too pretty. It was doubtless on the route which led her to Cortona that Margaret began to hate that too charming body. Because of the errors into which it had led her, it was already her enemy; and now her charm even kept her from approaching the sanctuary, and her appearance alone made holy people flee her. Ah! this impure beauty which raised itself between her desire and her God. Meanwhile, the little boy was crying and nagging her with questions: Will we be there soon? Im thirsty my feet hurt. But she wasnt listening to him, almost indifferent, already completely turned to the side of her new love, her eternal love!

Margaret hastened on, assured of being led she knew not where, but there where her God wanted her. However, with the furious hatred of her body, the terror of not being able to be saved grew in her heart after the repulse which she suffered at the Celle, a terror which would end only with her life, despite the signal grace with which she was to be loaded and overwhelmed.

She entered Cortona by the Berarda gate. Two women who were passing by stopped. The elder was named Marinaria Moscari; the younger was her daughter-in-law Renaria. They hesitated a few seconds before addressing this stranger. But, accustomed as they were to works of mercy, they had doubtless learned not to be taken in; at the first glance, they recognized one of those wretches who are not simply being dramatic. Perhaps they also yielded to the charm of the weeping face. Two Minorites had fled before such a formidable beauty but the Moscari women did not have the same reasons to be frightened; and who in Italy does not have a passion for handsome faces?

Margaret answered them with complete confidence; but in the street she had only to tell the merest bit necessary to arouse the curiosity of the holy women and to bring to the highest pitch that hunger for souls, that need to lay hands on all those who passed by their door, with which Marinaria in particular seems to have been possessed. The confession continued and concluded in one of the rooms of the Moscari house, and its effect was such that the women would no longer allow the child or the mother to set out again.

CHAPTER II

The Delicious and Criminal Way of the World

OF HER FIRST YEARS IN LAVIANO, AN UMBRIAN village not far from Lake Trasimene, in the Fever-ridden vale of Chiana, where Margaret was born in 1247, we know hardly anything. Perhaps her father was a tenant of the Municipio of Perugia; he was only a poor farmer. Her mother, who had given her the taste for prayer, died when Margaret was seven years old. Two years later her father remarried, and from the very beginning there was warfare between the child and the new wife.

Adolescents who are despised in the family circle become dangerously sensitive to the love that they inspire on the outside. Hardly did she cross the threshold of the house, the house where she knew she was hated, where her very beauty, far from winning to her the hearts of others, made her stepmother more jealous, when the reign of Margaret began.

She knew the intoxication of those first conquests which give reassurance as a humiliated childhood draws to a close. So we are not this monster after all, this object of family derision! Margaret became aware of her charm. her power. Peasant that she was, she even enchanted the manor lords, and even the chief of them all, that gentleman from Montepulciano, the lord, it may be, of Laviano and the Villa Palazzi.

All biographers of the saint have tried hard to make this young man out to be a seducer who won her with gifts, deceived her by a promise of marriage and kept her almost by force for nine years which does not keep the saints first biographer, Brother Giunta Bevegnati, from showing us a triumphant Margaret in luxurious garments, her hair adorned with gold chains, going out only on horseback or in a carriage, her face painted, proud of her lovers wealth.

Was she married? Everything leads us to believe that she was not. The testimony of Bevegnati is explicit on this point. But then, under what title did she reign during those nine years at the castle of Montepulciano? Wadding (in the Annals of the Minorites, volume V) insinuates that she had affairs. The only thing we can be quite sure of is this: she lived in evil, in crime and in dishonor. She did evil; and she did it in the presence of One Who had already chosen her, had already marked her with His sign. What the story of Margaret teaches us is that a creature may, at the very depths of her wretchedness, be already elected. We are not dealing with a matter of conjecture. We know only very little about her guilty life, but this little comes from a source which does not deceive. After a certain moment, Christ spoke to her, and most of the circumstances of her life are known to us only because the Lord recalled them to His poor daughter, to His poor- little one as He called her.

Thus, we would have been forever ignorant of the fact that on the night of her abduction, when she had to make her way with her seducer over the twelve miles which separated her from Montepulciano, they barely escaped perishing in the swamps of the Chiana, had not the Lord himself spoken to her about it: My poor daughter, remember the crossing of that pond, alone, in the middle of the night, when the ancient enemy wanted to drown you with your accomplice at the moment when you were getting ready by your crimes to renew the agony of My Passion; but My divine clemency has preserved you, and you have been delivered by an infinite mercy.

The inner words that mystics believe they have heard are not transmitted to us quite purely. There is hardly a one which does not offer itself to us without some lingering doubt, because they lack the bareness of those that the synoptics have preserved for us, where the very accent of the Lord is still perceptible. In the greatest souls, the inner words make their way through an impoverished nature still pervaded by passions of a mediocre sort.

It is enough to read the book called Divine Words, in which Father Saudreau has collected a part of what holy souls throughout the centuries have heard within themselves, to see to what extent the ridiculously human is sometimes mixed in. It happens that a vein of silliness gets into them, to the point that the authentic part of the Lord is hardly discernible there any longer.

However, what was addressed to two Italian sinners of the thirteenth century, Saint Angela of Foligno and our Margaret of Cortona, has a particular ring there, as if human love had destroyed in them what blameless lives are sometimes encumbered with. Here nothing remains but the ash and the burned rock and the exquisite voice which bursts forth above a desert where all vegetation has been consumed by fire.