gst these was the Treatise of the Mental Sufferings of Christ--the
book of the Blessed Battista of Varano, Princess of Camerino, who
founded the convent of Poor Clares in that city--a book whose almost
blasphemous presumption fired the train of my earliest misgivings.

Another was The Spiritual Combat, that queer yet able book of the cleric
Scupoli--described as the "aureo libro," dedicated "Al Supremo Capitano
e Gloriosissimo Trionfatore, Gesu Cristo, Figliuolo di Maria," and this
dedication in the form of a letter to Our Saviour, signed, "Your most
humble servant, purchased with Your Blood." 1

1 This work, which achieved a great vogue and of which
several editions were issued down to 1750, was first printed
in 1589. Clearly, however, MS. copies were in existence
earlier, and it is to one of these that Agostino here
refers.

Down the middle of the chamber ran a long square-ended table of oak,
very plain like all the rest of the room's scant furnishings. At the
head of this table was an arm-chair for my mother, of bare wood without
any cushion to relieve its hardness, whilst on either side of the board
stood a few lesser chairs for those who habitually dined there. These
were, besides myself, Fra Gervasio, my tutor; Messer Giorgio, the
castellan, a bald-headed old man long since past the fighting age
and who in times of stress would have been as useful for purposes of
defending Mondolfo as Lorenza, my mother's elderly woman, who sat below
him at the board; he was toothless, bowed, and decrepit, but he was very
devout--as he had need to be, seeing that he was half dead already--and
this counted with my mother above any other virtue.2

2 Virtu is the word used by Agostino, and it is susceptible to a wider
translation than that which the English language affords, comprising as
it does a sense of courage and address at arms. Indeed, it is not clear
that Agostino is not playing here upon the double meaning of the word.

The last of the four who habitually sat with us was Giojoso, the
seneschal, a lantern-jawed fellow with black, beetling brows, about whom
the only joyous thing was his misnomer of a name.

Of the table that we kept, beyond noting that the fare was ever of a
lenten kind and that the wine was watered, I will but mention that my
mother did not observe the barrier of the salt. There was no sitting
above it or below at our board, as, from time immemorial, is the
universal custom