out the year 1586 or early in 1587, after having just begun the
Salutation chapel. I have explained in "Ex Voto" that I do not believe
this story. I have no doubt that Tabachetti was declared to be mad, but
I believe this to have been due to an intrigue, set on foot in order to
get a foreign artist out of the way, and to secure the Massacre of the
Innocents chapel, at that precise time undertaken, for Gio. Ant. Paracca,
who was an Italian.

Or he may have been sacrificed in order to facilitate the return of the
workers in stucco whom he had superseded on the Sacro Monte. He may have
been goaded into some imprudence which was seized upon as a pretext for
shutting him up; at any rate, the fact that when in 1587 he inherited his
father's property at Dinant, his trustee (he being expressly stated to be
"_expatrie_") was "_datif_," "_dativus_," appointed not by himself but by
the court, lends colour to the statement that he was not his own master
at the time; for in later kindred deeds, now at Namur, he appoints his
own trustee. I suppose, then, that Tabachetti was shut up in a madhouse
at Varallo for a considerable time, during which I can find no trace of
him, but that eventually he escaped or was released.

Whether he was a fugitive, or whether he was let out from prison, he
would in either case, in all reasonable probability, turn his face
homeward. If he was escaping, he would make immediately for the Savoy
frontier, within which Saas then lay. He would cross the Baranca above
Fobello, coming down on to Ponte Grande in the Val Anzasca. He would go
up the Val Anzasca to Macugnaga, and over the Monte Moro, which would
bring him immediately to Saas. Saas, therefore, is the nearest and most
natural place for him to make for, if he were flying from Varallo, and
here I suppose him to have halted.

It so happened that on the 9th of September, 1589, there was one of the
three great outbreaks of the Mattmark See that have from time to time
devastated the valley of Saas. {15} It is probable that the chapels were
decided upon in consequence of some grace shown by the miraculous picture
of the Virgin, which had mitigated a disaster occurring so soon after the
anniversary of her own Nativity. Tabachetti, arriving at this juncture,
may have offered to undertake them if the Saas people would give him an
asylum. Here, at any rate, I suppose him to have stayed till some time
in 1590, probably the second half of it, his desig