ong the people. In default
of accuracy of detail, the incidents which are related here contain a
higher truth--their tone is true. Here are words that were never
uttered, acts that never took place, but the soul and the heart of the
early Franciscans were surely what they are depicted here.

The Fioretti have the living truth that the pencil gives. Something is
wanting in the physiognomy of the Poverello when we forget his
conversation with Brother Leo on the perfect joy, his journey to Sienna
with Masseo, or even the conversion of the wolf of Gubbio.

We must not, however, exaggerate the legendary side of the Fioretti:
there are not more that two or three of these stories of which the
kernel is not historic and easy to find. The famous episode of the wolf
of Gubbio, which is unquestionably the most marvellous of all the
series, is only, to speak the engraver's language, the third state of
the story of the robbers of Monte Casale[31] mingled with a legend of
the Verna.

The stories crowd one another in this book like flocks of memories that
come upon us pell-mell, and in which insignificant details occupy a
larger place than the most important events; our memory is, in fact, an
overgrown child, and what it retains of a man is generally a feature, a
word, a gesture. Scientific history is trying to react, to mark the
relative value of facts, to bring forward the important ones, to cast
into shade that which is secondary. Is it not a mistake? Is there such a
thing as the important and the secondary? How is it going to be marked?

The popular imagination is right: what we need to retain of a man is the
expression of countenance in which lives his whole being, a heart-cry, a
gesture that expresses his personality. Do we not find all of Jesus in
the words of the Last Supper? And all of St. Francis in his address to
brother wolf and his sermon to the birds?

Let us beware of despising these documents in which the first
Franciscans are described as they saw themselves to be. Unfolding under
the Umbrian sky at the foot of the olives of St. Damian, or the firs of
the March of Ancona, these wild flowers have a perfume and an
originality which we look for in vain in the carefully cultivated
flowers of a learned gardener.

APPENDICES OF THE FIORETTI

In the first of these appendices the compiler has divided into five
chapters all the information on the stigmata which he was able to
gather. It is easy to understand the succ