seem to have exhausted his little 'bank-account' and to have left him destitute, there is moving evidence in a couple of his letters. The first was addressed to his ever generous friend in Barcelona, Elizabeth Roser, a somewhat difficult good lady who was ill and miserable:

The grace and love of Christ our Lord be with us. Through Dr. Benet I have received your three letters and the sum of twenty ducats. May God our Lord reckon them to your account on the day of judgment and pay you in good and sterling coin, as I hope of His divine goodness. . . . You tell me that it has been His holy will to take to Himself your friend Canilla. In honesty, I cannot feel sorry for her, but only for you and me who remain behind on this earth of endless toil and suffering and misery. I know that in this life she was loved and cherished by her Creator and Lord, and I have good confidence that she will have been received and welcomed by Him, beyond the vain palaces and pomps of this world. You mention also the apologies of our sisters in Christ our Lord [for not being able to help]. Of course, they are under no obligation whatever to me, but I am their debtor for ever. I cannot make any return to them in this life, but when they leave it, then, I think, I shall be able to repay them liberally. In your second letter you tell me of your heavy suffering from the stomach, consequent on your late illness. I am grieved to my heart for you, wishing as I do that you may enjoy all good health and prosperity imaginable which can help you in promoting the glory and service of God our Lord. Yet, when I consider that those illnesses and other temporal misfortunes are very often from the hand of God our Lord and designed to enable us to know ourselves better, to wean us from attachment to created things, and to bring home to us the brevity of our little lives that we may beautify our souls for the life without end; and when I reflect that it is in such ways He visits those whom He loves best, I cannot feel unhappy and sad about you. I think that a servant of God comes out of an illness made half a doctor of theology [hecho medio doctor],

qualified to direct and order his life for the glory and service of God our Lord.

Inigo goes on to tell the distressed lady that she will be in his mind and his prayers as long as he lives, that he feels more indebted to her than to any other person he has known, that he leaves it entirely to her judgment whether he should write to the ladies who had formerly helped him, explaining his present predicament. It had come to such a pass that he was not sure then, November, 1532, whether he would be able to remain in Paris another year. Here we see him, the once proud, sensitive gentleman of Spain, humbly and tactfully writing begging letters, for that is what they were, but made memorable by the golden words so often repeated, servir and servicio, become by then the passionate slogans of his existence. To serve God to the limit of his powers, and then by God's grace magis, even beyond the limit, that was the whole of his practice and his philosophy.

Elizabeth poured out on him all her woes, telling him how much she was suffering from the malicious gossip of her neighbours. His answer to the effusion was as follows:

I am not surprised at what you tell me, and would not be, even had the trouble been much greater. From the moment you resolved to seek with all your power the glory, honour and service of God our Lord, you offered battle to the world and raised your standard against the spirit of the age [ciglo], disposing your soul to accept with equanimity whatever might befall you of high or low, of honour or dishonour, of riches or poverty, things agreeable or abhorrent, precious or despised, in a word, the glory of the world or all the injuries the world can do you. When the affronts we receive go no further than words, we shall not make much account of them, for they cannot hurt a hair of our heads. Besides, words, no matter how offensive and injurious, lose their power to hurt and discompose us once we welcome them, but if we desire absolutely to enjoy the honour and esteem of our neighbours,

we can hardly stay rooted in God nor avoid feeling wounded when we are despitefully used.

The good lady, however, had little of Inigo's sublime spirit of 'indifference', and sought redress for her injuries in ways that saddened him. His letter continued thus:

May it please the Mother of God to obtain for you perfect patience and constancy, by bringing you to gaze and reflect upon the greater injuries and affronts which Christ our Lord suffered for us all. . . . If we discover not this patience in our hearts, we have more reason to lament our own sensuality and want of mortification than the insults of those who abuse us, for they do but give us the chance of winning greater treasures and riches than any man can accumulate in this world....1

1 MHSJ, Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Epistolae et Instructiones, I, pp. 83-9. Elizabeth persuaded Inigo to allow her to make a vow of obedience to him. Many years later, she and a maid-servant turned up in Rome and forced themselves embarrassingly on his attention, their aim being apparently to form a society of Jesuit nuns. When Ignatius set his face against this project and released Elizabeth from her vow to him, she took it very badly and spread rumours of how good she had been to him and of all the money she had spent on him and his companions, a sum by her greatly exaggerated. He was very ill at the time and found the whole business extremely distasteful, but he held to his point and was encouraged to do so by the Holy See. Eventually, Elizabeth returned to Barcelona with her maid, became a Franciscan nun, and wrote apologizing to Ignatius for all the trouble she had caused him. He had told her in the letter cited above an extraordinary story related to him by the Franciscans in Paris. A young girl was so much impressed by the piety and spirit of poverty of the Friars, that she cut off her hair, dressed as a young man, and applied for admission into the community. She was accepted by the unsuspecting Guardian and deeply impressed the brethren by her devotion and regularity. Alas, another girl was impressed, too, but in a wicked way, and endeavoured to seduce the good-looking young friar' whom, of course, she thought to be a man. Being steadfastly repulsed she accused him' to the Guardian of being the father of her child. There was a great scandal, and the poor friar' was subjected to heavy public penance, which she bore with heroic patience and sweetness, never seeking to exculpate herself or uttering a single unkind word against her accuser. She died like a saint, and only then did the Franciscans discover her secret. Inigo had held her up as an example to the querulous and self-willed Elizabeth. Perhaps that was why she became a Franciscan nun.

Seven months later, in June, 1533, Inigo, then very ill indeed, was still in grave pecuniary difficulties. He had learned to live on next to nothing, but degrees were not to be won in that way and, besides, he must provide somehow for the beloved Pierre Favre, poorest of the poor, for the dear improvident Francis Xavier who seems never to have known how to get or keep a sou, and for others of his hard-pressed friends. Either the Spanish merchants must have ceased to send their contributions or did not send enough, for he was obliged once more to have recourse to the faithful women of Barcelona. His letter to his former hostess, Agnes Pascual, is extant, and in it he mentions the names of four of his former benefactresses, Doña Anna de Rocaberti, Doña Guiomar Gralla, Doña Isabel de Josa, Doña Aldonsa de Cardona, to whom, however, he was reluctant to make any further appeal. Only the humble shop-keeper Agnes Pascual became his confidante. He told her of the expense he had been put to in obtaining his Licentiate and of the heavy debts he was forced to incur. But he begged her to say nothing about his difficulties to Elizabeth Roser because she had troubles enough of her own. Perhaps a chance might arise of giving the rich Doñas, who had promised to help him at any time, a hint of the situation?

Do as appears best to you, and I shall regard your decision as best and be well content. I greatly wish to know how it fares with your son Juan, my old friend, whom I love as a brother in our Lord. May God our Lord give him the grace of perfect self-knowledge and an intimate realization of the presence of His Divine Majesty in his soul, so that, captivated by His love and grace, he may become heart-free of all earthly attachments. I conclude by praying God in His infinite goodness to make you both in this life images of that blessed mother [St. Monica] and her son St. Augustine.1

1 MHSJ, Sancti Ignatii Epistolae . . ., I, 90-2. Juan at this time was a young man in his early twenties and lived to give evidence in the first official investigations set on foot with a view to the beatification of St. Ignatius. But he did not prove himself so excellent a witness as he had always been a Christian. He romanced a little, as old men do remembering their youth.

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CHAPTER X

SUNRISE ON MONTMARTRE

O sooner had the extraordinary, half-dying Inigo obtained his licence to teach than he promptly put him

self again in the position of learner by registering as a student of theology at the Sorbonne and with the Dominicans of the Rue Saint-Jacques. There has survived a certificate of the Faculty of Theology testifying that our beloved, the venerable and distinguished [discretus] man Ignatius of Loyola, Master of Arts, studied in this our Faculty for one year and a half'. Wonderful were the ways of Paris, for there is extant an exactly similar certificate granted to Pierre Favre and crediting him also with a mere year and a half, whereas it is perfectly certain from the documents that he had given more than five years to theology by the Seine. The year and a half appears to have been a stereotyped way of saying that the person in question, no matter how long he may have studied, had not gone on to take his doctorate. None of Inigo's close friends and disciples in Paris had aimed at that distinction, for the simple, revealing reason that it was far too expensive for poor men, such as they had voluntarily made themselves. But that did not prevent Inigo himself, to whom God had given a direct and immediate knowledge of His sublimest mysteries, from becoming a very good scholastic theologian, as his multitudinous writings testify, nor could the degree have added much lustre to the fame of Laynez who proved at Trent that he was a theologian of genius. The eleventh of Inigo's Rules for thinking according to the mind of the Church' runs as follows:

We ought to praise and commend theology, both positive [that is, patristic] and scholastic; for as it belongs rather to the positive doctors, such as St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Gregory,