Gutenberg Literary Edition #8455

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, David Widger and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

Since the condemnation of _The Saint_ by the Congregation of the Index, the publishers of the authorized translation of this novel feel that, in justice to its author, Senator Antonio Fogazzaro, they owe to the public a word of explanation by way of making plain (what the author has in more than one letter made plain to them) how it comes about that, in spite of the decree of the Index, the Senator sanctions the appearance of the book in America. The explanation is found in the fact that the American publishers secured, before the sentence of the Congregation had been passed, the sanction for the publication of their translation--a sanction which the author, as a loyal Catholic, could not have given later, but which, once it was given, he did not feel justified in withdrawing.

_The Saint_, though it is independent of Fogazzaro’s earlier romances, and though it explains itself completely when read in its entirety, will perhaps be more readily understood and enjoyed, especially in the opening chapters, if a few words are said with regard to certain of its characters who have made an appearance in preceding stories by the me author. All needful information of this kind is conveyed in the following paragraph, for which we are indebted to Mrs. Crawford’s article, “The Saint in Fiction,” which appeared in _The Fortnightly Review_ for April, 1906:

“Readers of Fogazzaro’s earlier novels will recognise in Piero Maironi, the Saint, the son of the Don Franco Maironi who, in the _Piccolo Mondo Antico_, gives his life for the cause of freedom, while he himself is the hero of the _Piccolo Mondo Moderno_. For those who have not read the preceding volumes it should be explained that his wife being in a lunatic asylum, Maironi, artist and dreamer, had fallen in love with a beautiful woman separated from her husband, Jeanne Dessalle, who professed agnostic opinions. Recalled to a sense of his faith and his honour by an interview with his wife, who sent for him on her death-bed, he was plunged in remorse, and disappeared wholly from the knowledge of friends and relatives after depositing in the hands of a venerable priest, Don Giuseppe Flores, a sealed paper describing a prophetic vision concerning his life that had largely contributed to his conversion. Three years are supposed to have passed between the close of the _Piccolo Mondo Moderno_ and the opening of _Il Santo_, when Maironi is revealed under the name of Benedetto, purified of his sins by a life of prayer and emaciated by the severity of his mortifications, while Jeanne Dessalle, listless and miserable, is wandering around Europe with Noemi d’Arxel, sister to Maria Selva, hoping against hope for the reappearance of her former lover.”