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him a saint.
    It would have been possible for me, by virtue of the legislation approved by Pope John Paul II over fifty years ago, to request further inquiries. But in that case, I would not have been abl e secretum servare in iis ex quorum revelatione preiudicium causae vel infamiam beato afferre posset. In other words, I would then have had to reveal the contents of Rita and Francesco's typescript, if only to the promoter of justice or to the postulator (the saints' prosecution and defence lawyers, as the press so crudely describes them).
    In so doing, I would have permitted grave and irreversible asper­sions to be cast on the virtue of the Blessed: a decision which could be taken only by the Supreme Pontiff, certainly not by myself.
    If, however, the work had in the meantime been published, I would have been freed from the obligation to secrecy I therefore hoped that my two parishioners' book had already found a publisher. I confided the search to some of the youngest and least experienced members of my staff. But in the catalogues of books on sale, I found neither any writings of the kind nor my friends' names.
    I tried to trace the two young people (by now surely no longer young): the registers showed that they had indeed moved to Vienna, at Auerspergstrasse 7. I wrote to that address but received a reply from the head of a university hostel, who was unable to provide me with any assistance. I asked the Commune of Vienna, but nothing useful came of that.
    I feared the worst. I wrote to the parish priest of the Minoritenkirche, the Italian church in Vienna. But Rita and Francesco were unknown to everyone there, including, fortunately, the keeper of the graveyard records.
    In the end, I decided to go to Vienna myself, in the hope of trac­ing at least their daughter, even though, some forty years after the event, I could no longer remember her Christian name. As was to be expected, this last attempt also came to nothing.
    For three years, I have sought them everywhere. Sometimes I find myself looking at girls with red hair like Rita's, forgetting that hers will now be as white as my own. Today, she will be seventy-four and Francesco, seventy-six.
    Now, I take my leave of you, and of His Holiness. May God inspire you in the reading which you are about to undertake.
    Msgr Lorenzo Dell'Agio
    Bishop of the Diocese of Como
     
     
    To the defeated
     
    Sir,
    In conveying to you these memoirs
    which I have at last recover'd,
    I dare hope that 'Your Excellency
    will recognise in my Efforts
    to comply with Your Wishes
    that Excess of Passion and of Love
    which has ever been the cause of my Felicity,
    whenever I have had Occasion
    to bear Witness thereof
    to your Excellency.
     
     
    Memorials

     
Day the First
 
 
11th September, 1683
    The men of the Bargello arrived in the late afternoon, just as I was about to light the torch that illuminated our sign. In their fists, they grasped planks and hammers; and seals and chains and great nails. As they advanced along the Via del Orso, they called out and gestured im­periously to the passers-by and knots of curious bystanders that they must clear the street. Truly, they were most wrathful. When they came level with me, they began to wave their arms about: "All inside, all inside, we must shut up the house," cried the man who gave the orders.
    Barely had I time to descend from the stool onto which I had climbed than hard hands shoved me roughly into the entrance, while some began to bar the door with threatening mien. I was stunned. I came abruptly to my senses, jostled by the gathering which, drawn by the officers' cries, had piled up in the doorway as though a bolt of lightning had fallen from an empty sky. These were the lodgers at our inn, known as the Locanda del Donzello.
    They were but nine, and all were present: waiting for supper to be served, as was their wont every evening, they wandered about the ground floor among the day-beds in the entrance hall and the tables of the