The Well of Saint Clare by Anatole France (1895)

Sometimes France seems to be treading water. The first part of this book is fairly inoffensive and not particularly stirring. Most of these stories and sketches have a commonality in the Franciscan. These emanations from the author's antiquarian side, very well established in his early career, seem somehow to lack a little in the way of compulsion, though that may be my mood talking. They detail moral lessons learned or delivered by wandering monks, often quite eccentric fellows, or they are so purely spiritually aware that the worldly ones around them regard them as such. A couple deal with interactions with Lucifer as fallen angel and subtle doctor, and detail France's relatively enlightened approach to necessary unities between the great dark and the great light; organised modern religion and paganism. A couple of things in this collection are different - one a memorable retelling of the story of Maria d'Avalos, a late middle ages Neapolitan married to a harsh prince, who takes a lover. She and the Duke d'Andria have splendid trysts while her goatlike husband is off shooting and carousing, but they become spoken of round about. The prince hears these rumours, sets a trap, and they are soundly caught. The bloodiness of the time is fulfilled in a welter of stabbing and streaming red, and he leaves their bodies near the front door of the palace for the community to gawp at and learn their lesson. Another sketch deals with Napoleon stopping off in Italy mid-campaign to stay in the house of a Florentine distant relative, becoming importuned by him to assist in the belated canonisation of an ancestor. These pieces have interest, but perhaps not quite enough essentiality to truly whet the appetite.