... 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 his 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 prophet vision concerning his life that had largely contributed to his conversion.
Three years are supposed to have passed between the close of 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.
[1]After a dramatic meeting with Jeanne Dessale, the reformed Maironi (now Benedetto) takes refuge as a monk in a religious community in the mountain village of Jenne and acquires a reputation among the peasants there as a saint who sometimes works miracles of healing.
[4] Benedetto forms with Don Clemente and Professor Giovanni Selva (in whom the critic Jean Lebrec recognizes Friedrich von Hügel, a close friend of Fogazzaro[5]) the nucleus of a latter-day Cénacle who call themselves Le Catacombe.