Note 95 — Chapter IV · CATHERINE’S LIFE FROM 1473 TO 1506 AND ITS MAIN CHANGES AND GROWTH

Ibid. 14b. I have introduced into my account a note of gradualness which is presented by no single (even authentic) document of the Vita, but which any attempt at harmonizing those documents imperatively requires. For there is, on the one hand, the repeated insistence upon her four years of particular penances for her own particular sins; and the vivid account of the final complete withdrawal of all sight of those sins and of all desire for those penances (Ibid. pp. 12b, 13c; 14b, 5c). And there is, on the other hand, the, apparently, equally authentic saying, as to her performing her penances, before the end of those years, without any particular object in view (Ibid. p. 14b). The only unforced harmonization is then to assume that a period, in which the sight of her particular sins had been at first all but unintermittent and then still predominant, had shaded off into another period, in which this sight occurred in ever fewer moments, until at last, at the end of four years, a day came on which it ceased altogether.