Brother Bernard and His Companion at Florence

At Florence two of the first brethren who had been begging through the city could find no lodging. Coming to a house where there was an oven in the porch, they said to one another: 'We shall be able to find lodging here.' So they asked the lady of the house to take them in. On her refusing to do so, they humbly asked her at least to let them rest that night by the oven. After she had allowed them to do this, her husband came, and found them in the porch, and, calling his wife, he said to her: 'Why have you allowed these rogues to take shelter in our porch?' She answered that she had refused to receive them into the house, but had allowed them to lie outside the porch, where they could steal nothing but wood. Her husband would not let any covering be given them though it was very cold, because he thought they were rogues and thieves. But they, after spending that night by the oven in sober sleep until the hour of Matins, warmed only by Divine warmth and covered with the covering of Lady Poverty, went out to the nearest church to hear Matins.

When it was day, the woman [who had allowed the two brethren to sleep in the porch of her house] went to the same church, and seeing those brethren devoutly continuing in prayer, she said to herself: 'If these men were rogues and thieves, as my husband said, they would not thus reverently continue in prayer.' While she was thinking thus, a man named Guido was distributing alms to the poor abiding in that church, and when he was come to the brethren, and was going to give money to each of them as he gave to the others, they refused to take it. But he said to them: 'Why, being poor, do you not take the money like the others?' Brother Bernard answered: 'It is true that we are poor, but poverty is not so grievous to us as to other poor, for by God's grace, whose counsel we fulfill, we have become poor of our free choice.' So the woman, observing that the brethren would not take the money, came up to them and told them she would be glad to receive them into her house if they would lodge there. They humbly answered: 'The Lord repay thee for thy good will.'

- text taken from Franciscan Days: being selections for every day in the year from ancient Franciscan writings, translated and arranged by Alan George Ferrers Howell