Augustine now startles Francesco by the abrupt statement that the worst is still to come. The most serious spiritual disease has not yet been mentioned.
_Augustine_. You suffer from a certain dismal malady of the mind that the moderns call _acedia_ and which the ancients termed _aegritudo._
_Francesco_. The very name of the disease fills me with horror.
_Augustine_. No wonder, for you have long been grievously vexed by it.
_Francesco_. I admit it; and it is because there is after all a certain admixture of sweetness, however false, in almost all the other things that torment me. When I am in this sad state everything is bitter, wretched, terrible, the road to desperation opens before me and I behold all those things which may drive an unhappy soul to destruction. The attacks of my other passions, if frequent, are short and fleeting, but this plague sometimes holds me with such persistence that it binds and tortures me for days and nights together. Light and life are blotted out and I seem plunged in Tartarean gloom and the bitterness of death. But nevertheless, as the culmination of my miseries, I feast upon the very pangs and throes of my anguish with a certain confined pleasure, so that I am reluctant to be torn from them.
_Augustine_. You seem to know your disease well; We will now look to the cause. Say on; what is it that so saddens you--some adversity in your worldly affairs, bodily pain, or some stroke of ill fortune?
_Francesco_. Not any one of these. If I were engaged in single combat I should certainly hold my own. But as it is I am overwhelmed by an army.
Affliction after affliction has attacked him in rapid succession. He has finally been forced to take refuge in the stronghold of reason. There his ills lay siege to him and receiving constant reënforcements they set up their battering-rams and mine the walls. The turrets tremble and the scaling ladders are in place, and he sees the glittering swords and the threatening visages of his enemies appearing above the wall. "Who would not be filled with terror and bewail his fate, even if the enemy withdrew for the moment? Liberty is gone, the saddest of losses to the stout-hearted." Augustine finds this figurative language a little vague and confused but thinks that he understands Petrarch's case. He accuses him of mourning over misfortunes long past. "No," Francesco exclaims; "on the contrary, none of my wounds are old enough to be forgotten; those that afflict me are all recent, and lest perchance any one of them might be healed by time, Fortune takes care to strike me often in the same spot, so that the gaping wound may never cicatrise. Add to these troubles a hate and contempt for the human estate itself and I can not be otherwise than sad and dejected when oppressed by all these woes. I by no means exaggerate this _acedia_, or _aegritudo_, or whatever you choose to call it; my description exactly corresponds to the facts."