+++  We live only a couple of blocks from the Franciscan Friary in which my dear wife Dawn and I married each other more than six years ago, with the kind and holy help of Father Anthony Francois, and so I think about the Franciscans, and all things Assisian, often.  It all started for the Hartnells, I  guess, with William Petty Hartnell, who helped many of the older Franciscans in the old California missions by trading with them all up and down the Camino Real in the 1830s.  It really all starts with Jesus Christ himself, of course, and then we jump to the Middle Ages, the time of the troubadours, when our man Francesco, in full flower as an ardent lover and singer of chansons provencales, has a crisis of  conscience, strips off all clothes in the piazza, and the rest, as they say, is….  The American Francophile Julien Green tells the beloved story of the God-crazed Italian youth here in this English translation from the original French.  I wrote a short review of the CCC copy for the online lending library catalogued at LibraryThing, and post it now here: goyodelarosa.wordpress.com/  (the CCC Weblog address), where it can be found on the right in the blogroll under ‘FRANCIS,’ in the tags shown here, or at the following address: www.librarything.com/work/262998  +++