A few days after the death of the Duchess, Père Pierre Lefevre of the Company of Jesus arrived at Gandia, by previous arrangement, to lay the foundation stone of the college which the Duke was building for the Jesuits. He brought with him the Book of Spiritual Exercises written by the General Padre Iñigo de Loyola. The Duke of Gandia took advantage of his presence to perform these Spiritual Exercises, consisting of prayers, pious meditations, and rigorous and systematic searchings of the heart. Feeling profited by this experience, he wrote to the Lord Paul P.P. III, begging Him to pronounce Apostolic Approval of the book. In course of post, (which the Sixteenth Century carried on by means of private couriers,) that is to say in the course of a few months, he received from the Holiness of the Pope a Brief of Recommendation. The Bull of Approval was issued on the thirty-first of July 1548. This Brief caused him to resolve to join the Company of Jesus; and he wrote his resolution to the General without delay. When the death of his Duchess made him free to renounce the world, he seriously had thought of becoming a Friar Minor. His name Francisco gave him San Francisco d’Assisi, the founder of the Religion of Friars Minor, as his patron-saint: the abject poverty, the singular contempt of the world, the awful austerities of the Franciscans admirably agreed with his habit of mind. He consulted his resident chaplain who himself was a Friar Minor. To this friar, there came a vision of Madonna Mary saying, “Tell the Duke to enter the Company of my Son.” To Duke Don Francisco, also, a statue of Madonna Mary spoke the same words. Hence his final resolution. Padre Ribadaneira of the Company of Jesus, who, afterwards was his confessor, and who wrote the life of the Duke of Gandia and swore before five tribunals of the truth of every word that he had written, says (xv. 238) that, for the next seven days, Duke Don Francisco was afflicted with an apparition of a sumptuous mitre always floating above his head. He had much fear. He knew that, when a person of his quality relinquished a brilliant secular career, an equally brilliant ecclesiastical one lay open to him. This was the very last thing that he desired. He swore to God that, unless the apparition left him, and he should be allowed to practise poverty during his whole life yet to come, he would refuse to don the clerical habit: for he felt the prospect of dignity to be a danger. Then the apparition left him: How exceedingly natural is this example of unconscious cerebration. It would have been strange indeed if the Duke’s crushed and bruised humanity had not asserted itself in phantasmal apparitions.