He was miserly, as the course of this history will show, but his pride and self-conceit exceeded his avarice.
Pica, his wife, gentle and modest creature,[16] concerning whom the biographers have been only too laconic, saw all this, and mourned over it in silence, but though weak as mothers are, she would not despair of her son, and when the neighbors told her of Francis's escapades, she would calmly reply, "What are you thinking about?
I am very sure that, if it pleases God, he will become a good Christian."[17] The words were natural enough from a mother's lips, but later on they were held to have been truly prophetic.
How far did the young man permit himself to be led on?
It would be difficult to say.

The question which, as we are told, tormented Brother Leo, could only have suggested itself to a diseased imagination.[18] Thomas of Celano and the Three Companions agree in picturing him as going to the worst excesses.

Later biographers speak with more circumspection of his worldly career.

A too widely credited story gathered from Celano's narrative was modified by the chapter-general of 1260,[19] and the frankness of the early biographers was, no doubt, one of the causes which most effectively contributed to their definitive condemnation three years later.[20] Their statements are in no sense obscure; according to them the son of Bernardone not only patterned himself after the young men of his age, he made it a point of honor to exceed them.

What with eccentricities, buffooneries, pranks, prodigalities, he ended by achieving a sort of celebrity.