Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/189

Rh matins of the Celestines. She brought upon herself a premature death by visiting the sick of the Hôtel Dieu.

Among the princes and the lords of the fifteenth century, more than one presents the type of an almost inconceivable mixture of devotion and debauchery. Louis of Orleans, an insane lover of luxury and pleasure, addicted even to the sin of necromancy, has his cell in the common dormitory of the Celestines, where he shares the privations and duties of monastic life, rising at midnight and sometimes hearing five or six masses a day.

The coexistence in one person of devotion and worldliness is displayed in a striking fashion in Philip the Good. The duke, famous for his “moult belle compagnie” of bastards, his extravagant feasts, his grasping policy, and for a pride not less violent than his temper, is at the same time strictly devout. He was in the habit of remaining in his oratory for a long time after mass, and living on bread and water four days a week, as well as on all the vigils of Our Lady and the apostles. He is often still fasting at four o’clock in the afternoon. He gives alms on a great scale and in secret. After the surprise of Luxemburg, he remains engrossed in his hours and special prayers of thanksgiving so long that his escort, awaiting him on horseback, grow impatient, for the fight was not yet quite over. On being warned of the danger, the duke replies: “If God has granted me victory, He will keep it for me.”

Gaston Phébus, count of Foix, King René, Charles of Orleans, represent so many different types of a very worldly and often frivolous temperament, coupled with a devotional spirit which one shrinks from stigmatizing as hypocrisy or bigotry. It has rather to be regarded as a kind of reconciliation, hardly conceivable to the modern mind, between two moral extremes. Its possibility in the Middle Ages depends on the absolute dualism of the two conceptions, which then dominated all thinking and living.

Men of the fifteenth century often couple with austere devotion the love of bizarre splendour. The craving to decorate faith with the magnificence of forms and colours is displayed in other forms besides works of religious art; it is sometimes found in the forms of spiritual life itself. When