Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/190

164 Philippe de Mézières plans his Order of the Passion, which was to save Christendom, he imagines a whole phantasmagoria of colours. The knights, according to their ranks, will be dressed in red, green, scarlet and azure, with red crosses and hoods of the same colour. The grand-master will be all in white. If he saw but little of this splendour, as his order was never established, he was at least able to satisfy his artistic taste in the monastery of the Celestines at Paris which was the refuge of his last years. If the rules of the order, which he followed as a lay-brother, were very severe, the convent-church, on the other hand, a mausoleum of the princes of the time, was most sumptuous, all sparkling with gold and precious stones; it was reputed the most beautiful of Paris.

It is but a step from luxurious piety to theatrical displays of hyperbolic humility. Olivier de la Marche remembered to have seen in his youth the entry of Jacques de Bourbon, the titular king of Naples, who had renounced the world because of the exhortations of Saint Colette. The king, miserably dressed, was carried in a sort of hand-barrow, “not differing from the barrows in which dung and ordure are usually carried.” An elegant cortège followed closely. “And I have heard it recounted and said”—says La Marche—“that in all the towns where he came, he made similar entries out of humility.”

The minute directions given by a number of saintly persons concerning their burial bear witness to the same excessive humility. The blessed Pierre Thomas, improving upon the example of Saint Francis of Assisi, leaves orders to wrap him up in a sack, with a cord round his neck, and so place him on the ground to die. “Bury me,” he says, “at the entrance of the choir, that every one may walk over my body, even dogs and goats.” Philippe de Mézières, his disciple and friend, tries to go even further in fantastic humility. In his dying hour a heavy iron chain is to be placed round his neck. When he has given up the ghost, he is to be dragged by his feet, naked, into the choir, where he is to remain on the ground, his arms crossed, tied by three ropes to a plank. Thus “this fine treasure for the worms” is to wait till people come to carry it to the grave. The plank is to take the place of the “sump-