Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/193

Rh If we are to trust Froissart, this Charles of Blois would seem to have had a bastard. “There was killed in good style the aforesaid Lord Charles of Blois, with his face to the enemy, and a bastard son of his called Jehans de Blois, and several other knights and squires of Brittany.” Was Froissart mistaken? Or are we to suppose that the mingling of piety and sensuality, which is so evident in the figures of Louis of Orleans and of Philip the Good, reappears in him in a still more astonishing degree?

No such question arises in the case of the blessed Pierre de Luxembourg, another ascetic sprung from court circles. This scion of the house of Luxemburg, which in its several branches held the imperial dignity and a preponderant place at the courts of France and Burgundy, is a striking representative of the type called by William James “the under-witted saint,” a narrow mind, which can only live in a carefully isolated sphere of devotion. He died in his eighteenth year, in 1387, having been loaded from his childhood with ecclesiastical dignities, being bishop of Metz at fifteen and a cardinal soon after. His personality as it disengages itself from the narratives of the witnesses in the proceedings for his canonization is almost pitiful. He is of a consumptive disposition and has overgrown his strength. Even as a child he was wholly given up to austerity and devotion. He reprimands his brother when he laughs, because the Gospel does tell us that the Lord wept, but not that he laughed. Sweet, courteous and debonair—says Froissart—“virgin as to the body, a very great giver of alms. The greater part of the day and the night he spent in prayer. And in all his life there was nothing but humility.” At first his noble parents tried to dissuade him from a life of religion. When he said he wished to go forth and preach, he was told: “You are much too tall, everybody would recognize you at once. You could not endure the cold, and as to preaching the crusade, how could you do that?” “I see,” said Pierre—and here the very recesses of his narrow mind seem lighted up for a moment—“I see very well, that you want to lead me from the right road to the bad; but assuredly, if I once enter on it, I shall do so much that the whole world will talk of me.”

When once his ascetic aspirations had overcome all attempts