Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/194

168 to extirpate them, his parents were clearly proud of having such a young saint in the family. Imagine, amidst the unbridled luxury of the courts of Berry and Burgundy, this sickly boy, horribly dirty and covered with vermin, as the witnesses attest. He is ever occupied with his sins and notes them down every day in a pocket-book. If he is prevented from doing this by a journey or some other reason, he makes up for this neglect by writing for hours. At night he is seen writing up or reading his pocket-books by the light of a candle. He rises at midnight and awakes the chaplains in order to confess; sometimes he knocks in vain—they turn a deaf ear to his nocturnal call. If he obtains a hearing, he reads out his lists of sins from his little scraps. Towards the end of his life, he is shriven twice a day and will not allow his confessor to leave him for a moment. After his death a whole chest was found filled with these little lists of sins.

The Luxembourgs and their friends immediately took steps to get him canonized. The request was made at Avignon by the king himself, and supported both by the University of Paris and the Chapter of Notre Dame. The greatest lords of France appeared as witnesses at the trial in 1389: André de Luxembourg, Louis de Bourbon, Enguerrand de Coucy. Though the canonization was not obtained because of the pope’s negligence (the beatification only took place in 1527), the veneration of Pierre de Luxembourg was at once established, and miracles multiplied at Avignon, on the spot where he lay buried. The king founded a Celestine monastery there after the model of the one at Paris, which was the favourite sanctuary of the high nobility, and which Pierre had also frequented in his youth. The foundation-stone was laid by the dukes of Orleans, Berry and Burgundy.

There is another case which may serve to illustrate the intercourse of princes with saints: Saint Francis of Paula at the court of Louis XI. The very peculiar type of piety which this king presents is too well known to be described here at large. Louis XI, “who bought the grace of God and of the Virgin Mary for more money than ever king did,” displays all the qualities of the crudest fetishism. His passion for relics, pilgrimages and processions seems to us almost totally devoid of really pious sentiment, and even of respect.