Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/196

170 his will. His ferocious asceticism reminds us of the barbarous saints of the tenth century, Saint Nil and Saint Romuald. He flies at the sight of a woman. Since his youth he has never touched a piece of money. He sleeps upright or in a leaning position; he lets his hair and beard grow. He does not eat animal food and accepts only roots. The king, who is already ill, took pains to procure the proper food for his rare saint. “Monsieur de Genas, I beg you to send me lemons and sweet oranges, and muscatel pears, and parsnips, and it is for the holy man who eats neither flesh nor fish; and you will do me a very great pleasure.” At court he was known only as “the holy man,” so that Commines appears not to have known his name, although he often saw him. The mockers and suspicious persons also called him “holy man.” The king himself, at the instigation of Jacques Coitier, his physician, begun by setting spies on the man of God and by putting him to the proof. Commines is prudently reserved about him. Although declaring that he had never seen a man “of such saintly life, nor one in whom the Holy Spirit seemed more to speak through his mouth,” he concludes: “He is still alive, so that he may well change, for the better or for the worse, so that I shall be silent, as many mocked at the arrival of this hermit, whom they called ‘holy man.’” It is noteworthy that learned theologians like Jan Standonck and Jean Quentin, having come from Paris to speak to him about the founding of a monastery of Minims at Paris, went back full of admiration.

It is a significant fact that the princes of the fifteenth century often ask the advice of great visionaries and extravagant ascetics in political matters. Thus Saint Colette is consulted by Philip the Good and by his mother, Marguerite of Bavaria, and acts as an intermediary in the controversies between the houses of France, Savoy and Burgundy. Her canonization was demanded with pious insistence by the house of Burgundy.

More important still was the public part played by Denis the Carthusian. He also was frequently in touch with the house of Burgundy. Obsessed by the fear of imminent