Joinville's account of Louis's life is a positioning of the king as saint and martyr,

and though it is hard to separate the account from the life,

Louis's life seems nothing,

if not a staging of sainthood,

in which every word and deed points to his probity,

his piety, devotion, courage and self-sacrifice.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Louis wanted nothing so much as to be a saint.

A great collector of relics who found the amassing of fragments not quite enough,

Louis wanted to obscure the distance between himself

and the Saints, between sacred history and contemporary history.

He sought fusion with the relics.

Louis wanted to be a relic,

which is exactly what happened.

After his death, Louis's innards were removed and taken by his brother, Charles to Sicily.

The flesh was boiled off his bones which were

transferred to Saint Denis where they resided with

his heart until Louis's head and some of

his bones were transferred to the Sainte Chapelle in 1306,

and at least his jaw bone ended up in the treasury of Notre-Dame in Paris.

Soon after he died,

Louis's body began to perform miracles,

each of which is the story of a cure or of a life saved.

And I'll give only a few examples.

The first of which is the curious case of Emmelot of Chaumont,

a 28 year old woman who came with two companions to the town of Saint Denis

where she took lodging at the house of Emelin Lushahon on a Sunday.

On Monday, she did all the tasks that healthy women do:

fetching water, bread, making beds,

but on Tuesday night around midnight,

she was struck in the right thigh,

leg and foot by an ailment which prevented her from walking.

This is all recounted in William of Saint-Pathus Life of St. Louis.

One of the women with whom Emmelot came to Saint Denis and her host Emilin,

began to touch the afflicted leg which

was redder than the other one and had no sensation.

They tried poking their leg with a needle and placing

her foot in the fireplace with the same result.

Emmelot begs to be taken to the tomb of St. Louis,

whose help she has invoked, promising to go on a pilgrimage for him, only

to eat once a day if she is cured.

Emmelot friends put her on a stretcher and

carry her to the church in front of St. Louis tomb.

She returns to her host's house on crutches,

dragging her leg and foot behind it.

Emmelot kept returning to the tomb of St. Louis until one holy Sunday of the passion,

she was finally cured.

Emmelot in fulfillment of a vow made a pilgrimage to le benoit saint Loÿs,

then returned to Saint Denis where she worked as a domestic servant until her death.

In another miracle recounted by William of Saint-Pathus,

Jenny, daughter of Alice, born in Fresnes,

in the Diocese of Theroanne,

who lived in Paris in the parish of St. John en Greve,

was three years-old, and she was healthy as could be.

But one morning when this healthy child got out of bed,

she found on the right part of her cheek, below her ear,

a swelling as big as a hen's egg,

and the sickness began to spread and to extend itself

under her chin and over to the other ear,

so that within the space of a year,

the whole area was swollen and purple up to

her collar in such a way that her neck was as large as her head.

And the skin in the affected area was irritated and hard and was not red,

but as white as the rest of her.

And because she could not turn her neck if she did not turn her shoulders,

even her head, the said child could hear nothing.

Alice's mother took little Jenny to see the king in Paris.

But the king's touch,

the famous King's healing touch did not cure the affliction,

which lasted for another year.

The parents had heard of miracles at the tomb of St. Louis

at Saint Denis and vowed to take their daughter there.

In fact, they left her there with a nurse who

took her to visit St. Louis's bones every day.

And when the next Tuesday came around,

when the said child there was in front of

the aforementioned tomb with the said Ermengart,

the child burst on her left side and spit out great filth.

And when on the following Wednesday,

when the said Alice,

mother of the said child,

came to Santa Denis see her daughter,

she found the said child in front of the tomb;

and they said that Jenny's wen had burst.

When the inquisitor's and notaries made their examination of the miracle,

they looked closely at the said Jenny and saw that she was indeed

cured and it seemed to be that that was for a long time,

and there appeared nonetheless five traces of

scars from one ear to the other in the aforementioned places,

fully healed and as if the signs of an old sickness.

In another miracle recounted by William of Saint-Pathus,

Gile de Saint Denis,

daughter of Girart Dlout,

bourgeois of Saint Denis, and a butcher,

was married at the age of 15 to Estiene Phelipe,

a butcher and bourgeois of Saint Denis.

In the month of June of the same year,

the day after the feast of the blessed Mary Magdelene,

that same Gile was pregnant such that she

brought forth within the year a stillborn daughter.

While in labor, Gile noticed that she felt weak in the knees,

and when the neighbors began to examine her,

they noticed that her feet were all black and

blue and lifeless and that she could not stand on

her haunches or on her feet and that she had lost all sensation below the navel.

They tried pulling her toenails holding candles and burning

coal to her feet but Gile felt nothing.

Gile remained incapacitated for a year and a half until one day,

the day itself the bones of blessed St. Louis

were carried to the Church of Saint Denis,

she heard that those who had scrofula on their chin were cured by touching the holy box.

And a man born at Saint Denis,

who could not see before that,

had recovered his sight.

That very day Gile vowed that if St. Louis cured her affliction,

she would attend the mass on his birthday every year.

She would do nothing else on that day and she would be his Pilgrim.

Gile visited Louis tomb,

touched it with her paralyzed members,

kissed the holy box and tomb,

lay before many days and pray.

At the end of 10 days,

she felt the force returning to her legs and was able to stand up.

For three days she walked with the aid of a crutch,

and on the fourth she was able to walk unaided.

And William of Saint-Pathus tells us she was

still walking when the inquest of this miracle was made.

That is to say in the month of May 1282.

I could go on to recount each of the 65 miracles of

St. Louis which bear a certain family resemblance.

The thing to bear in mind, however,

is that this man who collected relics himself became a relic.

And the miracles worked by his bones may seem to

us like the stuff of legend or fairy tale,

but they were the objects of

a serious canonical and judicial inquiry and were believed to be

true and real by the vast majority of the population of thirteenth century France.

Such belief endowed the bones of the saint with an aura,

that will at the time of the renaissance,

with it's loss of faith and rationalist deflation of miracles,

will be absorbed into the work of art,

which survived on the manuscript page and in the multimedia of architecture,

sculpture, stained glass and painting of the Sainte Chapelle.

The loss of faith in miracles will of course culminate in the Democrat revolutions of

the 18th century when the cathedrals were pillage and

their relics and statues either destroyed or scattered.

In our next and final time together,

we shall examine the restoration of cathedrals after the damage brought by

the revolution and after decades of neglect in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This too is part of what you might think of as the contemporary age of cathedrals,

which brought them to the state,

in which we can still see them today.

24.3 The King Becomes a Relic

Age of Cathedrals

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