Whilst St. Melanie the Younger was exciting the enthusiasm of the Catholic world by her ardent charity, St. Marcella, the most illustrious of the gifted daughters of St. Jerome, was the pride and admiration of the Roman aristocracy. Gifted in the very highest degree both in respect to birth, wealth, grace, and beauty, at a time, too, when these rare endowments were rendered such a source of peril, owing to the capture of the Eternal City by Alaric (410), she had withdrawn to a modest dwelling on the Aventine Hill, with Principia, a young maiden recommended to her by St. Jerome. Here she had to submit to every kind of outrage, without permitting her zeal to be lessened by this cruel trial. She afterwards opened a fresh centre of charity, having founded not far from Rome the Convent of the Relieving Virgins (_Vierges Secourables_), which was taken as a model for many similar institutions throughout Italy. [Illustration: Fig. 268.--Robert I., Duke of Burgundy, having slain his father-in-law, builds the Church of Sémur to expiate the crime, and has the parricide represented on the building.--Tympan in the portico of the Church of Sémur (Eleventh Century).] Her friend St. Paula, who was Roman by birth, and a descendant of the Scipios, whose daughters were saints, whose theatre of action was in the East, whose tomb was at Bethlehem, and whose panegyrist was St. Jerome, followed in her footsteps. A widow at thirty, she effected a sweeping change in her own household and property, set all her slaves at liberty, and devoted herself to doing good; then shrouding herself in an incomparable modesty, and breaking off all her social ties, she emigrated to Palestine, where she worked miracles of charity. Long before her death, in 404, she had distributed all her worldly wealth to the poor. She had herself become so needy that it was necessary to borrow money to pay for her funeral, and her beloved daughter, who closed her eyes, inherited nothing but her faith and charity.