Cathédrale de Chartres; Civilization, Medieval; Mont-Saint-Michel (Abbey : France)
A certain priest, who celebrated every day a mass in honour of the
Holy Virgin, was brought up before Saint Thomas of Canterbury who
suspended him from his charge, judging him to be short-witted and
irresponsible. Now Saint Thomas had occasion to mend his hair-cloth
shirt, and while waiting for an opportunity to do so, had hidden it
under his bed; so the Virgin appeared to the priest and said to him:
"Go find the archbishop and tell him that she, for love of whom you
celebrated masses, has herself mended his shirt for him which is
under his bed; and tell him that she sends you to him that he may
take off the interdict he has imposed on you." And Saint Thomas
found that his shirt had in fact been mended. He relieved the
priest, begging him to keep the secret of his wearing a hair-shirt.
Mary did some exceedingly unconventional things, and among them the
darning Thomas A'Becket's hair-shirt, and the supporting a robber on
the gibbet, were not the most singular, yet they seem not to have
shocked Queen Blanche or Saint Francis or Saint Thomas Aquinas so
much as they shocked M. Gaston Paris and M. Prudhomme. You have
still to visit the cathedral at Le Mans for the sake of its twelfth-
century glass, and there, in the lower panel of the beautiful, and
very early, window of Saint Protais, you will see the full-length
figure of a man, lying in bed, under a handsome blanket, watching,
with staring eyes, the Virgin, in a green tunic, wearing her royal
crown, who is striking him on the head with a heavy hammer and with
both hands. The miracle belongs to local history, and is amusing
only to show how little the Virgin cared for criticism of her
manners or acts. She was above criticism. She made manners. Her acts
were laws. No one thought of criticizing, in the style of a normal
school, the will of such a queen; but one might treat her with a
degree of familiarity, under great provocation, which would startle
easier critics than the French, Here is an instance:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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