[Illustration: A FRENCH KNIGHT OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY] On feast days he would bid to his palace two hundred beggars, and himself serve them at table. On the Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays of Advent and Lent, and every Wednesday and Friday throughout the year, he would send for thirteen of them into his own or a neighbouring room and give them food with his own hand, without disgust at their dirtiness. If one among the number was blind the king would give the piece of bread into one of his hands, and guide the other to the bowl containing his portion. If this consisted of fish, he would remove the bones, dip it in the sauce and place the morsel in the blind man’s mouth. Before the meal he gave to each person twelve deniers or more according to his need; and if a mother was there with her child, he added more for the little one. On Saturdays he would choose three of the most decrepit, most miserable among the poor, and leading them into his dressing-room, where towels and three basins of water were in readiness, he washed their feet. With reverence he would dry and kiss those feet, whatever their deformity, however hardened by daily contact with the ground; then, kneeling, he would offer them water to wash their hands, give to each forty deniers, and kiss their hands. Nor was this all. Every day, in all weathers, he sent for thirteen other beggars and from among them chose out the three most repulsive, whom he seated at a table drawn up close beside his own. On many of these points he would not to-day have won the same universal approbation. It is, however, difficult for us to reinvest his figure with the atmosphere by which it must be surrounded before we can form a just judgment; it is far more difficult to place ourselves at the necessary point of view from which we can see him clearly. The modern historian is ofttimes reduced to pleading extenuating circumstances for the saints; for the saints, and St. Louis among them, have this much in common with the Saviour, that in more than one case they could say with him: “Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.”[h] St. Louis built the asylum of the Quinze Vingts for the blind, several hospitals, and the church of Vincennes. To provide a place for the crown of thorns which the Venetians had turned over to his keeping, he had built by Pierre de Montereau within the precinct of his palace, now the Palais de Justice, the Sainte Chapelle, a shrine of open-work stone. His confessor Robert de Sorbon founded a community under the title of _Congrégation des pauvres maîtres étudiants en théologie_. This congregation became the Sorbonne, the theological faculty so famous throughout the entire Christian world that Mézeray calls it “the permanent council of the Gauls.” _Progress of the Monarchy under St. Louis_