The legend of the royal princess who was canonized by the Church as St. Enimie (d. 628 or 630 A.D.) contains an account of a miraculous spring and also enshrines the popular view of the cause of the strange outlines of an extensive mass of heaped-up boulders. This saint was a daughter of the French king Clotaire II (d. 628). Her most ardent wish was to devote herself exclusively to the service of Christ, but her royal parent insisted upon a marriage with one of the great nobles. The princess, who was the fairest of the fair, put up an earnest prayer that the Lord would destroy her beauty, even at the expense of some dreadful malady, so that she might cease to be an object of desire for men. Her prayer was heard and she was stricken with leprosy which entirely blotted out her charms. Not long after this an angel appeared to her in a dream and directed her to bathe in the Fountain of Boule, in the region of Gévaudan. On doing so she was immediately cured of her leprosy, but as soon as she went away from the spring to return to the royal residence, the malady returned. A second attempt had the same favorable and unfavorable results, and she now recognized that she must remain near the spring. So after bathing there a third time and being again completely cured, she erected a monastery on the spot and became the prioress. The institution flourished, but a few years later the saintly prioress was horrified to see that the Devil was busy with her nuns. Once more she sought for divine aid, and she was given authority to imprison the Evil One should she catch him in the monastery. This she did, but the Devil was crafty enough to make his escape. Near the spot where the monastery stood was a mass of heaped-up boulders, through which led a way called the Chasm Road which led to a rocky aperture of unknown depth. This was fabled to afford egress and ingress to the Devil in his passage out of and back to the infernal regions. Along this road he fled when he escaped from the monastery; St. Enimie fearlessly pursued, but the agile demon was on the point of slipping back again into his own realm, when the saint made a supreme appeal and called upon the rocks to help her. As she raised her arms in supplication, one of the largest boulders, called “La Sourde,” moved of its own accord and fell upon the Devil, pinning him fast to the ground beneath its ponderous weight. In his rage and despair he made frantic efforts to free himself and his bloody claws left an imprint on the rock. This mark, still observable a half-century ago, though it has now disappeared, was prosaically explained by scientists as a stain of iron-oxide. The other boulders were in motion to assist in the good work, but when the Devil had been caught they stopped short in their downward course, and this is supposed to account for the strange angles at which they stand.[500] It would be pleasant to fancy that His Satanic Majesty eventually failed to make his escape, but unfortunately the