By the aid and counsel of his wife Montfort gathered his forces and garrisoned the towns he had taken, while Charles de Blois led a French army against him and soon had him beleaguered in Nantes. The events of this siege would not concern us, since the Countess Jeanne was not in Nantes, were it not for the peculiar interest attaching to certain episodes and the light they throw upon the remarkable character of Charles de Blois. This man was reputed a saint in his own day, so much so that, under Pope Urban V., an inquiry was held and a favorable report made but never acted upon for a formal canonization. We learn some most curious things from _The Life and Miracles of Charles, Duke of Brittany, of the House of France_, in regard to what was in those days considered evidence of saintliness. "He confessed himself morning and evening, and heard mass four or five times daily.... Did he meet a priest, down he flung himself from his horse upon his knees in the mud.... He put pebbles in his shoes." When he prayed he beat himself in the breast till he turned black in the face. Next his skin he wore a coarse garment of sackcloth, and "he did not change his sackcloth, although full of lice to a wonder; and when his groom of the chambers was about to clean the said sackcloth of them, the lord Charles said: 'Let be; remove not a single louse;' and said they did him no harm, and when they stung him he remembered his God." Truly, at such a price salvation would seem dear to many of us! Yet the history of the early Church is full of saints whose fanaticism assumed this extraordinary type, the predilection for bodily filth. With all this piety, Charles de Blois was unrelentingly cruel and even immoral; for he began the siege of Nantes by cutting off the heads of thirty knightly partisans of Montfort and throwing them over the walls, and when he himself lay dead on the battlefield "a bastard son of his, called Sir Jean de Blois, was slain by his side."