Saint Francis of Paola

It was enough for Jacques Martotille and his wife to have a son and a daughter; after the birth of the latter, they renounced all use of marriage and, by mutual consent, took a vow of continence. Jacques's fervor was so great that he entered the Order of Minims, established by his son, and lived there with truly exemplary piety; he thus took his place in the chronicles of the same Order among the most illustrious persons in holiness who honored its beginnings. Francis could only receive from such a perfect father and such a virtuous mother a truly holy upbringing. His childhood was spent in marvelous innocence, candor, and devotion. As the Church assures us in his Office, he was already macerating his body with continual vigils and abstinences; his only pleasure was to spend entire days in the temples, to converse there with God and hear His word; his manners were so pure, and his fear of God so tender and perfect, that he already gave visible signs of that great holiness which has since appeared in him with such brilliance. It is even believable that he began from that time to keep the mortifications of Lent all year round, since we learn from the records of his canonization that his father observed this way of life, and it is highly likely that he also had it observed throughout his family. We do not read that he went to school; but his parents taught him what the Holy Spirit wanted him to learn from men, and which He did not refrain from teaching him immediately and by Himself. Two responses he made to his mother while still very small are reported, which sufficiently mark the divine prudence and extreme piety with which he was gifted. As she urged him to cover his head because of the cold while saying his rosary, he told her: "That if he were speaking to the queen, far from ordering him to cover himself, she would, on the contrary, command him to remain bareheaded; that thus she should not require him to remain covered while speaking to the Blessed Virgin, who is the Mother of God and the Sovereign of the universe." This pious lady exhorting him to go and amuse himself for some time with other children of his age, he replied: "That he would go very willingly if it were her will; but that for him, whose only pleasure was to love and serve God, he would find no other satisfaction than that of rendering Him obedience."

When he had reached the age of thirteen, a religious in the habit of Saint Francis appeared to him and warned him that it was time to fulfill the vow that his parents had made for his recovery when he was still in the cradle. He spoke to them about it immediately and begged them not to delay its execution any longer. They therefore took him to the convent of the Cordeliers in the city of San Marco, a day's journey from that of Paola, judging that this convent, where all the rigor of the observance was kept, would better suit his inclinations than that of San Lucido, which was closer. It was there that this holy child laid the foundations of the life so austere that he practiced until his death. Although he only received the small habit that is given to those who are obliged by vow, he nevertheless kept the whole rule with more exactitude and fervor than the most robust religious who were most zealous for the duties of their profession. From then on, he gave up shirts and shoes, and would wear nothing on his flesh but a coarse, extremely rough tunic, which is said to be still in his convent in Naples. The religious of his monastery ate meat, according to the freedom of their rule; but he, whom God was calling to a more eminent life, did not eat any and observed the Lenten life exactly. His conversation was so sweet, his obedience so prompt and perfect, his silence and mortification so ravishing, his humility so profound, that they perfumed the whole house and won him the love and respect of all the Brothers. He was often charged with several offices, such as helping the sacristan, the steward, the refectorian, and the infirmarian; but however incompatible these occupations were, he nevertheless always performed them very perfectly; this led some religious of this convent, as they themselves testified, to believe that he was in several places at the same time. One day, the sacristan having hurriedly sent him to fetch fire for the censer, and having given him nothing to carry it in, he innocently brought some in the front of his robe, without it being damaged in the least. Another time, the steward having fallen ill, and the charge of the kitchen having been given to him, he arranged the meat in the pot for dinner and placed it on cold ashes; then, having gone to the church to fetch fire, a sweet ecstasy occupied him so deeply that he remained there until the time of the meal. The guardian had him warned of this failure and of the trouble that his indiscreet devotion was going to cause in the community. The holy child, without being moved, asked him to have the meal rung at the usual hour, and, having entered the office, he made the meats boil so perfectly in a moment that they were ready to be served immediately to all that company of servants of God.

A life so perfect and so filled with miracles made the Bishop of San Marco wish to see this admirable child, and the Cordelier Fathers wish to keep him among them to make him enter their Order; but God was calling him to something else, and besides, his humility could not allow him to remain in a place where such great wonders could attract too much honor; as soon as the year of his vow had expired, he wanted to leave. He had his parents come for this purpose and begged them to take him on a pilgrimage to Assisi, to Our Lady of the Seven Angels, and to other places of devotion that he had obliged himself to visit, which they did very willingly. The author who wrote his history during his lifetime, and who had been one of his religious for nearly forty years, assures that he also went to Rome to honor the sepulchers of the holy Apostles, and that having met on the way a cardinal who was walking with great splendor, he took the boldness to point out to him that Our Lord and his disciples had been very far from this pomp. This cardinal took this reproach in good part, being touched by the modesty and holiness that appeared on his face; but he told him that he should not be scandalized by what he saw, because we had come to a time when ecclesiastical authority would be despised if it did not make itself venerable by these external appearances. On his return from Rome, he visited the most famous monasteries and hermitages that were on his path or nearby; one must probably include in the number Monte Cassino, where the admirable example of Saint Benedict, who had retired into solitude at the age of fourteen, could have greatly animated him to do the same. Tradition also holds that he went to the hermits of Monteluco, in Spoleto, whose form of habit he seems to have imitated in the clothing he later gave to his religious.

Contempt for the world and the fire of charity that inflamed him more and more did not allow him to return to his parents' house; for, before arriving in Paola, he asked them for permission to retire to a solitary place on their estate: these holy parents had no difficulty in granting him this favor, because, being enlightened by a divine light, they cooperated with joy in the designs of Providence for their son. They even provided him with food as long as he remained in this place, so that, being freed from all the cares of life, he would have nothing to do but occupy himself with the meditation of eternal truths. However, this retreat not seeming to him secret enough or separated enough from the frequentation of the world, he stayed there only a very short time; and a few months later, he chose another, not only more distant, but more frightful and deserted. It was the corner of a large rock raised above the sea, and surrounded by other rocks, whose height and roughness made them very difficult to access. He found there a cavity which he enlarged by his labor, and of which he made a cavern large enough to lodge in. It is still seen today; it is eight palms long, five wide, and seven high; but the entrance is so narrow that one can only pass through it sideways. Pilgrims visit it with much devotion and revere there a figure of our Saint represented on his knees, and his eyes raised toward heaven.

He redoubled that fervor which he had always shown for the exercises of penance and the interior life. His bed was the rock, his food some herbs or roots that he found between the rocks and in the woods, or that the charity of those who visited him provided, with pure water that he drew from a nearby torrent; his clothing, a vile and coarse habit, under which he wore a rough hair shirt; his occupation, prayer, tears, the contemplation of divine things, and sometimes consoling or instructing people from the neighborhood who had recourse to him. We know nothing in particular, neither of the battles that the demon waged against him in this place, nor of the victories he won over this enemy of men, nor of the visits he received from heaven, nor finally of the graces with which it pleased God to favor him; because his humility made him keep all these things secret; but the admirable progress he made in so little time in the silence of this cavern, and which made him capable of being the founder of a religious Order at the age of nineteen, must make us judge that his temptations there were great, his victories signaled, his commerce with the inhabitants of heaven frequent and ordinary, and his graces precious and abundant.

One could ask from whom he received the religious habit. The tradition of the convents of Calabria is that he received it from the hand of an angel; and one still shows, in Paterno, a hood that this blessed spirit allegedly placed on his head. Also, he performed great miracles; and, in the year 1456, as the plague was ravaging the whole kingdom of Naples, it was put into water, according to the advice that the Saint had given through a laborer to whom he appeared during his work: he immediately healed all the plague-stricken who drank of this water: this fact was attested shortly after, in a legal inquiry made by the Rev. Fr. Sébastien Quinquet, then visitor, and later general of his Order. If anyone imagines that this tradition is more pious than certain, we allow him to believe that he received the habit from the hands of the archpriest of Paola, or some other ecclesiastic deputed for that by the Ordinary, unless he received it from one of those holy hermits with whom he had stayed while returning from Rome, as Saint Benedict received it at Subiaco from the solitary Roman. One could also be troubled to know where he heard Mass and received communion, all the time he was retired in his cavern; other saints have been dispensed, by an extraordinary way, from the obligation of these precepts while they were hidden in solitude, as one cannot doubt of a Saint Paul, a Saint Onuphrius, and others similar. But I see no necessity to attribute this dispensation to the one whose life we are writing; and I would think more willingly that, until the time when a chapel was built for him, where Mass was said for him, he went to participate in the divine Mysteries in the nearest church.

His holiness and his extraordinary life soon attracted a multitude of people to his cave, to enjoy his conversation and to receive relief from him in their sorrows; but for five or six years, no one offered to imitate his penance and to dwell with him. At the end of this time (1435), some people begged him to receive them as his disciples. His eminent charity and his zeal for the salvation of souls could not refuse them this favor. He admitted them with him; and to house them, he first had a small hermitage built, composed of only three cells, with a beautiful chapel to sing the praises of God and to receive the Sacraments. One cannot say with certainty either the number or the names of those he then received into his company. Twelve are usually noted; but among those placed in this number, there are very certainly some who could not have been of age to join him until many years later, as is easy to infer from the year of their death. What is certain is that he lived with them under the rules of the eremitic life in marvelous austerity, innocence, and fervor. He was also like a refuge for all the poor of the region, and he exercised toward them not only spiritual charity by consoling them in their afflictions, advising them in their doubts, and strengthening them in their temptations, but also corporal charity, by healing their wounds and illnesses, of whatever nature they might be, and providing them, even miraculously, with the means to live in their necessities.

The number of his imitators increasing continually, he finally took the resolution to build a monastery and a larger church, with the permission of Pyrrhus, Archbishop of Cosenza, who, having only been consecrated, according to Ughelli, in the year 1452, could not have given him this permission before that time. It was then that God made manifest with brilliance what a man can do who is animated by His spirit and filled with His strength and virtue. It can be said, without exaggeration, that not as many stones and pieces of wood went into this new building as Francis performed miracles and prodigious things for its construction. He had first taken very narrow alignments for his church, not wishing to commit himself to an edifice that would surpass his means; but as the walls were already beginning to rise, a religious, in the habit of a Cordelier, suddenly appeared before him and reproached him, although with much civility and expressions of affection, for making his church so small; the Saint replied to him: "That he would have willingly made it larger, but that his poverty did not permit him to carry his enterprise higher." — "Fear nothing," the religious replied to him; "tear down what is already begun, and take a larger design: God will draw His glory from it and will provide you liberally with everything that will be necessary for you." The Saint, who had no less courage and trust in God than humility, acquiesced without difficulty to his order. He had the walls demolished in his presence, and took with him the alignment of a more beautiful and spacious edifice; and scarcely was this finished when this admirable architect disappeared, without anyone knowing where he had come from or where he had gone. This gave Pope Leo X reason to think, in the Bull of canonization of our Saint, that this religious was Saint Francis of Assisi. This story is also reported in the manner we have just written, in one of the trials of his canonization, by a witness who assures having been present at this whole action. A few days later, a lord of Cosenza, probably Jacques Tarsia, Baron of Beaumont, came to find the Saint and presented him with a considerable sum of money, with a quantity of livestock, to contribute to the expenses of this building. An infinity of other people also offered him, some money, others tools and materials, others their days and their labors to advance the work; and as he accepted their offers, knowing well that they would not be without reward, one saw working in his workshops not only charitable laborers, who took a few days from their weeks to consecrate them to this work of piety; but also men of high condition, delicate and frail ladies, and young children of noble birth, who took pride in carrying stones, wood, and cement, like laborers, to participate in the merit of this enterprise. There were even sick people who found their healing by setting themselves to work there, despite all the impossibility to which their illness reduced them, as the seventeenth witness of the trial held in Cosenza reports; the latter assures that, having had himself carried toward the Servant of God, to be relieved of a pain in his thigh that tormented him so cruelly that he could not put his foot on the ground, this holy Patriarch told him first that this evil had happened to him in punishment for having quarreled with his mother; then, he ordered him, for his healing, to bring alone to the building a beam that two oxen would not even have been able to move. This man made some resistance to this, and said to him: "How do you wish, holy Father, that I carry this beam, sick and crippled as I am, since, even when I were in full health, and had several men with me, I could not lift it?" But the Saint said to him: "By charity, do what I command you: you can do it." He did it, he loaded this beam on his back and brought it to the building, and, in this action, his sick thigh was perfectly healed. The same happened to a woman from the city of Cortona, who had been paralyzed for thirty years, and who was brought before the Saint in a chair. He commanded her to take a stone that was nearby, and to carry it to the place where it had to be placed; she made an effort to rise and to obey, and in this effort she recovered the use of her limbs so perfectly that, in thanksgiving, she wished to work for several days, and since then, she embraced the rule of the Third Order established by her liberator.

This type of miracle, of making stones and wood light, however heavy they might be, and of lifting them, or having them lifted without difficulty, was ordinary for him throughout the course of this construction. He himself transported, to another place, a rock of prodigious size, which hindered the foundations of the dormitory, and which a large number of workers had not been able to move, nor split and break into pieces. He carried, all alone, to the top of the bell tower, a cut stone that four very robust men had much trouble lifting. He pulled, all alone, from a forest and from the edge of a river, pieces of wood that several laborers together had uselessly attempted to pull from there. He loaded others of the same weight onto his shoulders and onto those of his workers, without either him or the others feeling their weight, as if the angels had supported them and had carried them with them. Moreover, twisted trees were straightened, raw joists were squared and prepared for use, and pits necessary for preparing materials were dug at his word alone and without employing the labor of men or the help of tools.

There are above all three miracles that have made this building famous, not only in Calabria, but also throughout all of Italy and even in Europe. The first is that of a lime kiln lit for twenty-four hours, into which he entered without burning himself. The violence of the flame had so cracked it that it was shooting fire on all sides and threatening imminent ruin: which would have spoiled the lime and would have done considerable harm to the whole workshop. The masons, troubled by this accident, let out a great cry and called the Saint for help. He came there immediately, and, seeing on one side the evident danger of losing this material which was necessary for the work of God, and, on the other, the pain and trouble of so many workers, he armed himself with a firm trust in the goodness of the Almighty, and made no difficulty in undertaking the repair of this furnace himself. He therefore entered inside and plugged all the cracks with mortar; he did the same on the outside, and rejoined the walls that were separating so well that the workers, whom he had sent to take their meal so that they would not be witnesses to this action, returning to the place, found the furnace in good condition, and the Saint washing his hands. Those whom curiosity brought back earlier saw him come out as fresh and as healthy as if he had not moved from his oratory. The Bull of his canonization, and the disciple who wrote his history during his lifetime, attest to this great wonder, and the sixth witness of the trial held in Cosenza, for this canonization, assures that this lime then multiplied miraculously, and that, against all human appearances, there was enough to do all the work.

The second miracle is that of a stone of prodigious size, which, detaching itself from the mountain, was rolling impetuously toward the new monastery with a manifest peril, not only of overturning it, but also of crushing several workers who were working there in various places. The danger made all those who were present cry out; but the Saint, without being troubled, raised his heart toward heaven, and, by a word of faith, he suddenly stopped and fixed this rock in the greatest precipitation of its fall. Then, he approached it himself, and propped it up with his staff; which was so powerful that it remained in this state for a long time, exposed to the view of an infinity of people who came to see this prodigy. Later it was split and broken into pieces to serve for the completion of the convent. He even suspended another by the power of the sign of the cross, on the slope of the precipice; and it is perhaps the one that the inhabitants of the place still see every day supporting itself without support, and in a situation where it would naturally be impossible for it not to fall.

The third is that of a miraculous fountain that the Saint made spring from a rock by striking it only with his staff, to relieve his workers who had too much trouble going to look for water in the torrent. What is more astonishing in this fountain is that, being enclosed in a basin of very hard stone, and where no opening appears, one has never been able to discover from where it draws its waters, and it is nevertheless an impossible thing to dry it up; and if it happens that one empties the basin to clean it, in less than five to six hours it is found entirely filled. All those who have been to Paola are so many eyewitnesses. The Saint having thrown into it a dead trout, which had been sent to him, it immediately recovered its life; and, since then, these waters have served for the healing of an infinity of sick people. This is why one sees there every year, on the first day of April, the eve of the Saint's feast, an extraordinary gathering of people. How many times again, in favor of these same workers, did he produce or multiply bread, wine, figs, and other similar foods, that hunger made them ask for! How many times did he suddenly cook, for them and for other people, vegetables that one had forgotten or neglected to cook! How many times did he restore to a state of working those whom falls and considerable wounds had rendered incapable of doing the slightest thing!

Besides these wonders that concern mainly the building of the convent of Paola, one cannot say how many others he performed at the same time for the healing and relief of men. I make no difficulty in asserting, on the deposition of an infinite number of witnesses, that there is no sort of infirmity or illness that he did not heal, nor any sense or member of the human body on which he did not exercise the grace and power that God had given him. He restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the mute, the use of feet and hands to the crippled, life to the dying and the dead; and, what is even more considerable, reason to the insane and the frenzied. The lepers, the dropsical, the paralyzed, persons afflicted with the stone, scrofula, colic, migraine, and every other kind of pain, wounds, and ulcers, found in his charity an instantaneous remedy. There was never any evil, however great and incurable it might appear, that could resist his voice or his touch. People ran to him from all parts, not one by one, but in great troops and by the hundreds, as if he had been the angel Raphael and some physician descended from heaven; and, according to the testimony of those who usually accompanied him, no one returned dissatisfied, but each blessed God for having received the fulfillment of what he desired.

Among these prodigies, one of the most signaled was the healing of the Baron of Beaumont, of whom we have already spoken above, and who was, in his time, general of the Venetian army in the war of Pisa. He had an abscess so horrible on his thigh that it was rotting the flesh down to the bone, and made him suffer pains that made his life unbearable. He tried for a long time the remedies of the most skillful surgeons of the region; he even sought more distant ones, but it was useless; finally, he had recourse to the Saint, who, by his prayer and by the sign of the cross, made him return home in perfect health. Marcel Cardille, of the city of Cosenza, was not only a leper, but also paralyzed in his feet and hands, and deformed in his whole body. He had also lost his speech, and had become all black; so that one could almost no longer see in him the figure or the appearance of a man. There was no doctor in the world who would have dared to undertake his cure; but the Saint, to whom he was led, taking him only by the hand, and exhorting him to have a lively faith in Jesus Christ, made him rise on his feet, and rendered him perfectly healthy. We must also report this other miracle in favor of a young religious of the Order of Saint Augustine, named Francis, who, since then, has been prior at the convent of the same Order, in Paola. Having gone, by obedience, to cut wood in a forest, he gave himself, with his axe, such a great blow on the foot that he wounded himself notably, and the blood was coming out in large spurts from his wound; the Saint, who was in the same forest, came immediately to him, and, by his touch, which was like a celestial balm, he healed him on the spot, and restored him to the same state he was in before his wound.

Among several dead whom he also resurrected in Paola, the most famous was his own nephew, whom some authors believe to have been Nicolas d'Alesso, brother of André. He had often shown an ardent desire to be a religious in the Order that his uncle had just established; but he had not been able to obtain permission from his mother, who, through a too natural love, did not want to be deprived of her children. Finally, he fell ill and died. His body was carried to the church of the Saint to be buried there; his funeral was held publicly, and one was ready to lower him into the grave; but this divine man, who had in his hands the keys of life and death, prevented it from being done. He took this body, carried it to his room, and the mother herself, after many prayers and tears, resurrected him. The mother came the next day to mourn her son. He asked her if she was resigned to the will of God, and if she consented that this child be a religious: "Ah!" she replied, "if only I had consented to it sooner, he would be presently alive, and I would have the consolation of seeing him; but it is now too late, and I will see him neither as a secular nor as a religious." — "It is enough," said the Saint, "that you consent to it"; and, at the same instant, going up to his room, he gave him the habit of his Order, and brought him to his mother, who could not praise God enough for his mercies toward her and toward this son to whom he had restored life. He has since lived very religiously, both in Italy and in France, under the obedience of his uncle.

But however great these miracles of Saint Francis of Paola were, it must be admitted that the most surprising thing was his own person and his way of life, which seemed angelic rather than human. Although he was in the midst of so many workers, and worked himself like a laborer, he was nevertheless always in a state of perfect peace and serenity of mind; they even appeared on his face, where one never saw anything sad, but a celestial splendor and an air of eternity. His prayer was continuous, and this multiplicity of occupations did not prevent him from being unceasingly united with God, and from often having ecstasies, raptures, and secret and familiar conversations with heaven. One day, while he was praying at the foot of the high altar, while the religious were assembled, he was seen by two priests and a brother whom divine Providence brought there, all surrounded by light, and having above his head three crowns of glory, shaped like the tiara of the Sovereign Pontiff. Another time, according to the memoirs of Jean de Milazza, one of his disciples, the Archangel Saint Michael, to whom he was extremely devoted, and whom he had prayed to be his protector and that of his nascent family, appeared to him in great brilliance, and presented him with a cartouche surrounded by rays like a glory of the Blessed Sacrament, containing the word Charity written in letters of cele Charité Motto and coat of arms of the Order of Minims revealed by the Archangel Michael. stial gold, and laid on a field of azure, ordering him to take this sign as the arms and coat of arms of his entire Order. Thus, this great man, whose life was nothing more than the pure love of God, did nothing and ordered nothing except through charity.

If he made journeys, if he undertook buildings, if he received religious into his company, it was through charity. If he commanded the fire, the air, the water, the earth, the trees, the rocks, it was through charity. If he made things effective for the healing of the sick, which in themselves would have been useless or even harmful to them, it was through charity. "By charity," he would say, "take this herb, use this powder, eat this piece, and you will be healed." In a word, he always had charity in his mind, in his heart, on his tongue, and in his hands; and as he lived only by it, he also acted only by it. Yet another day, several people being at the door of his cell, where he was locked in, heard an admirable melody, such as one never hears on earth, with which the angels took pleasure in recreating him; and this melody calmed the anger of a man who had come to insult him, because the earth that was being pulled from his foundations, being carried away by a torrent, sometimes prevented his mills from turning.

Despite these labors, he did not fail to treat his body with a rigor that we could call merciless. He had, at that time, no other bed than the floor of his cell, with a stone or a piece of wood for a pillow. Being older, he slept on a mat or a pile of brushwood. His sleep was so short that it hardly deserved the name of rest; it was to give more time, and often entire nights, to prayer. Not only did he keep the Lenten life in all its rigor, of which he made a vow and an inviolable law in his Order; but he ate so little that several witnesses did not hesitate to say of him what Our Lord said of Saint John the Baptist: that he did not eat. His usual meal was a little bread and water in the evening. He was sometimes two or three days, and even, before great feasts and in public necessities, eight or ten days without taking anything, and in continuous prayer. It is asserted that he once spent an entire Lent without food, in imitation of Our Lord, Moses, Elijah, and Saint Simeon the Stylite. Wine was unknown to him, unless some weakness or illness forced him to taste it. He assiduously wore the hair shirt or cilice, and tore his body with frequent flagellations that he performed with an iron discipline cut in the shape of a saw. His habit was neither to protect him from the cold nor to relieve him in the heat, but only to cover his body; this habit was, on one hand, very rough and of coarse, prickly hair, and, on the other, so poorly made that it was hardly capable of warming him. He did not change it until it was completely worn out: such is the one he left in Paola when coming to France, and which the acts of his canonization assert to have performed so many wonders. And even then he did not take a new one, but one less bad, and which had already served another religious. Finally, his austerity was so prodigious that the Pope, in the Bull of the same canonization, is obliged to say that it did not seem that he had a body, but rather that it was a pure spirit.

But while he took so much trouble to offer himself as a pleasing sacrifice to the Almighty, this sovereign Goodness exempted him from the pains that follow the condition of our nature, and which are common to all men. He always went barefoot through the burning sands, through the sharpest pebbles and rocks, through snows, ice, brambles, thorns, water, and mud, but he was as if invulnerable there. An infinity of witnesses have testified that these sands did not burn him, that these pebbles and rocks did not wound him, that these snows and ice did not freeze him, that these brambles and thorns did not prick him, and that the mud itself did not soil him, because God had commanded his angels to guard him in all his ways. Although he continually handled stones, wood, and tools, he nevertheless had hands as white and delicate as if he had been a man of the cabinet who had worked only with a pen. His frequent sweats in an old habit, which he did not take off day or night, did not make him smell bad; on the contrary, an odor so sweet usually exhaled from his body that it perfumed those who approached him. His face itself did not seem to suffer from his austerities or his age, being always quite full, and with a serene air and a color of fire. This is why he was looked upon everywhere as an innocent Adam in the midst of the earthly paradise, or, to speak with Antoine Staramelle, in a letter to Pope Leo X, as a mortal God, to whom all creatures seemed to be subject.

The rigor he exercised against himself did not fall upon his religious. He had for them extreme sweetness and tenderness, and did not suffer them to do anything without his permission above the ordinary rules of observance. If he was sometimes obliged to correct and punish them, he always mixed oil with wine, and mercy with justice. Far from abusing the rank and quality of superior, he made himself, in effect, the servant of the least of the brothers. He cleaned and mended their clothes, and even those of the novices; served them in the refectory, swept the church and the convent, and applied himself with joy to the other most vile ministries of the house, thus doing his best to humble himself all the more as God raised him up by wonders and by extraordinary and unprecedented graces.

We will speak later of his other virtues, of which we will find heroic examples everywhere. It remains for us, before leaving the convent of Paola, to say that prophecy was so ordinary for him that he seemed to have the gift habitually. He knew those who were to come to find him for their healing, and sometimes sent to meet them to receive them. He penetrated the causes of their illnesses and pointed out to them the faults for which God had punished them. He read into the depths of consciences and discovered the most secret sins. He knew the future, and things that were happening in the most distant places were as present to him as if they had happened before his eyes. He predicted, twenty years before, to his religious, the journey he was to make to France, without anything making it foreseeable. There were sick people whom he assured of their convalescence, and others to whom he said that God had counted their days, and that they would undoubtedly die; which was always found to be true. Finally, as it seemed, by his miracles, that God had shared his omnipotence with him, it also seemed, by his predictions, that he had shared his prescience with him. But what I find most admirable in all this is that, whether he performed actions that entirely surpassed the strength of man, or whether he predicted events that only the prophetic light could discover to him, he always did it with much ease and simplicity: one would have said that this way of acting and speaking was natural to him, and that there was nothing extraordinary in all his conduct. This should make us judge that he had, from that time, arrived at such an eminent perfection that grace with its gifts had become as if second nature to him; in which theologians make the highest degree of the mystical life consist. I have said nothing of his almost sovereign authority over the demons, although he cast several out of the bodies of the possessed during his first construction, because we will soon have other proofs of it; but I cannot yet omit in this place that his humility, his austerity, and his great love for God had made him so formidable to these monsters of hell that they even feared his disciples and everything that belonged to him, or that he had touched.

While this great wonder-worker was laying the first foundations of his Order in Paola, in the manner we have just said, the inhabitants of Paterno, a town in the same diocese and not far from Paola, wished to have a share in the blessing of their neighbors. They therefore begged him to come to them, and offered to give him a site to establish a religious community there. Paul de Rondace, a gentleman of Paterno, whom he had received into the number of his children, and who, since then, has been his vicar-general in Italy, joined his prayers to those of his compatriots so that the Saint might grant them this grace. He finally yielded to their instances, and, having taken Paul and some other religious with him, he came to establish his first colony and his second convent in Paterno. He was first given as a retreat the house of the Brothers of the Discipline, that is to say, of the Penitents who flagellated themselves publicly, located in the suburb, while waiting to be provided with a place and other things necessary for the building of a monastery. The time he remained in this house and before this new edifice is not certain; what is indubitable, and which we learn from an almost infinite number of witnesses, is that he performed, in this construction, the same wonders and things even more surprising than he had done in that of Paola. He made, as in Paola, the trees and stones light; he entered, without burning himself or his clothes, into a burning furnace; he stopped a rock in the air in the greatest impetuosity of its fall, and made a fountain of living water spring up in a dry place where there was no water. He miraculously found materials in a land that was incapable of producing them, made lime stones cook in an invisible way and without having put fire to them; he often fed his entire workshop with what would not have sufficed for the food of one man alone. A demon had sat on the stone that was to serve as the keystone for the great door of the church, and made it so heavy that it was impossible to move it; our Saint compelled him to lift it himself, and to carry it to the place where it was to be placed. He made seven beautiful chestnut trees grow in an instant, by putting seven chestnuts into the ground, to appease the anger of a man who was complaining that he had had one cut down in his woods, although he had only done so with the permission of the wife who had presumed the good will of her husband; and the fruits of these chestnut trees have since served, throughout all of Italy, for the healing of an infinity of sick people. He made untamed bulls, which had never borne the yoke, serve to cart tiles for his roofs; which they did with as much gentleness as if they had been tamed for ten years. A tree, of prodigious size, being in the middle of the great road that led to his church, and thus inconveniencing the passage, he divided it, by his word alone, into two halves, and made each half move back several feet to leave a sufficient space in the middle, without either half losing its greenery; and, by this means, he settled the dispute of two brothers who had given him the road, and who were arguing together about the ownership of this tree. These halves long subsisted in the same state; but the branches having been used to make crosses and rosaries, one sees only the trunks now. Finally, he performed so many other wonders in this edifice that the convent of Paterno was called by excellence the Convent of Miracles.

The healings of wounds, ruptures, and illnesses were also very numerous there. One of the witnesses assures, as having seen it with his own eyes, that he healed two hundred people in one day. Others say that he healed them at every moment, and as if without number, just as if he had had in his hands the keys of health and life. One day a small child was brought to him who had come into the world without eyes and without a mouth; he marked with his saliva the places where these organs should be, and, hardly had he made the sign of the cross, than two beautiful eyes and a very well-made mouth were formed there. The blind, the deaf, and the mute from birth did not cost him more to heal than those who had only become so by accident. One counts up to six dead whom he resurrected in this place, without speaking of the persons who were in agony or abandoned by doctors, whom he preserved, by his prayer, from a near and indubitable death. The most renowned of all these dead was Thomas d'Yvre, an inhabitant of Paterno, to whom he restored life twice: once after he had been crushed under the fall of a tree, and another time after he had broken his body by falling from the top of the bell tower to the bottom, and this is perhaps the unique example that can be found in the history of the Saints of the double resurrection of the same person.

These miraculous cures made a great splash. The surgeons of the country, who saw that they were taking away all their practices, had the Reverend Father Scozette, a Minor religious of the Observance, who was then preaching in the main pulpits of Calabria, secretly solicited to preach against the Saint, and to publicly decry his life, his conduct, and his wonders. He easily let himself be persuaded. He had been told that the Saint used, for these healings, some herbs or some powders that he applied to the wounds, (which he did out of profound humility, and to hide, as much as he was able, this great power to perform miracles that God had given him); the religious imagined that there could well be superstition in that. There were also other religious of his Order who encouraged him in it, whether out of jealousy or out of an imprudent and hasty zeal. Thus, this great preacher began to declaim, in his sermons, against the way of life, so extraordinary, of our wonder-worker, against the Lent that he made his children keep perpetually, and especially against these healings of which one spoke so much. The Saint was warned of these declamations; but as he sought in everything only the glory of God, and did nothing except by his movement and by his spirit, he abandoned to him with a marvelous patience and sweetness the protection of his innocence, and the defense of his cause. Scozette, seeing that his speeches, which he also supported with his familiar conversations, made no impression on the minds, because there was no one who was not convinced of the great merits of the Saint, resolved to come and find him himself to reprimand him, easily persuading himself that, being learned in philosophy and theology, he would confuse without difficulty a poor Hermit who had never studied. The servant of God received him with his ordinary candor and affability, and to better give him the ease of explaining himself, he led him into a private room near the fire. The preacher unburdened himself before him of everything he had already said in public, and even treated him injuriously, as a man who was deceiving the world by false miracles.

Saint Francis was not moved by it; but after he had finished his complaints, seeing that however ardent he appeared, he was nevertheless inwardly all frozen by lack of charity, he took burning coals in his hands, and, pressing them for a long time without burning himself, he presented them to him and said pleasantly: "Father Antoine, warm yourself by charity, for you have great need of it." This religious, touched by this miracle, and waking up as if from a deep sleep, threw himself at his feet and asked his pardon. The Saint raised him up, and, after having embraced him, he wisely showed him that man, however weak he may be of himself, can nevertheless do all things when God wishes to use him for his glory. From that time on, this preacher was the great panegyrist of Saint Francis, and published his holiness on all sides: he profited so well from the moment of conversation he had had with him that he arrived in a few years at a very high perfection, which Our Lord even manifested by miracles. He died at the convent of Amantea, in the year 1470.

The gift of prophecy, which had appeared in our Saint with such brilliance at the convent of Paola, followed and accompanied him also in that of Paterno and everywhere else; there is an infinity of examples mixed among the miracles that have just been reported: for, as the tongue as well as the heart and the mind of this great man were always in the hands of God, this adorable Wisdom usually used them to pronounce oracles and to discover secrets that could be useful for the amendment and spiritual healing of those who addressed themselves to him. As for the possessed, he also delivered many in Paterno; and one, among others, whom he first made work for a few days on his buildings, after which the demon, compelled to leave by the force of his command, did so with such impetuosity and noise that it seemed that the whole church was going to collapse, and that nothing would remain intact. Since then, he has healed several others, both in Italy and in France; among others, a novice of his Order and one of the Order of Saint Francis of Assisi, whom the evil spirit had seized by a secret permission of God.

But it is perhaps too much to stop at the convent of Paterno. From this convent, he went to Spezzano-le-Grand, which is also in the diocese of Cosenza, and is only four miles from that city, and from Spezzano to Corigliano, which is in the diocese of Rossano. With the permission of the Ordinaries, he established new colonies there, and later built new convents there. Miracles accompanied him everywhere, both for the buildings and for the relief of all kinds of unfortunate people: he especially rewarded the liberality of the Coriglianesi by miraculously giving them fountain waters, of which they had an extreme need. Moreover, one must not believe that this admirable servant of God only cared for the healing of bodies: his main application was for the conversion of sinners and for the salvation of souls. Although he had not studied, he did not fail to preach at the end of the day to those who had rushed toward him, and he did so with so much zeal, light, and unction, even citing the Holy Scriptures, that all the listeners were touched by it. He gave salutary advice to everyone: as he knew, by a prophetic spirit, the needs of each one, everyone noticed that he was telling him what needed to be said, and returned home with the resolution to live with more piety. In a word, the witnesses assure that he was the light of all Calabria, that he brought everyone back into the ways of salvation; that he made a marvelous change in the morals of this entire province, and that it suffered an irreparable loss when he left it to go to France.

The Saint, having these four convents, went from one to the other, both for the advancement of their constructions, which lasted a long time, and for the government of his religious, who still had no other rule than that which he gave them by word of mouth with the examples of his holy life. While he was taking such great care of them, a very sensitive displeasure happened to him by the loss of a poor brother who, having gone out without leave, and even with the intention of leaving the holy habit of religion, was killed by a bolt of lightning in the territory of Cartiarco. But God, who never afflicts his elect to the point of leaving them without consolation, rewarded the loss of this stray sheep by the admirable conversion of a young libertine, who came to collect the crown that the other had let fall. This was Jean de la Roque, a noble ecclesiastic of Corigliano, leading a scandalous life; he wanted to pass through Spezzano to go and satisfy his passion with a courtesan who was a little further on. The Saint, having had a revelation of it, ordered the porter to let him enter the convent when he came to ask for water at the door, and then to introduce him into a room and lock him in. The porter punctually executed this order, then, having led this madman into a cell that was in the cloister, he pulled it out and locked the door on him. It was a great subject of astonishment for this wretch who loved his misery, and who was running with joy to his ruin, to see himself stopped in the pursuit of his design. He first threw fire and flames, vomited many insults against the religious, and made a great noise to be delivered; but, as no one opened, he finally tired of shouting and knocking; he lay down on the ground and let himself fall into sleep. Then the Saint entered the room, and having awakened him, said to him coldly: "Hey! my friend, what are you thinking of? why do you not shake out of your ear what torments you, and which gives you such a headache?" This young man, not knowing if he was awake or asleep, immediately carries his hand to his right ear, and pulls out a large, very hideous and all-hairy worm. He then carries it to his left ear, and pulls out another worm of the same shape, and at that moment all his impure desires and all his brutal and dishonest affections were dampened; feeling himself touched by the hand of God, he threw himself at the feet of the Saint and begged him with instance to receive him into the number of his disciples. He had no trouble obtaining this favor, to which the servant of God knew he was predestined. He rendered very great services to the Order with much holiness, and did not die until the year 1520.

But it is enough to stay in Calabria, we must pass with Saint Francis of Paola into Sicily. The noise of his virtues and his miracles had spread there so much that there was no city in all this island that did not ardently ask for his presence. Especially the inhabitants of Milazzo wished for it, and sent deputies to him to beg him to come and establish a community of his disciples among them. He was also pressed by some Sicilians, to whom he had given the habit of his Order. Thus, after having put order in the monasteries he was leaving, he left for Sicily with two of his religious, who are believed to have been Father Paul of Paterno, and Br. Jean of Saint-Lucide. He performed a signal miracle on the way; it was to feed, for three days, nine hungry travelers, with a very small bread that he made them find very miraculously in their knapsack. Having arrived at the crossing of the Strait of Messina, so renowned among the poets, because of the gulf of Charybdis and the rock of Scylla, formerly famous for an infinity of shipwrecks, he begged, by charity, a boatman named Pierre Colosse, to put him in his boat with his companions, and to take him across. This rustic man, seeing that he had no money to pay for his passage, rebuffed him, and even said some insult to him. Then the Saint, having made his prayer, and feeling himself inspired by the Holy Spirit, who gave him, at that moment, an admirable and extraordinary use of the spirit of faith and the gifts of counsel and strength, peacefully spread his cloak on the waves, and, having climbed onto it, with his two disciples, he used it as a secure boat to cross such a dangerous strait. The sea trembled, but he did not tremble; the waves respected him, the winds were obedient to him; Charybdis and Scylla, which made the best-equipped galleys shudder, honored him in his passage, and it is even said that, since th at time, the sea phare de Messine Site of the monastery's foundation and the martyrdom of Placid. has been calmer there, and that so many shipwrecks have no longer been seen there. Finally, he arrived near Messina, and his humility not permitting him to land at the port, where he would have been seen by an infinity of people, he landed to the side, where, according to the report of Placide Sempère, of the Company of Jesus, he gave spiritual and bodily life to a dead man who had been hanging for three days on the public gallows. From there, he went to Milazzo; he was received there like an angel come from heaven; they built him in a short time a beautiful convent, which was the first of his institute in the entire island. There was neither great nor small, nor rich nor poor, who did not want to contribute to this edifice; the wonders that the Saint performed there were also so great that they were the happy seeds of many other monasteries of men and women that were soon given to his Order in the other cities, and which compose at present the provinces of Messina and Palermo. One shows in Milazzo, above the main door of his church, two large stones that he raised alone and without the help of anyone, and from which it is impossible to tear off any splinter, and a salty well whose waters he made sweet only until the time when a cistern would have been made. His miraculous crossing, of which we have just spoken, is attested in the acts of his canonization by several witnesses, and it would have been by many others, if information had been taken in Sicily, where the tradition of it is very widespread. Pierre Colosse, who had refused him passage in his boat, recognizing his fault, felt an incredible confusion and pain; and, when he saw him beatified, he came every morning to his church in Messina, where, by striking his breast and shedding many tears, he ceaselessly deplored his rusticity, which had deprived him of the happiness of taking such a great man across.

After Saint Francis of Paola had thus satisfied the piety of the Sicilians, he returned to his convents in Calabria. However, the prodigious actions he performed at every moment, making a great noise throughout Italy, led Pope Paul II, who ascended the chair of Saint Peter on August 6, 1464, to want reliable news of them, and for this purpose, he sent one of his chamberlains to the Archbishop of Cosenza so that he might be fully informed. The Archbishop, who knew the holiness of the servant of God, spoke very advantageously of him to this prelate: "But so," he told him, "that one cannot doubt our testimony, take the trouble yourself to go to him, question him, examine him, and report to the Pope only what you have known of him through your own information." The chamberlain believed him, and, without giving notice of his journey, he went as soon as possible to Paola. As soon as he saw Saint Francis, he wanted to kiss his hands out of respect; but the Saint defended himself with great humility, telling him that it was much more appropriate that he himself render this duty to him, as one who had been honored for thirty-three years with the priestly dignity. The chamberlain was surprised by these words, which he found to be true upon reflection. Nevertheless, when he had been led to the fire, wishing to execute his commission, he began to speak against the life of the Saint and against that of his children, taxing him with indiscreet rigor and dangerous singularity, on which he spoke at great length. The Saint listened to him peacefully; but as it was a matter of supporting the establishment of the perpetual Lenten life, for which he had received the order from heaven, he took burning coals in his hands, and, holding them for a long time without burning himself, he said to the prelate: "You see, My Lord, what I do by the virtue of God; do not doubt also that, being assisted by this virtue, one can endure the most austere life and the greatest rigors of penance." The prelate, frightened, wanted to throw himself at his feet to ask his excuse and receive his blessing; but he was prevented by the Saint, who asked him, on the contrary, for his; he then had a completely heavenly conversation with him, which charmed him; he left his company even more edified by the eminent holiness that he displayed through his discourse and his manners of acting and speaking than he was astonished by the miracle he had seen performed before his eyes. He informed the Pope and the entire Roman court of this; which disposed the Holy See to the graces it has since granted to the Order of Minims. Moreover, this kind of miracle, of handling fire and burning things without receiving any damage, was so common to Saint Francis that there are an infinity of examples of it in the course of his life. It must be believed that God granted him this privilege in reward for his charity and his prodigious austerity, and to authorize the penitent life that he had come to establish in the world.

Archbishop Pyrrhus had given him permission to take three houses in his diocese, setting an example for other prelates so that they would allow him to make similar foundations; he wanted to honor his nascent Order with beautiful privileges. Thus, in the year 1471, he exempted it from his jurisdiction and that of his successors, and placed it under the immediate protecti on of the Hol pape Sixte IV Pope who authorized the reform of the Couëts. y See. Two years later, Pope Sixtus IV made the authentic establishment of the said Order, under the name of Hermits of Saint Francis, which h as since been cha Religieux Minimes Mendicant religious order founded by Saint Francis of Paola. nged by Alexander VI to that of Minims Religious, and he gave its holy founder, whom he created its superior general against his will, ample power to found houses throughout the Christian world, and to compose a Rule and Constitutions for its conduct.

These favors from the sovereign Pontiffs and the prelates of the province of Calabria did not prevent him from being the object of the persecution o Ferdinand Ier, roi de Naples King of Naples who initially persecuted the saint. f his own prince, Ferdinand I, King of Naples, as well as the Duke of Calabria and the Cardinal of Aragon. The cause is not well known; but it is probable that it was for some important advice that the Saint had given to this prince, for the good of his person and his State; they did not please him, and pleased his children even less, who profited from his exactions and his tyrannical government. Be that as it may, they sent to Paterno, where the servant of God was, a galley captain with soldiers to seize his person and bring him feet and hands bound to Naples. This news threw the whole country into consternation. The principal citizens tried to dissuade this captain from attempting anything against such a holy man; they pointed out to him that it would be to draw upon himself and the entire royal house the anger of God and the scourges of his indignation. Notwithstanding this, he wanted to execute his order. He entered the church and the convent, looking for the one his prince hated. Francis, far from hiding, as his disciples begged him to do, knelt on the steps of the high altar, exposed to the sight of everyone. The captain and the soldiers passed often in front of him and around him; but God making him invisible, they could not perceive him. Finally, he revealed himself, and at the same instant this captain was touched by the hand of God and filled with such great respect that he threw himself at his feet and asked his pardon for his attempt. The Saint raised him with great kindness, and told him to fear nothing; but to go on his behalf to tell the king, the queen, and their children that if they did not correct themselves of their vices, they would soon experience, with their whole house, the rigor of the vengeance of the Almighty. He also charged him with blessed candles and other objects of devotion to present to them. Finally, he did not want to let him or his men leave without having a meal. And this wonder happened: two small loaves and a pint of wine, which were served to them, were sufficient to satisfy them all, although they were more than forty, and they ate and drank freely, according to their need; and, at the end of the meal, there remained as much bread and wine as had been placed on the table. The court was soon informed of what had happened, and, by this means, the persecution ceased.

However, the Saint, knowing by a prophetic spirit that the Turks were about to descend into Italy and the kingdom of Naples, gave notice of it to the king, sending word to him, with his usual generosity, that he should not concern himself with the affairs of others, but that he should take care to preserve his States, which were about to be attacked by the infidels. He also declared to his religious, and to other persons, what God had made known to him of this descent; they were all the more terrified by this, as his prediction of the capture of Constantinople in 1453 by Mahomet II had been punctually fulfilled. The king neglected to prevent this misfortune, and, in the year 1480, on the last day of August, Achmet Pasha, having had his army land, seized Otranto, a considerable city and port, had the archbishop and many of the inhabitants impaled, and sacked most of the surrounding places. Such a great misfortune made Ferdinand open his eyes. He promptly sent an army to retake this city and to drive the Turks from Italy, then he commanded the principal lords of his kingdom to be present at the siege, to help repel this common enemy. Jean Nicolas, Count of the Arenas, was one of them; but as he was a great servant of God, and an intimate friend of the Saint, he did not want to leave for this expedition without recommending himself to his prayers and asking for his blessing. He came to find him at Paterno, with a fine company of gentlemen and soldiers from his vassals. The Saint, who had spent eight days in prayer and tears in his cell to divert the scourge of God from Italy, assured him that they would take Otranto, that they would drive out the Turks, and that they would all return in health; he gave each of them a blessed candle as a safeguard. The thing happened as he had predicted; for, although the count and those in his suite were often in the midst of the enemies, and a horrible carnage was made around them by stones, projectiles of all kinds, and fires thrown by the besieged, and the plague also made great ravages in the camp, not one of those who had received these candles was killed or wounded; the city was taken, the Turks forced to withdraw, and all this holy company returned home full of glory and health. The only muleteer of the count, who had mocked the Saint's blessed candles and had not wanted to take any, died of the contagion, and his body immediately exhaled an unbearable odor. This story is attested in the acts by unimpeachable witnesses.

King Louis XI, Le roi Louis XI King of France who enriched the reliquary of the Innocents in Paris. an astute, political, and distrustful prince, was reigning in France at that time. He was afflicted with a dangerous illness from which he ardently desired to be cured. There were no skilled physicians he had not consulted, no remedies he had not tried, no devotions he had not performed or had performed to overcome it; but as neither God nor men satisfied him through all these means, hearing of the wonders that the holy hermit of Calabria had long been performing, he had a great desire to speak with him and have him near him. It was, no doubt, by a secret movement of divine Providence, which willed that Saint Francis should come to France to give more luster to his Order and to extend it more easily throughout Europe. He urged him himself by letters, promising him very considerable advantages for himself and his own, if he would come to find him. But as these letters were without effect, the Saint being too dead to the world to be moved by its promises, Louis had recourse to the King of Naples and asked him, as a singular favor, to send him his holy man. Ferdinand did his best to persuade the Saint to give the Most Christian King the satisfaction he desired, not considering that to lose him was to lose the happiness of his State and something more precious than his entire kingdom. But Francis always defended himself against it, not believing that he should undertake such a great journey, because those who invited him had in view that he should come to perform a miracle. Finally, Louis addressed Pope Sixtus IV, and begged him to command the hermit of Paola to come and find him. The Pope, judging it appropriate to satisfy him, sent two Briefs to the holy man, by which he ordered him to proceed promptly to the court of France. It took no more than that to determine him, and the voice of the sovereign Pontiff was for him like an order come from heaven.

He said goodbye to his children, left as his vicar Father Paul of Paterno, of whom we have already spoken, and whose holiness was so great that, besides several miracles reported of him, his body remained for one hundred and fifty years after his death without corruption. His poverty excused him from giving them presents; but the few things that remained to them of him, such as an old habit, a hood, a cord, a tunic, a discipline, and a tooth from his mouth, which he gave to his sister, have been, and still are, sources of supernatural favors and healings throughout Calabria. He performed several miracles as far as Naples, as in Salerno, in Cava, and in other places, which the reader will be able to see in his history.

In Naples, he was received with the same pomp as if he had been a great apostolic legate (these are the very terms of Philippe de Commines), or as if the King had made his own entry for the first time. Ferdinand, his children, and all the nobles and persons of quality in the city went out to meet him, and the crowd of people was so great that, without the efforts of the Prince of Taranto, the King's second son, who had come to fetch him as far as Salerno, it would have been impossible to make him pass. The King wanted him to lodge in his palace, either to do him more honor or to have a means of observing him. Spying at night, through cracks, at what he was doing in his room, he perceived him in prayer, all surrounded by light, and raised several feet above the floor; he was all the more surprised, as he persuaded himself that after the fatigues of a journey and a solemn reception, and after having received such great honors, he would hardly be in a state to pray; but he did not yet know that the fervor of the Saint was so constant, and his humility so profound, that neither honors raised him, nor labors cast him down.

The next day he invited him to eat at his table; but the Saint having excused himself as from a thing that did not suit him, he sent him, for his dinner, fried fish that had been served to him. The Saint blessed them, restored them to life, and sent them back to him by the same page who had just brought them; which he did to correct his distrust, knowing well that he had only sent him this dish to test him. Then, the King came to find him himself and presented him with a quantity of gold coins, to help, he said, with the foundation of his convents; but the Saint told him again courageously that he would do much better to return this gold to his poor subjects, whose blood he had sucked through unjust taxes, than to give alms that could only be abominable before God. And, to convince him of the truth of what he was telling him, he took one of these gold coins, broke it in two, and made several drops of blood flow from it in his presence. This terrible miracle, which is attested by the oldest writers of his life, cast terror into the mind of this prince; he recognized his fault, wept over it bitterly, and promised to make amends; but he hardly executed, in the following, what he had promised, and thus he drew upon himself and his whole family the scourge with which this great Prophet had already threatened him, and with which he threatened him again on this occasion. However, the King obliged him, before his departure, to choose a place for the monastery he wanted to build for him in his royal city. He chose it, but in the dirtiest and least frequented quarter of the city. The King was astonished and told him that his religious would be useless there and that they would better render, in another place, the services that one could expect from their charity. But the Saint predicted to him that this quarter he had chosen would one day be so pleasant and so populated that there would be none like it in the whole city; which the event has shown to be true, because the palace of the viceroy was built there opposite the convent of the Minims, with a large number of mansions and beautiful houses, which have made it entirely change its face.

From Naples, the Saint was conducted by sea to Rome. His first historian assures that there was such a great crowd at his entry, because of the miraculous healings he was performing at every moment, that it was impossible to approach him either by water or by land. The Pope received him with much honor, and even, according to Philippe de Commines, gave him three audiences, at each of which he conversed familiarly with him for three or four hours, absolutely wanting him to be seated on a beautiful chair. All the cardinals visited him and gave him marks of a most singular esteem and veneration. His Holiness wanted to raise him to the ecclesiastical orders; but he always constantly defended himself against it, and contented himself with the power he gave him to bless candles and rosaries; which has been the source of an infinity of miracles he performed in France. He spoke to him of the vow of the Lenten life, which he wanted to establish in his Order; but as the Pope made many difficulties about it, he took by the hand the cardinal nephew, who was Giuliano della Rovere, and said to His Holiness: "Holy Father, this one will do what your Holiness has so much trouble doing"; predicting by that that he would be Pope. Which he confirmed again to this cardinal, when he took refuge in France, under the pontificate of Alexander VI. Indeed, he was later under the name of Julius II, and it is he who approved the rules of the Order with the fourth vow of the Lenten life.

The servant of God, having satisfied his devotion by visiting the holy places and having received the apostolic blessing, returned to Ostia and resumed the road to France. Passing through Genoa, he pointed with his finger to a neighboring mountain, where he assured that there would one day be a convent of his Order; which was executed thirteen years later, by the liberality of Prince Doria. He had predicted the same thing in Messina, by pointing to the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher; in Cava, near Naples, by laying the first stone of the church of a Congregation called the Society of Jesus, and in Rome, by pointing to the Pincian Hill; and one can say of him what is said of Samuel, that none of his words fell to the ground, but that they were all punctually fulfilled.

From Genoa, the envoy of the Most Christian King, who had come to fetch him in Calabria and was leading him throughout the journey, had him take the route to Marseille; but, by a guidance of divine Providence, the vessel docked at a small port between Bormes and Brégançon. The Saint, before setting foot on land, confessed and distributed blessed candles to the most considerable of the company; which he did to prepare himself for the great wonders that God was going to perform, through his means, throughout the kingdom of France. Having landed, he imprinted his footprints on a rock, which still retains them at present; and this very place has become very famous by a chapel that the inhabitants had built there, and which is visited by all the neighborhood with much devotion.

The envoy asked to enter the city of Bormes; but that would have been refused, because of the plague that was ravaging the whole country and had already begun to spread in this city, if the Saint had not said: "Open out of charity, God is with us." They opened at this word, and this kindness of the inhabitants was not useless to them; for the Saint having said his prayer, all their sick, and even those who had retired to the countryside to be treated, were healed in a moment; and, what is more admirable, there remained to them this great privilege, that the plague never enters their city, whatever damage it does in the whole province, and that none of the citizens of Bormes, wherever they may be, and even if they were to sleep with the plague-stricken, is ever infected by the contagion. We have had, until now, countless proofs of this, and which have even been legally examined and approved. Also, immediately after the canonization of the Saint, they had a superb church built in his honor; and, in these recent times, they have given a convent to the religious of his Order. The city of Fréjus, through which he passed afterwards, likewise experienced his great power before God, for he also healed all those who were struck by the epidemic. This benefit was recognized eight years later, by the foundation of a beautiful monastery, where three general chapters were celebrated, but which, since then, has been changed to that of Arles, because of the intemperance of the air.

It must be said here, in passing, that these two cities are not the only ones that have been healed or preserved from the plague by the prayers and protection of this great Servant of God. He has renewed this miracle several times after his death; and he is one of the Saints who is invoked with the most success in this public calamity. In the year 1629, the city of Naples confessed that it was indebted to him for its preservation, in a horrible contagion that had just ravaged all of Sicily and part of Italy; and, in thanksgiving, it adopted him among the number of its principal patrons, which was done with a pomp and magnificence that had not yet had an example. The description of it was printed in Italian and French, under the title of *Patronage of Naples*. The cities of Morlaix and Saint-Pol-de-Léon, in Lower Brittany; that of Mons, in Hainaut, that of Malaga, in Spain, and those of Cosenza and Paterno, in Calabria, render him their thanks every day, for having been delivered from the same evil by his powerful intercession. We have already said that that of Paterno was by means of water, where one of his hoods had soaked; it healed generally all those who drank of it. That of Cosenza was almost at the same time by a miraculous oil that flowed from the lamp that burned in his chapel of Paola; its mere anointing restored health to all those who were infected. As for that of Malaga, it was in the year 1637 in an even more extraordinary manner; for, as more than twenty thousand people had already died there in less than a month, a lawyer of the Third Order of the Saint, named Antoine Pérez, who had a relic of him, having had it touched by the sick of his house, healed them all on the spot. The bishop having learned of it, ordered a solemn procession where the image of Saint Francis of Paola was carried, and during which eight hundred plague-stricken people, who were in the hospital, were healed, and the plague ceased entirely throughout the city. Let us now resume the continuation of our history.

We would have to stop at every step, if we wanted to report all the other prodigies that the Saint performed throughout the course of his journey. He had performed some on the sea by preserving his vessel from a shipwreck and from a capture by corsairs, which seemed inevitable; he performed others on land throughout the rest of the way: for, as the cities and towns went on all sides to meet him to receive his blessing, he often rewarded their devotion with extraordinary favors and healings. Sometimes also he rendered himself invisible, either to not be interrupted in his prayers, or to avoid the honors that one wanted to defer to him, which one day put the envoy of France in extreme distress, by making him believe that the Saint had taken the road back to Italy.

King Louis XI, learning of his arrival in France, had so much joy that it seemed that he had conquered a new kingdom, and it is said that he gave ten thousand crowns to the one who brought him the first news of it. Knowing that he was approaching Tours, where he resided, he ordered his dauphin, who has since been called Charles VIII, to receive him at Amboise. He did so with great testimonies of esteem and respect, and, since that time, he has always loved and honored him as his own father. But, if we believe Philippe de Commines, the King even surpassed this welcome; for he did not receive him upon his arrival at Plessis-lès-Tours, which was on April 24, 1482, with less honor and submission than if it had been the Pope himself. He Plessis-lès-Tours Royal residence near Tours where the saint lived and died. went out to meet him with his court; and, as if he had recognized in him something divine, he threw himself at his feet, and begged him to restore his health. The Saint raised him as best he could, and, as for his health, he answered him what a wise person should answer him, namely: that the health and life of kings, as well as that of other men, being in the hands of God who has counted all their days, one must address oneself to him through prayer, to know his will on this matter. The King had him lodge in an outbuilding of his castle, in a small house near the chapel of Saint-Mathieu, in order to be able to enjoy his conversation more easily, and gave charge to two of his officers to take care of his subsistence and that of his religious; but, as he was suspicious by nature, and as, moreover, his physician, Jacques Coythier, was adroitly casting thoughts of distrust of the holy man into him, through a secret jealousy that he had against him, he began to tempt and test him in various ways.

Indeed, he sent him sometimes a precious buffet filled with a quantity of gold and silver vases, which he could apply, he said, to the construction of a monastery; sometimes an entire service of pewter tableware for his use; sometimes an image of Our Lady that was valued at eighteen thousand crowns; but as the Saint refused all these presents to which he preferred his poverty, he brought him himself secretly a hat full of gold coins, assuring him that he could take them without fear, and that no one would know anything about it. The Saint gave him a severe reprimand on this, and told him that he would do much better to repair the wrongs he had done to so many people during his life and to think seriously about obtaining pardon for them through penance, than to give presents of iniquity, and to tempt the servants of God. This prince, nevertheless, did not yield yet; but, seeing that the Saint was unshakeable on the side of avarice, he wanted to test him on the side of intemperance, often sending him baskets of beautiful fish, and telling him that, if he did not eat any, he begged him at least to let his companions eat some. But this admirable servant of God, who penetrated by the light of heaven the malice of his host and the iniquity of his offering, would not acquiesce to it; he replied that his religious were content with coarse food, and that they did not need these delicious dishes, which were only good for the mouths of the great.

Finally, the King recognizing by this the incomparable virtue of a man proof against all kinds of temptations, conceived an extraordinary esteem for him, and gave him entire credit in his mind. Often he would go to visit him in his cell, where he would remain for a very long time alone with him, and one would see him leave this sanctuary with his eyes bathed in tears and with great sentiments of compunction for his past faults. Other times, not being able to go there because of his illness, he would have him come into his room, where the Saint spoke to him and to the persons of his court with so much prudence, wisdom, and vigor, that it was all visible that the spirit of God was speaking through his mouth. This is how Philippe de Commines says it, a man of the court, who assures having heard him speak in this manner several times.

Certainly, there are two things to remark about this wonderful man in this place, which should not give less astonishment than his greatest miracles, and which make it manifest that his virtue had raised him to a perfect enjoyment of the liberty of the children of God. First, although he had always been in solitude, or occupied with the construction of his convents in Calabria, nevertheless, when God made him leave it to extend his Order in other countries, he appeared in the first courts of Europe, and treated with the Pope, kings, cardinals, princes, bishops, ladies of quality, with all that was great, spiritual, and delicate in these courts, without any embarrassment, but with as much engagement, openness, and ease as if he had been raised there all his life; none of those with whom he conversed for more than twenty years ever remarked anything weak, fawning, or reprehensible in him, but always a great strength of mind, a completely heavenly wisdom, and a holiness that obliged everyone to revere him. Then, he knew well that King Louis XI passionately desired health; one could not speak to him of death, without him entering into fits of rage and fury; and, after all, he had only had him come from Calabria in the hope that he would cure him; nevertheless, our Saint having learned, in prayer, that the prince should not expect this grace, but that, his hour having come, he should prepare himself for the final passage, he generously brought him the word, saying to him like Isaiah to Hezekiah, but in much more delicate circumstances: "Dispose of your affairs, for you will die and will live no more." And this king, far from letting himself go to his ordinary angers, received this advice from the mouth of the Saint with great calm and perfect submission of mind, asking him only to serve as his director and to prepare him for this hour which is the most terrible of all hours. The Saint did so with great care; and thus, this great French monarch, who had been during his life the terror of princes, the arbiter of the universe, and the avenger of kings, being well provided with the sacraments of the Church, rendered his spirit to God on the very day that Francis had predicted, against the advice of the physician, namely August 4, 1483.

Upon dying, he commended his three children to him: Charles, his dauphin, only thirteen years old; Princess Anne, married to Pierre, Duke of Bourbon; and Princess Jeanne, married to Louis, Duke of Orleans, who has since become Louis XII. The Saint took extraordinary care of them; for Princess Anne, who appeared sterile and could not have children, he obtained two for her through his prayers, a boy and a girl; in gratitude, she founded and had the convent of the Minims of Gien built in the year 1496 or 97. As for Princess Jeanne, he contributed much, through his advice and intercessions with God, to help her reach that eminent holiness which causes her to be publicly recognized as blessed; when King Louis XII repudiated her, Saint Francis consoled and strengthened her so powerfully that she joyfully exchanged the status of Queen of France for that of the solitary spouse of the Son of God. Finally, regarding Charles VIII, he assisted him pe rpetually in Charles VIII King of France, husband of Anne of Brittany. his affairs. It is he who, through his tears, helped him win two signal victories of extreme importance for his person and for his entire kingdom: one, on the day of Saint Aubin, against Francis, Duke of Brittany, during which war he was locked in his cell for twenty-two days to obtain heaven's help for him; the other, on the day of Fornovo, against the princes of Italy leagued together to destroy him, upon his return from the conquest of Naples. The Saint knew, by revelation, the danger the king was in, and having disclosed it to his religious, he had them pray with him to merit God's protection. And his prayer was so effective that this prince, with seven thousand soldiers, overcame an army of forty thousand men led by the most skillful captain in all of Italy. It is also this holy man who, after the defeat of the Duke of Brittany, procured the king's marriage with Anne, his daughter and sole heiress, which forever united this rich and illustrious province to the crown of France.

Charles, for his part, forgot nothing to reward the favors he had received and received every day from the Saint. He visited him often, or had him come to his cabinet to have his advice in the most thorny affairs of his State and his conscience, and it is said that, out of respect, he never spoke to him uncovered. He absolutely wanted him to name his dauphin at the baptismal font, of which there is an authentic act in the registers of the Chamber of Accounts in Paris. He had the famous convent of Plessis built for him in his own park, to which he assigned revenues for the subsistence of his religious. He also gave him one in Amboise, whose Church was built on the very spot where he had received him while dauphin, by the command of King Louis XI, his father. When he entered Rome triumphantly in the year 1495, and was proclaimed Emperor of Constantinople there by Pope Alexander VI, one of his greatest cares was to found a monastery of his Order there: it is that of the Holy Trinity, on the Pincian Hill, which, according to the intentions of its founder and the ordinances of the Saint, confirmed by four sovereign Pontiffs, must only be inhabited by religious of the French nation.

King Louis XII, who was heir to the crown of Charles, was also heir to his benevolence and liberality toward this great servant of God. It is true that, at first, as he did not know his merit, because he had always been far from the court, he gave him permission to return to Italy; but, having learned what a treasure he would be deprived of by losing this holy man, whom the kings, his predecessors, had looked upon as the support of their State and the powerful safeguard of the kingdom of France, he immediately retracted this permission. He conceived so much respect and esteem for him that he even exceeded the graces that Louis XI and Charles VIII had bestowed upon him; no other proof is needed than the great privileges he granted to his Order.

The favor of these three kings gave such a high reputation to this nascent Order that it spread in a short time into several considerable cities of the kingdom; many lords and women of quality wanted to have monasteries on their lands and in the places of their domains. Its progress was the same in Italy and Sicily; one saw the convents of Rome, Naples, Genoa, and Messina rise, of which we have already spoken; and others in Spain and Germany through the piety of Ferdinand V, King of Castile and Aragon, and Emperor Maximilian I, who wanted to have, in their States, shoots of such a happy plant; the holy man thus had the consolation of seeing his Order established in his lifetime in the four main parts of Europe. Later it extended to America.

But what contributed most to such a prompt increase was undoubtedly the number of his miracles and prophecies, and his life more angelic than human; he had a particular grace for obtaining from God that He grant the favor of maternity to women who remained sterile, for attracting the help of heaven upon those who were in labor, and for preserving and restoring the health of small children who were recommended to his prayers. We have many miracles of this kind in the information gathered in Tours for his canonization. Since his death, he has often shown that he still has the same power; I want no other proof than the infinite number of paintings and votive images that one sees in the churches and chapels dedicated under his name, and that great quantity of children who have worn or who still wear at present the habit, the color, or the cord of his Institute.

We will say here, on this occasion, that there are hardly any sovereign houses in Europe that are not beholden to him for some prince or some princess. That of France is indebted to him for King Francis I, one of the greatest monarchs to have worn the scepter; for Madame Claude of France, his wife, daughter of Louis XII, and for the young Francis, their first dauphin, elder brother of Henry II. That of Austria is indebted to him for Emperor Leopold-Ignace, who reigned in the 18th century. That of Savoy, for Duke Charles-Emmanuel, a prince endowed with very fine qualities, and who governed his State with such kindness and prudence that he made himself immortal in the spirit and heart of all his subjects. He himself very often said that he was a child of Saint Francis of Paola, and that he also owed to his merits the birth of his son, Prince Victor-Amadeus-Francis, who succeeded him. That of Bavaria, for Duke Ferdinand Maria, son of Maximilian I. That of Lorraine, for Duchess Nicole, only daughter and heiress of Henry II, Duke of Lorraine. That of Mantua, for the happy lineage of Charles of Gonzaga, Duke of Nevers, who gave sovereigns to the Mantuan and Montferrat; a queen, wife of two kings, to Poland; and a very virtuous princess to the Palatinate of the Rhine. That of Montpensier, for Marie of Bourbon, first wife of the Duke of Orleans. That of Urbino, for Prince Guy Ubaldo, whose birth was all the more wonderful as his father was unable and without hope of having children, and he was only led to make a vow to Saint Francis of Paola to obtain one by the desire and devotion of his subjects.

I leave aside the houses of Condé, Nemours, Nassau, Saint-Georges, and several others, which have similar obligations to his prayers, and which have rendered him public acknowledgments. I have not spoken of Louis the Great; for, if Queen Anne of Austria, his mother, acknowledged that the vow made by her to our Saint had contributed much to her fertility, nevertheless it is just to give thanks most especially for the birth of this great king, from whom the Church and France have drawn so many advantages, to the liberality of the Blessed Virgin, who wished to reward, with such a worthy gift, the offering that Louis the Just and the same Anne of Austria, his wife, had made to her of their kingdom, in 1638, in the church of the Minims of Abbeville.

I return to the other miracles that the servant of God performed while in Tours. For supernatural healings, it suffices to say that he continued in France what he had done in Italy; with this difference only that, to better hide the gift of God, which he had most at heart, he performed almost all these cures by means of blessed candles and rosaries that he distributed or sent to the sick; he thus attributed their healing more to their faith, or to the virtue of the blessing, than to the merit of his prayers, which he believed to be very small. However, he healed Queen Anne of Brittany, who was always supremely affectionate toward him, in another way. This princess, in a dangerous illness, sent to recommend herself to his prayers; he had three apples brought to her, and sent word for her to eat them for her healing; she ate them against the advice of all the doctors, who judged that this would cause her death; and, in a short time, she was healed.

His most notable prophecies were those that gave rise to his convents in Malaga, in Spain, and in Nigeon-lès-Paris. In the year 1487, Ferdinand, King of Castile and Aragon, was besieging the city of Malaga, occupied by the Moors; Saint Francis knew, by revelation, that this prince would lift the siege and abandon his enterprise if he were not supported and strengthened by some heavenly promise. He therefore sent him, from Tours to Spain, two of his disciples, and sent word for him to have good courage, and that, in three days, God would make him master of this place. The thing succeeded as he had foretold. Ferdinand, who had already made arrangements for lifting the siege, took heart, and, three days later, he entered the place triumphantly. In gratitude, he had a church built in honor of Our Lady of Victory, and then gave it to the Order of the Minims: it is this church and the signal victory won over the Moors in the taking of a place of this importance that have caused them to be called throughout Spain the Brothers of Victory. Some time later, two doctors of the Sorbonne, named Jean Quentin and Jean Standonc, both renowned for their science and piety, but who, for some human considerations, had been opposed, in the council of the Bishop of Paris, to the establishment of this new Order in his diocese, were deputed, for some business, to King Charles VIII, who was in Amboise; they resolved to go as far as Tours, to see and sound out the holy hermit. Their arrival was not unknown to him; he learned of it in prayer; and, as they arrived in Tours, he sent two religious to ask them to take lodging in his convent. This message astonished them extremely. But they were much more surprised when, having entered into conference with him, they heard him speak of our mysteries, and explain the greatest difficulties of theology with more clarity and light than the greatest scholars of their Faculty could have done. Then he showed them his prophetic spirit with brilliance, by predicting to them that after having hindered until then the propagation of his Order and its establishment near the capital of the kingdom, they would subsequently be its most zealous promoters, and even its agents and procurators; which effectively happened; for, having returned to Paris, they applied all their care to the construction of the famous convent of Nigeon, and showed so much zeal for this affair that the Saint abandoned the entire conduct of it to them. It is believed, however, that while going to Champagne, he passed through this monastery and gave it his blessing.

The life of this great servant of God was always perfectly uniform: neither the change of places, nor the passage of years, nor even advanced old age ever made him change his conduct. His living, his clothing, his sleeping, his vigils, his fasts, his prayers, his mortifications, were the same after eighty years as they had been in the vigor of thirty and forty years. Although he was General of a cenobitic Order, employed in ecclesiastical ministry, he always remained constantly in his state as a hermit. He had a cell separated from the others, which we could call, like the mountain of Moriah, a place of vision, since it was there that the angels visited him, that God communicated Himself perfectly to him, and that he was raised in a very high contemplation of divine truths. One day, he did not open the door to King Charles VIII, who came himself to knock at his door, because it was not right, say the acts of his canonization, to leave the King of heaven to entertain a king of the earth. Only this same cell was witness to the tears he shed there, the bloody disciplines he gave himself there, and the extraordinary graces he received there. However, part of the day was spent in church, either in receiving communion and hearing Masses, which he did with extraordinary tenderness and fervor, or in assisting at the canonical hours, which he did not fail to recite, although he was not a cleric; or in meditating on the mysteries of our salvation; and the fire of divine love that inflamed his heart then became so vehement that it sometimes raised him several cubits above the floor; which happened not only before his religious, but also in the presence of Anne of Bourbon, eldest daughter of Louis XI, and several other ladies of the court who bore witness to it.

He had a particular devotion to the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, and of the Passion of Our Lord; and the names of Jesus and Mary were so deeply engraved in his heart that he pronounced them at every moment, as well as that of charity: thus he wished that most of the churches of his first convents be dedicated under the invocation of one of these names or both together. Finally, he appeared in everything so dead to the world, so detached from the senses, so immersed in God, so inflamed with divine love, that one would have taken him for a seraph rather than a man subject to the miseries and weaknesses of the body.

His virtues appear with such brilliance, in all that we have just said, that it is no longer necessary to dwell on them in particular. Indeed, what faith must he not have had to move, by his word, mountains from one place to another, to enter into burning furnaces without being burned, to suspend rocks in the middle of the air, to draw fountains of living water from the hardness of pebbles, to walk dry-shod on the waves of the sea, to drive away contagious diseases with authority, and to command the elements and all of nature? What hope and what confidence in God to begin, without any human help, the establishment of a great Order that recognizes none more austere; to promise with assurance, either children to sterile women, or healing to the sick whom medicine judged incurable, and to feed, by supernatural multiplications, entire troops with a piece of bread that was not sufficient to feed one man alone! What fervor and what love of God to leave his parents and all the things of the earth so young, to retire at fourteen into a dreadful desert devoid of all the comforts of life; to lead until ninety-one a life so austere and so contrary to the inclinations of nature; never to relax in the exercises of prayer and penance, and to put all his joy in conversation with God and in the application to the advancement of his glory! What charity towards his neighbor, to be constantly employed in doing good to everyone, in healing the sick, in consoling the afflicted, in helping the poor, in converting sinners, in instructing the ignorant, and in doing all the other works of corporal and spiritual charity; to spend entire weeks in fasting and prayer, in order to turn away the scourges of God from kingdoms and to draw His graces and the effects of His mercy upon His people; in a word, to make himself, like Saint Paul, all things to all men, so as to save them all!

What shall we say of these virtues that we call cardinal? Does his prudence not appear admirably in the foundation and government of his Order, in the salutary advice he gave to those who had recourse to his counsel, and in his ways so discreet of dealing with so many people so different in age, state, and condition; with the Pope, kings, cardinals, bishops, ministers of State, ladies of the court, and so many others who were never bored with him and whom he always perfectly satisfied? Does his justice not shine forth in the refusal he made of the goods that were offered to him to the prejudice of restitution, in his gentle severity towards his guilty religious, and in his zeal against sinners and especially against the great who tyrannically abused their authority? Does his strength not show itself, either in bearing with joy calumnies and persecutions, or in generously undertaking what God inspired him for His glory, however difficult that might be, and although that appeared much above his strength, or in persevering, until death, in the same conduct of life; or, to put it better, in always advancing from virtue to virtue, without one being able to notice that he ever retreated, or that he ever stopped on the path of perfection? Does his temperance not shine in a most singular way in his fasts and his continual mortifications, in his abstinence from meat, fish, and wine, in his aversion for all sensual pleasures, and for all the satisfactions of the body; and especially in that virginal purity that he kept inviolable, and almost without any contrary movement, until the last breath of his life?

I say nothing of his humility, so profound that, whatever prodigies he performed, and whatever honors he received, he always remained constantly in the view of his weakness and his impotence, and in the persuasion that he was unworthy of all honor; thus, all General of his Order that he was, he did not fail to serve his brothers and to lower himself to the vilest ministries of his convents. I say nothing either of his sweetness and his affability: they so won over all those who had once enjoyed his conversation that they never left him without a great desire to return, following these words of Wisdom: "Those who eat me will still be hungry, and those who drink me will still be thirsty." And this is what acquired for him the friendship of the Spanish and German lords who were at court, and which was the cause of two beautiful colonies of religious that he sent to Spain and Germany, as we have already remarked.

Finally, what crowned all this beautiful concert of virtues was his admirable simplicity; he did all things without affectation and without study, in a manner so easy and so tranquil that one would have said that miracles naturally came out of his hands and prophecies from his mouth, and that he had passed into a nature of extraordinary grace and conduct. Francis of Paola was what we ordinarily call good, that is to say, open, frank, candid, helpful, prompt to do good to everyone; it is this character and this spirit that he left to his children, and which reigns throughout his Order.

It is therefore this life so marvelous that was the principal cause of such a prompt establishment of his Order in the first four parts of Europe. He had had permission from Pope Sixtus IV, as early as the year 1474, while still in Calabria, to compose the Rule; and one can believe, with much appearance, that he worked on it from that time; nevertheless, he did not send it to Rome, and did not ask for the approval of the Holy See until the year 1492. It was Alexander VI who then occupied the chair of Saint Peter: he gave him this approval with much praise, and even changed the name of Hermits of Saint Francis, which his religious bore, to that of Minims, which the Saint cherished particularly. Julius II confirmed it again later, namely in the year 1506, after some changes that this excellent legislator had made to it, and especially when he had made a vow of the Lenten life, which was at the beginning only a constitution.

This Rule is quite particular and different from the four ancient ones, which, alone, were then in force: we mean those of Saint Basil, Saint Augustine, Saint Benedict, and Saint Francis of Assisi. The Church sings, in the office of his feast, that he composed it by a movement, a light, and a particular application of the divine Spirit, and that it contains all the perfection of religion: he himself named it a sweet and holy Rule, *hæc est Regula mitis et sancta*. Although it is called a Rule, in the singular, it nevertheless includes three: that of the religious, who bind themselves to the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and perpetual observance of the Lenten life; that of the nuns, who make the same vows and keep the same observances; and that of the Third Order, for secular persons who wish to lead in the world a life more austere and more perfect than the life of the common faithful. To this Rule, the Saint added two other works: 1st a Correctorium, in which he marks the penances that must be imposed, in his Order, on the transgressors of the commandments of God and the Church, and on the violators of their Rule; and 2nd a Ceremonial, in which he marks the ceremonies that one must keep in the recitation of the divine offices and in the other ecclesiastical functions. So that one can say that he perfectly imitated Moses, the first and most famous of the legislators, who, according to the doctrine of Saint Thomas, gave three kinds of precepts to the Israelites: the precepts of morals, for the good conduct of their life; the precepts of judgments, for the punishment of the guilty, and the precepts of ceremonies, for the regulation of divine worship.

It is time to come to the end of this holy life. Three months earlier, the servant of God, who had always prepared for it with extreme care, wished to renew his dispositions more particularly. He shut himself up more than ever in his cell at Plessis, and remained there almost always retired and hidden, so that there would be nothing to distract him from that spirit of love, of which he hoped soon for the full enjoyment and blessed eternity. On Palm Sunday of the year 1507, he had some onset of fever, which he learned by revelation was to be the instrument of his deliverance; he did not, however, wish for any care to be taken of him, nor for any relief to be given to him. On Holy Thursday, he assembled the religious in the sacristy, which served as a chapter room, according to the ordinance of his Rule, and exhorted them to the love of God, to charity for one another, and to the faithful observance of their Rule, and especially of the Lenten life, which distinguished them from other religious. It is said that on this occasion, to strengthen the spirit of some faint-hearted ones who viewed this vow as an unbearable rigor, he took fire in his hands and told them not to fear anything, and that the same God who enabled him to handle these burning coals without burning himself would give them the strength to endure a life they believed to be above nature. I believe, however, that this great miracle had happened long before, when he had changed this abstinence from all kinds of meat, from a simple constitution that it was, into a fourth vow, in the year 1501.

The same day, he had himself led to the church, where, after confessing, he received the Holy Eucharist in the manner that all his religious received it on that day, that is to say, barefoot and with a rope around his neck. But he showed, in this action, so much devotion and fervor, and such great transports of love and joy, that it was easy to see that this was the communion that was to unite him to his center and make him enter into the possession of the sovereign Good. After the thanksgiving, he retired to his cell, leaning on the arms of his religious. A brother, named Bertre, asked him if, in the afternoon, they should wash his feet, according to the custom of the Church. He replied no, but that the next day they would do with his body what they wished, predicting by this that the following day would be that of his death. The rest of the same day and the following night served to inflame him more and more with the desire to see Him whom he had only known under the veils of faith. He called his religious around him for the last time, exhorted them again to peace among themselves and to the practice of their observances, named a vicar general in his place until the first Chapter that would be held in Rome, received with singular devotion the sacrament of Extreme Unction, and had the seven Penitential Psalms, the Litanies of the Saints, and the Passion of Our Lord according to Saint John recited to him; then, he blessed his children, armed himself with the sign of the cross, took holy water, lovingly kissed the image of the Crucifix, and, raising his eyes toward heaven, he said this last word of Jesus dying on the cross: "My Father, I commend my spirit into your hands." This was not, however, his last; for, regaining a little strength, he added this excellent prayer that one of his companions, named Michel Lecomte, has preserved for us: "O lovable Jesus, good shepherd, preserve the just, justify the sinners, have compassion on all the faithful departed, and be favorable to me, although I am but a very unworthy sinner!" Upon finishing these words, he rendered his spirit to God, without any appearance of pain or death, but like a person who is surprised by a sweet sleep that numbs all his senses.

It was not only on the very day of the death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Good Friday, but also around the hour at which it is believed he expired, as Pope Leo X expressly remarked, with everything we have just said, in the bull of his canonization. Cardinal Bellarmine makes much of this circumstance, and admits that it gave him a particular veneration for Saint Francis of Paola, whose life and death had been vowed to honor Jesus Christ crucified and expiring on the cross. The time of his birth, in 1416, and that of his death, in 1507, sufficiently mark that he lived ninety-one years. This is also the age given to him, not only by the acts and the bull of his canonization, but also by the lessons of his office and all the authors who have written about him for two centuries, as the curious will be able to see in the dissertation of which we spoke at the beginning of this life.

His holy body was carried to the church and remained exposed there for three days, without being able to be buried, because of an infinite concourse of people of all kinds of conditions who came to see and honor him. On Easter Monday, he was buried in a chapel of the nave, on the right side. But the Duchess of Bourbon, daughter of Louis XI, and the Duchess of Angoulême, mother of Francis I, not being content that he had been put in the ground, mainly because this place was very damp due to the frequent flooding of the Cher river, forced the religious to raise him the following Thursday. He was again exposed for several days, during which he always appeared as beautiful and as fresh as if he had only been asleep. He even exhaled such a pleasant odor that the whole church was perfumed by it; this prodigy attracted so many people to the convent, in a simple countryside, that in one day no less than six thousand people were seen there. The painter who had already molded his face, shortly after his death, imprinted it once more after twelve days, in order to represent it more naturally; he is one of those who authentically bore witness to this state of non-corruption, and it is from him that we have the painting of the Vatican, which served as an original for an infinity of images and paintings of the Saint that have been made since. A grotto of masonry, very well vaulted, was made in the same chapel to place this rich treasure, and he was deposited there in a large hollowed stone, in the form of a tomb, which the Duchess of Bourbon had brought from the commandery of Balan, after the commander had donated it to her. This stone had always appeared so heavy that eighteen pairs of oxen had not been able to lift it, which had forced it to be left on the road; but it became light, and two oxen dragged it very easily as soon as it was destined for such a holy use.

The faithful began from then on to make vows to this great Saint, to ask for his intercession with God and to obtain his assistance and supernatural favors through his merits, and their vows were often answered in heaven. The most famous was that made by Queen Anne of Brittany, by the advice of Messire Laurent Lallement, Bishop of Grenoble, for the healing of Madame Claude of France, her only daughter, who was dangerously ill; immediately this princess recovered perfect health, although she was very far from the Queen, who was then residing at the castle of Monbonnot, in Dauphiné. The letter of this most illustrious prelate to Pope Leo X bears indubitable witness to this healing. It happened only three weeks after the death of the Saint.

Everything that had belonged to him, served him, or touched him also received a very particular virtue to perform miracles and to restore health to the sick. The acts of his canonization attest that before his death, glasses that he had sent to a holy ecclesiastic of his Third Order, named Ange Serra, who was blind, restored his sight as soon as he used them; his iron discipline, which was stained with his blood, healed a woman afflicted with a chest ailment, the violence of which she could not bear; a cord that he had worn, having been presented in Rome by one of his religious to a possessed woman, the demon was forced to leave her body and leave her in freedom; and, after his death, a piece of his tunic having been divided into twenty pieces, to be distributed to twenty gentlemen who each wished to have their share, such a prodigious multiplication occurred under the hand of the Lord Jean, Count of Arènes, who was doing the distribution, that there was enough for eighty other people who arrived at the same time, and there were still seven left for the Count. These pieces have since been sources of miracles throughout Calabria and the kingdom of Naples, where they were dispersed. The caps and other cords that he had used, and those that were put on him on purpose after his death, still procure graces and visible relief every day to those who have them applied to them with faith and piety. There are very authentic examples of this on all sides, which I nevertheless refrain from reporting; I will only say, in passing, that these free-thinkers, to whom these devotions do not please, should consider that if God, by a secret of His Providence, and to humble the human spirit, has attached His greatest graces and the very work of our salvation to what is most common on earth, namely: to water, chrism, and oil, which are the matter of three of our Sacraments, one should not be surprised that He also uses the least things that have been at the use of the Saints to confer considerable favors to those who apply them for their relief. It is in this that He shows His greatness and His magnificence; He shows that He knows how to reward with interest the honor that His servants have rendered Him, since He does not only honor them in their persons, but also in everything that touches them and has belonged to them. Thus we read in the Acts of the Apostles, whose testimony is indubitable, that the handkerchiefs of Saint Paul, and the cloths that had touched him, being placed on the sick, delivered them from their illnesses and even had the power to drive out evil spirits from their bodies; and we have seen, in the life of Saint Gregory the Great, that this Pope, so learned and so enlightened, believed he had given some ambassadors a very precious relic of great virtue by giving them only a white cloth that he had had touched to the bones of the Martyrs; and, in fact, to convince them of it, he made blood come out of it by piercing it with a knife. This therefore shows that it is not a weakness of spirit, but an act of religion that is very holy and very advantageous, to have the sacred remains applied to oneself, not only of the body, but also of the clothes of the Saints.

All the great, both in France and in Calabria and in the kingdom of Naples, interested themselves in the canonization of the one of whom we are speaking. Queen Anne of Brittany solicited it as long as she lived, following the vow she had made, by the advice of the Bishop of Grenoble, for the health of the princess her daughter. After her death, King Francis I, Queen Claude, his wife, the Duchess of Angoulême, mother of the King, and several princes and princesses of their blood pressed for it even more. Their letters on this subject, both to the Pope and to the cardinals, have been preserved, and we still have the copies in our hands. Finally, the decree was solemnly published on May 1, the year 1519, by Pope Leo X, to whom the Saint had predicted that he would be Pope, and who testified that he had never done any action with as much joy and satisfaction as that one. It was King Francis I who paid all the expenses of this solemnity; and although he had done it with such magnificenc e that one pape Léon X Pope who authorized the office of Saint Ozanne. has hardly seen anything similar since, he believed, nevertheless, that he had done nothing to recognize the obligations that his house and his whole kingdom had to the memory of the one who had just been declared a citizen of heaven. This canonization gave the freedom to build churches, to set up altars, to celebrate masses, and to sing solemn offices in his honor; which was done immediately in many places, not only by the religious of his Order who had permission for it since the time of his beatification, made on July 7 of the year 1513, but also by many other communities that were waiting for this moment with impatience, to testify publicly to the Saint their gratitude for his benefits.

It seemed that nothing had been missing for his glory but martyrdom; but God wanted to give him in some way, after his death, the honor of which he had been deprived during his life: for in the year 1562, the Calvinists, having entered his convent of Plessis with armed force, to sack it and violate its holy things, as they had done in the other churches of the city of Tours, pulled him from his tomb, where they found him entirely intact, and still clothed in his habits, although he had already been dead for fifty years; dragged him with a rope that they put around his neck into the room intended for receiving guests, and burned him there with the wood of the great crucifix of the church, which they split into several pieces for that purpose. I leave it to the piety of the readers to make whatever reflections they please on the circumstances of this attack; I will only say that it had not been unknown to this great servant of God during his life, and that he had even predicted the time and the year to his disciples. In fact, in the year 1562, a few months before the Calvinists came to Tours, the Rev. Fr. Mathurin Aubert and the Rev. Fr. Joseph le Tellier, who has since been General of the Order, making the visitation to the convent of Plessis by deputation, an old religious, who had seen the holy Father, and who had even received the habit from his hands, declared to them that the time was approaching at which this great Prophet had predicted that the churches of Tours would be profaned and pillaged by the heretics. This is what makes me say of him what the Church sings of Saint Martin on the day of his feast: "Although the sword of an executioner did not take his life, he did not, however, lose the merit and the palm of martyrdom." I do not say this only because his life, as it is stated in the act of his canonization, was a long and continuous martyrdom, or because he a thousand times wished to shed his blood and be immolated for the defense of Catholic truths; but also because he accepted, being alive and still capable of merit, the barbaric and inhuman treatment that he knew would one day be done to his body, just as Our Lord accepted before his death the spear thrust that was to pierce his side and heart after his death.

Moreover, far from diminishing the honor that was paid to his body, this cruelty served much to make it more famous and more glorious. For, since that time, more miracles have been performed at his tomb than before, and it has been visited more than ever by cardinals, bishops, princes, princesses, and the greatest lords of the kingdom. There has not even been until now (said Fr. Giry in 1685), a single one of our kings who has not rendered him this duty, and they have all looked upon this devotion as an act of gratitude and piety, which seemed hereditary to their crown. The bones of our Saint having been, for the most part, removed from the pyre by zealous Catholics who mingled skillfully among the heretics, they were distributed, in the course of time, to various churches. Notre-Dame-la-Riche, a parish of Tours, received some, which Queen Marie de Médicis had enclosed in a precious reliquary. The others, besides what the convent of Plessis-lès-Tours retained, were given, by the wise disposition of the superiors, to those of Nigeon, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Madrid, Malaga, Barcelona, Paola, Naples, Genoa, and some others, where they were richly encased in gold, silver, and crystal.

One invokes this great Servant of God for all kinds of affairs, necessities, and afflictions, whether public or private, spiritual or bodily; and one does so, either by promising to perform some act of piety in his honor, or by novenas, or by thirteen-day prayers, an ancient devotion of thirteen Fridays, to honor the day of his death which was a Friday and the thirteen weeks of years, that is to say, the ninety-one years that he lived on earth. God has granted so many graces and extraordinary favors to these ways of praying and imploring His mercy, that one cannot doubt that they are very pleasing to Him. One of the most considerable is the signaled miracle that happened to the Minims of the city of Calais, in the year 1661, in the person of a pious girl, called Péronne Rault. She had been so infirm for several years that she could only drag herself on crutches, and with the help of a servant; many of her bones were dislocated and out of their natural position, and she even had one leg half a foot shorter than the other; her ailment had even increased for three months, and it had been impossible for her, during all this time, to go to church otherwise than by being carried in a chair. Finally, after the feast of Saint Francis of Paola, she took the resolution to make a novena in the chapel that is dedicated under his name, to ask him for her healing, notwithstanding what the King's doctors had told her, when they passed through Calais, that her ailment was incurable and that she would never recover from it. On the fourth day of her novena, which was that of the octave of the feast, after she had attended mass and received communion, she was seized by an extraordinary pain and weakness, during which she felt her bones move, her nerves stretch, and as if a beneficial humor spread through all her limbs to restore them; she also heard the sound of the same bones entering back into their joints and fitting into one another, according to the natural constitution of the human body; and, at that instant, she was so perfectly healed that, after having had a second mass said to thank God for such a signal favor, she left her crutches in the chapel, where they were seen hanging for a long time, and returned home on foot, in good health and without the help of anyone. The Bishop of Boulogne, on whom the city of Calais depends, had a legal investigation made of this great event, and, after having recognized that it was a true miracle, he permitted its publication, and a solemn recognition by a Te Deum and a procession. This served not a little to confound the heretics and to strengthen the English Catholics, who, as neighbors, were soon informed of this prodigy.

There are an infinity of similar ones; but as it would be useless to detail them, it remains for me to say that Pope Gregory XIII gave a plenary indulgence, in perpetuity, to all the faithful who, on the day of the feast of Saint Francis of Paola, will visit one of the churches of his Order, and, being confessed and having received communion, will offer prayers there for the ordinary subjects marked in his Bull. It is from the year 1580, and it is expressly stated there that, when this feast is transferred, which happens quite often by concurrence with Holy Week, or with the solemnity of Easter, the indulgence will also be transferred with it, and that it will never be separated from the office. In the year 1585, Pope Sixtus V also placed Saint Francis of Paola in the Roman Breviary, with three proper lessons, which are the summary of his life.

The attributes of the holy Founder of the Minims are: 1° the cartouche surrounded by rays bearing the word charity — *charitas* — which word thus framed has become both the coat of arms and the motto of the Order: we have said in what circumstance; 2° a staff, either to express his great age, in which he must have needed this third foot of the elderly, or to recall the miracle he performed of stopping with his staff an enormous stone that was rushing down a steep slope; 3° a donkey in front of a forge. A blacksmith who had just shod the Saint's donkey demanded, cash on the nail, the payment of his wages; but as the man of God did not carry money on him, the blacksmith flew into a rage with a thousand curses: to put an end to this noise, Francis ordered his beast to shake its feet and return the shoes. The donkey, obeying against its custom, made its ironwork fall at the feet of the worker, very astonished at such an outcome. — We will only briefly recall other notable circumstances of the life of the Saint that may have served to characterize him and that we have already described, such as that of his crossing the Strait of Messina on his cloak; his visit to Ferdinand, King of Sicily, before whom he breaks in two a gold coin that lets blood flow; his arrival before Louis XI, who receives him on his knees, etc., etc.; we will also point out that the scapular of the Minims is much smaller than that of other religious Orders: it only comes to mid-body, instead of falling to the ground. The color of the robe and of the whole costume is black. Several cities have taken Saint Francis of Paola as their patron or the titular of one of their churches: Naples in 1619, Nocera in 1631, Tours in 1653, Malaga in 1637; Havana where he was chosen before being known there: his name having been put in an urn with that of several other saints, was brought by a child in charge of the drawing of lots (1628).

The Order of the Minims gave in France the example of submission to the Bull *Unigenitus*, and consequently attracted the criticism of the Jansenists.

The Minims have given to letters several celebrities: we count among the French the Fathers Niceron, Mersenne, Plumier, Avrillois, Le Clerc, de Coste, Monteynard, Giry, author of the *Life of the Saints*, which serves as a basis for ours, etc.

In the 18th century, the Minims had five houses in Rome, one of which, the *Trinité-du-Mont*, belonged to the French. They counted six provinces in Spain, two houses in Paris, one in Vincennes, etc.

Today, these religious have seven houses in the Austrian States and several in Italy. They have made efforts to re-establish themselves in France, their second homeland: they do not count, as far as we know, other houses than those of Marseille, one of religious men and the other of religious women.

Father Giry mainly drew from the original documents that were used in the affair of the canonization, the biography of the founder of the Minims, and he wrote it with all the more love, as he was a Minim himself: we have hardly retouched his style.