Saint Savin

It was a time when the Church, delivered in Gaul from the poison of Arianism, arianisme Heresy opposed by Columbanus in Italy among the Lombards. breathed again at the tomb of Saint Hilary after long and lively struggles. However, error did not cease to appear in Poitou with the barbarian hordes who possessed Aquitaine: the Visigoths were the masters there, and this region especially had to endure their brutal exactions.

Upon arriving in that part of the upper Poitou where the Gartempe flows into the Creuse, the two young men found the country occupied by several detachments of these barbarians. The faith of the Trinity that they preached displeased the fierce enemies of this adorable mystery: they pursued the two Saints, who thus found themselves forced to separate to escape more easily through the woods with which the country was covered. But God permitted that the same fate would soon reunite them in a dwelling that no one could take f rom t Savin Priest and martyr of Poitou, brother of Saint Cyprian. hem. Savin had taken refuge on a small island in the Gartempe, named the Gué-de-Sceaux, between the current town of Saint-Savin and Antigny (Vienne). He was already exercising his charitable zeal there toward a few poor souls who listened to his instructions when he was discovered, very close to a place then called Le Cerisier. His persecutors seized him, and, to force him to renounce Jesus Christ, subjected him to cruel torments. Whips, the rack, and iron combs exercised his constancy in turn; but pain could not overcome this intrepid soldier of Jesus Christ: he forgot his suffering to exhort his executioners to convert, and they could only impose silence upon him by cutting off his head on the very site of his generous combat.

Cyprian Cyprien Bishop of Carthage cited as an example for his refusal to appoint his priests. had managed to reach Antigny, but he was not safe there for long. Men eager in his pursuit had set out on his trail and caught up with him there. Urged to renounce Jesus Christ, in the name of his youth which these barbarians seemed to want to respect, the young man rejected this unworthy apostasy with horror, and died the death of his brother.

The two priests, who had been forced to separate from the two Martyrs, had not lost sight of them, and hastened, the following night, to come and steal their bodies from the earth with which they had been covered. They were carried and buried in the same tomb, at the Three Cypresses, a country house in the vicinity, which occupied the eminence known today by the name of Mont Saint-Savin. The name of the two brothers did not take long to become famous in the region, and spread the renown of their miracles far and wide.

## CULT AND RELICS.

In 806, Charlemagne founded a magnificent abbey on the banks of the Gartempe, near a place sanctified by our two Martyrs. The Rule of Saint Benedict was followed there until its destruction in 1794. Miracles continued there, numerous and striking, such that Pepin I, King of Aquitaine, who held his court in Poitiers, jealous to possess some of these pious riches, obtained from the monks what had not been granted to other churches: remains of Saint Cyprian. They were tr ansported to saint Cyprien Bishop of Carthage cited as an example for his refusal to appoint his priests. Poitiers in 828, amidst great pomp and an immense crowd of people, who had gone to fetch them from the abbey church and accompanied them to the capital of Poitou.

There was then outside the city, and on the banks of the Clain, a small church dedicated to Our Lady and Saint Martin: it was there that the holy bodies received a new refuge, and that a vaster and more beautiful church was raised under the invocation of Saint Cyprian. Pepin added a monastery there where Benedictines were placed, and which he endowed with lands and revenues. Shortly after, in 846, the Normans came to besiege Poitiers and overturned the church and the buildings. Rebuilt in the first years of the 10th century by Bishop Frottier II, it was dedicated, in 936, to the Blessed Virgin and the holy Martyr. But it seemed that the two brothers, whom God had united during their life in such a holy friendship, whose death had been the same, who had rested for nearly four centuries in the same tomb, and who had finally been separated only to honor them more, it seemed, we say, that they were to be found together in the devotion of the great city. This is why a parish church was dedicated there to Saint Savin shortly after, and was only suppressed, like the abbey of Saint-Cyprien, in the unhappy days when it was given to the enemy of God to "prevail for a time against his Church". It was to recover in our century its former splendor.

The church of Saint-Savin is today a basilica two hundred and forty feet in length, recently restored by the State and noted as the masterpiece of the Romanesque style, not to mention its 12th-century frescoes, which make it a true museum and have an almost European reputation, its spire which is incontestably today one of the most beautiful in France, and its 11th and 12th-century inscriptions with which all its altars are covered. The frescoes in the crypt of this basilica provide, in painting, the most complete history of Saint Savin. The materials for this biography were provided to us by the Abbé Auber, who wrote the Lives of the Saints of Poitiers, and by the parish priest and dean of Saint-Savin.