consideration which, in the humblest conditions, satisfies the self-respect of people, and elevates them in their own eyes.  “Louis used to visit his domestics when they were ill; and when they died he never failed to pray for them, and to commend them to the prayers of the faithful.  He had the mass for the dead, which it was his custom to hear every day, sung for them.”  He had taken back an old servitor of his grandfather, Philip Augustus, whom that king had dismissed because his fire sputtered, and John, whose duty it was to attend to it, did not know how to prevent that slight noise.  Louis was, from time to time, subject to a malady, during which his right leg, from the ankle to the calf, became inflamed, as red as blood, and painful.  One day, when he had an attack of this complaint, the king, as he lay, wished to make a close inspection of the redness in his leg; as John was clumsily holding a lighted candle close to the king, a drop of hot grease fell on the bad leg; and the king, who had sat up on his bed, threw himself back, exclaiming, “Ah!  John, John, my grandfather turned you out of his house for a less matter!” and the clumsiness of John drew down upon him no other chastisement save this exclamation. (Vie de Saint Louis, by Queen Marguerite’s confessor; Recueiz des Historiens de France, t. xx. p. 105; Vie de Saint Louis, by Lenain de Tillemont, t. v. p. 388.)

Far away from the king’s household and service, and without any personal connection with him, a whole people, the people of the poor, the infirm, the sick, the wretched, and the neglected of every sort occupied a prominent place in the thoughts and actions of Louis.  All the chroniclers of the age, all the historians of his reign, have celebrated his charity as much as his piety; and the philosophers of the eighteenth century almost forgave him his taste for relics, in consideration of his beneficence.  And it was not merely legislative and administrative beneficence; St. Louis did not confine himself to founding and endowing hospitals, hospices, asylums, the Hotel-Dieu at Pontoise, that at Vernon, that at Compiegne, and, at Paris, the house of Quinze-Vingts, for three hundred blind, but he did not spare his person in his beneficence, and regarded no deed of charity as beneath a king’s dignity.  Every day, wherever the king went, one hundred and twenty-two of the poor received each two loaves, a quart of wine, meat or fish for a good dinner, and a Paris denier.  The mothers of families had a loaf more for each child.  Besides these hundred and twenty-two poor having out-door relief, thirteen others were every day introduced into the hotel, and there lived as the king’s officers; and three of them sat at table at the same time with the king, in the same hall as he, and quite close.” . . .  “Many a time,” says Joinville, “I saw him cut their bread, and give them to drink.  He asked me one day if I washed the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday.  ‘Sir,’