said I, ’what a benefit!  The feet of those knaves!  Not I.’  ‘Verily,’ said he, ’that is ill said, for you ought not to hold in disdain what God did for our instruction.  I pray you, therefore, for love of me accustom yourself to wash them.’” Sometimes, when the king had leisure, he used to say, “Come and visit the poor in such and such a place, and let us feast them to their hearts’ content.”  Once when he went to Chateauneuf-sur-Loire, a poor old woman, who was at the door of her cottage, and held in her hand a loaf, said to him, “Good king, it is of this bread, which comes of thine alms, that my husband, who lieth sick yonder indoors, doth get sustenance.”  The king took the bread, saying, “It is rather hard bread.”  And he went into the cottage to see with his own eyes the sick man.

[Illustration:  “It is rather hard Bread.”——­146]

When he was visiting the churches one Holy Friday, at Compiegne, as he was going that day barefoot according to his custom, and distributing alms to the poor whom he met, he perceived, on the yonder side of a miry pond which filled a portion of the street, a leper, who, not daring to come near, tried, nevertheless, to attract the king’s attention.  Louis walked through the pond, went up to the leper, gave him some money, took his hand and kissed it.  “All present,” says the chronicler, “crossed themselves for admiration at seeing this holy temerity of the king, who had no fear of putting his lips to a hand that none would have dared to touch.”  In such deeds there was infinitely more than the goodness and greatness of a kingly sold; there was in them that profound Christian sympathy which is moved at the sight of any human creature suffering severely in body or soul, and which, at such times, gives heed to no fear, shrinks from no pains, recoils with no disgust, and has no other thought but that of offering some fraternal comfort to the body or the soul that is suffering.

He who thus felt and acted was no monk, no prince enwrapt in mere devoutness and altogether given up to works and practices of piety; he was a knight, a warrior, a politician, a true king, who attended to the duties of authority as well as to those of charity, and who won respect from his nearest friends as well as from strangers, whilst astonishing them at one time by his bursts of mystic piety and monastic austerity, at another by his flashes of the ruler’s spirit and his judicious independence, even towards the representatives of the faith and Church with whom he was in sympathy.  “He passed for the wisest man in all his council.”  In difficult matters and on grave occasions none formed a judgment with more sagacity, and what his intellect so well apprehended he expressed with a great deal of propriety and grace.  He was, in conversation, the nicest and most agreeable of men; “he was gay,” says Joinville, “and when we were private at court, he used to sit at the foot of his bed; and when the preachers and cordeliers who were there spoke