le, 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.
Besid