ng of Burgundy, who died in 509.
St. Marius made a pilgrimage to St. Martin's, at Tours, and another to
the tomb of St. Dionysius, near Paris, where, falling sick, he dreamed
that he was restored to health by an apparition of St. Dionysius, and
awaking, found himself perfectly recovered. St. Marius, according to a
custom received in many monasteries before the rule of St. Bennet, in
imitation of the retreat of our divine Redeemer, made it a rule to live
a recluse in a forest during the forty days of Lent. In one of these
retreats, he foresaw, in a vision, the desolation which barbarians would
soon after spread in Italy, and the destruction of his own monastery,
which he foretold before his death, in 555. The abbey of
La-Val-Benois[1] being demolished, the body of the saint was translated
to Forcalquier, where it is kept with honor in a famous collegiate
church which bears his name, and takes the title of Concathedral with
Sisteron. St. Marius is called in French St. May, or St. Mary, in Spain,
St. Mere, and St. Maire, and in some places, by mistake, St. Marrus. See
fragments of his life compiled by Dynamius, extant in Bollandus, with
ten preliminary observations.

Footnotes:
1. In Latin Vallis Bodonensis. Baillet and many others call it at
present Beuvons, or Beuvoux: but there is no such village. Bevons
indeed is the name of a village in Provence, one league from
Sisteron; but the ruins of the abbey La-Val-Benois are very
remarkable, in a village called St. May, in Dauphine, sixteen
leagues from Sisteron, in which diocese it is. See many mistakes of
martyrologists and geographers concerning this saint and abbey
rectified by Chatelain, p. 424.

{276}

JANUARY XXVIII.

SAINT AGNES, V.M.

A SECOND commemoration of St. Agnes occurs on this day in the ancient
Sacramentaries of pope Gelasius and St. Gregory the Great; as also in
the true Martyrology of Bede. It was perhaps the day of her burial, or
of a translation of her relics, or of some remarkable favor obtained
through her intercession soon after her death.

ST. CYRIL,

PATRIARCH OF ALEXANDRIA.

From Socrates, Marius Mercator, the councils, and his works. See
Tillemont, t. 14, p. 272. Ceillier, t. 13, p. 241.

A.D. 444.

ST. CYRIL was raised by God to defend the faith of the Incarnation of
his Son, "of which mystery he is styled the doctor, as St. Austin is of
that of grace," says Thomassin. He studied under his uncle Theoph