e discharge of monastic
duties, and when he was grown up, St. Benedict made him his coadjutor in
the government of Sublaco. Maurus, by his singleness of heart and
profound humility, was a model of perfection to all the brethren, and
was favored by God with the gift of miracles. St. Placidus, a fellow
monk, the son of the senator Tertullus, going one day to fetch water,
fell into the lake, and was carried the distance of a bow-shot from the
bank. St. Benedict saw this in spirit in his cell, and bid Maurus run
and draw him out. Maurus obeyed, walked upon the waters without
perceiving it, and dragged out Placidus by the hair, without sinking in
the least himself. He attributed the miracle to the prayers of St.
Benedict; but the holy abbot, to the obedience of the disciple. Soon
after that holy patriarch had retired to Cassino, he called St. Maurus
thither, in the year 528. Thus far St. Gregory, Dial. l. 2, c. 3, 4, 6.

St. Maurus coming to France in 543, founded, by the liberality of king
Theodebert, the great abbey of Glanfeuil, now called St. Maur-sur-Loire,
which he governed several years. In 581 he resigned the abbacy to
Bertulf, and passed the remainder of his life in close solitude, in the
uninterrupted contemplation of heavenly things, in order to prepare
himself for his passage to eternity. After two years thus employed, he
fell sick of a fever, with a pain in his side: he received the
sacraments of the church, lying on sackcloth before the altar of St.
Martin, and in the same posture expired on the 15th of January, in the
year 584. He was buried on the right side of the altar in the same
church,[1] and on a roll of parchment laid in his tomb was inscribed
this epitaph: "Maurus, a monk and deacon, who came into France in the
days of king Theodebert, and died the eighteenth day before the month of
February."[2] St. Maurus is named in the ancient French litany composed
by Alcuin, and in the Martyrologies of Florus, Usuard, and others. {155}
For fear of the Normans, in the ninth century, his body was translated
to several places; lastly, in 868, to St. Peter's des Fusses, then a
Benedictin abbey, near Paris,[3] where it was received with great
solemnity by AEneas, bishop of Paris. A history of this translation,
written by Eudo, at that time abbot of St. Peter's des Fusses, is still
extant. This abbey des Fusses was founded by Blidegisilus, deacon of the
church of Paris, in the time of king Clovis II. and of Audebert, b