sant
girl, had her most famous sanctuary; there it was that Saint Catherine
received multitudes of pilgrims and worked great miracles. According
to popular belief the origin of her worship in this place was warlike
and national and dated back to the beginning of French history. It was
known that after his victory over the Saracens at Poitiers Charles
Martel had placed his sword in the oratory of the Blessed
Catherine.[462] But it must be admitted that since then the sanctuary
had long suffered from desertion and neglect. Rather more than forty
years before the coming of the damsel from Domremy, its walls in the
depths of a wood were overrun by briers and brambles.

[Footnote 461: _Trial_, vol. i, pp. 56, 75; vol. iii, pp. 3, 21; vol.
v, p. 378.]

[Footnote 462: That Saint Catherine was known in the west shortly
before the Crusades is possible, but not that her worship should date
back to Charles Martel; at any rate it flourished in the days of
Jeanne d'Arc. _Cf._ H. Moranville, _Un pelerinage en Terre sainte et
au Sinai au XV'e siecle_, in the _Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des
Chartes_, vol. lxvi (1905), pp. 70 _et seq._]

In those days it was not uncommon for saints of both sexes, if they
had suffered from some unjust neglect, to come and complain to some
pious person of the wrong being done them on earth. They appeared
possibly to a monk, to a peasant or a citizen, denounced the impiety
of the faithful in terms urgent and sometimes violent, and commanded
him to reinstate their worship and restore their sanctuary. And this
is what Madame Saint Catherine did. In the year 1375 she entrusted a
knight of the neighbourhood of Fierbois, one Jean Godefroy, who was
blind and paralysed, with the restoration of her oratory to its old
brilliance and fame, promising to cure him if he would pray for nine
days in the place where Charles Martel had put his sword. Jean
Godefroy had himself carried to the deserted chapel, but beforehand
his servants must perforce hew a way through the thicket with their
axes. Madame Saint Catherine restored to Jean Godefroy the use of his
eyes and his limbs, and it was by this benefit that she recalled to
the people of Touraine the glory they had slighted. The oratory was
repaired; the faithful again wended their way thither, and miracles
abounded. At first the saint healed the sick; then, when the land was
ravaged by war, it was her office more especially to deliver from the
hands of the English such p