ABSTRACT
Louis IX 2 was the son of a father who had been nicknamed “ The Lion ” and his grandfathers, Philip Augustus and Alphonse the Noble, King of Castile, were men of valour. On the maternal side, he was the great-grandson of the Empress Eleanor and the great King of England, Henry II. Trained by his mother Blanche, he had been brought up in a school of activity. Personally, he was of a nervous, irascible temperament but he possessed a firm will. He was a brave knight and a king who could punish severely. He complained, like many mystics, that he had not the gift of tears, and, when he prayed, could not “ water the dryness of his heart ” . He was no bigot, had no love for fanatics, and was horrified by hypocrisy. His relations with his followers, as they are reported to us by his friend the Sire de Joinville, reveal his malicious gaiety. After his majority, he passed several years of brilliant youth and this fine knight won great admiration, “ slender, tall stature, angelic countenance, and gracious figure.” Joinville has told us how he hid from his mother to make love to his young wife, Margaret of Provence, but he was chaste and had an unsmirched soul. He had been brought up in the practices of an exalted devotion and he developed more and more rigorous habits of mortification. He was afraid of not loving his Saviour enough and not suffering enough for him. He deprived himself of earthly enjoyment, submitted to regular beatings with chains of iron, and attended the sick and the poor, preferably the most repulsive. Worn out by vigils and fasting and still infected by an ague he had caught in Saintonge during the war against
the English in 1242, he all but died in 1244. There is no doubt that the idea of approaching death contributed not a little to make him an ascetic.
