A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [301]
A son of the chaste and pious Count Guy de St. Pol, who had died of the plague as a hostage in England, and of Jeanne de Luxemburg of the same family as the late Emperor Charles IV, Pierre had been orphaned at three and rather precociously renounced the flesh in an oath of perpetual chastity at six. He was said to have imposed the same vow on a twelve-year-old sister and to have reproached his brother for laughing, on the ground that the Gospels recorded that Jesus had wept but not laughed. At eight he was an overgrown, hollow-chested ascetic, who was sent to study in Paris, where he practiced fasting and self-flagellation and demanded to enter the austere and currently fashionable Célestin Order. Opposed in this wish by his guardians, he regularly visited the Order to share its bread and water and sleep on the bare ground fully clothed without removing belt or shoes in order to be ready for prayers at midnight without losing time.
His remarkable piety combined with high birth won him appointment as a canon at nine, as archdeacon some years later, as Bishop of Metz at fifteen and Cardinal at sixteen. The red robe did not discourage his austerities or lonely orisons. His life was “nothing but humility” and “always he fled from the vanities and superfluities of the world.” He spent the greater part of the day and night in solitary prayer or in writing down his sins in a notebook by candlelight and confessing them twice a day to his chaplain. His urgency, like Catherine of Siena’s loquacity, was sometimes too much for the chaplain, who occasionally feigned sleep when he heard Pierre knocking on his door in the middle of the night.
The boy Cardinal developed a faculty for miraculous cures: he was credited with saving the Duchesse de Bourbon from labor pains lasting two weeks, healing wounds suffered in a tournament by Guy de Tremolile, resurrecting a steward of the Duc de Bourbon who had been felled by a thunderbolt, and outside this rather limited circle, restoring to health a poor workman who had been tortured by brigands. When he died of consumption and self-imposed rigors in 1387, he was buried by his wish in the paupers’ cemetery at Avignon, where his grave became an object of pilgrimage by the poor and sick, causing a “great marvel” at the visitations made there daily. Kings and nobles, including the Sire de Coucy, sent rich gifts and lamps of silver, and Froissart, who never missed the newsworthy, came to observe the crowds at the grave.
To ensure a foolproof case for canonization, the hearings on Pierre’s qualifications lasted six months and took evidence from 72 witnesses on 285 different articles. As Witness Eight in the first week, Coucy testified from personal knowledge, telling how, when Pierre went to take possession of the Bishopric of Metz, he had required the men-at-arms of his brother, Count Waleran de Pol, to evict the Urbanist clerics who held the episcopal property. When Waleran demanded to be reimbursed from the revenues of the bishopric, Pierre had said he would rather die than bind the lands of the Church, whereupon such discord arose between the brothers that Coucy himself had to take custody of the Church property until a settlement could be reached. He added that he had known Pierre from childhood and marveled at his piety, nor had he ever seen at Avignon a youth of such virtue.
All the roll of witnesses was not enough. Whether Clement’s own unholiness quailed before a question of sainthood or he hesitated for some other