A Spring Walk in Provence

by Archibald Marshall

Out of all of which the sceptic may at least accept the fact, interesting enough, that the crypt as it stands is of the date at which St. Mary Magdalene probably died.

When the Saracens were burning all the churches, and scattering all the sacred relics that they could lay hands upon, the Cassianite monks who had been in charge of these peculiarly holy ones for three hundred years, filled the crypt of their church with earth so as to hide it, and for further precaution moved the bones of St. Mary Magdalene from their tomb in the place of honour into that previously occupied by those of Sidonius, where they remained for five hundred years.

So far, then, we have in evidence the tradition of the landing of this company of saints on the shores of Provence and their subsequent missions, not from St. Maximin alone, but also from Aix, Marseilles, Tarascon and Saintes-Maries, in each of which places are monuments to their glory. We have also the evidence of a burial-place of the first century which was an object of veneration at that time and remained so thereafter.

It is true that during the epoch of the Crusades the magnificent church of Vezelay in Burgundy, in which Bernard of Clairvaux preached and Richard Cœur de Lion took the vows, attracted to itself great honour by its claim to possess the true relics of St. Mary Magdalene. But M. Rostan points out that this belief on the part of Vezelay, so far from being in flagrant contradiction to the Provençal tradition, confirms it; for the monks of the Abbey of Vezelay attributed the possession of these sacred relics to the piety of their founder, Gérard de Roussillon, who was Count and Governor of Provence under the Emperor Lothair. "But as the body of St. Magdalene had not been visible at Saint Maximin for a long time, and the precise spot in which it was hidden was not known, the statement of Vezelay was believed, and conferred great celebrity upon it as a place of pilgrimage, until the moment when it entered the designs of Providence to clear up the mystery that enveloped the tomb of the glorious saint and dispel all uncertainty upon the subject of her relics."

The instrument of this discovery was the Prince of Salerno, known later as Charles II, King of Sicily and Count of Provence, who was the son of Charles of Anjou, the belligerent brother of St. Louis.

It was in 1279. While Charles I was fighting in Italy, his son, then at Aix, moved by a great devotion towards St. Mary Magdalene and a lively desire to recover her relics, betook himself to Saint-Maximin in order to have excavations made beneath the pavement of the church. He put himself at the head of the workers, and on the ninth day of September had the singular happiness of uncovering the ancient sarcophagus which held the venerated body. Restraining the zeal of his assistants the prince put his seal on the tomb, and at once summoned a convocation of prelates to witness the exhumation of the sacred bones, which took place on the eighteenth day of the same month. In the dust of the tomb was discovered a box of cork enclosing an inscription on parchment or papyrus, which, translated from the Latin, runs thus:

"In the year of our Lord 716, in the month of December, very secretly in the night, when the most pious Odo was king of the French, at the time of the invasion of the perfidious nation of the Saracens, this body of the most dear and revered Mary Magdalene was translated from its own tomb of alabaster into this one of marble, out of fear of the said perfidious nation of the Saracens, because it is more secret here, the body of Sidonius having been removed."

Contemporary historians unanimously report the miraculous circumstances that accompanied the discovery. All make mention of the delicious odour that came from the sarcophagus when it was opened. They tell, too, how a verdant plant of fennel grew from the tongue of the blessed penitent, whose body had not yet known corruption. The noli me tangere, the spot on the forehead which the Saviour had touched, was in a perfect state of preservation. Among the eminent churchmen who vouched for the miraculous events that surrounded the disinternment was the Cardinal de Cabassoles, Petrarch's friend, whose country retreat at Vaucluse we shall visit later.

Prince Charles caused a magnificent reliquary to be made at Aix to hold the head of the saint. It was of silver gilt, in the form of a hollow bust, into which the skull was fitted. The face and the hair were of gold, and it was surmounted by a gold crown set with precious stones.