In the next year Prince Charles was taken prisoner by Peter of Aragon, and shut up in Barcelona for four years. He attributed his deliverance and the restoration of his kingdom—his father having died in the meantime—to the influence of St. Mary Magdalene, and set in hand the building of a church at Saint-Maximin which should be more worthy of the holy relics it contained. But it was not until more than two hundred years later that it was finished.
Charles carried to Rome the sacred head, to offer it for the veneration of the Pope, Boniface VIII. We are not told how it had come about, but the head had been discovered deprived of the lower maxillary. The Pope knew that a relic of this sort was honoured at the church of St. John Lateran in connection with St. Mary Magdalene. It was found to fit perfectly, and the Pope presented it to the King, who did not keep it with the greater part of the head, possibly because the magnificent reliquary would have had to be altered to receive it, but presented it in his turn to the nuns of Notre Dame de Nazareth at Aix. There it remained, until the amiable King René, who has left such a pleasant memory of himself in Provence, finally restored it to Saint-Maximin.
During all the two hundred and forty years that the great church was in the building the precious relics that it enshrined attracted pilgrims without number. Six Popes visited them, to say nothing of two anti-Popes; in one year alone five kings bowed before the shrine; royalties came from as far off as Sweden; the unfortunate Albigenses, after they had "abjured their errors," were compelled to make pilgrimage to it; and finally Louis XIV, with his mother, Anne of Austria, his brother, afterwards Duke of Orleans, and a numerous and splendid following, bent his knee at the sacred tomb, and assisted in the translation of the relics into a magnificent receptacle of porphyry. These relics would not, of course, include the head. Some vertebræ were offered to the Queen, who accepted them with gratitude. The sacred bones were examined by the King's head physician, and immediately placed in a case of lead covered with gold brocade, upon which the King placed his seal in six places. It was carried the next day in procession, and the church was filled with people, who shed tears of joy to see renewed in their own day "a devotion so holy and august in the presence of a king and queen so pious and devout."
During all these years, however, the relics had not been preserved without vicissitude or diminution. Under the Queen Jeanne, Provence was overrun by brigands, and for three years they were hidden at Sainte-Baume. King René gave part of the lower arm to the nuns who had the lower jaw. In 1505 a Neapolitan monk robbed the reliquary of its jewels, and was caught and hanged. After this mutilation a new reliquary was presented by the Queen of France, Anne of Brittany, as splendid as the old one, and a statuette of herself was added to it in enamelled gold. Louis XIII asked for some fragments of the body, and was refused. Four years later he asked again, on behalf of the Queens Mary of Medici and Anne of Austria, and was more successful, obtaining also a fragment to be presented to the Sovereign Pontiff.
In 1639 a portion of the much venerated noli me tangere was stolen from the head, and, whether it is the same or not, a minute particle of the noli me tangere is cherished in the church of Mane, in the Basses-Alps. In 1781 Louis XVI ordered a thigh bone to be detached and presented to the Duke of Parma, which was done.
We have followed the story for nearly eighteen hundred years, and now comes the Revolution, which wrought more havoc than all the successive disturbances that had taken place before it. The church was spoiled and the sacred relics profaned. The porphyry urn was violated, and the documents it contained burnt. The glorious remains of the saint were thrown pell-mell on the pavement, the head was torn from its gold case, and the other bones from their reliquaries. But the piety of the sacristan preserved the chief glory of the church, which was restored to it five years later. The head, a bone from one of the arms, some locks of hair, together with the reliquary of the Holy Ampulla, and sundry fragments of the bodies of other saints were received back when the storm had passed over, and there the bulk of them remain to this day.
CHAPTER V
The Church of Saint-Maximin