Little Benet interrupted the bishop's sermon by announcing his mission. He was led to the provost of the city to be chastised, and announced it also to him. The provost reviled him but said that if he could carry away a certain stone which he had in his palace he would believe that he could build the bridge. The bishop and all the townspeople looked on while he raised the stone, which thirty men could not have moved, as easily as if it were a small pebble and carried it away to form the foundation stone of his bridge.
So, with a gift of money from the repentant provost, and more from the townsfolk, and with the usual miracles of healing and raising the dead to life, the bridge was begun, and Little Benet hailed as a true saint.
The pretty story, which is given in full, translated from the Provençal, in Mr. Okey's book need not be rejected entirely. There was a Little Benet, as well as a Great, and he was instrumental in building the bridge. For he was chief of a community of Friars Hospitallers founded at Maupas, near Avignon, in 1164, "to establish ferries, build bridges, and give hospitality to travellers along the rivers of Provence."[14]
One of the most attractive exhibitions of religious feeling in the Middle Ages, among a good many that are not at all attractive, was this undertaking of works of necessity by men of piety who believed that they were doing service to God by doing service to men. "Travellers were considered as unfortunates deserving pity," says M. Jusserand in his "English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages," in which there is much interesting information about the building and preservation of roads and bridges, "and help was given to them to please God."
Thus, when Henry VIII gave the lands of the dissolved monastery of Christ Church to Canterbury Cathedral, he declared that he made this donation "in order that charity to the poor, the reparation of roads and bridges, and other pious offices of all kinds should multiply and spread afar." It is probable that the Frères Pontifes, taking their pattern from the Collegium Pontificum of Rome, owed their Christian impetus to St. Benet of Avignon, for his is the first society of its kind that is known, though it was soon copied all over Europe. It took him eleven years to build the bridge, and he also built the chapel of St. Nicholas that still stands upon it. He was buried in this chapel, and his body remained there for five hundred years. But the great floods of 1669 so shook the structure that his remains were translated to a chapel at the end of the bridge, thence to the church of the Célestines, and finally at the Revolution, into the church of St. Didier.
Is it too fanciful to suppose that there is some foundation in fact for the legend of his beginning his great work as a child? I like to imagine him filled with his great idea as he walked by the side of the Rhône as a boy, talking about it and being laughed at, gradually forming a strong purpose, and finally bringing it to a triumphant issue. It reminds me of Dickens, as a poor child, passing the mansion of Gad's Hill and making up his mind that he would some day live there.
The bridge passed through many vicissitudes. It was much quarrelled over, and seems to have been kept in fair repair whenever the Church's rights in it were recognized, but let go when it was in the hands of the laity. It has been in ruins now for two hundred and fifty years, but the few arches that remain show how well Little Benet and his bridge-builders did their work; and as it stands now it is one of the most picturesque features of the beautiful city.