We stopped at Kermartin, a farmhouse near Tréguier, to see the bed said to have belonged to St. Ives, the favourite saint of the Bretons, and whose name is borne by the majority of the inhabitants of the district of Tréguier and St. Brieuc. Charles of Blois held him in great veneration. He gave part of a rib of St. Ives to the church at Lamballe, and carried the relic in procession barefooted to [pg 085] the church. Before the battle of Auray, he ordered his men to march "in the name of God and St. Yves."
St. Ives, or Yves Hélory, was one of the most remarkable characters of the thirteenth century. He studied law in the schools of Paris, and applied his talents in defending the cause of the poor; hence he was called "the poor man's advocate;" and so great to this day is the confidence placed in his justice, that, in the department of the Côtes-du-Nord, when a debtor falsely denies his debt, a peasant will pay twenty sous for a mass to St. Yves, convinced that St. Yves will cause the faithless creditor to die within the year. His truthfulness was such, he was called St. Yves de Verité. He is the special patron of lawyers, and always represented in the "mortier," or lawyer's cap, with an ermine-trimmed scarlet robe.
“Saint Yves était Breton,
Avocat et pas larron,
Chose rare, se dit-on.”
Lawyers, says a writer, take him for a patron, but not for a model. Philip le Hardi, in acknowledgment of his worth, granted him a pension of six deniers a day—in those times a considerable sum.
Over this house is a marble tablet with this inscription:—
“Ici est né le 17 Oct^r 1253, et est mort le 19 Mai 1303,
Saint Yves,
Officiel de Tréguier, curé de Tredretz et de Lohannec. Sa maison, qui a subsisté jusqu'en l'année 1834, ayant été alors demolie à cause de vetusté, Mg^r Hyacinthe Louis de Quelen, Arch^vque de Paris, et propriétaire des domaines de Kermartin, a fait placer cette inscription, afin qu'un lieu sanctifié par la presence d'un si grand serviteur de Dieu ne demeurât pas inconnu (1837).”