His charity to the poor, his compassion for the sick and infirm was without limit. Thus, when Malledegonde, sister of the young Calétric, who lay at death’s door, asked the holy Bishop of Chartres for some drops of oil blessed by his hands, he did at once that which she had not dared to ask. He came in person to the bedside of her dear invalid, bathed his forehead, and prayed that he might be restored to health. Then the young man opened his eyes, and seizing the aged bishop’s hand declared that he was healed. A bas-relief on the south porch of the Cathedral portrays this incident in stone. In glass, a bishop and enthroned, you may see the saint in the second window of the northern clerestory of the nave. From that moment S. Lubin continued to take a paternal interest in the lad, and on his death Calétric succeeded him as Bishop of Chartres. S. Calétric,[19] according to his panegyrist, combined every virtue with every accomplishment, and was, in fact, the personification of that Roman urbanity which the rude manners of the French had almost banished from the Gallic world. His tomb, as we have already seen, is now in the Cathedral crypt, whither it was removed from the Chapel of S. Nicholas, when that building, which was formerly adjacent to the apse of the Cathedral, was destroyed in 1702 to make room for the present bishop’s palace.[20] S. Lubin, like most of the bishops of the sixth and seventh centuries, was still less fortunate in the place of his burial. He was interred in the crypt of
which probably marks the site of the chief extra-mural cemetery of the Chartres of those days. This asylum of the dead was more than once profaned by the ravages of the Northmen and the excesses committed during the civil and religious wars. The nave and aisles were seriously damaged in the fourteenth century by the bands of English soldiers and marauders who overran the country at that time. The Huguenots, also, under Condé (1568) utterly devastated the church crypt, violating the tombs of the bishops and wantonly burning the building. The tomb of S. Lubin, indeed, was flung out of the church and was long used for domestic purposes, until at last it was cracked by the frost. Even then it was not safe from the utilitarian spirit of the day. It was turned to account when the foundations of the cemetery wall were being constructed.