Monday, September 17, 2012

Saint Cloud

The saint, not the palace.
St. Cloud, called in Latin Chlodoardus, is the first and most illustrious saint among the princes of the royal family of the first race in France. He was son of Chlodomir, king of Orleans, the eldest son of St. Clotilda, and was born in 522. He was scarcely three years old when his father was killed in Burgundy in 524; but his grandmother, Clotilda, brought up him and his two brothers, Theobald and Gunthaire, at Paris, and loved them extremely. Their ambitious uncles, Childebert, king of Paris, and Clotaire, king of Soissons, divided the kingdom of Orleans between them, and stabbed with their own hands the two eldest of their nephews, Theobald and Gunthaire, the former being ten, the latter seven years old. Cloud, by a special providence, was saved from the massacre, and cut off his hair with his own hands, by that ceremony renouncing the world, and devoting himself to the service of God in a monastic state. He had many fair opportunities of recovering his father’s kingdom; but, young as he was, he saw by the light of grace that all that appears most dazzling in worldly greatness is no better than smoke, and that a Christian gains infinitely more by losing than by possessing it. (Read entire post.)
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