left the church as if just awakened from slumber, soothed and gentle. The
courtiers knew that it was the best time to ask him either for pardon, or
for a gift.

Jadwiga entered through the vestry door also. Seeing her enter, the
knights standing near the stalls, immediately kneeled, although mass had
not begun, voluntarily paying her homage as to a saint. Zbyszko did the
same; nobody in this assembly doubted that he really saw a saint, whose
image would some time adorn the church altars. Besides the respect due to
a queen, they almost worshipped her on account of her religious and holy
life. It was reported that the queen could perform miracles. They said
that she could cure the sick by touching them with her hand; that people
who could not move their legs nor their arms, were able to do it, after
they put on a dress which the queen had worn. Trustworthy witnesses
affirmed that they had heard with their own ears, Christ speak to her
from the altar. Foreign monarchs worshipped her on their knees and even
the Order of the Knights of the Cross respected her and feared to offend
her. Pope Bonifacius IX. called her the pious and chosen daughter of the
church. The world looked at her deeds and remembered that this child of
the Andegavian[41] house and Polish Piasts[42], this daughter of the
powerful Louis, a pupil of the most fastidious of courts, and also one of
the most beautiful women on earth, renounced happiness, renounced her
first love and being a queen married a "wild" prince of Lithuania, in
order to bring to the cross, by his help, the last pagan nation in
Europe. That which could not be accomplished by the forces of all the
Germans, by a sea of poured out blood, was done with one word from her.
Never did the glory of an apostle shine over a younger and more charming
forehead; never was the apostleship united with equal self-denial; never
was the beauty of a woman lighted with such angelic kindness and such
quiet sadness.