Knight tells a king he'd choose thirty mortal sins over leprosy

JOINVILLE, Champagne, October 1309 AD — Saint Louis IX of France once asked Jean de Joinville whether he would rather be a leper or commit a mortal sin. Joinville wrote down his answer in a book he finished this month. He also wrote down what the king told him about it the next day.

The two men went on crusade together, and in Egypt in 1250 AD they were taken prisoner together. St. Louis died in 1270 AD. Pope Boniface VIII declared him a saint in 1297 AD. Joinville was nearly eighty when he started his book of the king’s holy words and deeds.

Two monks and two questions

The first part of Joinville’s book collects the king’s sayings. One day St. Louis called Joinville to him while two monks were in the room. The king told him: “Because of the subtle mind that is in you I dare not speak to you of the things relating to God; so I have summoned these two monks that are here, as I want to ask you a question.”

St. Louis asked Joinville what God is. Joinville said God was so good that there could be nothing better. The king told him he had answered well, because that answer was written in the book St. Louis was holding.

Then St. Louis asked which he would rather, “either to be a leper, or to have committed a mortal sin”. Joinville gives his own answer in a single sentence: “And I, who never lied to him, made answer that I would rather have committed thirty mortal sins than be a leper.”

At the king’s feet

The next day the monks had gone. St. Louis called Joinville to him alone and made him sit at his feet. The king asked him: “How came you to say that to me yesterday?” Joinville gave the same answer again. St. Louis told him: “You spoke hastily and as a fool.”

Then the king gave his reasons. St. Louis said: “There is no leprosy so hideous as the being in mortal sin.” A soul in mortal sin, he said, is like the Devil.

Leprosy is a sickness of the body, St. Louis went on. A man is cured of it when he dies. But a man who dies in mortal sin can’t be sure that God has forgiven him, the king said. So that man must be very afraid that his sin will last “as long as God is in paradise.”

St. Louis begged Joinville to choose leprosy, or any other sickness of the body, rather than let mortal sin into his soul. He asked it “for the love of God, and for the love of me.”