The Count’s Son and the Ten Baskets

We will not be silent either about a brother we knew, who came of a high family by the standards of this world. His father was a count and extremely wealthy, and he himself had been well brought up with a liberal education. When he had left his parents and fled to the monastery, his superior, to test the humility of his disposition and the ardor of his faith, at once ordered him to load ten baskets on his shoulders (though there was no need to sell them publicly) and to hawk them through the streets for sale. A condition was attached, so that he might be kept longer at the work: if anyone happened to want to buy them all together, he was not to allow it, but was to sell them to buyers one at a time. He carried this out with the greatest zeal. Trampling underfoot all shame and embarrassment, out of love for Christ and for his name’s sake, he put the baskets on his shoulders, sold them one by one at the fixed price, and brought the money back to the monastery. He was not in the least upset by the strangeness of so lowly and unusual a task, and paid no attention to the indignity of the thing, the splendor of his birth, or the disgrace of the selling, since through the grace of obedience he was aiming to gain that humility of Christ which is the true nobility. [a]