Patron saint of Trevos. Represented (1) with two angels above her head carrying her soul to heaven; (2) with a church in her hand as a founder. Said to be daughter of Dagobert II. (674- 670) and sister of St. Adela (2); and sometimes, with still less likelihood, called daughter of Dagobert I. (628-638). She is perhaps the same person called St. Primina, daughter of Dagobert and sister of St. Modesta.
In her youth she was betrothed and much attached to Count Hermann, but just before the wedding day, Edgar, one of his attendants, who admired Irmina and could not bear that his master should have her, called him out of the town on pretence that there was a merchant waiting there with beautiful jewels which Hermann might buy and present to Irmina. The traitor led him across the Mosel to the top of a rock, and then holding him firmly, jumped over the precipice. Both were killed and the bodies were found a few days afterwards. Irmina was much grieved. When her father, to comfort her, said he would find her a richer and nobler husband, she said, "I will have a husband not only richer and nobler, but the richest and noblest,—the Lord of all lords." The king approved her decision and built her the great monastery of Horres, called also Oeren, or Ste. Marie aux Greniers, at Treves, which was dedicated by St. Modoald, bishop of Trèves. She lived there as abbess, a pattern of all virtues. Through her liberality and that of Pepin, mayor of the palace, St. Willibrord of Northumberland, bishop of Utrecht, was enabled to found the abbey of Epternac in Luxemburg. She was succeeded as abbess by St. Modesta. R.M, AA.SS. Cahier. Butler, "St. Willibrord." Le Mire, Fasti Belglci. Guénebault. Lechner gives the date of her death as 720.
St. Irmina (2), Imma.
St. Isabel (l), Aug. 31, Sept. 1, 0.S.F. 1225-1270.
Isabelle de Valois, princess of France. Daughter of Louis VIII., king of France, and B. Blanche of Castile, his wife. The only sister of seven brothers, all older than herself, the eldest of whom was Louis IX., king and saint. When she was about nineteen, the Emperor Frederick II. proposed to marry her to his son Conrad. All her family and all France favoured the marriage, and so did all Germany and the Pope, Innocent lY. Isabel, however, had already determined on a religions and celibate life, and lived at her brother's court the life of a nun. The Pope, on hearing her decision, wrote to congratulate and encourage her. She spent her dowry in building the Franciscan convent of Longchamps, at Boulogne, near Paris, dedicated to the Humility of the V. Mary, 1260, and after her mother's death she took up her residence there, but never took the veil, and was only dressed in the habit of the order after her death. The nuns of this convent were the first Urbanists, or mitigated Clares (see Clara (2)); that is to say, that, finding the rule of St. Francis too severe, they obtained from Pope Urban IV. a mitigation of their extreme asceticism. The convent of Longchamps also had a dispensation from the rule of poverty to enable them to hold the lands and rents presented to them by their founder. Their successors, more than 200 years afterwards, obtained her beatification from Leo X. (1513-1522). Urban VIII. (1623-1644) permitted her body to be taken up and exposed for public veneration. Her Life was written by Agnes do Harcourt, one of her maids of honour, and afterwards abbess of Longchamps, who records that she had magnificent hair, and that one day she asked her maids what was the use of keeping (as she saw they did) all that came out when they were brushing and combing it. They said they were preserving these hairs to serve as relics when she should be a saint. She used to say, "Les premices appartiennent à Dieu"—"The firstfruits belong to God." One day her brother St. Louis saw her finishing a cap of her own spinning, and asked her to give it to him for a night-cap, saying he would value it highly as the work of her hands. She replied that she must give it to Jesus Christ as it was the first work of that sort she had made. The king then asked her to make another
