struck at the prevailing
abuse by which members of powerful families, non-resident and often
children, were intruded into rich benefices, to the great detriment of
their charges.[15] Consideration was also had of the rule adopted at
St. Justina's at Padua, the centre of reform in Northern Italy; and
thus it was not till 1516 that the new ordinances were finally
sanctioned by Leo X.

[15] Thus the family of d'Illiers at this time almost monopolized the
see of Chartres; members of it holding the bishopric consecutively for
fifty years, the deanery for a hundred, the arch-deaconry and the rich
abbey of Bona Vallis also for fifty.

About 1490, Jouveneaux, fired with enthusiasm by the success of du
Mas' reforms at Chezal Benoit, determined to quit his professor's
chair at Paris and take upon him the vows and the life of a monk under
du Mas' rule; and subsequently he was the means of bringing into the
Congregation the Abbey of St. Sulpice at Bourges, being invited
thither by John Labat, the Abbot, to introduce the new rule, and
himself succeeding to the abbacy for a triennial period. A year or two
after his retirement from the world, he was followed to Chezal Benoit
by Charles Fernand, who subsequently went on to St. Vincent's at Le
Mans. John Fernand also ended his days at St. Sulpice in Bourges.

Charles Fernand is a personality who deserves more attention than he
has received. Whilst he was in the world he enjoyed considerable
esteem amongst the learned. He was a friend of Gaguin, and published a
commentary on Gaguin's poem on the Immaculate Conception; he also
dedicated to Gaguin a small volume of Familiar Letters. But his most
important literary work was done in the retirement of his cell: a
volume of Monastic Conversations, composed at sundry times, and
published in 1516; a treatise on Tranquillity (1512), in which he
gives an account of the motives which led him to take the monastic
habit; and a Mirror of the Monastic Life (1515), dwelling at length on
the ideals that should be held before the eyes of novices and animate
their lives when they were professed. Unfortunately his style is so
excessively elegant, with wide intervals between words closely
connected in sense, that he is difficult to read; and hence, perhaps,
in some measure the neglect which has been meted out to him.

Of his four Monastic Conversations the first and the last are
concerned with the question whether monks should be allowed to read
the boo