The place was full of lepers and there was the Queen standing in the middle of them. And taking off a linen cloth she had wrapped around her waist, she put it into a water basin and began to wash and dry their feet and kiss them most devotedly while she was bathing them and drying them with her hands. And I said to her, ‘My lady! What are you doing? Surely if the King knew about this he would never deign to kiss you with his lips after you had been polluted by the putrefied feet of lepers!’ Then she, under a smile, said, ‘Who does not know that the feet of the Eternal King are to be preferred to the lips of a King who is going to die? Surely for that reason I called you, dearest brother, so that you might learn such works from my example.’