Jacques Barcillon’s handwritten, unpublished 17th-century manuscript has never been printed or reproduced.
Nearly nine centuries after his death, Saint Lambert of Vence remains one of the most important figures in the town’s history. Alongside Saint Véran, he is one of Vence’s two patron saints, and over the centuries, he has often been credited with protecting the town from disaster, disease, and ruin. Yet much of his life remains obscure. Few records were kept during his lifetime, and even fewer have survived the ravages of time.
The most important surviving document concerning Saint Lambert’s life is an unpublished seventeenth-century manuscript biography titled La Vie & Les Miracles de Saint Lambert (The Life & Miracles of Saint Lambert), written by Canon Jacques Barcillon. Like Barcillon’s companion biography of Saint Véran, Vie de Saint Véran (The Life of Saint Véran), it cites almost no sources and offers little historical evidence for many of the details it presents. Barcillon was writing in the hagiographic tradition, a style that presents saints in an idealized and devotional manner. His purpose was not to produce a strictly factual biography in the modern sense, but to honor Saint Lambert, preserve his memory, and encourage devotion among the faithful.
Barcillon was a canon of the Cathedral Chapter of Vence in the first half of the seventeenth century and one of the diocese’s most learned clerics. His two biographies form part of a broader post-Tridentine devotional movement in Provence, in which the lives of local saints were recast as models of reform, piety, and spiritual renewal for clergy and faithful alike.
Much of what Barcillon records cannot be treated as verifiable history. Yet his work remains valuable as a sincere and attentive reflection of the local traditions that shaped Vence’s understanding of Saint Lambert over many centuries. His narrative preserves the beliefs, stories, and devotional practices that had grown around the saint’s memory. Even when individual details cannot be historically confirmed, they show how the people of Vence saw their patron saint, and how his presence continued to shape the town’s identity, memory, and religious life.
The Life & Miracles of Saint Lambert is divided into two parts, comprising twenty-three chapters in all. It opens with a three-page dedication from Barcillon to Antoine Godeau, then bishop of Vence, followed by a two-page address to the reader. The manuscript itself is then arranged in two main sections: the first recounts Lambert’s life, while the second describes the many miracles attributed to him after his death. The pages are numbered, but only on the first side. Meaning we have page number 1, followed by an unnumbered page, then page number 2, followed by another unnumbered page, etc.
First Part:
I. On the Nobility and Birth of Saint Lambert and the Death of His Mother.
II. On the Education of Saint Lambert in His Father’s House, and on the Island of Lérins, Where He Consecrated Himself to the Service of God.
III. On the Progress He Made in Learning and Virtue, and on the Beautiful Means God Used to Lead Him There.
IV. The Most Remarkable Virtues of Saint Lambert.
V. Saint Lambert is Elected and Consecrated Bishop of Vence.
VI. On the Beginnings Our Saint Gave to His New Government and on His Usual Occupations.
VII. The Deplorable State of His Century, and How He Acted in It Through His Charitable Care.
VIII. His More Interior Occupations.
IX. God Makes Saint Lambert Understand That He Must Soften His Abstinences Through a Very Remarkable Miracle.
X. On Some Other Miracles He Performed During His Lifetime.
XI. On the Last Illness of Saint Lambert, and How He Wished to Bless His Tomb Before His Death.
XII. On His Blessed Death.
XIII. The Room of Saint Lambert Unexpectedly Restored.
Second Part:
I. Some Miracles That Occurred in the First Year After the Death of Saint Lambert
II. The Miraculous Fountain Flowing from the Tomb of Saint Lambert
III. Various Miracles That Occurred at Different Times Through the Intercession of Saint Lambert
IV. On the Devotion of the Inhabitants of Vence, Nice, and Bauduen Toward Saint Lambert
V. Discovery of the Relics of Saint Lambert
VI. Donation and Transfer of the Relic of Saint Lambert to the Place of Bauduen
VII. On What Happened That Was Worthy of Note During the Transfer of the Relic of Saint Lambert, and in the First Year After Its Arrival at Bauduen
VIII. Transfer of the Body of Saint Lambert
IX. On the Canonization of Saint Lambert
X. Prayers to Saint Lambert
Below are links to download the three versions of this manuscript (as well as a zip file with all three versions):
1. The original, handwritten old-French manuscript.
2. A modern French translation of the manuscript.
3. A modern English translation of the manuscript.
I visited the Catholic Archives in Nice and photographed each page of the original manuscript. I used ChatGPT’s OCR (optical character recognition) to examine each page and convert the images into the actual text. I then compared the photographs of each page of the original manuscript I had taken with the text generated by ChatGPT, line by line and word by word, and made any necessary corrections or additions. Finally, I used ChatGPT to translate the “old French” into modern French and English.
Note: This manuscript was handwritten almost four hundred years ago. Many of the pages are damaged. Much of the text is difficult to read. Notes have been scribbled in the margins on several pages. Lines have been crossed out, and new text has been added throughout the document. On many pages, the text from the opposite page bleeds through. Much of the manuscript presents real challenges for transcription. ChatGPT did an amazing job with the initial transcription, and I have done my best to make any necessary corrections. That said, there are bound to be some mistakes in both translations. Even so, I believe what I present here is very, very close to Barcillon’s original text.
Download a high-quality PDF reproduction of the original manuscript in old French (22mb)
Download a high-quality PDF translation of the manuscript in modern French (6mb)
Download a high-quality PDF translation of the manuscript in English (6mb)
Download a zip file of all three versions (35mb)
[click on any image to see sample pages of the different versions]
