abbess, on the other side: They did not call me nor bid me sit with them,
and that purposely, in order to make me vile in the eyes of so many folk.
And neither at my coming in nor at my going out did they rise just a
little from their scats, rendering me vile, as you did see yourself.  I
cannot speak of it, for grief and shame.  And it will be my death, far
more even than the less of our land which they have unworthily wrested
from us; unless, by God's grace, they do repent them, and I see them in
their turn reduced to desolation, and losing somewhat of their own lands.
As for me, either I will lose all I have for that end or I will perish in
the attempt."  Queen Blanche's correspondent added, "The Count of La
Marche, whose kindness you know, seeing the countess in tears, said to
her, 'Madam, give your commands: I will do all I can; be assured of
that.'  'Else,' said she, 'you shall not come near my person, and I will
never see you more.'  Then the count declared, with many curses, that he
would do what his wife desired."

And he was as good as his word.  That same year, 1241, at the end of the
autumn, "the new Count of Poitiers, who was holding his court for the
first time, did not fail to bid to his feasts all the nobility of his
appanage, and, amongst the very first, the Count and Countess of La
Marche.  They repaired to Poitiers; but, four days before Christmas, when
the court of Count Alphonso had received all its guests, the Count of La
Marche, mounted on his war-horse, with his wife on the crupper behind
him, and escorted by his men-at-arms also mounted, cross-bow in hand and
in readiness for battle, was seen advancing to the prince's presence.
Every one was on the tiptoe of expectation as to what would come next.
Then the Count of La Marche addressed himself in a loud voice to the
Count of Poitiers, saying, 'I might have thought, in a moment of
forgetfulness and weakness, to render thee homage; but now I swear to
thee, with a resolute heart, that I will never be thy liegeman; thou dost
unjustly dub thyself my lord; thou didst shamefully filch this countship
from my step-son, Earl Richard, whilst he was faithfully fighting for God
in the Holy Land, and was delivering our captives by his discretion and
his compassion.'  After this insolent declaration, the Count of La Marche
violently thrust aside, by means of his men-at-arms, all those who barred
his passage; hasted, by way of parting insult, to fire the lodging
appointed for him by Count Alphonso, and, followed by his people, left
Poitiers at a gallop."  (_Histoire de Saint Louis,_ by M. Felix Faure,
t. i.  p. 347.)

[Illustration: De la Marche's parting Insult----126]

This meant war; and it burst out at the commencement of the following
spring.  It found Louis equally well prepared for it and determined to
carry it through.  But in him prudence and justice were as little to seek
as resolution; he respected public opinion, and he wished to have the
approval of those whom he called upon to commit themselves for him and
with him.  He summoned the crown's vassals to a parliament; and, "What
think you," he asked them, "should be done to a vassal who would fain
hold land without owning a lord, and who goeth against the fealty and
homage due from him and his predecessors?"  The answer was, that the lord
ought in that case to take back the fief as his own property.  "As my
name is Louis," said the king, "the Comet of La Marche doth claim to hold
land in such wise, land which hath been a fief of France since the days
of the valiant King Clovis, who won all Aquitaine from King Alaric, a
pagan without faith or creed, and all the country to the Pyrenean mount."
And the barons promised the king their energetic co-operation.

The war was pushed on zealously by both sides.  Henry III., King of
England, sent to Louis messengers charged to declare to him that his
reason for breaking the truce concluded between them was, that he
regarded it as his duty towards his step-father, the Count of La Marche,
to defend him by arms.  Louis answered that, for his own part, he had
scrupulously observed the truce, and had no idea of breaking it; but he
considered that he had a perfect right to punish a rebellious vassal.  In
this young King of France, this docile son of an able mother, none knew
what a hero there was, until he revealed himself on a sudden.  Near two
towns of Saintonge, Taillebourg and Saintes, at a bridge which covered
the approaches of one and in front of the walls of the other, Louis, on
the 21st and 22d of July, delivered two battles, in which the brilliancy
of his personal valor and the affectionate enthusiasm he excited in his
troops secured victory and the surrender of the two places.  "At sight of
the numerous banners, above which rose the oriflamme, close to
Taillebourg, and of such a multitude of tents, one pressing against
another and forming as it were a large and populous city, the King of
England turned sharply to the Count of La Marche, saying, 'My father, is
this what you did promise me?  Is yonder the numerous chivalry that you
did engage to raise for me, when you said that all I should have to do
would be to get money together?'  'That did I never say,' answered the
count.  'Yea, verily,' rejoined Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of
Henry III.: 'for yonder I have amongst my baggage writing of your own to
such purport.'  And when the Count of La Marche energetically denied that
he had ever signed or sent such writing, Henry III. reminded him bitterly
of the messages he had sent to England, and of his urgent exhortations to
war.  'It was never done with my consent,' cried the Count of La Marche,
with an oath; 'put the blame of it upon your mother, who is my wife; for,
by the gullet of God, it was all devised without my knowledge.'"

It was not Henry III. alone who was disgusted with the war in which his
mother had involved him; the majority of the English lords who had
accompanied him left him, and asked the King of France for permission to
pass through his kingdom on their way home.  There were those who would
have dissuaded Louis from compliance; but, "Let them go," said he;
"I would ask nothing better than that all my foes should thus depart
forever far away from my abode."  Those about him made merry over Henry
III., a refugee at Bordeaux, deserted by the English and plundered by the
Gascons.  "Hold! hold! said Louis; "turn him not into ridicule, and make
me not hated of him by reason of your banter; his charities and his piety
shall exempt him from all contumely."  The Count of La Marche lost no
time in asking for peace; and Louis granted it with the firmness of a
far-seeing politician and the sympathetic feeling of a Christian.  He
required that the domains he had just wrested from the count should
belong to the crown, and to the Count of Poitiers, under the suzerainty
of the crown.  As for the rest of his lands, the Count of La Marche, his
wife and children, were obliged to beg a grant of them at the good
pleasure of the king, to whom the count was, further, to give up, as
guarantee for fidelity in future, three castles, in which a royal
garrison should be kept at the count's expense.  When introduced into the
king's presence, the count, his wife, and children, "with sobs, and
sighs, and tears, threw themselves upon their knees before him, and began
to cry aloud, 'Most gracious sir, forgive us thy wrath and thy
displeasure, for we have done wickedly and pridefully towards thee.'
And the king, seeing the Count of La Marche such humble guise before him,
could not restrain his compassion amidst his wrath, but made him rise up,
and forgave him graciously all the evil he had wrought against him."

A prince who knew so well how to conquer and how to treat the conquered
might have been tempted to make an unfair use, alternately, of his
victories and of his clemency, and to pursue his advantages beyond
measure; but Louis was in very deed a Christian.  When War was not either
a necessity or a duty, this brave and brilliant knight, from sheer equity
and goodness of heart, loved peace rather than war.  The successes he had
gained in his campaign of 1242 were not for him the first step in an
endless career of glory and conquest; he was anxious only to consolidate
them whilst securing, in Western Europe, for the dominions of his
adversaries, as well as for his own, the benefits of peace.  He entered
into negotiations, successively, with the Count of La Marche, the King of
England, the Count of Toulouse, the King of Aragon, and the various
princes and great feudal lords who had been more or less engaged in the
war; and in January, 1213, says the latest and most enlightened of his
biographers, "the treaty of Lorris marked the end of feudal troubles for
the whole duration of St. Louis's reign.  He drew his sword no more, save
only against the enemies of the Christian faith and Christian
civilization, the Mussulmans."  (_Histoire de St. Louis,_ by M. Felix
Faure, t. i.  p. 388.)

Nevertheless there was no lack of opportunities for interfering with a
powerful arm amongst the sovereigns his neighbors, and for working their
disagreements to the profit of his ambition, had ambition guided his
conduct.  The great struggle between the Empire and the Papacy, in the
persons of Frederick II., Emperor of Germany, and the two popes, Gregory
IX. and Innocent IV., was causing violent agitation in Christendom, the
two powers setting no bounds to their aspirations of getting the dominion
one over the other, and of disposing one of the other's fate.  Scarcely
had Louis reached his majority when, in 1237, he tried his influence with
both sovereigns to induce them to restore peace to the Christian world.
He failed; and thenceforth he preserved a scrupulous neutrality towards
each.  The principles of international law, especially in respect of a
government's interference in the contests of its neighbors, whether
princes or peoples, were not, in the thirteenth century, systematically
discussed and defined as they are nowadays with us; but the good sense
and the moral sense of St. Louis caused him to adopt, on this point, the
proper course, and no temptation, not even that of satisfying his fervent
piety, drew him into any departure from it.  Distant or friendly, by
turns, towards the two adversaries, according as they tried to intimidate
him or win him over to them, his permanent care was to get neither the
State nor the Church of France involved in the struggle between the
priesthood and the empire, and to maintain the dignity of his crown and
the liberties of his subjects, whilst employing his influence to make
prevalent throughout Christendom a policy of justice and peace.

That was the policy required, in the thirteenth century more than ever,
by the most urgent interests of entire Christendom.

She was at grips with two most formidable foes and perils.  Through the
crusades she had, from the end of the eleventh century, become engaged in
a deadly struggle against the Mussulmans in Asia; and in the height of
this struggle, and from the heart of this same Asia, there spread,
towards the middle of the thirteenth century, over Eastern Europe, in
Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Germany, a barbarous and very
nearly pagan people, the Mongol Tartars, sweeping onward like an
inundation of blood, ravaging and threatening with complete destruction
all the dominions which were penetrated by their hordes.  The name and
description of these barbarians, the fame and dread of their
devastations, ran rapidly through the whole of Christian Europe.  "What
must we do in this sad plight?" asked Queen Blanche of the king, her son.
"We must, my mother," answered Louis (with sorrowful voice, but not
without divine inspiration, adds the chronicler), "we must be sustained
by a heavenly consolation.  If these Tartars, as we call them, arrive
here, either we will hurl them back to Tartarus, their home, whence they
are come, or they shall send us up to Heaven."  About the same period,
another cause of disquietude and another feature of attraction came to be
added to all those which turned the thoughts and impassioned piety of
Louis towards the East.  The perils of the Latin empire of
Constantinople, founded, as has been already mentioned, in 1204, under
the headship of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, were becoming day by day more
serious.  Greeks, Mussulmans, and Tartars were all pressing it equally
hard.  In 1236, the emperor, Baldwin II., came to solicit in person the
support of the princes of Western Europe, and especially of the young
King of France, whose piety and chivalrous ardor were already celebrated
everywhere.  Baldwin possessed a treasure, of great power over the
imaginations and convictions of Christians, in the crown of thorns worn
by Jesus Christ during His passion.  He had already put it in pawn at
Venice for a considerable loan advanced to him by the Venetians; and he
now offered it to Louis in return for effectual aid in men and money.
Louis accepted the proposal with transport.  He had been scared, a short
time ago, at the chance of losing another precious relic deposited in the
abbey of St. Denis, one of the nails which, it was said, had held Our
Lord's body upon the cross.  It had been mislaid one ceremonial day
whilst it was being exhibited to the people; and, when he recovered it,
"I would rather," said Louis, "that the best city in my kingdom had been
swallowed up in the earth."  After having taken all the necessary
precautions for avoiding any appearance of a shameful bargain, he
obtained the crown of thorns, all expenses included, for eleven thousand
livres of Paris, that is, they say, about twenty-six thousand dollars of
our money.  Our century cannot have any fellow-feeling with such ready
credulity, which is not required by Christian faith or countenanced by
sound criticism; but we can and we ought to comprehend such sentiments in
an age when men not only had profound faith in the facts recorded in the
Gospels, but could not believe themselves to be looking upon the smallest
tangible relic of those facts without experiencing an emotion and a
reverence as profound as their faith.  It is to such sentiments that we
owe one of the most perfect and most charming monuments of the middle
ages, _the Holy Chapel,_ which St. Louis had built between 1245 and 1248
in order to deposit there the precious relics he had collected.  The
king's piety had full justice and honor done it by the genius of the
architect, Peter de llontreuil, who, no doubt, also shared his faith.

It was after the purchase of the crown of thorns and the building of _the
Holy Chapel_ that Louis, accomplishing at last the desire of his soul,
departed on his first crusade.  We have already gone over the
circumstances connected with his determination, his departure, and his
life in the East, during the six years of pious adventure and glorious
disaster he passed there.  We have already seen what an impression of
admiration and respect was produced throughout his kingdom when he was
noticed to have brought back with him from the Holy Land "a fashion of
living and doing superior to his former behavior, although in his youth
he had always been good and innocent and worthy of high esteem."  These
expressions of his confessor are fully borne out by the deeds and laws,
the administration at home and the relations abroad, by the whole
government, in fact, of St. Louis during the last fifteen years of his
reign.  The idea which was invariably conspicuous and constantly
maintained during his reign was not that of a premeditated and ambitious
policy, ever tending towards an interested object which is pursued with
more or less reasonableness and success, and always with a large amount
of trickery and violence on the part of the prince, of unrighteousness in
his deeds, and of suffering on the part of the people.  Philip Augustus,
the grandfather, and Philip the Handsome, the grandson, of St. Louis, the
former with the moderation of an able man, the latter with headiness and
disregard of right or wrong, labored both of them without cessation to
extend the domains and power of the crown, to gain conquests over their
neighbors and their vassals, and to destroy the social system of their
age, the feudal system, its rights as well as its wrongs and tyrannies,
in order to put in its place pure monarchy, and to exalt the kingly
authority above all liberties, whether of the aristocracy or of the
people.  St. Louis neither thought of nor attempted anything of the kind;
he did not make war, at one time openly, at another secretly, upon the
feudal system; he frankly accepted its principles, as he found them
prevailing in the facts and the ideas of his times.  Whilst fully bent on
repressing with firmness his vassals' attempts to shake themselves free
from their duties towards him, and to render themselves independent of
the crown, he respected their rights, kept his word to them scrupulously,
and required of them nothing but what they really owed him.  Into his
relations with foreign sovereigns, his neighbors, he imported the same
loyal spirit.  "Certain of his council used to tell him," reports
Joinville, "that he did not well in not leaving those foreigners to their
warfare; for, if he gave them his good leave to impoverish one another,
they would not attack him so readily as if they were rich.  To that the
king replied that they said not well; for, quoth he, if the neighboring
princes perceived that I left them to their warfare, they might take
counsel amongst themselves, and say, 'It is through malice that the king
leaves us to our warfare; then it might happen that by cause of the
hatred they would have against me, they would come and attack me, and I
might be a great loser there-by.  Without reckoning that I should thereby
earn the hatred of God, who says, 'Blessed be the peacemakers!'  So well
established was his renown as a sincere friend of peace and a just
arbiter in great disputes between princes and peoples that his
intervention and his decisions were invited wherever obscure and
dangerous questions arose.  In spite of the brilliant victories which, in
1212, he had gained at Taillebourg and Saintes over Henry III., King of
England, he himself perceived, on his return from the East, that the
conquests won by his victories might at any moment become a fresh cause
of new and grievous wars, disastrous, probably, for one or the other of
the two peoples.  He conceived, therefore, the design of giving to a
peace which was so desirable a more secure basis by founding it upon a
transaction accepted on both sides as equitable.  And thus, whilst
restoring to the King of England certain possessions which the war of
1242 had lost to him, he succeeded in obtaining from him in return "as
well in his own name as in the names of his sons and their heirs, a
formal renunciation of all rights that he could pretend to over the duchy
of Normandy, the countships of Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, and,
generally, all that his family might have possessed on the continent,
except only the lands which the King of France restored to him by the
treaty and those which remained to him in Gascony.  For all these last
the King of England undertook to do liege-homage to the King of France,
in the capacity of peer of France and Duke of Aquitaine and to faithfully
fulfil the duties attached to a fief."  When Louis made known this
transaction to his counsellors, "they were very much against it," says
Joinville.  "It seemeth to us, sir," said they to the king, "that, if you
think you have not a right to the conquest won by you and your
antecessors from the King of England, you do not make proper restitution
to the said king in not restoring to him the whole; and if you think you
have a right to it, it seemeth to us that you are a loser by all you
restore."  "Sirs," answered Louis, "I am certain that the antecessors of
the King of England did quite justly lose the conquest which I hold; and
as for the land I give him, I give it him not as a matter in which I am
bound to him or his heirs, but to make love between my children and his,
who are cousins-german.  And it seemeth to me that what I give him I turn
to good purpose, inasmuch as he was not my liegeman, and he hereby cometh
in amongst my liegeman."  Henry III., in fact, went to Paris, having with
him the ratification of the treaty, and prepared to accomplish the
ceremony of homage.  "Louis received him as a brother, but without
sparing him aught of the ceremony, in which, according to the ideas of
the times, there was nothing humiliating any more than in the name of
vassal, which was proudly borne by the greatest lords.  It took place on
Thursday, December 4, 1259, in the royal enclosure stretching in front of
the palace, on the spot where at the present day is the Place Dauphine.
There was a great concourse of prelates, barons, and other personages
belonging to the two courts and the two nations.  The King of England,
on his knees, bareheaded, without cloak, belt, sword, or spurs, placed
his folded hands in those of the King of France his suzerain, and said to
him, 'Sir, I become your liegeman with mouth and hands, and I swear and
promise you faith and loyalty, and to guard your right according to my
power, and to do fair justice at your summons or the summons of your
bailiff, to the best of my wit.'  Then the king kissed him on the mouth
and raised him up."

[Illustration: ST. LOUIS MEDIATING BETWEEN HENRY III. AND HIS BARONS----
136]

Three years later Louis gave not only to the King of England, but to the
whole English nation, a striking proof of his judicious and true-hearted
equity.  An obstinate civil war was raging between Henry III. and his
barons.  Neither party, in defending its own rights, had any notion of
respecting the rights of its adversaries, and England was alternating
between a kingly and an aristocratic tyranny.  Louis, chosen as arbiter
by both sides, delivered solemnly, on the 23d of January, 1264, a
decision which was favorable to the English kingship, but at the same,
time expressly upheld the Great Charter and the traditional liberties of
England.  He concluded his decision with the following suggestions of
amnesty: "We will also that the King of England and his barons do forgive
one another mutually, that they do forget all the resentments that may
exist between them; by consequence of the matters submitted to our
arbitration, and that henceforth they do refrain reciprocally from an
offence and injury on account of the same matters."  But when men have
had their ideas, passions, and interests profoundly agitated and made to
clash, the wisest decisions and the most honest counsels in the world are
not sufficient to re-establish peace; the cup of experience has to be
drunk to the dregs; and the parties are not resigned to peace until on or
the other, or both, have exhausted themselves in the struggle and
perceive the absolute necessity of accepting either defeat compromise.
In spite of the arbitration of the King of France the civil war continued
in England; but Louis did not seek any way to profit by it so as to
extend, at the expense of his neighbors, his own possessions or power;
he held himself also from their quarrels, and followed up by honest
neutrality ineffectual arbitration.  Five centuries afterwards the great
English historian, Hume, rendered him due homage in these terms: "Every
time this virtuous prince interfered in the affairs of England, it was
invariably with the view of settling differences between the king and the
nobility.  Adopting an admirable course of conduct, as politic probably
as it certainly was just, he never interposed his good offices save to
put an end the disagreements of the English; he seconded all the measures
which could give security to both parties, and he made persistent
efforts, though without success, to moderate the fiery ambition of the
Earl of Leicester."  (Hume, _History of England,_ t. ii.  p. 465.)

It requires more than political wisdom, more even than virtue, to enable
a king, a man having in charge the government of men, to accomplish his
mission and to really deserve the title of Most Christian; it requires
that he should be animated by a sentiment of affection, and that he
should, in heart as well as mind, be in sympathy with those multitudes of
creatures over whose lot he exercises so much influence.  St. Louis more
perhaps than any other king was possessed of this generous and humane
quality: spontaneously and by the free impulse of his nature he loved his
people, loved mankind, and took a tender and comprehensive interest in
their fortunes, their joys, or their miseries.  Being seriously ill in
1259, and desiring to give his eldest son, Prince Louis, whom he lost in
the following year, his last and most heartfelt charge, "Fair son," said
he, "I pray thee make thyself beloved of the people of thy kingdom, for
verily I would rather a Scot should come from Scotland and govern our
people well and loyally than have thee govern it ill."  To watch over the
position and interests of all parties in his dominions, and to secure to
all his subjects strict and prompt justice, this was what continually
occupied the mind of Louis IX.  There are to be found in his biography
two very different but equally striking proofs of his solicitude in this
respect.  M. Felix Faure has drawn up a table of all the journeys made by
Louis in France, from 1254 to 1270, for the better cognizance of matters
requiring his attention, and another of the parliaments which he held,
during the same period, for considering the general affairs of the
kingdom and the administration of justice.  Not one of these sixteen
years passed without his visiting several of his provinces, and the year
1270 was the only one in which he did not hold a parliament.  (_Histoire
de Saint Louis,_ by M. Felix Faure, t. ii.  pp. 120, 339.) Side by side
with this arithmetical proof of his active benevolence we will place a
moral proof taken from Joinville's often-quoted account of St. Louis's
familiar intervention in his subjects' disputes about matters of private
interest.  "Many a time," says he, "it happened in summer that the king
went and sat down in the wood of Vincennes after mass, and leaned against
an oak, and made us sit down round about him.  And all those who had
business came to speak to him without restraint of usher or other folk.
And then he demanded of them with his own mouth, 'Is there here any who
hath a suit?' and they who had their suit rose up; and then he said,
'Keep silence, all of ye; and ye shall have despatch one after the
other.'  And then he called my Lord Peter de Fontaines and my Lord
Geoffrey de Villette (two learned lawyers of the day and counsellors of
St. Louis), and said to one of them, 'Despatch me this suit.'  And when
he saw aught to amend in the words of those who were speaking for
another, he himself amended it with his own mouth.  I sometimes saw in
summer that, to despatch his people's business, he went into the Paris
garden, clad in camlet coat and linsey surcoat without sleeves, a mantle
of black taffety round his neck, hair right well combed and without coif,
and on his head a hat with white peacock's plumes.  And he had carpets
laid for us to sit round about him.  And all the people who had business
before him set themselves standing around him; and then he had their
business despatched in the manner I told you of before as to the wood of
Vincennes."  (Joinville, chap.  xii.)

The active benevolence of St. Louis was not confined to this paternal
care for the private interests of such subjects as approached his person;
he was equally attentive and zealous in the case of measures called for
by the social condition of the times and the general interests of the
kingdom.  Amongst the twenty-six government ordinances, edicts, or
letters, contained under the date of his reign in the first volume of the
_Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France,_ seven, at the least, are
great acts of legislation and administration of a public kind; and these
acts are all of such a stamp as to show that their main object is not to
extend the power of the crown or subserve the special interests of the
kingship at strife with other social forces; they are real reforms, of
public and moral interest, directed against the violence, disturbances,
and abuses of the feudal system.  Many other of St. Louis's legislative
and administrative acts have been published either in subsequent volumes
of the _Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois,_ or in similar collections, and
the learned have drawn attention to a great number of them still
remaining unpublished in various archives.  As for the large collection
of legislative enactments known by the name of _Etailissements de Saint
Louis,_ it is probably a lawyer's work, posterior, in great part at
least, to his reign, full of incoherent and even contradictory
enactments, and without any claim to be considered as a general code of
law of St. Louis's date and collected by his order, although the
paragraph which serves as preface to the work is given under his name and
as if it had been dictated by him.

Another act, known by the name of the Pragmatic Sanction, has likewise
got placed, with the date of March, 1268, in the _Recueil des Ordonnances
des Rois de France,_ as having originated with St. Louis.  Its object is,
first of all, to secure the rights, liberties, and canonical rules,
internally, of the Church of France; and, next, to interdict "the
exactions and very heavy money-charges which have been imposed or may
hereafter be imposed on the said Church by the court of Rome, and by the
which our kingdom hath been miserably impoverished; unless they take
place for reasonable, pious, and very urgent cause, through inevitable
necessity, and with our spontaneous and express consent and that of the
Church of our kingdom."  The authenticity of this act, vigorously
maintained in the seventeenth century by Bossuet (in his _Defense de la
Declaration du Clerge de France de 1682,_ chap. ix.  t. xliii.  p. 26),
and in our time by M. Daunou (in the _Histoire litteraire de la France,
continuee par des Hembres de l'Institut,_ t. xvi.  p. 75, and t. xix.
p. 169), has been and still is rendered doubtful for strong reasons,
which M. Felix Faure, in his _Histoire de Saint Louis_ (t. ii.  p. 271),
has summed up with great clearness.  There is no design of entering here
upon an examination of this little historical problem; but it is a
bounden duty to point out that, if the authenticity of the Pragmatic
Sanction, as St. Louis's, is questionable, the act has, at bottom,
nothing but what bears a very strong resemblance to, and is quite in
conformity with, the general conduct of that prince.  He was profoundly
respectful, affectionate, and faithful towards the papacy, but, at the
same time, very careful in upholding both the independence of the crown
in things temporal, and its right of superintendence in things spiritual.
Attention has been drawn to his posture of reserve during the great
quarrel between the priestdom and the empire, and his firmness in
withstanding the violent measures adopted by Gregory IX. and Innocent IV.
against the Emperor Frederick II.  Louis carried his notions, as to the
independence of his judgment and authority, very far beyond the cases in
which that policy went hand in hand with interest, and even into purely
religious questions.  The Bishop of Auxerre said to him one day, in the
name of several prelates, "'Sir, these lords which be here, archbishops
and bishops, have told me to tell you that Christianity is perishing in
your hands.'  The king crossed himself and said,  Well, tell me how that
is made out!'  'Sir,' said the bishop, 'it is because nowadays so little
note is taken of excommunications, that folk let death overtake them
excommunicate without getting absolution, and have no mind to make
atonement to the Church.  These lords, therefore, do pray you, sir, for
the love of God and because you ought to do so, to command your provosts
and bailiffs that all those who shall remain a year and a day
excommunicate be forced, by seizure of their goods, to get themselves
absolved.'  Whereto the king made answer that he would willingly command
this in respect of the excommunicate touching whom certain proofs should
be given him that they were in the wrong.  The bishop said that the
prelates would not have this at any price, and that they disputed the
king's right of jurisdiction in their causes.  And the king said that he
would not do it else; for it would be contrary to God and reason if he
should force folks to get absolution when the clergy had done them wrong.
As to that,' said the king, 'I will give you the example of the Count of
Brittany, who for seven years, being fully excommunicate, was at pleas
with the prelates of Brittany; and he prevailed so far that the pope
condemned them all.  If, then, I had forced the Count of Brittany, the
first year, to get absolution, I should have sinned against God and
against him.'  Then the prelates gave up; and never since that time have
I heard that a single demand was made touching the matters above spoken
of."  (Joinville, chap.  xiii.  p.  43.)

One special fact in the civil and municipal administration of St. Louis
deserves to find a place in history.  After the time of Philip Augustus
there was malfeasance in the police of Paris.  The provostship of Paris,
which comprehended functions analogous to those of prefect, mayor, and
receiver-general, became a purchasable office, filled sometimes by two
provosts at a time.  The burghers no longer found justice or security in
the city where the king resided.  At his return from his first crusade,
Louis recognized the necessity for applying a remedy to this evil; the
provostship ceased to be a purchasable office; and he made it separate
from the receivership of the royal domain.  In 1258 he chose as provost
Stephen Boileau, a burgher of note and esteem in Paris; and in order to
give this magistrate the authority of which he had need, the king
sometimes came and sat beside him when he was administering justice at
the Chatelet.  Stephen Boileau justified the king's confidence, and
maintained so strict a police that he had his own godson hanged for
theft.  His administrative foresight was equal to his judicial severity.
He established registers wherein were to be inscribed the rules
habitually followed in respect of the organization and work of the
different corporations of artisans, the tariffs of the dues charged, in
the name of the king, upon the admittance of provisions and merchandise,
and the titles on which the abbots and other lords founded the privileges
they enjoyed within the walls of Paris.  The corporations of artisans,
represented by their sworn masters or prud'hommes, appeared one after the
other before the provost to make declaration of the usages in practice
amongst their communities, and to have them registered in the book
prepared for that purpose.  This collection of regulations relating to
the arts and trades of Paris in the thirteenth century, known under the
name of _Livre des Metiers d'Etienne Boileau,_ is the earliest monument
of industrial statistics drawn up by the French administration, and it
was inserted, for the first time in its entirety, in 1837, amongst the
_Collection des Documents relatifs d l'Histoire de France,_ published
during M. Guizot's ministry of public instruction.

St. Louis would be but very incompletely understood if we considered him
only in his political and kingly aspect; we must penetrate into his
private life, and observe his personal intercourse with his family, his
household, and his people, if we would properly understand and appreciate
all the originality and moral worth of his character and his life.
Mention has already been made of his relations towards the two queens,
his mother and his wife; and, difficult as they were, they were
nevertheless always exemplary.  Louis was a model of conjugal fidelity,
as well as of filial piety.  He had by Queen Marguerite eleven children,
six sons and five daughters; he loved her tenderly, he never severed
himself from her, and the modest courage she displayed in the first
crusade rendered her still dearer to him.  But he was not blind to her
ambitious tendencies, and to the insufficiency of her qualifications for
government.  When he made ready for his second crusade, not only did he
not confide to Queen Marguerite the regency of the kingdom, but he even
took care to regulate her expenses, and to curb her passion for
authority.  He forbade her to accept any present for herself or her
children, to lay any commands upon the officers of justice, and to choose
any one for her service, or for that of her children, without the consent
of the council of the regency.  And he had reason so to act; for, about
this same time, Queen Marguerite, emulous of holding in the state the
same place that had been occupied by Queen Blanche, was giving all her
thoughts to what her situation would be after her husband's death, and
was coaxing her eldest son, Philip, then sixteen years old, to make her a
promise on oath to remain under her guardianship up to thirty years of
age, to take to himself no counsellor without her approval, to reveal to
her all designs which might be formed against her, to conclude no treaty
with his uncle, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, and to keep as a secret
the oath she was thus making him take.  Louis was probably informed of
this strange promise by his young son Philip himself, who got himself
released from it by Pope Urban IV.  At any rate, the king had a
foreshadowing of Queen Marguerite's inclinations, and took precautions
for rendering them harmless to the crown and the state.

As for his children, Louis occupied himself in thought and deed with
their education and their future, moral and social, showing as much
affection and assiduity as could have been displayed by any father of a
family, even the most devoted to this single task.  "After supper they
followed him into his chamber, where he made them sit down around him;
he instructed them in their duties, and then sent them away to bed.  He
drew their particular attention to the good and evil deeds of princes.
He, moreover, went to see then in their own apartment when he had any
leisure, informed himself as to the progress they were making, and, like
another Tobias, gave them excellent instructions.  .  .  .  On Holy
Thursday his sons used to wash, just as he used, the feet of thirteen of
the poor, give them a considerable sum as alms, and then wait upon them
at table.  The king having been minded to carry the first of the poor
souls to the Hotel-Dieu, at Compiegne, with the assistance of his son-in-
law, King Theobald of Navarre, whom he loved as a son, his two eldest
sons, Louis and Philip, carried the second thither."  They were wont to
behave towards him in the most respectful manner.  He would have all of
them, even Theobald, yield him strict obedience in that which he enjoined
upon them.  He desired anxiously that the three children born to him in
the East, during his first crusade, John Tristan, Peter, and Blanche, and
even Isabel, his eldest daughter, should enter upon the cloistered life,
which he looked upon as the safest for their salvation.  He exhorted them
thereto, especially his daughter Isabel, many and many a time, in letters
equally tender and pious; but, as they testified no taste for it, he made
no attempt to force their inclinations, and concerned himself only about
having them well married, not forgetting to give them good appanages,
and, for their life in the world, the most judicious counsels.  The
instructions, written with his own hand in French, which he committed to
his eldest son, Philip, as soon as he found himself so seriously ill
before Tunis, are a model of virtue, wisdom, and tenderness on the part
of a father, a king, and a Christian.

Pass we from the king's family to the king's household, and from the
children to the servitors of St. Louis.  We have here no longer the
powerful tie of blood, and of that feeling, at the same time personal and
yet disinterested, which is experienced by parents on seeing themselves
living over again in their children.  Far weaker motives, mere kindness
and custom, unite masters to their servants, and stamp a moral character
upon the relations between them; but with St. Louis, so great was his
kindness, that it resembled affection, and caused affection to spring up
in the hearts of those who were the objects of it.  At the same time that
he required in his servitors an almost austere morality, he readily
passed over in silence their little faults, and treated them, in such
cases, not only with mildness, but with that consideration which, in the
humblest conditions, satisfies the self-respect of people, and elevates
them in their own eyes.  "Louis used to visit his domestics when they
were ill; and when they died he never failed to pray for them, and to
commend them to the prayers of the faithful.  He had the mass for the
dead, which it was his custom to hear every day, sung for them."  He had
taken back an old servitor of his grandfather, Philip Augustus, whom that
king had dismissed because his fire sputtered, and John, whose duty it
was to attend to it, did not know how to prevent that slight noise.
Louis was, from time to time, subject to a malady, during which his right
leg, from the ankle to the calf, became inflamed, as red as blood, and
painful.  One day, when he had an attack of this complaint, the king, as
he lay, wished to make a close inspection of the redness in his leg; as
John was clumsily holding a lighted candle close to the king, a drop of
hot grease fell on the bad leg; and the king, who had sat up on his bed,
threw himself back, exclaiming, "Ah! John, John, my grandfather turned
you out of his house for a less matter!" and the clumsiness of John drew
down upon him no other chastisement save this exclamation.  (_Vie de
Saint Louis,_ by Queen Marguerite's confessor; _Recueiz des Historiens de
France,_ t. xx.  p. 105; _Vie de Saint Louis,_ by Lenain de Tillemont,
t. v.  p. 388.)

Far away from the king's household and service, and without any personal
connection with him, a whole people, the people of the poor, the infirm,
the sick, the wretched, and the neglected of every sort occupied a
prominent place in the thoughts and actions of Louis.  All the
chroniclers of the age, all the historians of his reign, have celebrated
his charity as much as his piety; and the philosophers of the eighteenth
century almost forgave him his taste for relics, in consideration of his
beneficence.  And it was not merely legislative and administrative
beneficence; St. Louis did not confine himself to founding and endowing
hospitals, hospices, asylums, the Hotel-Dieu at Pontoise, that at Vernon,
that at Compiegne, and, at Paris, the house of Quinze-Vingts, for three
hundred blind, but he did not spare his person in his beneficence, and
regarded no deed of charity as beneath a king's dignity.  Every day,
wherever the king went, one hundred and twenty-two of the poor received
each two loaves, a quart of wine, meat or fish for a good dinner, and a
Paris denier.  The mothers of families had a loaf more for each child.
Besides these hundred and twenty-two poor having out-door relief,
thirteen others were every day introduced into the hotel, and there lived
as the king's officers; and three of them sat at table at the same time
with the king, in the same hall as he, and quite close."  .  .  .  "Many
a time," says Joinville, "I saw him cut their bread, and give them to
drink.  He asked me one day if I washed the feet of the poor on Holy
Thursday.  'Sir,' said I, 'what a benefit!  The feet of those knaves!
Not I.'  'Verily,' said he, 'that is ill said, for you ought not to hold
in disdain what God did for our instruction.  I pray you, therefore, for
love of me accustom yourself to wash them.'"  Sometimes, when the king
had leisure, he used to say, "Come and visit the poor in such and such a
place, and let us feast them to their hearts' content."  Once when he
went to Chateauneuf-sur-Loire, a poor old woman, who was at the door of
her cottage, and held in her hand a loaf, said to him, "Good king, it is
of this bread, which comes of thine alms, that my husband, who lieth sick
yonder indoors, doth get sustenance."  The king took the bread, saying,
"It is rather hard bread."  And he went into the cottage to see with his
own eyes the sick man.

[Illustration: "It is rather hard Bread."----146]

When he was visiting the churches one Holy Friday, at Compiegne, as he
was going that day barefoot according to his custom, and distributing
alms to the poor whom he met, he perceived, on the yonder side of a miry
pond which filled a portion of the street, a leper, who, not daring to
come near, tried, nevertheless, to attract the king's attention.  Louis
walked through the pond, went up to the leper, gave him some money, took
his hand and kissed it.  "All present," says the chronicler, "crossed
themselves for admiration at seeing this holy temerity of the king, who
had no fear of putting his lips to a hand that none would have dared to
touch."  In such deeds there was infinitely more than the goodness and
greatness of a kingly sold; there was in them that profound Christian
sympathy which is moved at the sight of any human creature suffering
severely in body or soul, and which, at such times, gives heed to no
fear, shrinks from no pains, recoils with no disgust, and has no other
thought but that of offering some fraternal comfort to the body or the
soul that is suffering.

He who thus felt and acted was no monk, no prince enwrapt in mere
devoutness and altogether given up to works and practices of piety; he
was a knight, a warrior, a politician, a true king, who attended to the
duties of authority as well as to those of charity, and who won respect
from his nearest friends as well as from strangers, whilst astonishing
them at one time by his bursts of mystic piety and monastic austerity,
at another by his flashes of the ruler's spirit and his judicious
independence, even towards the representatives of the faith and Church
with whom he was in sympathy.  "He passed for the wisest man in all his
council."  In difficult matters and on grave occasions none formed a
judgment with more sagacity, and what his intellect so well apprehended
he expressed with a great deal of propriety and grace.  He was, in
conversation, the nicest and most agreeable of men; "he was gay," says
Joinville, "and when we were private at court, he used to sit at the foot
of his bed; and when the preachers and cordeliers who were there spoke to
him of a book he would like to hear, he said to them, 'Nay, you shall not
read to me, for there is no book so good, after dinner, as talk _ad
libitum,_ that is, every one saying what he pleases.' "Not that he was at
all averse from books and literates: "He was sometimes present at the
discourses and disputations of the University; but he took care to search
out for himself the truth in the word of God and in the traditions of the
Church.  .  .  .  Having found out, during his travels in the East, that
a Saracenic sultan had collected a quantity of books for the service of
the philosophers of his sect, he was shamed to see that Christians had
less zeal for getting instructed in the truth than infidels had for
getting themselves made dexterous in falsehood; so much so that, after
his return to France, he had search made in the abbeys for all the
genuine works of St. Augustin, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, and
other orthodox teachers, and, having caused copies of them to be made, he
had them placed in the treasury of Sainte-Chapelle.  He used to read them
when he had any leisure, and he readily lent them to those who might get
profit from them for themselves or for others.  Sometimes, at the end of
the afternoon meal, he sent for pious persons with whom he conversed
about God, about the stories in the Bible and the histories of the
saints, or about the lives of the Fathers."  He had a particular
friendship for the learned Robert of Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne,
whose idea was a society of secular ecclesiastics, who, living in common
and having the necessaries of life, should give themselves up entirely to
study and gratuitous teaching.  Not only did St. Louis give him every
facility and every aid necessary for the establishment of his learned
college, but he made him one of his chaplains, and often invited him to
his presence and his table in order to enjoy his conversation.  "One day
it happened," says Joinville, "that Master Robert was taking his meal
beside me, and we were talking low.  The king reproved us, and said,
'Speak up, for your company think that you may be talking evil of them.
If you speak, at meals, of things which should please us, speak up; if
not, be silent.'  "Another day, at one of their reunions, with the king
in their midst, Robert of Sorbon reproached Joinville with being "more
bravely clad than the king; for," said he, "you do dress in furs and
green cloth, which the king doth not."  Joinville defended himself
vigorously, in his turn attacking Robert for the elegance of his dress.
The king took the learned doctor's part, and when he had gone, "My lord
the king," says Joinville, "called his son, my lord Philip, and King
Theobald, sat him down at the entrance of his oratory, placed his hand on
the ground and said, 'Sit ye down here close by me, that we be not
overheard;' and then he told me that he had called us in order to confess
to us that he had wrongfully taken the part of Master Robert; for, just
as the seneschal [Joinville] saith, ye ought to be well and decently
clad, because your womankind will love you the better for it, and your
people will prize you the more; for, saith the wise man, it is right so
to bedeck one's self with garments and armor that the proper men of this
world say not that there is too much made thereof, nor the young folk too
little."  (Joinville, ch.  cxxxv.  p. 301; ch. v. and vi.  pp. 12 16;
t. v.  pp. 326, 364, and 368.)

Assuredly there was enough in such and so free an exercise of mind, in
such a rich abundance of thoughts and sentiments, in such a religious,
political, and domestic life, to occupy and satisfy a soul full of energy
and power.  But, as has already been said, an idea cherished with a
lasting and supreme passion, the idea of the crusade took entire
possession of St. Louis.  For seven years, after his return from the
East, from 1254 to 1261, he appeared to think no more of it; and there is
nothing to show that he spoke of it even to his most intimate confidants.
But, in spite of apparent tranquillity, he lived, so far, in a ferment of
imagination and a continual fever, resembling in that respect, though the
end aimed at was different, those great men, ambitious warriors or
politicians, of natures forever at boiling point, for whom nothing is
sufficient, and who are constantly fostering, beyond the ordinary course
of events, some vast and strange desire, the accomplishment of which
becomes for them a fixed idea and an insatiable passion.  As Alexander
and Napoleon were incessantly forming some new design, or, to speak more
correctly, some new dream of conquest and dominion, in the same way St.
Louis, in his pious ardor, never ceased to aspire to a re-entry of
Jerusalem, to the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre, and to the victory
of Christianity over Mohammedanism in the East, always flattering himself
that some favorable circumstance would recall him to his interrupted
work.  It has already been told, at the termination, in the preceding
chapter, of the crusaders' history, how he had reason to suppose, in
1261, that circumstances were responding to his desire; how he first of
all prepared, noiselessly and patiently, for his second crusade; how,
after seven years' labor, less and less concealed as days went on, he
proclaimed his purpose, and swore to accomplish it in the following year;
and how at last, in the month of March, 1270, against the will of France,
of the pope, and even of the majority of his comrades, he actually set
out--to go and die, on the 25th of the following August, before Tunis,
without having dealt the Mussulmans of the East even the shadow of an
effectual blow, having no strength to do more than utter, from time to
time, as he raised himself on his bed, the cry of Jerusalem!  Jerusalem!
and, at the last moment, as he lay in sackcloth and ashes, pronouncing