there remain not one hundred in this city. Wherefore they do counsel you, sir, to get you hence to France, and to provide troops and money wherewith you may return speedily to this country, to take vengeance on these enemies of God who have kept you in prison.” Louis, without any discussion, interrogated all present, one after another, and all, even the pope’s legate, agreed with Guy de Mauvoisin. “I was seated just fourteenth, facing the legate,” says Joinville, “and when he asked me how it seemed to me, I answered him that if the king could hold out so far as to keep the field for a year, he would do himself great honor if he remained.”
Only two knights, William de Beaumont and Sire de Chatenay, had the courage to support the opinion of Joinville, which was bolder for the time being, but not less indecisive in respect of the immediate future than the contrary opinion. “I have heard you out, sirs,” said the king: “and I will answer you, within eight clays from this time, touching that which it shall please me to do.” “Next Sunday,” says Joinville, “we came again, all of us, before the king. ‘Sirs,’ said he, ‘I thank very much all those who have counselled me to get me gone to France, and likewise those who have counselled me to bide. But I have bethought me that, if I bide, I see no danger lest my kingdom of France be lost, for the queen, my mother, hath a many folk to defend it. I have noted likewise that the barons of this land do say that, if I go hence, the kingdom of Jerusalem is lost. At no price will I suffer to be lost the kingdom of Jerusalem, which I came to guard and conquer. My resolve, then, is, that I bide for the present. So I say unto you, ye rich men who are here, and to all other knights who shall have a mind to bide with me, come and speak boldly unto me, and I will give ye so much that it shall not be my fault if ye have no mind to bide.’ ”
Thus none, save Louis himself, dared go to the root of the question. The most discreet advised him to depart, only for the purpose of coming back, and recommencing what had been so unsuccessful; and the boldest only urged him to remain a year longer. None took the risk of saying, even after so many mighty but vain experiments, that the enterprise was chimerical, and must be given up. Louis alone was, in word and deed, perfectly true to his own absorbing idea of recovering the Holy Sepulchre from the Mussulmans and re-establishing the kingdom of Jerusalem. His was one of those pure and majestic souls, which are almost alien to the world in which they live, and in which disinterested passion is so strong that it puts judgment to silence, extinguishes all fear, and keeps up hope to infinity. The king’s two brothers embarked with a numerous retinue. How many crusaders, knights, or men-at-arms, remained with Louis, there is nothing to show; but they were, assuredly, far from sufficient for the attainment of the twofold end he had in view, and even for insuring less grand results, such as the deliverance of the crusaders still remaining prisoners in the hands of the Mussulmans, and anything like an effectual protection for the Christians settled in Palestine and Syria.
Twice Louis believed he was on the point of accomplishing his desire. Towards the end of 1250, and again in 1252, the Sultan of Aleppo and Damascus, and the Emirs of Egypt, being engaged in a violent struggle, made offers to him, by turns, of restoring the kingdom of Jerusalem if he would form an active alliance with one or the other party against its enemies. Louis sought means of accepting either of these offers without neglecting his previous engagements, and without compromising the fate of the Christians still prisoners in Egypt, or living in the territories of Aleppo and Damascus; but, during the negotiations entered upon with a view to this end, the Mussulmans of Syria and Egypt suspended their differences, and made common cause against the remnants of the Christian crusaders; and all hope of re-entering Jerusalem by these means vanished away. Another time, the Sultan of Damascus, touched by Louis’s pious perseverance, had word sent to him that he, if he wished, could go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and should find himself in perfect safety. “The king,” says Joinville, “held a great council; and none urged him to go. It was shown unto him that if he, who was the greatest king in Christendom, performed his pilgrimage without delivering the Holy City from the enemies of God, all the other kings and other pilgrims who came after him would hold themselves content with doing just as much, and would trouble themselves no more about the deliverance of Jerusalem.” He was reminded of the example set by Richard Coeur de Lion, who, sixty years before, had refused to cast even a look upon Jerusalem, when he was unable to deliver her from her enemies. Louis, just as Richard had, refused the incomplete satisfaction which had been offered him, and for nearly four years, spent by him on the coasts of Palestine and Syria since his departure from Damietta, from 1250 to 1254, he expended, in small works of piety, sympathy, protection, and care for the future of the Christian populations in Asia, his time, his strength, his pecuniary resources, and the ardor of a soul which could not remain icily abandoned to sorrowing over great desires unsatisfied.
An unexpected event occurred and brought about all at once a change in his position and his plans. At the commencement of the year 1253, at Sidon, the ramparts of which he was engaged in repairing, he heard that his mother, Queen Blanche, had died at Paris on the 27th of November, 1252. “He made so great mourning thereat,” says Joinville, “that for two days no speech could be gotten of him. After that he sent a chamber-man for to fetch me. When I came before him, in his chamber where he was alone, so soon as he got sight of me, he stretched forth his arms, and said to me, ‘O, seneschal, I have lost my mother!’ ” It was a great loss both for the son and for the king. Imperious, exacting, jealous, and often disagreeable in private life and in the bosom of her family, Blanche was, nevertheless, according to all contemporary authority, even the least favorable to her, “the most discreet woman of her time, with a mind singularly quick and penetrating, and with a man’s heart to leaven her Woman’s sex and ideas; personally magnanimous, of indomitable energy, sovereign mistress in all the affairs of her age, guardian and protectress of France, worthy of comparison with Semiramis, the most eminent of her sex.” From the time of Louis’s departure on the crusade as well as during his minority she had given him constant proofs of a devotion as intelligent as it was impassioned, as useful as it was masterful. All letters from France demanded the speedy return of the king. The Christians of Syria were themselves of the same opinion; the king, they said, has done for us, here, all he could do; he will serve us far better by sending us strong re-enforcements from France. Louis embarked at St. Jean d’Acre, on the 24th of April, 1254, carrying away with him, on thirteen vessels, large and small, Queen Marguerite, his children, his personal retinue, and his own more immediate men-at-arms, and leaving the Christians of Syria, for their protection in his name, a hundred knights under the orders of Geoffrey de Sargines, that comrade of his in whose bravery and pious fealty he had the most entire confidence. After two months and a half at sea, the king and his fleet arrived, on the 8th of July, 1254, off the port of Hyeres, which at that time belonged to the Empire, and not to France. For two days Louis refused to land at this point; for his heart was set upon not putting his foot upon land again save on the soil of his own kingdom, at Aigues-Mortes, whence he had, six years before, set out. At last he yielded to the entreaties of the queen and those who were about him, landed at Hyeres, passed slowly through France, and made his solemn entry into Paris on the 7th of September, 1254. “The burgesses and all those who were in the city were there to meet him, clad and bedecked in all their best according to their condition. If the other towns had received him with great joy, Paris evinced even more than any other. For several days there were bonfires, dances, and other public rejoicings, which ended sooner than the people wished; for the king, who was pained to see the expense, the dances, and the vanities indulged in, went off to the wood of Vincennes to put a stop to them.”
So soon as he had resumed the government of his kingdom, after six years’ absence and adventures, heroic, indeed, but all in vain for the cause of Christendom, those of his counsellors and servants who lived most closely with him and knew him best were struck at the same time with what he had remained and what he had become during this long and cruel trial. “When the king had happily returned to France, how piously he bare himself towards God, how justly towards his subjects, how compassionately towards the afflicted, and how humbly in his own respect, and with what zeal he labored to make progress, according to his power, in every virtue, all this can be attested by persons who carefully watched his manner of life, and who knew the spotlessness of his conscience. It is the opinion of the most clear-sighted and the wisest that, in proportion as