keep his own counsel up to the very last minded and pious mother, Blanche of Casmoment in matters in which his whole soul tille, who became a widow by the death of was engaged; not that he was in any degree the feeble-minded Louis VIII., in consemorose, or naturally reserved-on the con- quence of the fatigues of the siege of Avigtrary, his disposition was constantly cheer- non, when Saint Louis was of the age ful; what pleased him especially in Joinville of six. Blanche was grand-daughter of was his gay and frank nature; and he Henry II. of England, and of Alphonse laughed at his blunt repartees, even when VIII. of Castille. Thus Richard Cœur de they did not coincide with his own senti- Lion was his great-uncle. And since Philip ments, in the greatest good-humour. But Augustus, his grandfather, married Isabella on one occasion he said to him -"Je n'ose of Hainault, descended from the last of the vous parler, à cause de l'esprit subtil dont Carlovingian princes, Saint Louis had not vous êtes doué, de chose qui touche à Dieu." only Hugues Capet, but Charlemagne, AlJoinville was a pious man, but this speech fred, and William the Conqueror, among characterizes the difference which existed his ancestors. between him and the King. The light smart nature of the good-hearted Champenois feudal chief was not uncongenial to Louis, but it was not one to which he would be likely wholly to unburthen himself of his inmost deliberations.

One anecdote portrays well the friendly familiarity which existed between the King and the Seneschal. When they were both at Acre, in Palestine, a number of Armenian pilgrims came to De Joinville and asked him to show them "le saint roi." De Joinville went and found the King sitting on the bare sand in his tent, leaning his back against the tent-pole, and said to him, "Sire, there are some people here from Armenia in pilgrimage, to Jerusalem, and they want to see 'le saint roi;' but as for me, I do not yet desire to kiss your bones" Et le roi rit moult clairement et me dit de les aller quérir."

Blanche of Castille told her son one day that she would rather see him dead before her than know he had committed one mortal sin, and the education she gave him was in accordance with this precept. As a boy, Saint Louis was remarkable for his fine features, his fair and delicate complexion, and his abundant blonde hair; but later in life, his delicate constitution, his daily austere religious practices, and the fatigue and sufferings of the first Crusade, made his cheek thin and pale, and his form spare, and gave him an air of premature age. The expression of his face was one of habitual sweetness, so that after death, when stretched on the sands of Carthage, he seemed to smile on his beholders. His infancy and youth were spotlessly pure, and his religious habits were early formed, at a time when the daily life of princes partook of all the severity of the cloister. A prince Saint Louis, indeed, could be familiar of regular life—was not only present every with all, even with mendicants, without losing day at mass, but followed all the canonical his dignity; and as for a "prud-homme," rites from matins to vespers; read daily not meaning in the language of the time a val- only his breviary, but the works of St. Augusiant and true man," he always rose from tine, St. Cyprian, St. Anselm, and other his seat to welcome him when he entered doctors of the Church. The education, his presence. To his most familiar friends then, of Saint Louis was of a cloistral kind. he signed himself in writing Louis de Pois- He got little of what we now call secular sy, having been born at Poissy, on the 25th and scientific training; he thought, up to his of April, 1215. He set indeed small value latest hour, that Cairo was the ancient Babon his kingship compared with his member-ylon; and his biographer mentions that he was ship by baptism in the Christian community. 'Bel ami," he said finely to one of his nobles whom he admitted to his intimacy, "je ne me considère que comme un roi de la fevé dont la royauté ne dure qu'au soir."

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Saint Louis, both by birth and education, owed most of his fine qualities to his heroic

never given to singing profane songs, but preferred the chanting of Latin hymns, of which Ave Maria Stella was his favourite.

He learnt, in common with the nobleborn youths of his time, all the exercises of chivalry, and the chase with hound and falcon, but never conceived any great pas

sion for the latter, and remarked in later herself; she managed the affairs of the roydays, when he heard that observations werealty so dexterously, that she again and again made of the time he devoted to his religious duties, that if he spent daily twice the time with dice or in the forest, no one would have thought it extraordinary,

In those turbulent times, when the feudal chieftains were still fierce and impatient of any power superior to their own, the accession of a young king of six, with a widowed mother, a stranger in the kingdom, seemed a splendid opportunity for making all possible aggressions on the royal power, and the coronation of the young boy-king offered few circumstances of good augury. Scarcely any of the great barons attended, to avoid paying homage to the child, whom they intended to despoil to the utmost of their power. And shortly after the coronation ceremony at Rheims, when Blanche was at the royal castle of Montlhery, some of the great feudal chiefs made a plot for seizing the Queen-mother and her son. But the prestige of feudalism had received a deadly blow at the great battle of Bovines, a year before the birth of Louis. The burgesses of the towns, who received their privileges from the crown, and hated the social oppressions of the great barons, were warmly attached to the royal cause; and when Blanche sent word to Paris that she was afraid to come there, because the great barons threatened the road, the whole of the citizens turned out in arms and lined the way from Montlhery. The memory of this devotion of the people to the royal cause in his boyhood sank deep into the heart of Louis; he spoke of it with affection to his latest day, and he never ceased to love his people as his children. "Beau fils," he said to his eldest son in 1259, "je te prie que tu te fasses aimer du peuple de ton royaume, car vraiment j'aimerais mieux qu'un Ecossais vint d'Ecosse et gouvernât le peuple du royaume bien et loyalement que si tu le gouvernasses mal appertement." It might indeed have fared ill with the boy had he not possessed such a mother as Blanche of Castille; and the two are inseparably connected in history. She was beautiful, high-minded, able in government, and of spotless reputation. Not seeing any one in whom she could trust to direct the affairs of her son, she assumed the Regency

dissolved or broke up by force factious leagues of the rebellious feudal lords; even after Louis became of age, his reverence for his mother was such that he disturbed her position as little as possible; and up to her death, which happened when her son was in Palestine, she continued to be the Regent of the kingdom in fact, if not in name.

She married Louis at twenty to Marguerite, the daughter of Raymond, Count of Provence. Marguerite was seven years younger than her husband, was beautiful, high-spirited, and generous; and the marriage was an admirable one, though the jealousy of Blanche, who was fearful of her influence over the son she had watched over and adored, was a great trial to both Marguerite and her husband. And when Blanche of Castille died, and Louis shut himself up at Acre in private sorrow for two days, Marguerite also showed signs of great sorrow; but on being asked what cause she had to grieve, confessed she mourned not on her own account, but out of sympathy for her husband.

The events of the reign of Saint Louis may be divided under five heads:

I. His repression of the rebellious spirit of the great feudatories, in pursuance of the policy tending to the consolidation of the French monarchy, commenced by Louis le Gros, carried on by Philip Augustus, himself, and Philip the Fair, and completed by Louis XI.

II. His relations with England, in connexion with the English possessions in France.

III. His position as neutral in the great quarrel between the Popes and the house of Hohenstauffen.

IV. His legislative and other reforms in the internal government of France, and his character as Sovereign.

V. His conduct as chief of the two last great Crusades proclaimed in Europe for the defence of Palestine.

As for the great feudatories, after raising endless troubles in the kingdom during the whole of the minority of Louis, they made a final great effort to override the royal

HISTOIRE DE SAINT LOUIS.

power in a league headed by the Comte de la Marche and the Comte de Toulouse, and backed by our Henry III. and thirty hogsheads d'esterlings. But the league was utterly broken up at the great combat of Taillebourg and the battle of Saintes, conducted by the King in person, then twentyseven years of age. The young Sovereign displayed great personal valour, and made good on that occasion the words which he spoke at fourteen, when advised to retire from an impending conflict, "Jamais ne combatterait-on ses hommes, que son corps ne fût avec. 99

priestly influence, and escaped the trap by saying he was willing si tel était l'avis de ses barons; and the barons were by no means willing to have the Pope and his devouring host on their territories.

Louis into the internal administration, lawcourts, and judicial procedure, were of imThe improvements introduced by Saint mense importance, founded on principles in. maturity or in germ which necessarily resulted in an entire change of feudal society, with immediate abolition of its worst abuses. He extinguished the right of priThe difficulties between England and he suppressed the most barbarous custom vate war as far as his authority extended, France were relative to the confiscation of of feudalism-the judicial duel, and he imthe French possessions of John by Philip proved the administration of justice to such Augustus. Henry III., after waging a long an extent, that the people said commonly, desultory warfare, and assisting the rebel- so fine a state of things had not been known lious outbreak of the great French barons, since Charlemagne. But the most imporaccepted terms of peace offered by Louis, tant of all the measures which he introduced and renounced all claim to Normandy, was the formation and management of a Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitiers, and trained body of lay lawyers, versed in the to the homage of other provinces, but was study of that body of "written reason," the confirmed in possession of Limousin, Quer- Roman law, in spite of the vehement oppocy, and Périgord, on condition of doing sition of both ecclesiastic and feudal dignihomage to the French King, which he ren- taries, who foresaw the total destruction of dered at Paris in the orchard before the their own jurisdiction in the ominous introroyal palace near the Pont Neuf, on the 6th duction into public life of a body of nonof December 1259, bareheaded, without noble functionaries, looking to the Crown cloak, sword, or spear, and on his knees, for advancement, as subtle as the clerical with his hands between those of his suzerain. canonists themselves in dispute, and enIn the great quarrel between the inflexi- dowed with a learning and a facility in the ble Innocent IV. and the elegant sceptic arts of reasoning and distinguishing which Frederic II., who wrote Provençal poetry, kept Mohammedan Bayadères, and wondered that God should have preferred the barren rocks of Judea to the neighbourhood of Naples, the mild, conciliatory, and Christian spirit of Louis was unable to effect any arrangement. He endeavoured in vain to mitigate the unforgiving obduracy of Innocent IV. towards the enemy whom he had twice excommunicated, and even deposed, in the Council of Lyons, so far as an ecclesiastical deposition could go. But Louis was the true representative of the Christian on earth, in contrast to the obdurate and angry priest, when, in his interview with him at Cluny, he suggested that Scripture bids us forgive not only once, but seventy times seven, and Innocent threw back his head in scorn. The Pope had been anxious to engage Louis on his side, and even to obtain the King's permission to hold in France the council subsequently held at Lyons, then a free city. He got up a great scene at Citeaux, at the famous monastery, where five hundred monks fell at once on their knees before Louis to implore his hospitality for the Pope. But Louis, religious as he was, always was able to withstand

drove the ignorant barons in disgust from
their own Courts, to leave them under the
control of men whom they despised. The
decrees and ordinances of Saint Louis were
collected later in that famous body of me-
diæval law known as the Établissements of
Saint Louis, and which occupies so impor-
tant a chapter in the history of French ju-
risprudence.

mere law reforms which judges might ad-
But Saint Louis was not content with
ministrate, he himself formed a last court
of appeal for his subjects; he was always on
horseback, travelling from one part of his
dominions to another, and wherever he
went all had free admission to his person,
and one of the most gracious pictures in all
history is that of Saint Louis, sitting day by
day after mass, in patriarchal fashion, with
his back against an oak, at Vincennes, and
his council around him, giving orders that
all, rich and poor, who had any grievance
to complain of, should come and state their
case in person before him, and redressing
the errors of justice as well as the wrongs
of those prevented from appealing to it.

by his charity, which was inexhaustible, and
But even his love of justice was exceeded

administer to him; and he made presents of similar boxes to his children and his friends. His bed was made of a few planks, with a thin mattress of cotton, with a piece of common stuff for covering; and after his return from Palestine he never wore any gold ornament, nor anything gilt, not even his spurs, and his dress from that time was so plain that he thought it his duty to indemnify the poor of his household, who considered his worn-out raiment as their perquisites.

He used every known device to stimulate his piety, and it seemed the grace of God was removed from him if he was unable to shed tears at the contemplation of Christ crucified, and cried, "O sire Dieu! je ne requiers fontaine de larmes pas, mais me suffiraient petites gouttes de larmes pour arroser la sécheresse de mon cœur."

it is difficult to understand how he was able | ways carried about with him a small scourge, to exercise it in such boundless fashion and with five knotted cords, in an ivory box, yet have his treasury always full. Wher- which it was the duty of his confessor to ever he went he visited the poor as friends; he entered leper-houses and hospitals, made inquiries after impoverished gentlemen, pensioned poor widows, gave dowries to poor girls, and fed hundreds daily from his table. He shrunk from no form of contagion and no object of disgust; he fed the leper and the blind with his own hand, washed the feet of the mendicant, and embraced the sick, the diseased, and the homeless, on the hand and the cheek, in reverence for the sanctity of affliction. One of the most exemplary instances of the incredible delicacy and fortitude with which he practised this virtue, was under the walls of Sidon, where he assisted with his own hands to bury the bodies of the workmen who had been slain by an invasion of Saracens while engaged in repairing the fortifications. The bodies were in the last stage of decay when he arrived at the town, and he alone walked among the putrefying corpses, and lifted them in his hands with a serene countenance, and without a sign of disgust or inconvenience. In fact, he saw in the poor and afflicted of every form the image of Christ, and the words "What ye shall do unto the least of them" never were put in practice with such devotion and self-sacrifice. Many of the maxims by which he re-a public vow. gulated his life have been recorded from his lips by Joinville, and give an admirable notion of the delicacy of his conscience: "Voulez-vous," said he, "être honoré dans ce siécle et avoir paradis pour mort? Gardez-vous de faire ou de dire rien que, si tout le monde le savait, vous ne puissiez avouer: J'ai fait celà; j'ai dit celà."

The ascetic side of his character is the one which we have now the most difficulty in sympathizing with. It appears he was at one time willing to withdraw into a monastery, if he could obtain the consent of his wife; but she extracted from him a promise never to speak of such a project any more. He got up at midnight to say matins in his chapel, and yet rose before daybreak in winter to join the chants to the Virgin; after the service was done he often remained in the cold chapel, prostrate, with his head on the pavement, absorbed in long prayers. Every morning he heard two masses, -one for the dead and one for the day, - besides other religious exercises in the course of the day and in the evening.

His fasts were frequent and severe, he wore haircloth, and he went often barefoot, but generally with shoes with the soles removed, not to attract attention, and he al

It was not possible for a king endowed with this intensity of faith not to join in all the enthusiasm of the time for the Crusades, and to feel more deeply than any for the calamities which then fell upon the Christian colonies in the East. He had long contemplated a Crusading expedition, when a severe illness came upon him, and his deliberations on the subject took the form of

His health, which was always weak, had never completely recovered from the fatigues of the campaign of 1242, and, during one of his last journeys about his kingdom, two years later, he fell dangerously ill of dysentery at Pontoise. As soon as it was known his life was in danger, the public consternation was universal. The people were struck with terror at the thought of losing their young Sovereign, whose reign promised to be a new epoch of peace and justice upon earth, and bishops, abbots, and barons, and all who had access to the Court, rushed to Pontoise. In all churches the reliquaries were uncovered and the bones of saints exposed to public adoration, and the altars were crowded with suppliants. The malady of Louis grew more virulent, and he was prepared to die. He called his chief officers of state and his barons about him, thanked them for their good services, and besought them to serve God with the same zeal as they had served himself. He then fell into a lethargy and was thought to be dead, and the Queen-mother and the Queen were entreated to leave the apartment. Two ladies were left with him; the one was for preparing him for burial, but the other contested the fact that he was