Ha! le bon Roy!
Simples, ignorans supportait
Pauvres, mendians confortait,
Observant de Jhusys la foi,
Redoutant Dieu—
Ha! le bon Roy!
Joinville has drawn for all time the picture of the years between the saint-king’s two crusades, a golden age, if ever there was one. The friendship begun during their years of Syrian comradeship continued, and the seneschal often came up to Paris. It was he who arranged the marriage of the king’s daughter with his own suzerain, the son of Thibaut IV, the song maker, in whose court of Champagne Joinville had acquired his delightful mode of speech.
Then, again, came the call of the East. Jaffa and Antioch had fallen to Islam, and the condition of the Oriental Christians was heartrending. Louis IX could not resist their cry for aid. In 1270, twenty-two years after his first departure from Aigues-Mortes, the king sailed again from that half-finished fort by the dead waters. Joinville was not with him, for he was needed by his “little people,” an excuse which his friend acknowledged.
The crusaders had scarcely landed on the coast of Africa when plague struck them down. First died Tristan, the son born to St. Louis in the sorrowful, earlier days in Egypt. Then the saint-king himself passed away; and on his lips was the prayer that his race might learn to despise the prosperity of this world and not to fear adversity, and that France might never deny the name of Christ. The night before he died they heard him singing, “Nous irons en Jerusalem,” the holy city he had never seen, the aspiration, the magic name that stirred those strong generations.[96] Before the century closed the Church canonized him. “House of France,” announced the pope, “rejoice to have given the world so great a prince, and to heaven so great a saint. People of France, rejoice to have had so great a king.”
“If ever the golden age of the good old times existed,” wrote Sainte-Beuve, “it certainly was under St. Louis, and it is by the pen of Joinville that it exists for us. They believed then in their king, they believed above all in their God, as if God were present in the smallest occurrences of daily life.” In the Histoire de St. Louis by Jean, sire de Joinville, there is not a mawkish note, and considering what happens to too many saints in their biographies, it must be acknowledged that the seneschal accomplished a feat. As depicted by his contemporaries, Louis IX is so convincingly himself that later efforts to stereotype him as the sacristan’s ideal of piety have failed. His “pleasant manner of speech seasoned with wit” had nothing of the prig in it. From his childhood to his deathbed of ashes in ancient Carthage (birthplace of his favorite Augustine), St. Louis possessed a direct personal touch with God. “Beau Sire Dieu, garde-moi mes gens!” he rose at night to petition with insistent outstretched arms when, in Egypt, the “Greek fire” was hurled into the Christian camp. And Joinville, who had a wholesome dread of the Saracens’ projectiles, turned to rest, feeling secure while such prayers were beseeching Heaven.
Louis IX was a tireless student of the Bible and works of the Church Fathers. He had a passion for the liturgy. The number of hours which he spent in prayer has roused the sarcasm of our indifferent generation. His hours before the Tabernacle bore fruit in deeds. His temper was naturally quick, and he had a keen sense of irony, but his friend, the seneschal, was able to bear witness, at his canonization process, that in an intimacy of over twenty years never had he heard a word of disparagement of others fall from the king’s lips. “There was something in the mere sight of him that found a way to the heart and affections,” wrote one who knew him; “the eyes of a dove,” said another. “He seemed pierced to the heart with pity for the unfortunate,” wrote Queen Marguerite’s chaplain who had daily intercourse with him. An observant Italian who saw the king on his way to his first crusade described the something of rare refinement and grace in his bearing.
Not a touch of self-consciousness was in Louis; barefooted, in a white tunic, he carried the Crown of Thorns through the streets of Paris. In his sublime other-worldliness, he bathed the feet of beggars, dressed the sores of lepers, and when he felt that his soul needed it he scourged himself. And at the same time he was a model of knightly prowess, who many a time had fought
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens.[97]
At the battle of Mansourah, Joinville saw the king, “the most beautiful of men,” to his eyes, fair, gallant, in stature head and shoulders above those around him, defend himself alone with great slashing sword cuts from the onslaught of six paynims. He was a true prud’homme, a name for which he had a weakness, for to be a prud’homme meant to be a knight, not only bodily, but in one’s soul.
Side by side with his other-worldliness went a sound practical sense. When his son-in-law, Thibaut V of Champagne, gave overgenerously to a monastery in Provins, all the while that he was in debt, St. Louis asked him was it fair to bestow alms with other people’s money. His personal tastes were unostentatious, but he held court sumptuously when the occasion required, and he advised his lords to dress well so that their wives would love them better. He was ever human; when word came to him in Palestine that the mother he adored had died in France, he shut himself away from sympathy for two days, then sent for the friend he loved best. As Joinville approached, the king opened his arms to him with the cry, “Ah, seneschal, I have lost my mother!”