In his trouble and confusion he turned a willing ear to the false counsel of his sister the Lady of Beaujeu,[19] who urged him to take the wind out of Jeanne’s sails by himself confiding in the French King, who, thanks to her good offices, was disposed in his favour. Baldwin fell into the trap. Louis sent him a safe conduct, and towards the close of June he set out for Péronne, where Louis was at that time holding his Court.

His entry into the city on the evening of July 4 was a vision of Eastern splendour. All glorious in purple and gold, with his crown on his head, and a white wand in his hand, they bore him aloft on men’s shoulders in a comely litter. Before him was carried the imperial cross, and a retinue of over a hundred gorgeously-attired knights followed in his train. At the palace gates Louis himself came out to greet him. ‘Welcome, sire,’ said the French King, ‘if thou art indeed mine uncle Baldwin, Count of Flanders.’ ‘Fair nephew,’ quavered the old man, ‘such in sooth am I, but my daughter doth not know me, and would fain take away mine heritage; prithee help me to keep it.’ Louis had already decided on the course he would pursue, and already agreed with Jeanne as to the price of his championship, but he deemed it prudent for the moment to disguise his intentions, and the Emperor was soon entertained at a sumptuous banquet, during which he again recited the story of his adventures, and with such good effect that many of those who heard him were moved to tears.

Presently the royal Council was summoned, and Baldwin was invited to plead his cause. He consented to do so, and it became clear that the solemn reception accorded him had been from the first a solemn farce. In inviting Baldwin to Péronne, the French King had but one object in view—to separate him from his friends—and in now affecting the appearance of a serious examination of his claim, his only desire was to discredit it. At last, after having endured much brow-beating and hectoring speech, the Emperor refused to answer any more questions; the hour was late, he said, and he had that day been greatly fatigued; on the morrow he would be ready to converse again. But the wary old man had no intention of keeping his word; he now fully realized the danger of his position. In coming to Péronne he had made a false move; his liberty, perhaps his life, was in peril, and he cast about him for some means of escape. Fortune was once more kind to him, and that very night he took horse and fled the city.

When he reached his own dominions he was greeted with the same wild demonstrations of joy which had at first hailed his coming. But if the great heart of the people still throbbed for Baldwin, the classes were no longer with him. He soon learnt that the sheriffs of Bruges and of other great towns had accepted Jeanne’s amnesty, and that even the picked knights who had accompanied him to Péronne had played him false, and he lost heart. There was no peace for him in this world save in a life of penance. He had slain the woman who loved him, the woman who had risked her life for his sake, and her shade would assuredly drive him back to his hermitage or to the gallows.

The cause of this sudden volte-face in favour of Jeanne is difficult to surmise, but corruption had not unlikely something to do with it, for we find in a treaty concluded, at Bapaume a few days later the Countess of Flanders acknowledging that Louis, whose soldiers had not once drawn their swords in her behalf, had expended ten thousand livres in reinstating her in her dominions. Meanwhile Baldwin had disappeared. Some of the few who still clung to him affirmed that he had fled to Germany and had been received with hospitality by Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne, who, they averred, had counselled him to go to Rome and lay his case before the Common Father of the faithful. Be this as it may, Baldwin was presently arrested by Baron Erard de Chastenay, at Rougemont in Burgundy, who sold him to Jeanne for four hundred silver marks, and she, filled with savage joy, hanged him in chains on a gibbet at Lille between two hounds.

‘Many of those who knew his story,’ comments Matthew Paris, in his delightful, gossiping way, ‘were convinced that this lot befell the Emperor in consequence of his sin.’ ‘And all those who had promoted it by their advice,’ he adds, ‘in like manner came to a terrible end.’ ‘One of these men, when he returned home to his wife, and had been recognized by her, was cast headlong into a well. She privily procuring the same because in her lord’s absence she had wedded another man, and had borne him children.’ ‘So too of the rest. By some mishap or other they all of them perished miserably, for the wrath of God, who willeth not that evil should be rendered for good, was fiercely enkindled against them.’

CHAPTER XII
The Love Story of Bourchard d’Avesnes

BEFORE proceeding further with the story of Bruges, it will be necessary to go back to the time when Baldwin first disappeared from men’s view (1205), blotted out by the thick mist of conjecture which clung round the bastions of Adrianople, and to note the course of events in Flanders from that date until the day of his unlooked-for home-coming twenty years later (1225).

The mysterious exit of the Emperor had left his patrimony in hazardous plight. Jeanne, his heiress and eldest daughter, was not yet fifteen years old; her sister Marguerite was still in her cradle; Philip, Marquis of Namur, whom Baldwin before setting out for the East had appointed their guardian, was a man unworthy of trust, and the redoubtable Philip Augustus was shaping the destiny of France.

Too shrewd to let slip so favourable a moment for strengthening his hold on Flanders, the French King at once laid claim as suzerain to the wardship of the infant princesses, and the Marquis of Namur,[20] bribed by the promise of a royal alliance, fell in with his kinsman’s designs, and presently dispatched them to France.