His loss was indeed a heavy one, both as son and as king. Even those contemporary writers who are least favourable to her acknowledge that Queen Blanche was 'the most discreet woman of her time, singularly acute and sagacious, with a man's courage, but the attractions and keen perceptions of her sex; magnanimous in her nature, a woman of indomitable energy; sovereign mistress of all the affairs of the century; guardian and protector of France; best to be compared to Semiramis, the greatest among women.'
During her son's minority, and from the time of his departure for the East, she had given him constant proofs of enthusiastic but not blind devotion, and had been very useful to him in spite of being slightly tyrannical. Several of the chroniclers assert that the absence of her son from 1248 to 1252, her anxiety on his account, and the duties which she undertook to perform for him, shortened her life. She died at the age of sixty-five; a few days before her death she bade farewell to the world, took the veil and made her vows as a nun of the Abbey of Maubuisson, which she had founded ten years previously and in which she was buried.
Queen Margaret shared her husband's grief. 'Madame Marie de Vertus,' says Joinville, 'a very excellent and pious woman, came to tell me that the Queen was in great affliction, and begged me to go to her and comfort her. When I entered I found her weeping, and I said that he had spoken truly who said that no faith was to be placed in women, "for she was the woman whom you hated above all others, and yet you show all this sorrow for her." She replied that she did not weep for the death of Queen Blanche, but for the King's grief, and for her daughter Isabella, [Footnote 35] who had been left in France under the care of her grandmother, and would now fall to the charge of men.'
[Footnote 35: Afterwards Queen of Navarre.]
Louis had a sincere love for his wife, and it was well merited, for during the whole crusade both in Egypt and Syria Queen Margaret had displayed both the constancy and courage of her affection. And yet when she rejoined the King at Sidon, in 1253, on hearing of her arrival, Louis asked his seneschal if the Queen and the children were well, and Joinville remarks: 'During the five years I had been with him he had never spoken of the Queen or of his children either to me or any one else. It seemed to me not a right thing thus to be a stranger to his own wife and children.'
But let the degree of affection in the royal household have been what it might, there can be no doubt that his mother Queen Blanche was the woman whom the King most admired, whom he most trusted, and who was treated by him with the greatest respect and consideration.