Master Robert plays a not altogether happy part in another scene, varicoloured and delightful:
“The holy king was at Corbeil one Pentecost, and twenty-four knights with him. The king went down after dinner into the courtyard back of the chapel, and was talking at the entrance with the Count of Brittany, the father of the present duke, whom God preserve. Master Robert de Sorbon came to seek me there, and took me by the cloak, and led me to the king, and all the other gentlemen came after us. Then I asked Master Robert: ‘Master Robert, what would you?’ And he said to me: ‘If the king should sit down here, and you should seat yourself above him, I ask you whether you would not be to blame?’ And I said, Yes.
“And he said to me: ‘Yet you lay yourself open to blame, since you are more nobly clad than the king: for you wear squirrel’s fur and cloth of green, which the king does not.’
“And I said to him: ‘Master Robert, saving your grace, I do nothing worthy of blame when I wear squirrel’s fur and cloth of green; for it is the clothing which my father and mother left me. But you do what is to blame; for you are the son of a vilain and vilaine, and have abandoned the clothes of your father and your mother, and are clad in richer cloth than the king.’ And then I took the lappet of his surcoat and that of the king’s, and said to him: ‘See whether I do not speak truly.’ And the king set himself to defend Master Robert with all his might.”
“Afterwards Messire the king called to him Monseigneur Philippe his son, the father of the present king, and the king Thibaut (of Navarre), and laid his hand on the earth and said: ‘Sit close to me, so that they may not hear.’
“‘Ah Sire,’ say they, ‘we dare not sit so close to you.’
“And he said to me, ‘Seneschal, sit down here.’ And so I did, so close that our clothes touched. And he made them sit down by me, and said to them: ‘You have done ill, you who are my sons, who have not obeyed at once all that I bade you: and see to it that this does not happen with you again.’ And they promised. And then he said to me, that he had called us in order to confess to me that he was in the wrong in defending Master Robert against me. ‘But,’ said he, ‘I saw him so dumbfounded that there was good need I should defend him. And do none of you attach any importance to all I said defending Master Robert; for, as the seneschal said to him, you ought to dress well and becomingly, so that your wives may love you better, and your people hold you in higher esteem. For the sage says that one should appear in such clothes and arms that the wise of this world may not say you have done too much, nor the young people say you have done too little.’”
The hopelessly worthy parvenu was quite outside this charmed circle of blood and manners.
Another story of Joinville opens our eyes to Louis’ views on Jews and infidels. The king was telling him of a grand argument between Jews and Christian clergy which was to have been held at Cluny. And a certain poverty-stricken knight was there, who obtained leave to speak the first word; and he asked the head Jew whether he believed that Mary was the mother of God and still a virgin. And the Jew answered that he did not believe it at all. The knight replied that in that case the Jew had acted like a fool to enter her monastery, and should pay for it; and with that he knocked him down with his staff, and all the other Jews ran off. When the abbot reproached him for his folly, he replied that the abbot’s folly was greater in having the argument at all. “So I tell you,” said the king on finishing his story, “that only a skilled clerk should dispute with misbelievers; but a layman, when he hears any one speak ill of the Christian law, should defend that law with nothing but his sword, which he should plunge into the defamer’s belly, to the hilt if possible.”
Well known is the hapless outcome of St. Louis’ Crusades: the first one leading to defeat and captivity in Egypt, the second ending in the king’s death by disease at Tunis. Yet in what he sought to do in his Lord’s cause, St. Louis was a true knight and soldier of the Cross. The spirit was willing; but the flesh accomplished little. Let us take from Joinville’s story of that first crusade a wonderfully illustrative chapter, giving the confused scenes occurring after the capture of Damietta, when the French king and his feudal host had advanced southerly through the Delta, along the eastern branch of the Nile. Joinville was making a reconnaissance with his own knights, when they came suddenly upon a large body of Saracens. The Christians were hard pressed; here and there a knight falls in the melée, among them