Louis was, however, firm in his resistance to ecclesiastical arbitrariness. The prelates complained to him on one occasion that Christianity was going to the dogs, because no one feared their excommunications, and prayed that he would order his sergeants to lend the secular arm to enforce their authority. “Yes,” answered the king, “if you will give me the particulars of each case that I may judge if your sentence be just.” They objected that that appertained to the ecclesiastical courts, but Louis was inflexible, and they remained unsatisfied.
Many were the king’s benefactions to the great hospital of Paris, the Hôtel Dieu. Rules, dating from 1217, for the treatment of the sick poor were elaborated in his reign with admirable forethought. The sick, after confession and communion, were to be put to bed and treated as if they were the masters of the house. They were to be daily served with food before the nursing friars and sisters, and all that they desired was to be freely given if it could be obtained and were not prejudicial to their recovery. If the sickness were dangerous the patient was to be set apart and to be tended with especial solicitude. The sick were never to be left unguarded and even to be kept seven days after they were healed, lest they should suffer a relapse. The friars and sisters were to eat twice a day: the sick whenever they had need. A nurse who struck a patient was excommunicated. In later times, lax management and the decline of piety which came with the religious and political changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made reform urgent, and in 1505 the Parliament appointed a committee of eight bourgeois clercs to control the receipts. The buildings were much increased in 1636, but were never large enough, and in 1655 the priory of St. Julien was united to the hospital. “As many as 6000 patients,” says Félibien, writing in 1725, “have been counted there at one time, five or six in one bed.” No limitations of age or sex or station or religion or country were set. Everybody was received, and in Félibien’s time the upkeep amounted to 500,000 livres per annum. The old Hôtel Dieu was situated to the south of Notre Dame, and stood there until rebuilt on its present site in 1878.
The king was ever solicitous for the earthly weal of his subjects and made an unpopular peace with England against the advice of his Council. “Sirs,” he protested, “the land I give to the king of England I give without being held to do so, that I may awaken love between his children and mine who are cousins germain.”
Louis sought diligently over all the land for the grand sage homme who would prove an honest and fearless judge, punishing the wicked without regard to rank or riches;[56] and what he exacted of his officers he practised himself. He punished his own brother, the Count of Artois, for having forced a sale of land on an unwilling man, and ordered him to make restitution. He inflicted a tremendous fine on the Sire de Coucy, one of the most powerful of his barons, for having hanged three young fellows for poaching. The whole of the baronage appealed against the sentence, but the king was inexorable. As Joinville was on his way to join ship at Marseilles for the crusade in Palestine, he passed a ruined château:—it had been razed to the ground as a warning to tyrannous seigneurs, who robbed and spoiled merchants and pilgrims. Louis forbade the judicial duel in civil cases; he instituted the Royal Watch to police the streets of Paris; he registered and confirmed the charters of the hundred crafts of Paris and gave many privileges to the great trade guilds.
In 1720 the king put on a second time the crusader’s badge, “the dear remembrance of his dying Lord,” and met his death in the ill-fated expedition to Tunis. Louis was so feeble when he left that Joinville carried him from the Hôtel of the Count of Auxerre to the Franciscan monastery (the Cordeliers), where the old friends and fellow-warriors in the Holy Land parted for ever. When stricken with the plague the dying king was laid on a couch strewn with ashes. He called his son, the Count of Alençon, to him and gave wise and touching counsel, and, after holy communion, he recited the seven penitential psalms, invoked “Monseigneurs St. James and St. Denis and Madame St. Genevieve,” crossed his hands on his heart, gazed towards heaven and rendered his soul to his Creator. Piteuse chouse est et digne de pleurer le trépassement de ce saint prince, says Joinville, to whom the story was told by the king’s son—“A piteous thing it is and worthy of tears the passing away of this holy prince.”
The bones of the dead king, from which the flesh[57] had been removed by boiling, were sent for burial to St. Denis, which he had chosen for the place of his sepulture. The Sieur de Joinville,[58] his friend and companion, from whose priceless memoirs we have chiefly drawn, ends his story thus:—“I make known to all readers of this little book that the things which I say I have seen and heard of the king are true and steadfastly shall they believe them. And the other things of which I testify but by hearsay, take them in a good sense if it please you, praying God that by the prayers of Monseigneur St. Louis it may please Him to give us those things that He knoweth to be necessary as well for our bodies as for our souls. Amen.”