vanished away.  Another time, the Sultan of Damascus, touched by Louis’s pious perseverance, had word sent to him that he, if he wished, could go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and should find himself in perfect safety.  “The king,” says Joinville, “held a great council; and none urged him to go.  It was shown unto him that if he, who was the greatest king in Christendom, performed his pilgrimage without delivering the Holy City from the enemies of God, all the other kings and other pilgrims who came after him would hold themselves content with doing just as much, and would trouble themselves no more about the deliverance of Jerusalem.”  He was reminded of the example set by Richard Coeur de Lion, who, sixty years before, had refused to cast even a look upon Jerusalem, when he was unable to deliver her from her enemies.  Louis, just as Richard had, refused the incomplete satisfaction which had been offered him, and for nearly four years, spent by him on the coasts of Palestine and Syria since his departure from Damietta, from 1250 to 1254, he expended, in small works of piety, sympathy, protection, and care for the future of the Christian populations in Asia, his time, his strength, his pecuniary resources, and the ardor of a soul which could not remain icily abandoned to sorrowing over great desires unsatisfied.

An unexpected event occurred and brought about all at once a change in his position and his plans.  At the commencement of the year 1253, at Sidon, the ramparts of which he was engaged in repairing, he heard that his mother, Queen Blanche, had died at Paris on the 27th of November, 1252.  “He made so great mourning thereat,” says Joinville, “that for two days no speech could be gotten of him.  After that he sent a chamber-man for to fetch me.  When I carne before him, in his chamber where he was alone, so soon as he got sight of me, he stretched forth his arms, and said to me, ‘O, seneschal, I have lost my mother!’” It was a great loss both for the son and for the king.  Imperious, exacting, jealous, and often disagreeable in private life and in the bosom of her family, Blanche was, nevertheless, according to all contemporary authority, even the least favorable to her, “the most discreet woman of her time, with a mind singularly quick and penetrating, and with a man’s heart to leaven her Woman’s sex and ideas; personally magnanimous, of indomitable energy, sovereign mistress in all the affairs of her age, guardian and protectress of France, worthy of comparison with Semiramis, the most eminent of her sex.”  From the time of Louis’s departure on the crusade as well as during his minority she had given him constant proofs of a devotion as intelligent as it was impassioned, as useful as it was masterful.  All letters from France demanded the speedy return of the king.  The Christians of Syria were themselves of the same opinion; the king, they said, has done for us, here, all he could do; he will serve us far better by sending us strong