This king, so well prepared for death, in his last days found great cause for rejoicing as a father.  William VII., Duke of Aquitaine, had, at his death, intrusted to him the guardianship of his daughter Eleanor, heiress of all his dominions, that is to say, of Poitou, of Saintonge, of Gascony, and of the Basque country, the most beautiful provinces of the south-west of France, from the lower Loire to the Pyrenees.  A marriage between Eleanor and Louis the Young, already sharing his father’s throne, was soon concluded; and a brilliant embassy, composed of more than five hundred lords and noble knights, to whom the king had added his intimate adviser, Suger, set out for Aquitaine, where the ceremony was to take place.  At the moment of departure the king had them all assembled about him, and, addressing himself to his son, said, “May the strong hand of God Almighty, by whom kings reign, protect thee, my dear son, both thee and thine!  If, by any mischance, I were to lose thee, thee and those I send with thee, neither my life, nor my kingdom would thenceforth be aught to me.”  The marriage took place at Bordeaux, at the end of July, 1137, and, on the 8th of August following, Louis the Young, on his way back to Paris, was crowned at Poitiers as Duke of Aquitaine.  He there learned that the king, his father, had lately died, on the 1st of August.  Louis the Fat was far from foreseeing the deplorable issues of the marriage, which he regarded as one of the blessings of his reign.

In spite of its long duration of forty-three years, the reign of Louis VII., called the Young, was a period barren of events and of persons worthy of keeping a place in history.  We have already had the story of this king’s unfortunate crusade from 1147 to 1149, the commencement at Antioch of his imbroglio with his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the fatal divorce which, in 1152, at the same time that it freed the king from a faithless queen, entailed for France the loss of the beautiful provinces she had brought him in dowry, and caused them to pass into the possession of Henry ii., King of England.  Here was the only event, under Louis the Young’s reign, of any real importance, in view of its long and bloody consequences for his country.  A Petty war or a sullen strife between the Kings of France and England, petty quarrels of Louis with some of the great lords of his kingdom, certain rigorous measures against certain districts in travail of local liberties, the first bubblings of that religious fermentation which resulted before long, in the south of France, in the crusade against the Albigensians—­such were the facts which went to make up with somewhat of insipidity the annals of this reign.  So long as Suger lived, the kingship preserved at home the wisdom which it had been accustomed to display, and abroad the respect it had acquired under Louis the Fat; but at the death of Suger it went on languishing and declining, without encountering any great obstacles.  It was reserved for Louis the Young’s son, Philip Augustus, to open for France, and for the kingship in France, a new era of strength and progress.