An interview took place between Queen Blanche and him; and “’Pardie, Count Theobald,’ said the queen, ’you ought not to have been against us; you ought surely to have remembered the kindness shown you by the king my son, who came to your aid, to save your land from the barons of France when they would fain have set fire to it all and laid it in ashes.’  The count cast a look upon the queen, who was so virtuous and so beautiful that at her great beauty he was all abashed, and answered her, ’By my faith, madame, my heart and my body and all my land is at your command, and there is nothing which to please you I would not readily do; and against you or yours, please God, I will never go.’  Thereupon he went his way full pensively, and often there came back to his remembrance the queen’s soft glance and lovely countenance.  Then his heart was touched by a soft and amorous thought.  But when he remembered how high a dame she was, so good and pure that he could never enjoy her, his soft thought of love was changed to a great sadness.  And because deep thoughts engender melancholy, it was counselled unto him by certain wise men that he should make his study of canzonets for the viol and soft delightful ditties.  So made he the most beautiful canzonets and the most delightful and most melodious that at any time were heard.” (Histoire des Dues et des Comtes de Champagne, by M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, t. iv. pp. 249, 280; Chroniques de Saint-Denis, in the Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de France, t. xxi. pp. 111, 112.)

Neither in the events nor in the writings of the period is it easy to find anything which can authorize the accusations made by the foes of Queen Blanche.  There is no knowing whether her heart were ever so little touched by the canzonets of Count Theobald; but it is certain that neither the poetry nor the advances of the count made any difference in the resolutions and behavior of the queen.  She continued her resistance to the pretensions and machinations of the crown’s great vassals, whether foes or lovers, and she carried forward, in the face and in the teeth of all, the extension of the domains and the power of the kingship.  We observe in her no prompting of enthusiasm, of sympathetic charitableness, or of religious scrupulousness, that is, none of those grand moral impulses which are characteristic of Christian piety, and which were predominant in St. Louis.  Blanche was essentially politic and concerned with her temporal interests and successes; and it was not from her teaching or her example that her son imbibed those sublime and disinterested feelings which stamped him the most original and the rarest on the roll of glorious kings.  What St. Louis really owed to his mother —­and it was a great deal—­was the steady triumph which, whether by arms or by negotiation, Blanche gained over the great vassals, and the preponderance which, amidst the struggles of the feudal system, she