chamber of the king her son, they knocked upon the door with their staves, and the king came running into his chamber, so that his mother might find him there; and so, in turn, did the ushers of Queen Marguerite’s chamber when Queen Blanche came thither, so that she might find Queen Marguerite there.  One day the king was with the queen his wife, and she was in great peril of death, for that she had suffered from a child of which she had been delivered.  Queen Blanche came in, and took her son by the hand, and said to him, ’Come you away; you are doing no good here.’  When Queen Marguerite saw that the queen-mother was taking the king away, she cried, ’Alas! neither dead nor alive will you let me see my lord; and thereupon she swooned, and it was thought that she was dead.  The king, who thought she was dying, came back, and with great pains she was brought round.”

Louis gave to his wife consolation and to his mother support.  Amongst the noblest souls and in the happiest lives there are wounds which cannot be healed and sorrows which must be borne in silence.

When Louis reached his majority, his entrance upon personal exercise of the kingly power produced no change in the conduct of public affairs.  There was no vain seeking after innovation on purpose to mark the accession of a new master, and no reaction in the deeds and words of the sovereign or in the choice and treatment of his advisers; the kingship of the son was a continuance of the mother’s government.  Louis persisted in struggling for the preponderance of the crown against the great vassals; succeeded in taming Peter Mauclerc, the turbulent Count of Brittany; wrung from Theobald iv., Count of Champagne, the rights of suzerainty in the countships of Chartres, Blois, and Sancerre, and the viscountship of Chateaudun, and purchased the fertile countship of Macon from its possessor.  It was almost always by pacific procedure, by negotiations ably conducted, and conventions faithfully executed, that he accomplished these increments of the kingly domain; and when he made war on any of the great vassals, he engaged therein only on their provocation, to maintain the rights or honor of his crown, and he used victory with as much moderation as he had shown before entering upon the struggle.  In 1241, he was at Poitiers, where his brother Alphonso, the new Count of Poitou, was to receive, in his presence, the homage of the neighboring lords whose suzerain he was.  A confidential letter arrived, addressed not to Louis himself, but to Queen Blanche, whom many faithful subjects continued to regard as the real regent of the kingdom, and who probably continued also to have her own private agents.  An inhabitant of Rochelle, at any rate, wrote to inform the queen-mother that a great plot was being hatched amongst certain powerful lords, of La Marche, Saintonge, Angoumois, and perhaps others, to decline doing homage to the new Count of Poitou, and thus to enter into rebellion against the king himself.