Robert always showed himself favorable to this pacific work; and he is the first amongst the five kings of France, in other respects very different,--himself, St. Louis, Louis XII, Henry IV., and Louis XVI.,-- who were particularly distinguished for sympathetic kindness and anxiety for the popular welfare. Robert had a kindly feeling for the weak and poor; not only did he protect them, on occasion, against the powerful, but he took pains to conceal their defaults, and, in his church and at his table, he suffered himself to be robbed without complaint, that he might not have to denounce and punish the robbers. “Wherefore at his death,” says his biographer Helgaud, “there were great mourning and intolerable grief; a countless number of widows and orphans sorrowed for the many benefits received from him; they did beat their breasts and went to and from his tomb, crying, ‘Whilst Robert was king and ordered all, we lived in peace, we had nought to fear. May the soul of that pious father, that father of the senate, that father of all good, be blest and saved! May it mount up and dwell forever with Jesus Christ, the King of kings!” [Illustration: Robert had a Kindly Feeling for the Weak and Poor----313] Though not so pious or so good as Robert, his son, Henry I., and his grandson, Philip I., were neither more energetic nor more glorious kings. During their long reigns (the former from 1031 to 1060, and the latter from 1060 to 1108) no important and well-prosecuted design distinguished their government. Their public life was passed at one time in petty warfare, without decisive results, against such and such vassals; at another in acts of capricious intervention in the quarrels of their vassals amongst themselves. Their home-life was neither less irregular nor conducted with more wisdom and regard for the public interest. King Robert had not succeeded in keeping his first wife, Bertha of Burgundy; and his second, Constance of Aquitaine, with her imperious, malevolent, avaricious, meddlesome disposition, reduced him to so abject a state that he never gave a gratuity to any of his servants without saying, “Take care that Constance know nought of it.” After Robert’s death, Constance, having become regent for her eldest son, Henry I., forthwith conspired to dethrone him, and to put in his place her second son, Robert, who was her favorite. Henry, on being delivered by his mother’s death from her tyranny and intrigues, was thrice married; but his first two marriages with two German princesses, one the daughter of the Emperor Conrad the Salic, the other of the Emperor Henry III., were so far from happy that in 1051 he sent into Russia, to Kieff, in search of his third wife, Anne, daughter of the Czar Yaroslaff the Halt. She was a modest creature who lived quietly up to the death of her husband in 1060, and, two years afterwards, in the reign of her son Philip I., rather than return to her