“And the saintly man received me right willingly and right joyfully.” So the ransom was completed, the king’s ransom and that of the greatest nobles of France, this group of starving ragged beggars in a dingey. Years followed of hard campaigning in Palestine. Once Saint Louis was even invited by the soldan of Damascus to visit as a pilgrim that Holy City which he could never enter as a conqueror. But Saint Louis and his knights were reminded of a story about Richard the Lion-Hearted, king of England. For Richard once marched almost within sight of the capital so that a knight cried out to him: “Sire, come so far hither, and I will show you Jerusalem!” But the Duke of Burgundy had just deserted with half the crusading army, lest it be said that the English had taken Jerusalem. So when Richard heard the knight calling he threw his coat armor before his eyes, all in tears, and said to our Savior, “Fair Lord God, I pray Thee suffer me not to see Thy Holy City since I can not deliver it from the hands of thine enemies.” King Louis the Saint followed the example of King Richard the Hero, and both left Palestine broken-hearted because they had not the strength to take Jerusalem. Very queer is the tale of the queen’s arrival from France. “When I heard tell that she was come,” said De Joinville, “I rose from before the king and went to meet her, and led her to the castle, and when I came back to the king, who was in his chapel, he asked me if the queen and his children were well; and I told him yes. And he said, ‘I knew when you rose from before me that you were going to meet the queen, and so I have caused the sermon to wait for you.’ And these things I tell you,” adds De Joinville, “because I had then been five years with the king, and never before had he spoken to me, nor so far as ever I heard, to any one else, of the queen, and of his children; and so it appears to me, it was not seemly to be thus a stranger to one’s wife and children.” To do the dear knight justice, he was always brutally frank to the king’s face, however much he loved him behind his back. The return of the king and queen to France was full of adventure, and De Joinville still had an appetite for such little troubles as a wreck and a sea fight. Here is a really nice story of an accident.