Joinville has drawn for all time the picture of the years between the saint-king's two crusades, a golden age, if ever there was one. The friendship begun during their years of Syrian comradeship continued, and the seneschal often came up to Paris. It was he who arranged the marriage of the king's daughter with his own suzerain, the son of Thibaut IV, the song maker, in whose court of Champagne Joinville had acquired his delightful mode of speech. Then, again, came the call of the East. Jaffa and Antioch had fallen to Islam, and the condition of the Oriental Christians was heartrending. Louis IX could not resist their cry for aid. In 1270, twenty-two years after his first departure from Aigues-Mortes, the king sailed again from that half-finished fort by the dead waters. Joinville was not with him, for he was needed by his "little people," an excuse which his friend acknowledged. The crusaders had scarcely landed on the coast of Africa when plague struck them down. First died Tristan, the son born to St. Louis in the sorrowful, earlier days in Egypt. Then the saint-king himself passed away; and on his lips was the prayer that his race might learn to despise the prosperity of this world and not to fear adversity, and that France might never deny the name of Christ. The night before he died they heard him singing, "_Nous irons en Jerusalem_," the holy city he had never seen, the aspiration, the magic name that stirred those strong generations.[96] Before the century closed the Church canonized him. "House of France," announced the pope, "rejoice to have given the world so great a prince, and to heaven so great a saint. People of France, rejoice to have had so great a king." "If ever the golden age of the good old times existed," wrote Sainte-Beuve, "it certainly was under St. Louis, and it is by the pen of Joinville that it exists for us. They believed then in their king, they believed above all in their God, as if God were present in the smallest occurrences of daily life." In the _Histoire de St. Louis_ by Jean, sire de Joinville, there is not a mawkish note, and considering what happens to too many saints in their biographies, it must be acknowledged that the seneschal accomplished a feat. As depicted by his contemporaries, Louis IX is so convincingly himself that later efforts to stereotype him as the sacristan's ideal of piety have failed. His "pleasant manner of speech seasoned with wit" had nothing of the prig in it. From his childhood to his deathbed of ashes in ancient Carthage (birthplace of his favorite Augustine), St. Louis possessed a direct personal touch with God. "_Beau Sire Dieu, garde-moi mes gens!_" he rose at night to petition with insistent outstretched arms when, in Egypt, the "Greek fire" was hurled into the Christian camp. And Joinville, who had a wholesome dread of the Saracens' projectiles, turned to rest, feeling secure while such prayers were beseeching Heaven.