Louis sought diligently over all the land for the _grand sage homme_ who would prove an honest and fearless judge, punishing the wicked without regard to rank or riches;[56] and what he exacted of his officers he practised himself. He punished his own brother, the Count of Artois, for having forced a sale of land on an unwilling man, and ordered him to make restitution. He inflicted a tremendous fine on the Sire de Coucy, one of the most powerful of his barons, for having hanged three young fellows for poaching. The whole of the baronage appealed against the sentence, but the king was inexorable. As Joinville was on his way to join ship at Marseilles for the crusade in Palestine, he passed a ruined château:--it had been razed to the ground as a warning to tyrannous seigneurs, who robbed and spoiled merchants and pilgrims. Louis forbade the judicial duel in civil cases; he instituted the Royal Watch to police the streets of Paris; he registered and confirmed the charters of the hundred crafts of Paris and gave many privileges to the great trade guilds. In 1720 the king put on a second time the crusader's badge, "the dear remembrance of his dying Lord," and met his death in the ill-fated expedition to Tunis. Louis was so feeble when he left that Joinville carried him from the Hôtel of the Count of Auxerre to the Franciscan monastery (the Cordeliers), where the old friends and fellow-warriors in the Holy Land parted for ever. When stricken with the plague the dying king was laid on a couch strewn with ashes. He called his son, the Count of Alençon, to him and gave wise and touching counsel, and, after holy communion, he recited the seven penitential psalms, invoked "Monseigneurs St. James and St. Denis and Madame St. Genevieve," crossed his hands on his heart, gazed towards heaven and rendered his soul to his Creator. _Piteuse chouse est et digne de pleurer le trépassement de ce saint prince_, says Joinville, to whom the story was told by the king's son--"A piteous thing it is and worthy of tears the passing away of this holy prince." The bones of the dead king, from which the flesh[57] had been removed by boiling, were sent for burial to St. Denis, which he had chosen for the place of his sepulture. The Sieur de Joinville,[58] his friend and companion, from whose priceless memoirs we have chiefly drawn, ends his story thus:--"I make known to all readers of this little book that the things which I say I have seen and heard of the king are true and steadfastly shall they believe them. And the other things of which I testify but by hearsay, take them in a good sense if it please you, praying God that by the prayers of Monseigneur St. Louis it may please Him to give us those things that He knoweth to be necessary as well for our bodies as for our souls. Amen."