Soon after this King Lewis had a dangerous illness, in which his life was given over. He had been for some time speechless, and was even supposed to be dead, when he asked that the cross might be given to him; and as soon as he had thus engaged himself to the crusade he began to recover. His wife, his mother, and others tried to persuade him that he was not bound by his promise, because it had been made at a time when he was not master of himself; but Lewis would not listen to such excuses, and resolved to carry it out faithfully. The way which he took to enlist companions was very curious. On the morning of Christmas day, when a very solemn service was to be held in the chapel of his palace (a chapel which is still to be seen, and is among the most beautiful buildings in Paris), he caused dresses to be given to the nobles as they were going in; for this was then a common practice with kings at the great festivals of the Church. But when the French lords, after having received their new robes in a place which was nearly dark, went on into the chapel, which was bright with hundreds of lights, each of them found that his dress was marked with a cross, so that, according to the notions of the time, he was bound to go to the holy war. PART III. The king did what he could to raise troops, and appointed his mother, Queen Blanche, to govern the kingdom during his absence; and, after having passed a winter in the island of Cyprus, he reached Damietta, in Egypt, on the 5th of June, 1249. For a time all went well with the Crusaders; but soon a change took place, and everything seemed to turn against them. They lost some of their best leaders; a plague broke out and carried off many of them; they suffered from famine, so that they were even obliged to eat their horses; and the enemy, by opening the sluices of the Nile, let loose on them the waters of the river, which carried away a multitude. Lewis himself was very ill, and at length he was obliged to surrender to the enemy, and to make peace on terms far worse than those which he had before refused. But even although he was a prisoner, his saintly life made the Mahometans look on him with reverence; so that when the Sultan to whom he had become prisoner was murdered by his own people, they thought of choosing the captive Christian king for their chief. Lewis refused to make any treaty for his deliverance unless all his companions might have a share in it; and, although he might have been earlier set free, he refused to leave his captivity until all the money was made up for the ransom of himself and his followers. On being at length free to leave Egypt, he went into the Holy Land, where he visited Nazareth with deep devotion. But, although he eagerly desired to see Jerusalem, he denied himself this pleasure, from a fear that the crusading spirit might die out if the first of Christian kings should consent to visit the holy city without delivering it from the unbelievers.