On the land it was the same. The king, weak unto death, was defended by the little band about him. They brought him into a house in the town of Menieh; within doors a tradeswoman from Paris held the royal head in her lap, as was supposed, watching him die. Without in the streets brave men laid down their lives in a last effort to save even their king’s body, but their heroic devotion served only to emblazon itself on this darkest page of the history of the crusades. Louis was taken by the foe and loaded with chains, but he felt more weightily the shame of being the first king of France ever a prisoner in the hands of a foreign enemy. Joinville, who tells the story, was dragged to a neighboring house, and would have been slain but that a little child clung to him and, by this double appeal of helplessness, excited the interposition of one whom he calls “the good Saracen.” The Moslems returned to Mansourah in triumph. They dressed their fleet in utmost gayety as it bore the person of their royal captive. Their armies marched on either bank of the Nile, escorting the Christian survivors, who were driven along with their hands bound behind their backs. Queen Marguerite was at Damietta, already entering the pains of childbed. Ordering all to leave her chamber but an aged knight, she said to him, “I require you, on the faith you have pledged to me, that if the enemy shall take this city you will cut off my head rather than allow me to become a captive.” “Certainly, madam, I will do it,” he replied. The queen gave birth to a son, whom she called Jean Tristan, because of the sorrows that begirt his birth. Learning that the remnant of the city guard proposed abandoning Damietta, she forbade it as involving additional disgrace. “Be moved by my tears,” she cried, “and have pity on the poor child whom you see lying on my bosom.” The attitude of this heroine saved the city, the last spot of Christian possession in the land they had come to conquer.