The greater part of the army remained under the African sun, tormented by the thick dust swept from the desert by the winds, and surrounded by the festering remains of the dead. The Moors prowled all around, continually cutting off some stragglers. There were no trees, no vegetable food; for water there was nothing but fetid marshes and cisterns full of disgusting insects. In eight days the plague had broken out. The counts of Vendôme, de la Marche and Viane, Walter de Nemours, marshal of France, the sires de Montmorency, Piennes, Brissac, St. Briçon, and d’Apremont were already dead. The legate soon followed them. The survivors being no longer able to bury them, they were thrown into the canal, till they covered the whole surface of the water. Meanwhile, the king and his sons were attacked by the malady; the youngest died in his vessel, and it was not till eight days afterwards that the confessor of St. Louis took on himself to acquaint him with the mournful event. The deceased was the most beloved of his children, and his death announced to a dying father was, to the latter, one tie less to earth, a call from God, a temptation to die. Accordingly, without perturbation or regret, he accomplished that last work of a Christian life, making the responses to the litanies and the psalms, dictating a noble and affecting instruction for his son, and receiving even the ambassadors of the Greeks, who came to entreat his intervention in their favour with his brother Charles of Anjou, whose ambition menaced them. He spoke to them with kindness, and promised to exert himself with zeal, if he lived, to keep them in peace; but the next day he himself entered into the peace of God. That last night of his life he desired them to raise him from his bed and lay him on ashes; and so he died, with his arms constantly folded in the form of a cross. “And on Monday the blessed king stretched his folded hands towards heaven, and said, ‘Good Lord God, have mercy on this people that here remaineth, and lead it into its country, that it fall not into the hand of its enemies, and that it be not constrained to renounce thy holy name!’ In the night before he deceased, whilst he was reposing, he sighed, and said in a low voice, ‘O Jerusalem! O Jerusalem!’”[d] In his lifetime the contemporaries of St. Louis suspected in their simplicity that he was already a saint, and more saintly than the priests. Says the king’s confessor, Geoffrey de Beaulieu:[l] “Whilst he lived a word might be said of him which is said of St. Hilary, ‘O most perfect layman whose life priests even desire to imitate.’ For many priests and laymen desired to be like the blessed king in his virtues and his morals; for it is even thought that he was a saint in his lifetime.”[d]