The knight, leading his horse and walking by Edward’s side, told how the King had been induced to make his descent on Tunis, from some wild hope of the king’s conversion, which had been magnified by Charles of Anjou, from his dislike to let so gallant an army pass by without endeavouring to obtain some personal advantage to his own realm of Sicily. Though a vassal of Beatrix of Provence, the Sire de Porçeles was no devoted admirer of her husband, Charles of Anjou, and spoke with no concealment of the unhappy perversion of the Crusade. Charles of Anjou was all-powerful with the court of Rome, and in crusading matters Louis deemed it right absolutely to surrender to the ecclesiastical power all that judgment which had made him so prudent and wise a king at home, while his crusades were lamentable failures. Thus in him it had been a piece of obedient self-denial not to press forward to the Holy Sepulchre; but to land in this malarious bay to fulfil aims that, had he but used his common sense, he would have seen to be merely those of private ambition. There it had been one scene of wasting sickness. A few deeds of arms had been done to refresh the spirits of the French, such as the taking of the fort of Carthage, and now and then a skirmish of some foraging party; but in general the Moors launched their spears and fled without staying for combat. Many who had hid themselves in the vaults and cellars of Carthage had been dragged out and put to death, and their bodies had aided in breeding pestilence. Name after name fell from the lips of the knight, like the roll of warriors fallen in a great battle, when “They melted from the field like snow, Their king, their lords, their mightiest low.” And the last foreign embassy that ever reached Louis IX. had been that of the Greek Emperor Michael Palæologos, come to set before him the savage barbarities perpetrated upon Christians by this brother— “Who had spoilt the purpose of his life.” It was as Charles entered the port, that Louis, lying on a bed of ashes, with his hands crossed upon his breast, and the words, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” entered not the Jerusalem of his earthly schemes, but the Jerusalem of his true aspirations. “Shall we conduct you to my Lord the King of Sicily?” asked De Porçeles. “No!” said Edward, with bitter sternness; “to my uncle of France.”