The men of Valenciennes believed this story, and pardoning his self-confessed crime as of little moment, since it affected only an infidel, proclaimed him their Count. The great towns of Flanders flung open their gates to him wherever he went, and finally he held his court in Bruges. His neighbours, the Dukes of Brabant and Limbourg, and his former ally, the King of England, acknowledged his claims, while his daughter Jeanne fled to France for protection. The chief reason for believing that Baldwin was an impostor is the fact that at this crisis of his career he failed signally to show any of the decision and judgment that twenty years before had made the true Baldwin Emperor. To be sure, twenty years of slavery, and the haunting memory of the beautiful Marie of Champagne who had followed him to her death, and of the Bulgarian princess whom he had so basely slain, may have enfeebled his intellect. He was now an old man. At all events, after a period of indecision he did the very thing he never should have done--he appealed to Philip for aid against his daughter. Summoned to Péronne, where the King of France was then holding court, he was subjected to a trial by the royal Council, which clearly showed its determination to convict him as an impostor. Perceiving that he had blundered into a trap, the old man fled from the castle and escaped to Flanders. Here, however, the appeal to Philip and its result, together with much French gold judiciously expended in behalf of Jeanne, caused the nobility to turn cold. He determined to lay his cause before the Pope, but while on his way to Rome was captured and sold to Jeanne who ordered him to be hanged in chains in the market-place at Lille between two hounds. If he was the true Baldwin, after all, few careers in history offer wider contrasts of glory and shame. [Illustration: HOTEL MERGHELYNCK, YPRES.]