Presently the royal Council was summoned, and Baldwin was invited to plead his cause. He consented to do so, and it became clear that the solemn reception accorded him had been from the first a solemn farce. In inviting Baldwin to Péronne, the French King had but one object in view--to separate him from his friends--and in now affecting the appearance of a serious examination of his claim, his only desire was to discredit it. At last, after having endured much brow-beating and hectoring speech, the Emperor refused to answer any more questions; the hour was late, he said, and he had that day been greatly fatigued; on the morrow he would be ready to converse again. But the wary old man had no intention of keeping his word; he now fully realized the danger of his position. In coming to Péronne he had made a false move; his liberty, perhaps his life, was in peril, and he cast about him for some means of escape. Fortune was once more kind to him, and that very night he took horse and fled the city. When he reached his own dominions he was greeted with the same wild demonstrations of joy which had at first hailed his coming. But if the great heart of the people still throbbed for Baldwin, the classes were no longer with him. He soon learnt that the sheriffs of Bruges and of other great towns had accepted Jeanne's amnesty, and that even the picked knights who had accompanied him to Péronne had played him false, and he lost heart. There was no peace for him in this world save in a life of penance. He had slain the woman who loved him, the woman who had risked her life for his sake, and her shade would assuredly drive him back to his hermitage or to the gallows. The cause of this sudden _volte-face_ in favour of Jeanne is difficult to surmise, but corruption had not unlikely something to do with it, for we find in a treaty concluded, at Bapaume a few days later the Countess of Flanders acknowledging that Louis, whose soldiers had not once drawn their swords in her behalf, had expended ten thousand livres in reinstating her in her dominions. Meanwhile Baldwin had disappeared. Some of the few who still clung to him affirmed that he had fled to Germany and had been received with hospitality by Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne, who, they averred, had counselled him to go to Rome and lay his case before the Common Father of the faithful. Be this as it may, Baldwin was presently arrested by Baron Erard de Chastenay, at Rougemont in Burgundy, who sold him to Jeanne for four hundred silver marks, and she, filled with savage joy, hanged him in chains on a gibbet at Lille between two hounds.