The romance of this scene, almost pathetic, is ruthlessly disturbed by the scene that is said to have followed, yet we must tell of this also. The young Prince Robert, always of a violent temper, took it upon him to insult the vanquished King of Navarre. He had the tails of the latter's horses cut off a--shameful insult to a knight--and as Thibaud was leaving the palace Robert threw a soft cheese on his head. Thibaud returned to Blanche indignant at the insult offered him despite her safe conduct; and she was preparing to punish the offenders summarily when she discovered that the ringleader was her own son. During the ten or twelve years that now intervened before Blanche was again to take the regency during Saint Louis's crusade, her role in public life is of less importance; there will be a fact in history to note here and there, but most of that which we shall say concerns the woman, the mother, rather than the queen. Though eminently fitted in intellect and temperament for exercising the powers of an active ruler, Blanche never forgot that she was only the king's mother, and that she held the royal power in trust for him. In all her acts--they were really done on her own responsibility--she sought to associate the name of her son, as if she would keep for him the honor. In that speech to Count Thibaud she does not reproach him for ingratitude to her; it is, "you should have called to mind the great goodness of my son, the king." Her whole life was devoted to the service of this son, whom she loved with a love painfully intense, cruelly jealous.