The cheik or senior of these _assassins_ could be nothing more than a chief of banditti; for there was at that time a sultan of Damascus who was very powerful. Our romance-writers of that day, as fond of chimeras as the Crusaders, thought proper to relate that in 1236 this great prince of the assassins, fearing that Louis IX., of whom he had never heard, would put himself at the head of a crusade, and come and take from him his territory, sent two great men of his court from the caverns of Anti-Libanus to Paris to assassinate that king; but that having the next day heard how generous and amiable a prince Louis was, he immediately sent out to sea two more great men to countermand the assassination. I say out to sea, for neither the two emissaries sent to kill Louis, nor the two others sent to save him, could make the voyage without embarking at Joppa, which was then in the power of the Crusaders, which rendered the enterprise doubly marvellous. The two first must have found a Crusaders' vessel ready to convey them in an amicable manner, and the two last must have found another. However, a hundred authors, one after another, have related this adventure, though Joinville, a contemporary, who was on the spot, says nothing about it--_"Et voilà justement comme on écrit l'histoire."_ The Jesuit Maimbourg, the Jesuit Daniel, twenty other Jesuits, and Mézeray--though he was not a Jesuit--have repeated this absurdity. The Abbé Véli, in his history of France, tells it over again with perfect complaisance, without any discussion, without any examination, and on the word of one William of Nangis, who wrote about sixty years after this fine affair is said to have happened at a time when history was composed from nothing but town talk. If none but true and useful things were recorded, our immense historical libraries would be reduced to a very narrow compass; but we should know more, and know it better. For six hundred years the story has been told over and over again, of the Old Man of the Hill--_le vieux de la montagne_--who, in his delightful gardens, intoxicated his young elect with voluptuous pleasures, made them believe that they were in paradise, and sent them to the ends of the earth to assassinate kings in order to merit an eternal paradise.