charities and his piety
shall exempt him from all contumely." The Count of La Marche lost no
time in asking for peace; and Louis granted it with the firmness of a
far-seeing politician and the sympathetic feeling of a Christian. He
required that the domains he had just wrested from the count should
belong to the crown, and to the Count of Poitiers, under the suzerainty
of the crown. As for the rest of his lands, the Count of La Marche, his
wife and children, were obliged to beg a grant of them at the good
pleasure of the king, to whom the count was, further, to give up, as
guarantee for fidelity in future, three castles, in which a royal
garrison should be kept at the count's expense. When introduced into the
king's presence, the count, his wife, and children, "with sobs, and
sighs, and tears, threw themselves upon their knees before him, and began
to cry aloud, 'Most gracious sir, forgive us thy wrath and thy
displeasure, for we have done wickedly and pridefully towards thee.'
And the king, seeing the Count of La Marche such humble guise before him,
could not restrain his compassion amidst his wrath, but made him rise up,
and forgave him graciously all the evil he had wrought against him."

A prince who knew so well how to conquer and how to treat the conquered
might have been tempted to make an unfair use, alternately, of his
victories and of his clemency, and to pursue his advantages beyond
measure; but Louis was in very deed a Christian. When War was not either
a necessity or a duty, this brave and brilliant knight, from sheer equity
and goodness of heart, loved peace rather than war. The successes he had
gained in his campaign of 1242 were not for him the first step in an
endless career of glory and conquest; he was anxious only to consolidate
them whilst securing, in Western Europe, for the dominions of his
adversaries, as well as for his own, the benefits of peace. He entered
into negotiations, successively, with the Count of La Marche, the King of
England, the Count of Toulouse, the King of Aragon, and the various
princes and great feudal lords who had been more or less engaged in the
war; and in January, 1213, says the latest and most enlightened of his
biographers, "the treaty of Lorris marked the end of feudal troubles for
the whole duration of St. Louis's reign. He drew his sword no more, save
only against the enemies of the Christian faith and Christian
civilization, the Mussulmans." (_Histoire de