together given up to works and practices of piety; he
was a knight, a warrior, a politician, a true king, who attended to the
duties of authority as well as to those of charity, and who won respect
from his nearest friends as well as from strangers, whilst astonishing
them at one time by his bursts of mystic piety and monastic austerity,
at another by his flashes of the ruler's spirit and his judicious
independence, even towards the representatives of the faith and Church
with whom he was in sympathy. "He passed for the wisest man in all his
council." In difficult matters and on grave occasions none formed a
judgment with more sagacity, and what his intellect so well apprehended
he expressed with a great deal of propriety and grace. He was, in
conversation, the nicest and most agreeable of men; "he was gay," says
Joinville, "and when we were private at court, he used to sit at the foot
of his bed; and when the preachers and cordeliers who were there spoke to
him of a book he would like to hear, he said to them, 'Nay, you shall not
read to me, for there is no book so good, after dinner, as talk _ad
libitum,_ that is, every one saying what he pleases.' "Not that he was at
all averse from books and literates: "He was sometimes present at the
discourses and disputations of the University; but he took care to search
out for himself the truth in the word of God and in the traditions of the
Church. . . . Having found out, during his travels in the East, that
a Saracenic sultan had collected a quantity of books for the service of
the philosophers of his sect, he was shamed to see that Christians had
less zeal for getting instructed in the truth than infidels had for
getting themselves made dexterous in falsehood; so much so that, after
his return to France, he had search made in the abbeys for all the
genuine works of St. Augustin, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, and
other orthodox teachers, and, having caused copies of them to be made, he
had them placed in the treasury of Sainte-Chapelle. He used to read them
when he had any leisure, and he readily lent them to those who might get
profit from them for themselves or for others. Sometimes, at the end of
the afternoon meal, he sent for pious persons with whom he conversed
about God, about the stories in the Bible and the histories of the
saints, or about the lives of the Fathers." He had a particular
friendship for the learned Robert of Sorbon, founder of the Sorbon