hat respect which the Mahometans had shown for the holy
places of the Jewish and Christian religions; thus these holy places
were now profaned in a way which had not been known before, and stories
of outrages done by the new conquerors, with cries for help from the
Christians of the Holy Land, reached the West.

Soon after this King Lewis had a dangerous illness, in which his life
was given over. He had been for some time speechless, and was even
supposed to be dead, when he asked that the cross might be given to him;
and as soon as he had thus engaged himself to the crusade he began to
recover. His wife, his mother, and others tried to persuade him that he
was not bound by his promise, because it had been made at a time when he
was not master of himself; but Lewis would not listen to such excuses,
and resolved to carry it out faithfully. The way which he took to enlist
companions was very curious. On the morning of Christmas day, when a
very solemn service was to be held in the chapel of his palace (a chapel
which is still to be seen, and is among the most beautiful buildings in
Paris), he caused dresses to be given to the nobles as they were going
in; for this was then a common practice with kings at the great
festivals of the Church. But when the French lords, after having
received their new robes in a place which was nearly dark, went on into
the chapel, which was bright with hundreds of lights, each of them found
that his dress was marked with a cross, so that, according to the
notions of the time, he was bound to go to the holy war.

PART III.

The king did what he could to raise troops, and appointed his mother,
Queen Blanche, to govern the kingdom during his absence; and, after
having passed a winter in the island of Cyprus, he reached Damietta, in
Egypt, on the 5th of June, 1249. For a time all went well with the
Crusaders; but soon a change took place, and everything seemed to turn
against them. They lost some of their best leaders; a plague broke out
and carried off many of them; they suffered from famine, so that they
were even obliged to eat their horses; and the enemy, by opening the
sluices of the Nile, let loose on them the waters of the river, which
carried away a multitude. Lewis himself was very ill, and at length he
was obliged to surrender to the enemy, and to make peace on terms far
worse than those which he had before refused.

But even although he was a prisoner, his saintly life made the
M