ed the poor Jew to the
ground. The King, who relates this to Joinville, draws one very wise
lesson from, it--namely, that no one who is not a very good theologian
should enter upon a controversy with Jews on such subjects. But when he
goes on to say that a layman who hears the Christian religion evil spoken
of should take to the sword as the right weapon of defense, and run it
into the miscreant's body as far as it would go, we perceive at once that
we are in the thirteenth and not in the nineteenth century. The
punishments which the King inflicted for swearing were most cruel. At
Cesarea, Joinville tells us that he saw a goldsmith fastened to a ladder,
with the entrails of a pig twisted round his neck right up to his nose,
because he had used irreverent language. Nay, after his return from the
Holy Land, he heard that the King ordered a man's nose and lower lip to be
burnt for the same offense. The Pope himself had to interfere to prevent
St. Louis from inflicting on blasphemers mutilation and death. "I would
myself be branded with a hot iron," the King said, "if thus I could drive
away all swearing from my kingdom." He himself, as Joinville assures us,
never used an oath, nor did he pronounce the name of the Devil except when
reading the lives of the saints. His soul, we cannot doubt, was grieved
when he heard the names which to him were the most sacred, employed for
profane purposes; and this feeling of indignation was shared by his honest
chronicler. "In my castle," says Joinville, "whosoever uses bad language
receives a good pommeling, and this has nearly put down that bad habit."
Here again we see the upright character of Joinville. He does not, like
most courtiers, try to outbid his sovereign in pious indignation; on the
contrary, while sharing his feelings, he gently reproves the King for his
excessive zeal and cruelty, and this after the King had been raised to the
exalted position of a saint.

To doubt of any points of the Christian doctrine was considered at
Joinville's time, as it is even now, as a temptation of the Devil. But
here again we see at the court of St. Louis a wonderful mixture of
tolerance and intolerance. Joinville, who evidently spoke his mind freely
on all things, received frequent reproofs and lessons from the King; and
we hardly know which to wonder at most, the weakness of the arguments, or
the gentle and truly Christian spirit in which the King used them. The
King once asked Joinville how