of Louis VIII. on the Rhone was successful; after a somewhat difficult siege, he took Avignon; the principal towns in the neighborhood, Nimes and Arles, amongst others, submitted; Amaury de Montfort had ceded to him all his rights over his father’s conquests in Languedoc; and the Albigensians were so completely destroyed or dispersed or cowed that, when it seemed good to make a further example amongst them of the severity of the Church against heretics, it was a hard matter to rout out in the diocese of Narbonne one of their former preachers, Peter Isarn, an old man hidden in an obscure retreat, from which he was dragged to be burned in solemn state.  This was Louis VIII.’s last exploit in Southern France.  He was displeased with the pope, whom he reproached with not keeping all his promises; his troops were being decimated by sickness; and he was deserted by Theobald iv., Count of Champagne, after serving, according to feudal law, for forty days.

Louis, incensed, disgusted, and ill, himself left his army, to return to his own Northern France; but he never reached it, for fever compelled him to halt at Montpensier, in Auvergne, where he died on the 8th of November, 1226, after a reign of three years, adding to the history of France no glory save that of having been the son of Philip Augustus, the husband of Blanche of Castille, and the father of St. Louis.

We have already perused the most brilliant and celebrated amongst the events of St. Louis’s reign, his two crusades against the Mussulmans; and we have learned to know the man at the same time with the event, for it was in these warlike outbursts of his Christian faith that the king’s character, nay, his whole soul, was displayed in all its originality and splendor.  It was his good fortune, moreover, to have at that time as his comrade and biographer, Sire de Joinville, one of the most sprightly and charming writers of the nascent French language.  It is now of Louis in France and of his government at home that we have to take note.  And in this part of his history he is not the only royal and really regnant personage we encounter:  for of the forty-four years of St. Louis’s reign, nearly fifteen, with a long interval of separation, pertained to the government of Queen Blanche of Castille rather than that of the king her son.  Louis, at his accession in 1226, was only eleven; and he remained a minor up to the age of twenty-one, in 1236, for the time of majority in the case of royalty was not yet specially and rigorously fixed.  During those ten years Queen Blanche governed France; not at all, as is commonly asserted, with the official title of regent, but simply as guardian of the king her son.  With a good sense really admirable in a person so proud and ambitious, she saw that official power was ill suited to her woman’s condition, and would weaken rather than strengthen her; and she screened herself from view behind her son.  He it was who, in 1226, wrote to the great vassals, bidding