ame, my heart and my
body and all my lands are yours; there is naught that could please you
that I would not do willingly; and never again, please God, will I go
against you or yours."

The romance of this scene, almost pathetic, is ruthlessly disturbed by
the scene that is said to have followed, yet we must tell of this also.
The young Prince Robert, always of a violent temper, took it upon him to
insult the vanquished King of Navarre. He had the tails of the latter's
horses cut off a--shameful insult to a knight--and as Thibaud was
leaving the palace Robert threw a soft cheese on his head. Thibaud
returned to Blanche indignant at the insult offered him despite her safe
conduct; and she was preparing to punish the offenders summarily when
she discovered that the ringleader was her own son.

During the ten or twelve years that now intervened before Blanche was
again to take the regency during Saint Louis's crusade, her role in
public life is of less importance; there will be a fact in history to
note here and there, but most of that which we shall say concerns the
woman, the mother, rather than the queen. Though eminently fitted in
intellect and temperament for exercising the powers of an active ruler,
Blanche never forgot that she was only the king's mother, and that she
held the royal power in trust for him. In all her acts--they were really
done on her own responsibility--she sought to associate the name of her
son, as if she would keep for him the honor. In that speech to Count
Thibaud she does not reproach him for ingratitude to her; it is, "you
should have called to mind the great goodness of my son, the king." Her
whole life was devoted to the service of this son, whom she loved with a
love painfully intense, cruelly jealous.

When she was left a widow, there was entrusted to her not merely the
ruling of a kingdom but the rearing of a large family of children. To
this latter task Blanche devoted herself with as much energy and as much
good sense as she displayed in larger affairs. She reared with
particular care the son who, though not the eldest, had become the heir
to the crown. She tried to make of him a good man. It was certainly not
her training or her example that taught him excessive devoutness; for,
though a good Christian, she was not a devotee. When he was a boy she
gave him over to the care of masters who were to instruct him in all
things. There was physical exercise and recreation as well as study;