ed from their delight and
astonishment, he spoke again: "Friends, now surely I am not lacking in
sense, I am not weak or troubled in spirit; I demand my cross again; He
Who knows all things knows that no food shall pass my lips until the
cross is placed once more on my shoulder."

There was no turning aside a man of such character; the preparations for
the crusade went on, and Saint Louis raised the Oriflamme at Saint-Denis
on June 12, 1248. We shall not tell of the crusade or of Louis's
characteristic conscientiousness in seeing, before he left, that
reparation was made for every act of injustice done in his kingdom, for
which purpose he sent out a commission charged with holding an inquest
in all parts of France. The inevitable day of separation came, the day
to which Blanche looked forward as the last upon which she would see her
son. She accompanied him for the first three or four days of his
journey, which lay through southern France to Aigues-Mortes, and at
Corbeil she received the regency, with power to act in the government
through what agents she pleased and in what way she pleased. The
guardianship of his children, too, Louis left to Blanche. At Cluni came
the scene of final separation; the grief of Blanche can be imagined, and
words would fail to help us to a realization of its intense sincerity.
Her premonition was well founded; she was not to live to see Louis
again.

Once more was Blanche de Castille regent of France, a heavy burden for
one who had lived a life of no easy indulgence and who was now sixty
years of age. Instead of peace and rest in her declining
years--perchance she had hoped to retire to her own convent of
Maubuisson--she must undertake the cares of government. Truly, Saint
Louis was sacrificing his mother for an ambition, albeit not a vain or
selfish ambition, and whatever service he may have rendered God by
killing some hundreds of Mohammedans in Egypt, there is no question
about the service Blanche was rendering to him and France.

To aid Blanche in her government, and also to collect an additional
force for the crusade, Louis had left in France his brother, Alphonse de
Poitiers, who was of real assistance to his mother. The other sons,
however, Robert d'Artois and Charles d'Anjou, had sailed with the
crusaders for Egypt. Blanche's first anxiety came from Henry III., who
chose this opportunity to make warlike preparations, after he had
refused to renew the truce with France, and who h