oth, although full of lice
to a wonder; and when his groom of the chambers was about to clean the
said sackcloth of them, the lord Charles said: 'Let be; remove not a
single louse;' and said they did him no harm, and when they stung him he
remembered his God." Truly, at such a price salvation would seem dear to
many of us! Yet the history of the early Church is full of saints whose
fanaticism assumed this extraordinary type, the predilection for bodily
filth. With all this piety, Charles de Blois was unrelentingly cruel and
even immoral; for he began the siege of Nantes by cutting off the heads
of thirty knightly partisans of Montfort and throwing them over the
walls, and when he himself lay dead on the battlefield "a bastard son of
his, called Sir Jean de Blois, was slain by his side."

Nantes was treacherously captured and Montfort treacherously seized and
imprisoned by the holy Charles de Blois, who sent his rival to be
confined in the tower of the Louvre at Paris. But the war was not over
because the count was captured; there was still the countess to deal
with, that lady, who, according to the enthusiastic Jean Froissart, "had
the courage of a man and the heart of a lion. She was in the city of
Rennes when her lord was taken, and howbeit that she had great sorrow at
her heart, yet she valiantly recomforted her friends and soldiers, and
showed them a little son that she had, called John, and said: 'Ah! sirs,
be not cast down because of my lord, whom we have lost: he was but one
man. See here my little child, who shall be, by the grace of God, his
restorer (avenger) and who shall do well for you. I have riches in
abundance, and I will give you thereof and will provide you with such a
captain that you shall all be recomforted.' When she had thus comforted
her friends and soldiers in Rennes, then she went to all her other
fortresses and good towns, and led ever with her John her young son, and
did to them as she did at Rennes, and fortified all her garrisons of
everything that they wanted, and paid largely and gave freely, whereas
she thought it well employed."

Jeanne herself was no mean strategist and captain, and she selected for
herself and her young son the strong castle of Hennebon, on the coast of
Brittany, where they passed the winter, she keeping up her connection
with the various garrisons and making preparations to resist Charles de
Blois when he should have reduced Rennes. The siege of this latter place
wa