. . .Page_36" id="Page_36">36 Lion." He lived, as Louis VIII., only three years, and "la reine blanche" (the widowed queens of France wore white for mourning, until Anne of Brittany put on black for her first husband, Charles VIII.) became the sole protector of her twelve-year-old son, on whom she so doted as to be jealous of the wife she had herself found for him. She ruled him and his hitherto unruly nobles, and cemented his kingdom, fractured by local jealousies. He is known to history as Saint Louis, fit to sit alongside Marcus Aurelius, in the equal conscience they put into their kingly duties. Voltaire himself ceases to sneer in the presence of this monarch's unselfish devotion to his people, and gives him praise as unstinted as any on record.

His Paris, the Paris of his mother and his grandfather, was made up of la Cité on the island, under the jurisdiction of the bishop; the northern suburb, outre-Grand-Pont or la Ville, governed by the Pré. . . Read More