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 The Development of France 213 most famous of his biographers was the courtly Sire de Joinville, who was brought up at the elegant and refined court of the counts of Champagne. He was born in 1225, and although eleven years younger than the king, he became his friend and companion, and had excellent opportunities to acquaint himself with the king's char- acter and to follow the events of his reign. Joinville was one of the first to desert Latin and write a serious his- torical work in French. As I have heard say, our sainted king Louis was born on 95. Revolt the feast of St. Mark the evangelist, after Easter [1214]. of the . . . God, in whom he put his trust, watched over him JhTopenin always, from his infancy to the end, but especially in his of the reign childhood, when he had greatest need of his care, as you shall hear later. God saved his soul through the pious care of his mother, who taught him to believe in God and to love him, and kept him surrounded by devout and religious peo- ple. Even as a child she made him attend the daily services and listen to the sermons on. feast days. He remembered hearing his mother often say that she would rather that he were dead than that he should commit a mortal sin. In his youth he had sore need of God's aid, for his mother, who came from Spain, had neither relatives nor friends in the whole kingdom of France. And when the barons of France saw that their king was a child and the queen mother a foreign woman, they made the count of Boulogne their head and treated him in all things as their lord. After the king had been crowned there were certain barons who demanded that the queen should give them extensive lands, and when she would not they assembled at Corbeil. And the sainted king has told me how he and his mother, who were at Montlhe'ry, dared not return to Paris until their supporters there came for them in arms. He told me, too, that all the way from Montlhery to Paris the roads were full of men, armed and unarmed, and that they all called on