I The Development of France 217 said to him, " Look now, if I do not speak the truth." Then the king set himself to speak in defense of Master Robert with all his might. Afterward my lord the king called my lord Philip, his son, the father of the present king, and King Thibaut, 1 and, seat- ing himself at the entrance to his oratory, he put his hand on the ground and said to them, " Sit here close by me so that no one can hear us." "O, sire," they said, "we dare not seat ourselves so close to you." Then he said to me, " Senes- chal, sit here," which I did, and so close to him that my gar- ments touched his. Then he made them sit down after me and said to them, "You did very wrong, you who are my sons, not to do at once what I commanded ; see that it does not happen again." And they said that it should not. Then he said to me that he had summoned us in order to confess to me that he had been wrong in defending Master Robert against me. " But," he said, " I saw that he was so thunderstruck that he was in sore need of my aid. How- ever, do not mind anything I may have said in defense of Master Robert ; for, as the seneschal told him, you should always dress neatly and well, for your ladies will love you the better for it, and your servants value you the more. As the philosopher says, one should array oneself, both as to clothing and arms, in such a manner that the men of sense of his generation cannot cry that he dresses too well, nor the young people that he dresses too poorly." When it was summer King Louis went and sat him dowrr St. Louis in the forest of Vincennes after mass, taking his place under J^"^* an oak tree, and making us sit down by him. Then those un der the who had anything to say to him might come without the oak tree, interposition of any usher or other attendant. Then he would ask of them, " Is there any one here who has any case to be decided?" and those who had a case would rise ; then he would say, "All must keep silence, for we must take up one matter after another." And then he called M. de Fon- taines and M. Geoffrey de Villette, and said to one of them, 1 Of Navarre, the son-in-law of St. Louis.
