CHAPTER VII

THE ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY AND LOVE

BESIDE such a figure as that of Blanche de Castille, the women of whom we might next speak would seem pale ghosts, mere masks and shadows; and, even then, not always pleasing ones. There are, in fact, no immediate successors of Blanche and her daughter-in-law in the history of France; there is an interregnum, so to speak, of good, great, even of notorious women; in this inter-regnum, therefore, let us see how chivalry and literature were treating woman, what was the ideal, and what was the real woman in the artistic world at this time.

Between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries Europe saw the birth, the growth, the culmination, the decay, and finally the displacement of those ideals and those customs which we associate with the word "chivalry." The subject of chivalry, interesting in itself, is also one of peculiar interest for us, since chivalry affected in no small degree the condition of women; but with its primal origin we shall not attempt to deal: we shall dig up no roots, but only do our best to describe the glorious tree itself and the soil in which it flourished. We shall find that chivalry, like all other earthly things, has its leprous spots, which one must keep out of sight if one would pour forth genuine and unchecked enthusiasm; yet the good and the bad alike must be understood if we would have a just conception of the whole.

We have seen in the case of the troubadours something of the nature of the extravagant amorous devotion avowed for his lady by the knightly poet. Though this exaggerated passion and romance is one of the concomitants, it is not the fundamental idea or the best part of chivalry. Originally, perhaps, a mere association for mutual defence and support, the order of knighthood soon came to have a deeper and a better purpose, a wider significance; it assumed the sanctity of a religious institution, for which long years of careful preparation were deemed necessary, and which imposed serious duties.

To defend the weak and the oppressed was what the soldier of God swore to do; and first in the list of those needing his defence were women. The knight was not only the sworn defender of woman from all physical wrong and oppression, but he must guard the honor of her name. Courteous and gentle he must be toward women himself, and from others less gentle he must compel at least outward respect. In the statutes of many an order of knighthood we find provisions like those set forth by Louis de Bourbon when, in 1363, he established the order of the Golden Shield: "He enjoined (the knights) to abstain from swearing and blaspheming the name of God; above all, he enjoined them to honor _dames et damoiselles_, not submitting to hear ill spoken of them; because from them, after God, comes the honor men receive; so that speaking ill of women, who from the weakness of their sex have no means of defending themselves, is losing all sense of honor, and shaming and dishonoring oneself." It was also about this time that Marshal Boucicaut established the order of the Knights of the Green Shield, fourteen in number, whose special purpose was the defence of women, and on whose shields was a blazon representing a woman clothed in white. This same sentiment we find persisting even in Brantôme: "If an honest woman would maintain her firmness and constancy, her devoted servitor must not spare even his life to defend her if she runs the least risk in the world, whether of her honor or of evil-speaking; even as I have seen some who have stopped all the wicked tongues of the court when they came to speak ill of their ladies, whom, according to the devoirs of chivalry, we are bound to serve as champions in their affliction."

The devotion to woman which we find becoming the dominant feature of the chivalrous ideal rises at times to sheer extravagance, mere moonshine madness. A knight vows devotion to his lady-love; to prove that he is the truest lover in the world and she the fairest dame, he wears a patch over one eye and engages in mortal combat with anyone who ventures to smile at this absurdity. Another takes his station on the highway and compels every passing knight to joust with him, because he has vowed to break three hundred lances in thirty days in the honor of his lady. Or there is Geoffrey Rudel, who falls in love with the Countess of Tripoli on hearsay; they say she is the most beautiful and lovable woman in the world; therefore he loves her, and therefore he goes on a crusade that he may see the lady. On the voyage he falls ill, and lands in Tripoli sick nigh unto death. The lovely countess, touched by the tales of his devotion, comes to his bedside; at once the glow of health returns to the dying lover, who praises God for preserving his life long enough to permit him to see his lady. When he died, soon after,--for the sight of the lady did not effect a permanent cure,--the countess had him buried in the church of the Templars, while she herself took the veil.

But if there is moonshine madness in the ideals of chivalry, there are also better things. Devotion to woman rises to the point of adoration; why should it not, when at its base is really the fervor of worship, the mystic worship of her whom the Middle Ages delighted to honor, Mary, the Mother of God? Let us content ourselves here with what Lecky has so well said in his _History of European Morals_: "Whatever may be thought of its theological propriety, there can be little doubt that the Catholic reverence for the Virgin has done much to elevate and purify the ideal of woman, and to soften the manners of men. It has had an influence which the worship of the Pagan goddesses could never possess, for these had been almost destitute of moral beauty, and especially of that kind of moral beauty which is peculiarly feminine. It supplied in a great measure the redeeming and ennobling element in that strange amalgam of religious, licentious, and military feeling which was formed around women in the age of chivalry, and which no succeeding change of habit or belief has wholly destroyed."

The fact that this love of the Virgin finally became a recognized force is a proof of how much stronger are love and romance than theology and dogma; for the strict religious theory of the Church had always been opposed to the elevation of women to a very high plane of adoration. While the Fathers of the Church praised and practised chastity as the highest virtue, and in consequence honored virgins above all others, they never forgot that it was the sin of woman which had "brought death into the world and all our woe"; they never forgot to twit the daughters of Eve with this fact, and to call them _vas infirmius_--"the weaker vessel." All through the ages when Christianity was struggling to maintain its own, the saints and martyrs, the holy hermits, in whom the Church delighted, fled the very sight of woman, and shuddered at her touch as at a contamination. Yet, in spite of this, or along with this, there was growing the adoration of a woman, the mother of Him whom the world called the Son of God. Little was known about her; so much the better for the pious hagiologists, who thought they did no wrong in piecing out scant fact with abundant legend. A regular cult of the Virgin arose, reaching such proportions that the Church had to do something to recognize it. Numerous festivals were established in her honor, some with the sanction of the Church, some without that sanction, some celebrated throughout Christendom, some only locally: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Purification, the Assumption.

The mystic worship, the tendency to find hidden meanings in things of the most ordinary appearance to the lay eye, the extravagant symbolism, were at their height in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The scholastic theologians and sermon writers applied their fantastic methods to all phases of the religious life; so we must not be surprised to find them treating even the Virgin in this way. One of the extraordinary instances which we can give occurs in a sermon delivered in Paris by the Chancellor of the university, Stephen Langton, later Archbishop of Canterbury. His name, by the way, is Latinized for us as _Stephanus de Langeduna_, whence it was easy and flattering to deduce _Stephanus Linguæ tonantis_. As a text the preacher takes nothing more nor less than a popular song, _Bele Aalis main se leva_, of which the following is the sense: "Sweet Alice arose in the early morn, dressed herself and adorned her fair body, and went into the garden. There she found five flowrets, of which she made a chaplet covered with roses. By my faith, therein has she betrayed thee, thou who lovest not." It is a little love song; and the author, whoever he may be,--probably some forgotten strolling minstrel who saw the girl go into the garden and wrought the incident to suit his fancy,--certainly had no religious intent. But Stephen Langton endeavors to make a mystic application of the song to the Virgin, and, as he says, "thus to turn evil into good." Let me quote a few lines of the sermon to show how this _tour de force_ was accomplished. _"Videamus quæ sit_ Bele Aeliz.... Cele est bele Aeliz _de qua sic dicitur: Speciosa ut gemma splendida ut luna et clara ut sol, rutilans quasi Lucifer inter sidera_, etc.... _Hoc nomen Aeliz dicitur ab a quod est sine et lis litis, quasi sine lite, sine reprehensione, sine mundana fæce._" It may be of interest to translate this as a specimen of the sermon of the first quarter of the thirteenth century: "Let us now see who is Bele Aeliz.... She is bele Aeliz of whom it is said: Beautiful as a jewel, shining as the moon and brilliant as the sun, glistening as Lucifer among the stars, etc.... This name Aeliz is formed from a, which means without, and _lis, litis_, which is as much as to say without dispute, without blame, without mixture of the dregs of the world." The worthy theologian then proceeds to what is undoubtedly the most difficult problem of his interpretation to demonstrate the connection of the garden, the chaplet, and the five flowers with the Virgin. "Who are these flowers? Faith, hope, charity, humility, virginity. These flowers did the Holy Ghost find in the blessed Virgin Mary..." The closing verses are, he says, directed against pagans, heretics, blasphemers, whom he scripturally addresses thus: "Depart, ye accursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

The enthusiasm of the clergy in behalf of the Virgin was matched by that of the people. Nothing was more popular than the hymn to the Virgin, scarcely distinguishable, in the ardor of some specimens preserved to us, from the contemporary love songs to women of flesh and blood. Clerks and laymen composed these songs, vying with each other in the fervor of the sentiments they expressed, writing in Latin, in French, in mixed Latin and French, praising the mere physical beauty and grace of her whom they called _rose des roses et fleur des fleurs_. One can read these things without shock only when one remembers that there was nothing but devotion of a purely spiritual kind intended by them, a fact of which it is sometimes hard to persuade oneself. As an example, and not an extreme one, it might do to substitute merely the name _Marie_ for that of _Aalis_ in the song used for Langton's sermon.

Besides these songs there were plays representing miracles ascribed to the Virgin, and legends without end grew up in which she was the intercessor for poor mortality. She becomes almost identified with the attribute of Mercy assigned to the Godhead, and some of the souls alleged to have been saved by her are not always worth the saving, according to modern standards of morality. A legend, repeated in many forms, tells us, for example, of a clerk of Chartres (presumably a clerk in the cathedral), "proud, vain, rude, and so worldly and licentious in his habits that he could not be restrained." With all his rakish ways, however, there was one thing that this man of God never omitted to do: "He would never pass before the image of Our Lady... without kneeling;" and once on his knees, "his face wet with tears, he saluted her many times most humbly, and beat his breast." Now the clerk was killed by an enemy of his, and then the world began to speak ill of him, and, on account of his notorious bad habits, they buried his body in a ditch outside Chartres. Thirty days, or nights, afterward, "she from whom springs all pity, all mildness and sweetness and love, and who never forgets her servants," appeared in a dream to one of the other clerks and reproached him bitterly for the dishonor done her servitor, of whose piety she then told him. The clergy of the city marched out to the grave of the clerk; and when it was opened they found "a flower in his mouth, so fresh and full of bloom that it seemed as if it had just blown there"; while the tongue with which he used to praise the Virgin was preserved from corruption, "as clear as is a rose in May." The moral of this story, one would think, would be anything but salutary; it is only when one recognizes the simple, unsophisticated piety which inspired it, and reflects upon its teaching of greater gentleness, greater charity in judging others, that one can admire it.

To the mediaeval mind, indeed, the Virgin was not very unlike a heroine of romance, and it was no disrespect to deck her out in fancy as gorgeously as some fair Elaine or Iseut. The story of this latter heroine, whose name no two will spell alike,--Iseut, Ysoult, Isolde, Isout, Ysolt,--is one typical of the age of romance and chivalry, and one which we shall give, despite its familiarity. By way of preface it may be well to remark that the story has been told so often that the variations introduced by this or that reviser are not to be distinguished from the original.

The mother of Tristan was Isabelle, sister of King Mark of Cornwall, who, dying when her son was born, asked that he be called Tristan, or Tristram, "that is as much as to say, sorrowful birth." The boy was hated by his uncle, King Mark, who tried to make away with him; but the youth escaped to France, where he won the love of King Faramond's daughter, and was in consequence compelled to flee again to Cornwall, where a temporary reconciliation with Mark was effected. Then there came out of Ireland a knight, Sir Morhoult, to claim tribute due to the Irish king by King Mark. Tristan fought with the stranger, wounded him unto death, and was himself wounded by the poisoned lance of his adversary. Only in the country where the poison was brewed was there hope of succor for the wounded hero; and accordingly Tristan set out for Ireland, in a boat without sails and without rudder, albeit well victualled. The helpless boat, however, bore its precious burden safely to Ireland.

The wounded knight, who concealed his real name, was kindly received by the Irish king, who gave him into the charge of his wife and his daughter, La Belle Iseut, both skilled leeches. The latter, fair and golden-haired, altogether lovely, became the special attendant of the wounded knight: "And when she had searched his wound, she found in the bottom of his wound that there was poison, and within a little while she healed him, and therefore Tristan cast great love to la Belle Iseut, for she was at that time the fairest lady in the world, and then Sir Tristan taught her to harp, and she began to have a great fantasy unto Sir Tristan." Unfortunately the mother of Iseut discovered by chance that Tristan was the slayer of her brother, Sir Morhoult. Tristan must leave, and nothing but the love of Iseut and the honor of the king saved him from the wrath of the queen and enabled him to escape unmolested.

For long years we hear no more of la Belle Iseut in Tristan's life, which is wholly devoted to winning himself a place at the Round Table and putting to shame his wicked uncle, King Mark. But he had never forgotten Iseut, and praised her so enthusiastically that King Mark conceived a desire to have her for his wife. Tristan, despatched to Ireland to fetch Iseut to be his uncle's bride, was kindly received on account of his honorable mission, and of the great renown he had won. He made a formal demand for the princess: "I desire that ye will give me la Belle Iseut, your daughter, not for myself, but for mine uncle King Mark, that shall have her to wife, for so have I promised him." "Alas," said the king, "I had liever than all the land that I have ye would wed her yourself." "Sir, an I did, then were I shamed for ever in this world, and false of my promise."

All was made ready for the voyage, and la Belle Iseut was committed to the care of Tristan: "a fairer couple or one more meet for marriage had no man seen." She was accompanied into the strange land by her gentlewoman, dame Brangian, to whom the Queen of Ireland had given a powerful love philtre to be administered to the husband and wife on the wedding day: whoso drank of that philtre with another, should love that other with a love that knows no ending. By a fatal error, it was to Tristan and Iseut that the philtre was given during the voyage; and from that time an invincible passion drew them toward each other. Love so overmastered Tristan that he was false to his knightly vows, false to the trust imposed, and yet happy in his guilty love for the betrothed of King Mark. And Iseut returned his love, and moaned at the thought of Mark.

When they reached the court of Cornwall some stratagem must be devised to prevent the King from discovering that his bride had been unfaithful; but it is always easy for the romancer to extricate himself from entanglements that seem to the ordinary mind hopelessly involved, and the solution generally suggests fresh complications. In this case it was arranged that the lady-in-waiting, Brangian, should personate the bride at night, trusting that King Mark, fuddled with wine and sleep, would not discover the fraud. The scheme was entirely successful; King Mark suspected no wrong. But la Belle Iseut, that gentle lady whom all loved, determined to leave no witness to the shame of herself and Tristan, hired two murderers to slay the faithful Brangian! More pitiful than Iseut, the murderers were smitten with compassion and merely carried off their victim and left her bound fast to a tree, from which she was rescued by the gallant Saracen knight, Sir Palamedes. Palamedes, indeed, was also one of Iseut's lovers, and had loved her in Ireland before she met Tristan. But Iseut scorned him now as she had scorned him then: her whole heart was given to Tristan, for Tristan was a knight of greater prowess than he. Iseut loved Tristan, and not her husband; the husband at length grew suspicious, and the lover was forced to flee for his life.

Many adventures befell him, but his heart was still with la Belle Iseut. Wounded once more by a poisoned arrow, he could no longer return to Iseut to be cured, and bethought him of his cousin, Iseut de la Blanche Main, a lady skilled in surgery, who lived in Brittany. To Iseut of the White Hand, then, went Tristan, and a new and most curious episode in the love story began. For the new Iseut cured Tristan, but fell in love with him, and loved him passionately. He could not return her love, for he had not forgotten la Belle Iseut, but out of gratitude he married her; and Iseut of the White Hand, not knowing that she had not all her husband's love, was happy in what she had.

Tristan made a confidant of his wife's brother, Peredor, telling him such marvels of the beauty of la Belle Iseut that Peredor was half in love by hearsay, and quite in love when he and Tristan journeyed into Cornwall and saw the lady. She seemed for a moment flattered by the new love, and played the coquette till Tristan, driven to madness, wandered off into the forest; and the heart of Iseut was sad and sick of longing and regret. Here he dwelt, till one day he was captured by King Mark, who failed to recognize his nephew in the naked madman, and confined him within the high walled garden. But la Belle Iseut came forth to see the man, and Tristan, knowing her even in his madness, turned away his head and wept. Then a little dog that Iseut had always with her, smelt Tristan, and knew him, and leapt upon him; for this dog had Iseut kept by her every day since Tristan gave her to Iseut in the first days of their love. And thereupon Iseut fell down in a swoon, and so lay a great while; and when she might speak, she said: "My lord Sir Tristan, blessed be God ye have your life! And now I am sure you shall be discovered by this little dog, for she will never leave you; and also I am sure that as soon as my lord King Mark shall know you he will banish you out of the country of Cornwall or else he will destroy you. For God's sake, mine own lord, grant King Mark his will, and then draw you unto the court of King Arthur, for there are ye beloved."

King Mark banished Tristan forever, and to the court of King Arthur went Tristan, winning there ever fresh fame, until finally King Mark himself, moved by jealousy and envy, came to destroy Tristan. But the good Arthur reconciled uncle and nephew, and Tristan went to free Cornwall from a horde of invading Saxons. The intrigue with Iseut was renewed, and Mark confined Tristan in a dungeon, whence he was released only by an insurrection of Mark's oppressed subjects. Iseut eloped with him, and the two wandered in the forest like true lovers, this fair lady and her bold knight, and were finally received at Joyeuse Garde by the gallant Lancelot, where they dwelt till a fresh reconciliation with King Mark brought about the restoration of Iseut to her husband.

We must not forget the other Iseut, the white-handed lady whom Tristan married and left behind in Brittany. The fact of her existence came again to his recollection now, and he returned to her. She was in dire distress and longing for her husband; but from her caressing arms he fled again to put down a rebellion in his dominions. Once more sorely wounded, once more he was cured by the white hands of his wife, whom he nevertheless soon afterward abandoned to renew the intrigue with the rival Iseut in Cornwall. But he was again discovered and put to flight by the jealous husband. The spirit of restlessness would not let him be quiet with his wife, the knight must be up and doing; and while he engaged in a reckless adventure he was grievously wounded, so grievously that death seemed nigh and not to be put off by the ministrations of Iseut of the White Hand. Tristan sent a messenger in haste for la Belle Iseut: "Come with all speed, if you love me! And that I may know you are on the ship let the sails be white; if you cannot come, let the sails be black." Iseut hastened toward her lover, with feverish impatience, blaming winds and waves and slow messengers. Meanwhile, the neglected wife, Iseut of the White Hand, discovered the truth and grew wildly jealous. Tristan lay on his bed in agony, waiting for news of the ship bearing la Belle Iseut. The jealous wife, too, kept watch, and when the white sails of the vessel told her that her rival was coming, was almost at hand, jealousy got the mastery: "I see the ship," she cried to Tristan. "What color are her sails?" asked he. "Black, all black," she cried. The sick knight fell back upon his bed, moaning out reproaches upon the Iseut who had forsaken him in his need:

"Amie Yoslt! treis fez a dit, A la quarte rent l'esperit."

(Iseut, my love! three times he cried, at the fourth he rendered up his soul.)

"Iseut is come out of the ship; in the street she hears the lamentations.... An old woman told her: 'Lovely lady, so help me God, we have here a sorrow greater than men ever had before: _Tristan li pruz, li francs, est mort_ (Tristan the brave and noble is dead).'... All dishevelled went Iseut through the streets and into the palace where the body lay. Then she turned her to the east and prayed for him pitifully: 'Tristan, my love, when I see you lie dead, I should live no longer. You are dead because of my love, and I die, ami, of grief because I could not come in time.' Then she lay herself beside him, embraced him,... and in that same moment yielded up her spirit."

The reader will note almost at once the similarity of this tale to one famous in Greek legend, that of Theseus and the Minotaur; and there are several details, necessarily omitted in the summary we have given, which tend to make this similarity still more marked. But the matter in which we are more interested is the character of the heroine. One might remark that there are certain features in la Belle Iseut not very unlike those of Andromeda, so readily consoled by Dionysius. The lady Iseut is a typical heroine of the romances, and as such we may comment upon those of her characteristics which seem most noteworthy.

The love motive of the romance is, to begin with, as strong as the motive of pure adventure; it is, indeed, the love story which serves as the thread to bind the whole together. This shows a marked change in the importance of women in the eyes of those who wrote to please the world. But the relations of the heroine to the hero are most amazing. Not only is Iseut very forward, more than ready to confess her love and to give full response to that of Tristan, but she is all this with the full consciousness that she is doing wrong. The poet, realizing that the moral of his story might be brought in question, the love potion: being under the spell of enchantment the lovers are not responsible.

Whether we shall acquit the lovers at the bar of romantic justice or not, we cannot forget that their entire story is based upon guilty passion, which seems to have a peculiar fascination for the romancer: it is the same, to cite but one example out of the many that could be adduced, in the story of Lancelot and Guinever, with the episode of Elaine. To be sure, in both cases we have mentioned, the highest honor is denied the hero: it is not for the guilty Tristan, false to his knightly oath, nor yet for the chivalrous but guilty Lancelot to win the Holy Grail; and we are not teft in doubt, we are told that only the pure in life could win that honor. And then for Iseut, though she is fair and much beloved, there is a pathetic end, an end that brings no crowning happiness, no reward; but punishment.

One trait in the character of Iseut is disconcerting to those who cherish romantic ideals: her cruelty. We could forgive her the love for Tristan, and we learn to feel for her, as we read the romance, some part of the passion that instilled itself into Tristan's veins with the love draught; but what shall we say when she deliberately plans the murder of a defenceless woman, and one who had performed service unexampled in its fidelity and sacrifice?

If Iseut represented the poetic ideal in the age of chivalry, was the real woman of that age like Iseut? We can answer, unhesitatingly, no. The conditions of life in the romances were very highly idealized, and certain forms in the romance became purely conventional. The heroine must always be more beautiful than tongue can tell, and she must, in the end, win her lover, or be merciful to him, according as she began in disdain or in love sickness. Numerous adventures, wildly fantastic in character, preceded this consummation; but readers even in that day got to such a point that their jaded palates could no longer be tickled even by the choicest extravagances. Men knew that in real life they did not love in that way; and women knew it, too, though they were perhaps slower to confess it. At any rate, the reaction from the extreme type of romantic idealization of woman began even while the romance of chivalry was trying to persuade its readers that all women were like Iseut, Guinever, Elaine, and that these were angels.

The reaction against the ideal of chivalry in literature took two main directions, the one, more purely comic or realistic, representing the woman of the middle classes, the other, more intellectual and satiric, representing woman in general but especially the lady. The first is represented, we may say, by the great _Roman du Renard_ and those short popular tales which strolling minstrels were wont to recite, the _Fabliaux_. The second we find chiefly in the _Roman de la Rose_ and its numerous progeny.

Renard is, of course, the central personage in the gigantic beast epic, but we hear not a little of his wife Hermeline or Erme, of madam wolf, Dame Hersent, and of Harouge, the leopardess. They play before us a little game, which we know is the game of life as women lived it in the days when Renard was still a famous personage. To give but one episode, from _Renard le Nouveau_, by Jacquemart Gelée, end of the thirteenth century, Renard becomes the confidant of Noble (the lion), and learns of his amour with Dame Harouge; forthwith the subtle Renard begins to intrigue, until at last Harouge becomes his mistress. Besieged in Maupertuis by Noble, Renard sends a flattering love letter to each of his old flames, the lioness, the wolf, and the leopardess. The three ladies are delighted with the proposals of the charming Maitre Renard. They draw lots to see which shall possess forever the affections of the irresistible Lothario; the lot falls to Dame Hersent, and the three ladies write a joint letter to inform Renard of their choice, a choice not very pleasing to Renard, who is, moreover, provoked because they have exchanged confidences. His revenge is at once planned. Going to court dressed as a charlatan, he gives to Noble a precious talisman by means of which, he says, any deceived husband can learn of his wife's infidelities; and Noble, Isengrin (the wolf), and the leopard are eager to test the virtues of the talisman. The ensuing dreadful revelations may be imagined. The guilty wives, well beaten by their wrathful husbands, flee from the court and are kindly received by crafty Renard, who forthwith establishes a harem. It is a pleasantly humorous story, and the conditions of real life are distinctly reflected, while the satiric intent is not enough to distort the reflection.

In the _Fabliaux_, however, woman is even more clearly portrayed as she really was, or at least as she seemed to the men. A large part of Old French literature, as one critic has remarked, is devoted to exposing and discussing, the misfortunes of marriage; and in these relations the deceived husband is, we might say, clown paramount. The authors of the _Fabliaux_--which were written to amuse the bourgeois as well as the knight--"invented or discovered anew talismans that revealed their misfortunes (as husbands): the enchanted mantle which grows either longer or shorter suddenly when put on by an unfaithful wife, the cup from which none but happy husbands can drink.... Our tellers of tales invented a whole cycle of feminine tricks and ruses.... The women of the Fabliaux shrink from no stratagem: they can persuade their husbands, one that he is covered by an invisible cloak, another that he is a monk, or a third that he is dead." Contending with them or seeking to outwit them is of no avail, says the author of these tales, for _mout se femme de renardise_,--many a foxy trick does woman know,--and _fols est qui femme espie et guette,_--he is a fool who spies upon a woman.

The story of one of these triumphs of beauty over wisdom will illustrate the best type of the _Fabliaux_; it is called the _Lai d'Aristote_. When Alexander had conquered India, he rested in shameful sloth, a slave to love for a young Hindoo princess. Aristotle, master of all wisdom, reproved his quondam pupil for this neglect of grave matters; and the Hindoo girl, perceiving Alexander's unhappy frame of mind, discovered what had produced it. She will be revenged on the crabbed old scholar; ere noon of the next day she will make him forget grammar and logic, if Alexander will only allow her free scope, and he shall see Aristotle's defeat if he will watch from a window opening on the garden. In the early morn, while the dew was on the grass and the birds were just beginning to sing, she tripped out into the garden, her corsage loosely fastened, her golden hair waving wildly down her neck; and as she picked her way hither and thither among the flowers, her petticoat daintily lifted, she sang sweet little songs of love. Master Aristotle, at his books, heard the singer, and "such a sweet memory she stirred in his heart that he shut his book." "Alas," he said, "what is the matter with my heart? Here am I, old and bald, pale and thin, and a philosopher more sour than any yet known or heard of." The damsel gathered flowers and wove a garland for herself, singing the while so sweetly, so enticingly, that the sour philosopher gave way, opened his window, and talked to her, nay, came out to her and courted her like a very lover, offering to risk for her sake body and soul. She asked not so much by way of proof of his devotion. "It is merely a little whim of mine," she said, "if you will gratify me in that, I might love you." The whim is, that he should let her ride about the garden on his back. "And you must have a saddle on: I shall go more gracefully." Love won the day, and there was the foremost scholar in the world prancing about on all fours like a colt, with a saucy girl on his back, when Alexander appeared at the window. The pedagogue was not dismayed; with the saddle and bridle upon him, he looked up at the king: "Sire, tell me if I was not right to fear love for you, in all the ardor of youth, since love has harnessed me thus, I who am old and withered! I have combined precept and example: it is for you to profit by them."

Sometimes the poet of the Fabliau pauses to describe his heroine and her costume; now it is a lively country maiden, barefooted, with her clothes all wet from the armful of water-cress she has gathered; now it is a coquette finishing her toilette before the mirror, which she makes a little page hold while she binds up her tresses and flirts with him; and now it is a party of ladies seated in some castle bower, embroidering heraldic devices on the banners of their knights. Then there is a jolly story of three _commères_ of Paris, the wife of Adam de Gonesse, her niece Marie Clipe, and Dame Tifaigne, milliner, who tell their husbands that they are going on a pilgrimage, oh! a pious pilgrimage, on the feast of the Three Kings of Cologne. They evade their watchful but too credulous spouses, and here they are seated at an inn table, where one gets "as good wine as ever grew; it is health itself; 'tis a wine clear, sparkling, strong, fine, fresh, soft to the tongue, and sweet and pleasant to swallow." The good cheer begins with much eating of fat goose, fritters, onions, cheese, almonds, pears, and nuts, while the trio joins in singing:

"Commères, menons bon revel! Tels vilains l'escot paiera Qui ja du vin n'ensaiera."

(Gossips, let's revel and frolic to our heart's content! The poor devil who has never put away wine will pay the score.) And then, the meal over, they come "out of the tavern into the street," not a little exhilarated, one may fancy, by this famous wine, and away they go singing to the fair.

Not all the pictures of women are as innocently amusing or mirthful as this one; on the contrary, the general attitude of the authors of the _Fabliaux_ is distinctly unflattering, not to say hostile. Sometimes it is merely one of the infinite variations on the idea of the scarcity of virtuous wives; it is Chicheface, the cow who feeds on virtuous wives, and who is all but starved to death, while Bigorne, with less rigorous ideas as to the morals of her food, is choked, fit to burst. But in general the notion prevails, as one writer himself puts it, that "woman is of too feeble intellect; she laughs at nothing, she cries at nothing; she will turn from love to hate in a moment. The strong hand alone can control her; and yet, beating is useless, for her faults are inherent; nature made her captious, obstinate, perverse; she is an inferior creature, by nature degraded and vicious."

But slightly different from this is the sentiment of the _Roman de la Rose_, when we take this huge work in its complete and most influential form. The _Roman de la Rose_, to rehearse a few well-known facts, was composed between 1225 and 1275 by two poets, one writing later than the other and under somewhat different inspiration. The story is allegorical, and its main thread has to do with the adventures of a young man, at once the hero and the poet, in his attempt to pluck a beautiful rose, which he finds hedged about with thorns in a garden full of marvels. In his attempts to reach the rose the lover is alternately aided and hindered by various allegorical personages, whose names suggest the part they play, such as Kindly Greeting and Modesty and Vanity and Pity. To the poet who first undertook the telling of this marvellous allegory, Guillaume de Lorris, woman is a superior being, almost an angel; and love is a divine thing. Love is the theme of his poem:

"Ce est li Romanz de la Rose Où l'Art d'Amours est toute enclose."

(This is the Romance of the Rose, wherein is all the art of love.) And it is real love that he teaches; for the God of Love himself commands the lover: "It is my wish and my command that you centre all the devotion of your heart in one place." His lover is gentle and courteous; we are in an atmosphere not very different from that of the romances of chivalry.

When Jean de Meung undertakes, some fifty years later, to complete the romance left unfinished by Guillaume, we find that woman is for him the incarnation of all vices; that love is a wicked thing, the root of all evil; that the art of deceiving women, not of loving them, is worth learning. Nay, the utmost libertinage is sanctioned; there is no such thing as fidelity in love, for it is contrary to the law of nature, which designed _toutes pour touz et touz pour toutes_--all women for all men, and all men for all women. Jean de Meung has absorbed all that the most cynical libertines of antiquity could teach him, and to that he has added his own rancor against woman. It is Ovid's _Art of Love and Remedy of Love_ revised for mediaeval use. Anything further from the gallantry of the romances of chivalry could hardly be found. And yet this cynical attitude was, as we have attempted to show, but an outgrowth of gallantry run mad; for in the beginning, gallantry, says Montesquieu, "is not love, but it is the delicate, the light, the perpetual pretence of loving."

VIII

MARIE DE BRABANT AND MAHAUT D'ARTOIS

THE household of the kings of France, so lately under the wise control of Blanche de Castille or the pure influence of the good but weak Marguerite de Provence, was the scene of a court scandal which threatened serious consequences under the son of Saint Louis, that Philippe misnamed "le Hardi." The central figure in this unpleasant episode, Marie de Brabant, is otherwise of so little note that we shall not tell more of her than is necessary to the understanding of the little intrigue of which she was accused.

Isabelle d'Aragon, the first wife of Philippe III., had died under tragic circumstances. She accompanied her husband and Saint Louis on the latter's second crusade, and returning with the body of the saintly king, was thrown from her horse while crossing a stream in Calabria, and died a few days later (January, 1271), giving birth to a child who did not long survive. In 1274, Philippe married Marie de Brabant, sister of Duke Jean de Brabant. The new queen was young, beautiful, and _excellente en sagesse_, increasing each day in favor with the king. The favorite of Philippe at that time was Pierre de la Brosse, who had begun life, so his enemies said, as barber-surgeon to Saint Louis, but who was really of more respectable origin. He had now arrived at such a pitch of fortune as to excite the envy of the nobles; since there was a clique against him, he was resolved to use every means to secure his power, for the loss of his power, as he well knew, would almost certainly involve the loss of his life.

The queen, Marie, had probably manifested dislike of this favorite and perhaps sympathy with the attempts to overthrow his power. An accident--we do not hesitate to affirm that it was an accident--gave Pierre, now her enemy, a chance to ruin her. In 1276, Prince Louis, Philippe's eldest son by Isabelle, died suddenly, or at least under mysterious circumstances. The days of poisoning were not by any means past, and poisoning was at once suggested to account for the mysterious death. Pierre de la Brosse industriously circulated the rumor that the queen had committed the crime and was prepared to do the like by the three remaining children of Isabelle, in order that the crown might descend to her children. There was, of course, much evil talk in the court, as well as plots and counterplots between the friends of the queen and the friends of the favorite. Philippe was half distracted between his love for Marie and his suspicions of her, and the latter Pierre de la Brosse took pains to keep alive. Finally things came to such a pass that resort was had to the supernatural to satisfy the doubts of the king,--no unusual method of settling difficulties in the days when the belief in things occult was still rife.

At the instance of one of the parties,--it is not absolutely certain which,--Philippe decided to refer the matter of the death of this son to the decision of a learned and devout nun, or Beguine, of Nivelle in Brabant, reputed to have the gift of second sight and mysterious knowledge of things past, present, and to be. It is not impossible that the oracle was tampered with by the enemies of Pierre de la Brosse; but, however that may be, she returned an answer that set Philippe's heart at rest. He was told to credit no ill against his good and loyal wife. Marie was thereby saved from a most dangerous position; but she could not fail to harbor resentment against the instigator of the attack upon her.

Though, in spite of the intrigues of the queen and the nobles led by her brother, for two years Pierre de la Brosse continued in favor, his fate was preparing; and in the spring of 1278 it overtook him, when letters written by him or forged by his enemies were put into the hands of the king. There was treason in these letters, alleged to have been taken from Pierre's correspondence with Spain. He was arrested and confined in Vincennes, and a court of nobles, dominated by the Dukes of Burgundy and Brabant and the Count of Artois, held a sort of trial and condemned him. The nobles lost no time in disposing of the fallen favorite, whom they conducted at once to the scaffold, while the people of Paris, convinced of the fact that Pierre had been a good minister and that he was being unjustly condemned, indulged in serious riots. There was a popular belief, indeed, voiced by a Parisian chronicler, that Pierre was sacrificed to the hatred of the queen and the nobles: "Against the will of the King, as I believe, was he hanged.... He was destroyed more by envy than by guilt." The insinuations against the queen were no doubt one of the main causes of his downfall.

History has never been able to determine whether Marie was really guilty of some attempt upon the life of the children of her husband's first wife. There is a very curious letter written by Pope Nicholas III. to Philippe and Marie that leads one to think that he at least credited the queen with some of the evil charged against her. After begging Philippe not to search deeper into the affair, since Pierre de la Brosse is dead, he fills his letter to Marie with rhetorical questions of a most disquieting nature: "What could possibly have provoked you to inflict a death so cruel upon an innocent child (Prince Louis) whose tender years could give no just grounds for hate?" If Marie was guiltless, it is hard to believe that the Pope thought her so, when one reads phrases so equivocal. She certainly had everything to gain for her own offspring by the death of Isabelle's children; but there is no proof that she even harbored evil designs, and the whole course of her rather quiet and obscure life gives the lie to the evil insinuations. She was gentle, pious according to the habit of the day, and had received a careful education which left her not without some appreciation of arts and letters, for we find her the patroness of a poet from her native Brabant, Adenet le Roi, called "king of minstrels." The real facts in the case, however, we can never know; and Marie hardly appears again in history, though she lived on in apparent wealth and fair renown until 1321, when her death occurred.

Before Marie de Brabant died many other queens had come and gone in Paris, during the reigns of Philippe le Bel and his sons, Louis le Hutin, and Philippe le Long. But not one of these is of sufficient fame or notoriety to merit extended comment; instead, we may centre our attention upon a typical _grande dame_ of the period, a woman who was a direct vassal of the crown and who played no small role in the affairs of her own domain, this is the Countess Mahaut d'Artois.

Mahaut, or Matilda, was one of the high nobility, illustrious in her birth and in her relationship to persons of some note in history, being great-niece of Saint Louis, cousin of Philippe le Bel, grandmother of a Duke of Burgundy and of a Count of Flanders, and, greater still, mother of two unhappy Queens of France, the wives of Philippe V. and Charles IV. She lived an active and a useful life, and is a character not unpleasant to consider. From the days of her impetuous grandfather, Robert d'Artois, brother of Saint Louis, her family had been fond of the battlefield, on which many of them had died. Robert, first Count of Artois, was killed at Mansourah; Mahaut's father, Robert II., had fallen in the great massacre of the French nobility at the battle of Courtrai; and her brother, Philippe, had fallen in another battle with the sturdy burghers of Flanders, in 1298. The death of this brother left Mahaut the heiress of Artois, and she succeeded to her heritage when, as we noted above, her father was slain at Courtrai, in 1302.

At that time Mahaut was already a matron and a great lady in the land; for, in 1285, she had married Otho, Count Palatine of Burgundy. Her husband was far older than she, being then forty-five, while Mahaut had scarcely reached womanhood; moreover, Otho had been a comrade of her father, and was as proud, as chivalrous, as lavish in his expenditures as any prince of his time. This habit of extravagance made Otho an easy victim for the rapacious money-lenders; and when he was in the hands of these Philistines the cautious King Philippe le Bel knew how to help him just enough to keep him a grateful and obedient vassal of the crown. As early as 1291 was born Mahaut's first child, a daughter named Jeanne, who was followed by a second daughter, Blanche (about 1295), and then by two sons, Robert, and John, the latter dying while still in infancy. The ruinous excesses of Count Otho had brought him to such a pass that, in 1291, Philippe le Bel made a most advantageous bargain with him: the infant daughter Jeanne, it was agreed, was to marry the eldest son of the king and thus bring Burgundy under the power of the crown; but it was stipulated that, in the event of the birth of a son to Otho, Burgundy should revert to this son and Jeanne should marry the second son of the king. This, in fact, was what happened, for Otho had two sons. Again, in 1295, when the count was in the hands of the usurers, Philippe le Bel paid his debts, and granted him a pension and a continuance of this or part of it to his children, in return for which Burgundy was placed in the king's hands, together with the guardianship of the children until they should reach the age of seventeen.

What the Countess Mahaut thought of these arrangements, so largely affecting the future of her children, we cannot tell, for we have little information in regard to her life previous to the death of her husband. This event occurred in the early part of 1303, when Otho, like so many others of Mahaut's family, was killed in battle with the Flemings; and it cannot be denied that his death was a gain rather than a misfortune for Mahaut and her children. As a widow she enjoyed the right to special protection from the crown, with which the relations of her family and of her husband had been most intimate and fortunate; and as a widow she was free to devote herself to the task of recouping the losses incurred through the bad management of her domains by Otho. As the feudal ruler of Artois and Bourgogne she would have much to occupy her time, even if her affairs had been in the best order and she had been left to manage them in peace; but this was not to be, for she had to contend for her rights during the greater part of the years that remained to her.

Before we enter upon her career as Countess of Artois, let us conclude a part of the more intimate life of Mahaut, a part full of shame and sorrow for the mother. Her son, Robert, was the object of much solicitude on the part of Mahaut, who sought in every way to give him an education not only suited for the high station in life he would be called upon to occupy, but calculated to make him a useful and a happy man. As early as 1304, when he could have been no more than seven or eight years of age, Mahaut provided him with a separate establishment, or _hotel_, under the government of two worthy gentlemen, Thibaud de Mauregard and Jean de Vellefaux. There was provided a little comrade for Robert, Guillaume de Vienne, his playmate, who was treated with as much consideration and kindness as was Robert himself. Then there was a retinue of some seven or eight servants, and two knights, old servants of Mahaut's father, to assist in the military training of the young gentlemen; and there was also a certain Henri de Besson, the pedagogue charged with the education of Robert. The child, of course, was not left solely to these attendants by his mother, who passed a considerable part of the time with him. Games and fashionable amusements were not forbidden by the fond mother, and, as early as 1308, we find Robert losing his money in play at the court, and spending his gold on horses and tourneys like other young gentlemen of the day.

In 1314 he was already able to wear knightly panoply of war, and in the following year he accompanied the royal army in an aimless expedition to Flanders, while his mother stayed at home and had prayers recited for the safety of her son. But that son, whom she loved so devotedly, and whom she was doing so much to please and amuse, did not live to manhood, for he died in the early part of September, 1317, before he had received the final dignity of knighthood. From all the Church dignitaries of Artois, from all the great relatives of Mahaut, came letters of condolence upon the death of the heir of Artois, which for two days was publicly proclaimed by servants of the countess through the streets of Paris, in which city generous alms were distributed to the poor; while pilgrims were despatched at once to Saint-James of Compostella, to Saint-Louis of Marseilles, and to other shrines, to intercede for the soul of the dead. A few weeks later Mahaut ordered a sculptor, Jean Pépin de Huy, to erect a tomb for the _très noble homme monseigneur Robert d'Artois, jadis fiuz (fils) de ladite comtesse_. This tomb, of white stone, bears a recumbent figure of the young count, clothed in armor, with long, flowing hair about the handsome, beardless face; it is now preserved in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, having been moved from the church of the Cordeliers, where it originally rested over the grave of Mahaut's son.

Long before the death of Robert, the Countess Mahaut's daughters had played their brief and disastrous parts in the French court. In January, 1307, in accordance with the treaty agreed to by Count Otho in 1291, the eldest daughter, Jeanne, was married to Philippe de Poitiers, second son of King Philippe le Bel. The next year, Blanche, a great deal younger than Jeanne, but already renowned for her unusual beauty, married Charles le Bel, Count de la Marche, the youngest of the three sons of Philippe le Bel, Louis le Hutin, the eldest, having married Marguerite, sister of Hugues de Bourgogne. After their marriage to the princes of France, we hear little more of Jeanne and Blanche in the accounts of their mother, though both were guests at her mansion rather frequently, and presents of various sorts were exchanged between mother and daughters, until in 1314 came the great catastrophe.

For some time there had been scandalous rumors at the court about the conduct of the three young princesses, and in the spring of 1314 the evil report received such confirmation that the old king, Philippe le Bel, gave the order to arrest them on charges of having been openly and scandalously unfaithful to their marriage vows with two young knights of their suite. Marguerite and Blanche were confined in rigid imprisonment at the famous Château Gaillard, built by Richard of the Lion Heart. They were stripped of all the glory of fine attire, and their heads were shaved. Meanwhile, their accomplices in adultery, Philippe and Gautier d'Aulnai, two Norman knights, were put to the torture, and confessed that during three years they had sinned many times with the princesses. The right of trial by battle, for which the knights first asked, had been sternly denied them; there was but the rack, and after that a shameful death for those who had dared to bring shame upon the royal family. With the ingenuity of the Middle Ages in devising exquisite torments, the two young men were publicly flayed alive, cruelly mutilated, and tortured as long as life could be kept in their miserable bodies. There were other accomplices in the disgrace of the princesses; these, too, when they were not of rank sufficiently high to protect them, were tortured, sewn up in sacks, and cast into the Seine. An unfortunate Dominican monk, accused of having debauched the princesses by compounding love philtres and otherwise exercising the black art, was delivered over into the hands of the Inquisition; he was never heard of afterward.

The confessions of their lovers left no doubt as to the guilt of Blanche and Marguerite. The former, still but a girl, had been led into her evil ways by Marguerite, and pitifully owned her sin, pleading for forgiveness in accents of such sincere repentance that all who heard her were moved. But her husband was inexorable; and she remained in prison until 1322, when Charles, having become king, obtained a dissolution of the marriage on the ground that Mahaut had been his godmother and that this established a spiritual relationship for which he had forgotten to ask a dispensation when he married Blanche. Then Charles married Marie de Luxembourg, and his unhappy divorced wife was compelled to retire to a nunnery.

It was said that in her prison of Château Gaillard she had suffered violence from her jailer; it is more charitable to suppose that this is so than to assume, as some do, that she was so depraved in morals as voluntarily to abandon herself to debauchery; and one must always remember that it was to the interest of the court party to represent her in colors as dark as possible. The belief in her guilt, nevertheless, cannot be avoided; and even her mother gives silent proof of her belief in it, for after the disgrace of her daughter, that daughter's name appears no more in the accounts of Mahaut's household. Blanche retired to the convent of Maubuisson, where she took the veil in 1325, and died in the next year. Under "a large white stone, much carved and decorated with roses, without any inscription, and bearing a figure representing a nun," lay the body of the unhappy Blanche, once Queen of France in right.

Her companion in debauchery, Marguerite de Bourgogne, met a fate more suddenly tragic, though surely not more pathetic. Her marriage with Louis le Hutin could have been dissolved, of course, on the score of adultery; but Louis preferred less public methods. Having become king, on the death of his father, not many months after Marguerite's disgrace, he desired to find another wife; so Marguerite was put to death in the Château Gaillard, being smothered, it is said, between two mattresses.

The third of the daughters-in-law of Philippe le Bel, the Countess Jeanne de Poitiers, was more fortunate than her sister and Marguerite. When the three had been arrested she was separated from the other two and sent to Dourdan. Her character seems to have been better formed than that of Blanche, and she had not indulged in the excesses proved against Blanche and Marguerite. Mahaut was from the first firmly convinced of her innocence, and sent frequent messages of consolation and sympathy to her during her confinement in Dourdan. Although she had been aware of the evil practices of her sister and her sister-in-law, it could hardly be held an unpardonable crime for her to have refrained from talebearing. In one of the rhymed chronicles, which gives a graphic account of this tragedy, Jeanne is represented as confessing her small share in the wrong and pleading for mercy before Philippe le Bel: "Sire, for God's sake hear me! Who is it that accuses me? I say I am a good woman, without guilt, without sin or shame." She demanded an investigation, and the king granted her request. While she was confined a strict inquiry was held into her conduct, and the result was that, at Christmastide, 1314, she was adjudged innocent, and came back to her husband, "whereof there was great joy throughout France." She was to become Queen of France not long afterward, and then to be widowed; but during the rest of her life there was no blot on her good name, and no interruption in the affectionate relations existing between herself and her mother. As Countess of Poitiers, as Queen of France, and as dowager Queen and Duchess of Burgundy, she visited Mahaut frequently, accompanied her in journeys, and exchanged gifts with her.

The scene of the orgies indulged in by Blanche de la Marche and Marguerite de Bourgogne was long pointed out in Paris and became an object of peculiar horror--one of those places of evil association which, without our knowing why, always arouse a feeling of repulsion and of dread. It was in the dark old Tour de Nesle, on the bank of the Seine opposite the Louvre, that, said the Parisian horror-mongers, the wicked queens had held high revel. The legend was not only enduring, but, like most legends, endowed with the faculty of gathering new matter as the years went by. Francois Villon, that great repository of the quaint beliefs of the people of the purlieus of the Sorbonne, tells of the great queen "who had Jean Buridan cast in the Seine in a sack" from the high walls of the Tour de Nesle. Brantôme, in his _Dames galantes_, records the same popular story of a queen "who dwelt in the Hotel de Nesle, at Paris, and lay in wait for passers-by; and those who pleased and suited her best, whatever class of people they might be, she had them summoned and made them come to her by night; and after she had had her pleasure of them she had them cast into the water from the top of the high tower, and had them drowned." Other historians are even more definite in their statements--which, nevertheless, are unfounded,--naming the queen who is said to have been the Parisian Messalina and to have given a tragic end to the celebrated legist, Jean Buridan; she was, they say, Jeanne de Navarre, wife of Philippe le Bel.

Jeanne, who died in 1307, was a violent and savage woman, but there is no proof that she was at all immoral. She it was who manifested such savage virulence against the Flemish women during the revolt of 1302: "When you kill these Flemish boars," she said to the soldiers, "do not spare the sows; them I would have spitted;" and she it was who did her best to ruin the minister Guichard, who had incurred her enmity by saving an unfortunate creditor whom she was resolved to destroy. She pursued Guichard with such relentless fury, indeed, that he had resort to the black art, seeking at first to win back the queen's favor by his enchantments, then seeking to compass her death by the favorite method of constructing a waxen image, representing his enemy, and causing it to melt slowly away, in the belief that she would waste as the image wasted. But Jeanne did not die of witchcraft, though Guichard was imprisoned and long persecuted as a sorcerer. We have given these few facts about her to show that she was a person of ill repute, which will partly account for the substitution of her name for the names of Marguerite and Blanche in the tales of the Tour de Nesle.

Because of the misfortunes which overtook her daughters, Countess Mahaut was compelled to be very circumspect in her own conduct. She had been an indulgent and affectionate mother to both; but her own political situation was at this time top precarious to admit of her attempting to defend them with a high hand. After the death of her father, in 1302, Mahaut and her husband had been invested with the county of Artois, and she had continued to govern it unmolested after Otho's death until 1307, when we first hear rumors of a claim affecting the validity of her title. Mahaut had inherited the county as being nearest of kin to Robert II., the Salic law not applying under the customs of Artois. At the time there was living a son of Mahaut's brother, Philippe; and this young Robert de Beaumont, calling himself Robert d'Artois, was the person who, instigated by his mother, now attacked Mahaut's title, appealing for judgment to the king and the court of peers. Robert demanded the recognition of his rights to the countship of Artois, or, failing that, to an indemnity of considerable amount. This latter had been already provided for by a convention between his grand-fathers at the time of the marriage of Philippe d'Artois and Blanche de Bretagne, and Robert was perfectly justified in demanding its payment. When the cause was tried before Philippe le Bel, October, 1309, he rendered fair judgment, confirming Mahaut in the possession of Artois and granting certain lands and a large sum of money to Robert.

But mediæval politics were very uncertain; what one king did or said might well be reversed by his successor; and so the death of Philippe le Bel (1314) was the signal for a renewed attempt to dispossess Mahaut and her children. At this time there was much disquiet over all the kingdom, and Mahaut had the dreadful shame of her daughter to harass her; it seemed, therefore, a peculiarly opportune time to begin the attack upon her. Robert addressed a most insolent letter to his aunt: _A très haute et très noble dame, Mahaut d'Artoys, comtesse de Bourgogne, Robert d'Artoys, chevalier_. But we will translate: "Since you have wrongfully denied me my rights to the countship of Artois, at which I have been and still am greatly troubled, and which I neither can nor will longer suffer, therefore I notify you that I shall take counsel to recover mine own as soon as may be." Not content with this formal claim, which he pushed before the king, Robert resorted to most unworthy weapons in his contest with Mahaut, stirring up the vassals and communes of Artois, inciting them to acts of violence against her and her children, and circulating rumors most dangerous in an age when people were but too ready to credit accusations of the sort that Mahaut had employed sorcery against her son-in-law, Philippe le Long, and had poisoned the King, Louis X.

We have had occasion to mention now and again this subject of witchcraft; it may be permissible, therefore, to give some few details brought out in the investigation, in 1317, of the charges of evil practices brought against Mahaut d' Artois. The belief in witchcraft was almost a cardinal article of faith throughout many centuries, even among the educated classes, and one might say that the cynical author of the second part of the _Roman de la Rose_, Jean de Meung, is almost a unique exception in his scepticism regarding the power of sorcery. Many a miserable old woman had suffered horrible tortures at the hands of justice or had been hounded to her death by superstitious neighbors who credited her with causing diseases of men and cattle, dearth, drouth, storms, or any other untoward misfortunes; and many a monk, devoting himself to rational study of the phenomena of nature, to chemistry, astronomy, medicine, or any other science, had incurred suspicion of damnable traffic with the devil, like the Guichard mentioned above, and like Gerbert himself, who lived to become Pope. The Church authorized the belief in evil spirits and provided forms of exorcism to rid the land, the cattle, the house, the body, of the demons that possessed them; while the mediaeval books of medicine show us that that science relied largely upon charms, peculiar times and seasons, and incantations, for the compounding of the drugs that were to effect cures. The witch and her hellish brews maintained a perfect reign of terror over the ignorant and the superstitious.

Instigated doubtless by Robert d'Artois or his emissaries, a certain Isabelle de Ferieves, reputed a witch in her own country of Hesdin, testified that Mahaut d'Artois had come to her and asked her to compound a sort of philtre or potion to restore the love of Count Philippe de Poitiers for her daughter Jeanne, then imprisoned at Dourdan under the charge of adultery. Isabelle required Mahaut to procure for her and deliver to her, in secret, some blood from Jeanne's right arm, which she mingled with three herbs, vervain, liver-wort, and daisy, pronouncing over the mixture a mystic incantation. Placing it then upon a clean new brick, she burned it by means of a fire fed with oak wood, and pounded up the paste so produced into a powder, which was to be administered to Philippe in his food or drink or cast upon his right side. For this Isabelle received a substantial price, seventy _livres parisis_, and was given a similar order for a philtre to recover the affections of the Count de la Marche for his wife Blanche. Moreover, she asserted that Mahaut, well pleased with the efficacy of these decoctions, asked for a poison to envenom arrows, which she pretended that she desired to use upon nothing more than the deer of her forests. The enchantress set to work again, with an adder's tail and spine and a toad dried in the open air, which she pounded up into a powder and mingled with wheat flour and incense. The sorceress was painfully lacking in imagination, else we should have had something to rival:

"Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble."

But perhaps the report of unsympathetic historians and lawyers has been unjust to her, and has toned down the horrors of her "charm of powerful trouble," which she alleged the Countess Mahaut gave to Louis X., thereby procuring his death and the accession of her son-in-law, Philippe V.

The king conducted a serious and searching investigation, to which Mahaut declared herself more than ready to submit, provided that the court were properly constituted and that her cause in the matter of the succession in Artois be in no wise prejudiced. Witnesses on both sides were examined, including the widow of the late King Louis X. and the officers of his household, and on October 9, 1317, a solemn verdict of acquittal resulted for Mahaut. There need be no doubt that the accusations against her had been entirely groundless, merely trumped up in the hope of prejudicing her cause in the eyes of the court. It was only a few months later that Philippe V., after a careful and impartial reexamination of the allegations on both sides, gave judgment in parliament confirming the finding of his father and establishing Mahaut's right to Artois, and ordering that "the said parties (Mahaut and Robert) should desist from all hate and all felonious acts,... and that the said Robert should love the said Countess as his dear aunt, and the said Countess the said Robert as her dear nephew" which both swore to do.

While Mahaut was forced to contend in the courts for her authority over Artois, the rebellion of the nobles on the death of Philippe le Bel had not been without serious results in Artois, where she had found it no easy task to maintain any sort of hold upon her vassals. Her chief counsellor, and a faithful servitor he proved, was Thierry d'Hirecon, whom the vassals of Artois hated as a parvenu foreigner he was from the Bourbonnais. In 1314 her vassals began complaining to Mahaut of abuses in the government; but they soon passed from peaceful and legitimate remonstrance to active outrages upon the servants and the property of their countess. In all this Robert d'Artois was no doubt the hidden instigator. One of Mahaut's officers, Cornillot, bailli of Hesdin, who had incurred the enmity of the Sire de Créqui by interfering with his hunting over field and forest without regard for the rights of others, was set upon by a mob of villains who hanged him to a tree; when the weight of his body broke the limb and brought the poor wretch to the ground, they buried him in the earth up to his neck, cut off his head, and carried it as a trophy to the Sire de Créqui. Mahaut despatched her son with a considerable force to arrest two of the rebel vassals in the act of going to war; they were taken to prison, but unwisely released by the intervention of the king, and on the very steps of the prison proclaimed their intention of going over to Mahaut's enemy, Robert. Some of the nobles came upon the young count and his sister, Jeanne, in a country house, insulted them grossly, and even threw mud in the face of the defenceless Jeanne and her brother, who had with them but three knights. Jeanne fled to Hesdin, where Mahaut was at the time, and on the road her carriage was surrounded by a mob of knights, who terrified her by their insults and their threats. At last both she and Mahaut were forced to abandon Artois till quieter days should come, leaving the officers and armies of the king to restore order, a task not completed until July, 1319.

The rebels committed so many outrages, and the public peace was so frequently disturbed by their quarrels, that the better element was ready to welcome Mahaut as a deliverer when she came back, fortified by the recent decree of the king in her favor. At Arras a sort of triumphal procession was arranged to welcome her, and "she entered seated upon a chariot, preceded by thirteen banners, accompanied by the Constable of France, by Thierry d'Hirecon,--who, like his mistress, had been driven to flight,--and, more wonderful still, by many bold knights who had long sworn to destroy her." The next day the countess gave a splendid banquet, at which were present "the Constable, all the knights, the burgesses and notables (of Arras), and besides many ladies." The towns in particular were glad to have their countess once more in power; indeed, all the towns except Arras had remained faithful to her, resisting the enticing proposals of Robert d'Artois and the rebel nobility, for well the burgesses knew that only a strong hand could protect them and their goods from the rapacity of nobles who were always in want of money and always ready to take the first that came to hand. To two of the emissaries of the rebels the citizens of Saint-Omer gave answer that their countess "was a good guardian of their law and their privileges, and if she were not they should make complaint to none but the King;" while they told the emissaries of Robert d'Artois, who dared not affirm that the king had decided in favor of their patron, "then we are not makers of any Count of Artois."

Though severe in her administration of justice and strict in the maintenance of order within her dominions, Mahaut appears to have been just, even kind, and hence able to command the respect of her subjects. With the citizens of Arras she exchanges courteous greetings and gifts; cloths, wine, fish, come to her from the townspeople; and she invites to her table the burgesses and their wives. When she is ill, they send to inquire solicitously after her health, and she replies: "Mahaut, Countess d'Artois, etc.... to our beloved and faithful _échevin_ and twenty-four burgesses of Arras, greeting and love. We are much pleased, and heartily do we thank you for that you sent to inquire concerning our health.... Therefore we wish you to know that on the day when this letter was written we were in good bodily health, thanks be to God.... Give greeting in our name to all our good subjects, and be assured that as soon as we shall be able we will journey into that part of the country. Our Lord have you in His care. Given at Bracon, the thirteenth day of August." What a quaint and yet dignified and kindly letter is this, showing us at once the great feudal lady and the woman really grateful for kindly sympathy.

Another episode, immediately preceding her triumphant reentry into Artois, reveals again the feminine nature, and we are rather surprised to find that this energetic, courageous Mahaut can be, at need, such a very woman. The royal troops had restored order in Artois, and the vassals of Mahaut, leagued against her authority, had been reduced to submission and had consented to a peaceful settlement of their alleged grievances and to the return of their lawful countess. On July 3, 1319, the royal commissioners came to her mansion in Paris to read her the treaty, in the presence of her counsellors. She protested that the treaty violated her privileges, and declared she would not listen to the reading of an agreement in which she could not alter a word. Tears flowed, and the excited lady now would, now would not, listen to the reading; and that, too, when she admitted that she, like the nobles of the league, had sworn to submit their differences to the arbitration of the king, and that she would keep her oath! Summoning her notary to draw up a formal act of protest,--"all that she might say or swear would be said or sworn against her will and her conscience, and in the fear of losing her county of Artois,"--she hurried to Longchamp, into the presence of the king. Philippe assured her that all had been done in good faith to safeguard her rights, and that it was merely for form's sake that he would require her to swear to observe the treaty. Presto! the doubts and the tears disappear: "I swear it!" And the countess went out in apparent peace of mind. But now she was met by two of her relatives, her nephew and her cousin, who pointed out to her that her oath was insufficient, because she had not specified exactly what it was that she swore; an oath so vague might have serious consequences, and so they implored her to return to the presence. More tears, more angry refusals to swear at all, and finally the countess once more yielded and went before the king. The chancellor held out the Bible for her to swear that she would observe the stipulations of the treaty; Mahaut turned toward the king: "Sire, do you wish me to take this oath?" "I advise you to do so." "Sire, I will swear, provided you guard me against all deception." "So help me God, it shall surely be done." "Then, I swear, as you have said," and once more Mahaut went out.

One can forgive her exasperation at finding that the persistent relatives were still not satisfied; poor woman, she felt that all she possessed and all her children possessed was somehow at stake, and she helplessly ignorant, like too many other women, of the technical points of the law. Again, feeling that her counsellors were probably in the right in protesting against the conditional oath she had taken, Mahaut went into the royal presence. The Sire de Noiers, marshal of France, protested that everyone was acting in good faith by her, and that the king merely wished her to take the oath without equivocation or reservation: "Sire de Noiers, I am here, as you can see, without counsel; some of the king's councillors have so intimidated mine that they dared not appear before you; God alone inspired me to say what I did say; have I not several times sworn as my lord commanded? What is there so amazing in the king's promising to succor me, a widow, in case of deception? Does he not owe this same protection to every widow in his kingdom? What I have sworn should suffice." Another councillor protested that her conditional oath was an insult to the King's councillors; there was crimination and recrimination, till at length the badgered countess, sighing deeply, appealed to Philippe: "Ah! dear Sire, have pity upon me, a poor widow driven from her heritage, and here without counsel! You see how your people besiege me, one barking on my right, another at my left, till I know not what to answer, in the great trouble of my mind. For God's sake, give me time to deliberate upon this matter.... I am willing to take any oath you wish." Then, when the chancellor again held out his Bible and required her to swear fearlessly and without conditions, she broke forth in tears: "Many times have I sworn already! I swear again, I swear, I swear, may evil come upon my body if I swear not truly!" And she rushed out and hurriedly left for Paris, in spite of all remonstrances. It was not till the next day that, her advisers succeeded in persuading her to take the oath in proper form, as the king wished it taken.

One may think that this quibbling, this Jesuitical swearing with a mental reservation to be bound only so far as seemed good to herself, was unworthy of Mahaut; it was, as a matter of fact, but the poor defence of the weak in an age when trickery was but too common. Mahaut knew that, although the king was her son-in-law, policy might have won him to the side of her nephew, the claimant of her county. Even if Philippe were above a miserable deception of the kind, there was no telling to what tricks the crafty lawyers, perhaps in the pay of Robert d'Artois, might have recourse. She could not conquer chicanery by force, she could not meet it with chicanery, hence her nervousness and her hesitation and suspicion.

When the countess felt herself strong in her own right and sure of proper support from her servants, she was by no means the tearful and vacillating woman whom we have seen in the preceding page or two. The officers of her government in the various bailiwicks of Artois were usually well chosen and reliable. Appointed and paid by the countess and holding office at her pleasure, these baillis, recruited from the ranks of the petty nobility and the bourgeoisie, had every incentive to honesty and faithful service. They were at once administrators, justices, and financial agents, and in the latter capacity had to make reports, at Candlemas, at Ascension, and at All Saints, to the chief financial officer, the receiver-general, who in turn submitted his accounts to Mahaut. She was not infrequently in dire need of money, for the expenses of her household were always large, and she was burdened by the debts left by Otho, but these she did at last manage to pay.

With the aid of her officers, upon whom she kept a close watch, Mahaut was prompt enough to repress any unruly vassal who went beyond the limits of law. Sometimes force was necessary, as when the Sire d'Oisy overran and ravaged the lands of certain monasteries under Mahaut's protection and slew the peaceful inhabitants. Summoned by the bailli to appear before her court, the sire at first refused to admit the bailli, then did admit him and kept him a prisoner. "Not a stone of his chateau shall be left standing," declared Mahaut, and she despatched a little army that soon brought the Sire d'Oisy to reason. The punishments inflicted upon recalcitrant vassals were sometimes most severe and sometimes fantastic. The seigneur himself is sometimes put to death when his crimes have been too much for the patience of the countess and her people; or he is expelled and deprived of his fief; or he is heavily fined and ordered to perform a penitential pilgrimage. It is thus that Jean de Gouves is condemned, in 1323, to undertake a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint-Louis of Marseilles, to the tomb of the Apostles in Rome, and to two other Italian shrines; while, to avoid possibility of deception on the part of this pious pilgrim, he is required to bring back a certificate from each of the places visited.

If the punishments inflicted on rebellious vassals were severe, what epithet shall we reserve for the punishments of the criminal code? The rack and the stake are not unheard of during the reign of Mahaut, and these are the milder forms of punishment: counterfeiters boiled in oil, women guilty of theft or of marital infidelity buried alive, miserable lepers put to the torture,--these are but a few of the ingenious and barbarous punishments of which we find record. But it is to be noted that Mahaut was not wantonly cruel or vindictive; the forms of execution we have mentioned were the established practice of the day, with which no one dreamed of interfering; so far from being heartless, Mahaut reduced the severity of the fines and penalties in some cases and provided for the widows and orphans of some who were sent to the gallows, while she was always endeavoring to restrain the grasping proclivities of her tax-gatherers and holding investigations whenever complaint of injustice reached her ears.

With the minor matters of her household economy we need not deal, since enough has been said of the manner of life of a mediaeval lady of rank. Suffice it to say that the _hôtel_ of the Countess of Artois was famous for its hospitality and that many of the great ones of the earth sat down to her table. With the fashionable world, the world of the court, Mahaut maintained very close relations, since she was, in one way or another, related to most of the royal family and to the great nobles. Whenever there was a marriage in these circles, there came a rich present from "Madame la Comtesse d'Artois"; sometimes, as in the case of the daughter of her minister, Thierry d'Hirecon, it was practically a whole trousseau: "One scarlet robe, another of deep green cloth, both lined and bordered with fine furs; a mantle and a _cotte_ of cloth of gold, the former lined with fur; a robe of Irish woollen; a coverlet of green cloth; a counterpane of _cendal_ (meaning usually a heavy and strong stuff, but sometimes silk); four green carpets and fifty ells of linens for sheets." Truly a present of which any bride might be proud, though not so expensive, it appears, as the _nef_ (an ornament for the table, shaped like a ship, and used to hold spices, extra spoons, etc.), and costing one hundred and fifty pounds, given to "our niece, Marie d'Artois, on the occasion of her marriage to Jean de Flandre, comte de Namur." Then, if her sovereign requires her presence at court, Mahaut equips herself and all her suite, gives presents to friends and dependents, and goes up, it may be, to Rheims, as when Philippe le Long is to be crowned if he can persuade enough of the Peers of France to attend, and where few do attend, so that our Countess Mahaut, a Peer of France, has the privilege of holding the royal crown over the head of her son-in-law. Or mayhap the countess, wishing to keep friends with the great, sends a mess of fine herrings to the powerful favorite, Enguerrand de Marigny, or to her own daughter, Queen Jeanne; or a magnificent jewel of enamelled silver, adorned with rubies and sculptured to represent a little king and queen, and costing one hundred and thirty _livres parisis_, to be delivered to the real king and queen; or a little statuette in enamelled silver, sustaining a shrine, to be presented to the widow of Philippe le Hardi, Marie de Brabant, "de par la comtesse d'Artois et de Bourgogne."

Mahaut spent in this way a considerable amount, besides purchasing for herself and her children various _objets d'art_, statuettes, paintings, illuminated missals and other books, handsome cups and the like for her table, and jewels and rich clothing in profusion. She was evidently a lady of taste, but also of rather extravagant habits and fond of travelling; for she had carriages or vehicles of some sort in plenty, and travelled on horseback when the state of the roads would not permit the use either of carriage or litter. With her retinue of servants and her carts loaded with baggage and provisions, the countess could yet make the trip from Arras to Paris in three or four days.

But the time was drawing nigh when all her journeyings would be at an end; and as she neared the end of her earthly pilgrimage fresh troubles came to disturb her in the lawful enjoyment of her heritage. After the last decree rendered by Philippe V., Mahaut and her nephew were reconciled and lived on good terms--at least so one would fancy from the exchange of courtesies and hospitality which took place in the years ensuing. But Robert was evidently only biding his time; and now an accident supervened to revive his hopes of better fortune in a new hearing before the royal court. Of course, there was a woman in this case, one who does not play a very creditable part. In 1328, Thierry d'Hirecon had been elected to the episcopal see of Arras, but had died in a few months after his election. After his death, which was a serious loss to Mahaut, the episcopal palace was cleansed, by her orders, of the presence of Thierry's infamous concubine, Jeanne de Divion, who had fled to the arms of the unscrupulous old churchman from the indignant vengeance of an outraged husband. Jeanne de Divion, finding herself driven forth by Mahaut, and forgotten in the will of Thierry, from whose senile infatuation she had hoped great things, resolved to be avenged on Mahaut. She fled from Arras to the service of the ambitious and unscrupulous Jeanne de Valois, sister of Philippe VI., and wife of Robert d'Artois.

Jeanne de Divion was full of vague tales of the valuable papers belonging to the county of Artois which she had seen in the possession of Thierry, and the two women soon saw that some capital could be made for the claims of Robert d'Artois. Robert himself seems to have been reluctant, at first, to have any dealings with the degraded paramour of Thierry d'Hirecon; in place of vague asseverations of what she had seen among the papers of Thierry he demanded the documents themselves, if there were any. It is probable that at the time there were no documents; but Jeanne de Divion was resourceful and not too nice in regard to matters of conscience. Going to Arras to search among the papers of Thierry, she returned with an alleged treaty negotiated in 1281 between the paternal and maternal grand-fathers of Robert, under the terms of which the customs of Artois were set aside and the succession guaranteed to Philippe d'Artois's children, of whom Robert was the representative.

Robert's scruples were laid at rest when this very questionable document, of which nobody had ever heard a word, was put into his hands. He wrote to his brother-in-law, now King of France, to demand a new investigation of the claims to Artois. Meanwhile, the Countess Mahaut set about collecting testimony in rebuttal, aiming especially to show the falsity of the alleged document containing the treaty. She arrested two servants of Jeanne de Divion, who testified, in the presence of several witnesses and of a notary who took down the depositions, that the treaty in question had been written by one Jacques Rondelet, clerk of Arras, at the dictation of Jeanne de Divion, on her recent visit to Arras. Moreover, the countess had the wisdom to get these witnesses to testify that they had not been coerced by her but testified of their own free will and accord. Then she interrogated Jacques Rondelet, who confirmed all that the servants had said, adding that he had written at dictation, and under oath of secrecy, from a document which Jeanne de Divion would not let him see.

The proofs of the forgery, one would think, were sufficient before the cause came to trial; yet, after a statement of the principal allegations on both sides, the king adjourned the hearing to another day. But that day was not to dawn for Mahaut. On November 23, 1329, the countess was at Poissy, where she dined with the king, going on to the convent of Maubuisson to pass the night, and thence to Paris next day. Here she fell suddenly ill; and her own physician, Thomas le Miesier, was sent for in all haste from Arras. The crude or dangerous remedies of the medicine of the day were powerless to relieve Mahaut; phlebotomy and purgatives probably served but to exhaust her already depleted strength, and the physicians recognized that her end was at hand. Couriers rode in haste from the Hotel d'Artois in Paris to Queen Jeanne, to the Duke of Burgundy, to the Count of Flanders, on the 26th, and as many as three to the king next day, bearing news of the great countess's peril. Jeanne came to her mother with all speed, but the end had come before she could reach Paris; the good Countess of Artois breathed her last on November 27th.

She who had expended considerable sums in the pomp of funerals, tombs, and effigies for others was buried very simply, at her own request, in the Abbey of Maubuisson, where her grave was marked at first by a plain, flat copper plate, hardly raised above the level of the pavement. In accordance with a custom not unusual in her day, the body was opened and the heart taken to the Franciscan Church in Paris, where it was interred, as she had directed, _juxta sepulturam Roberti carissimi filii mei_--"beside the grave of my very dear son Robert."

Judging from the features of a statue representing Mahaut, which was formerly in a church in Arras and was copied in miniature by an artist of the seventeenth century, the countess was a woman of large and commanding figure, with features rather masculine and strongly marked in their regularity. If one may say so, the sculptor has drawn for us Mahaut's character as well as her features; she was of the masculine type, strong and energetic rather than lovable. For a woman who would hold her own in those days, the qualities she possessed were, in fact, essential; to rule Artois in the fourteenth century there was need of an amazon rather than of a lovely, fragile, soft-hearted daughter of love. We do not mean that Mahaut was cold, heartless, merely a politician; she was far better both in morals and in kindness of heart than the average lady of her time. She was generous, and yet not a hopeless spendthrift; she was pious and devoted to the glorious memory of her great-uncle Saint Louis, whom she must have seen when a child, and yet not a narrow bigot, displaying her religious feeling rather in acts of charity than in acts of pure devotion. No niche awaits her among the heroines of France, for she is a figure neither heroic nor romantic; but she lived her life, the full, healthy, and useful life of a stirring and good lady of the manor in the fourteenth century.