WOMAN

VOLUME V

WOMEN OF MEDIÆVAL FRANCE

by

PIERCE BUTLER, PH. D.

OF TULANE UNIVERSITY OF LOUISIANA

ODETTE DE CHAMPDIVERS AND CHARLES VI.
After the painting by Albrecht de Vriendt

The king, now often idiotic when he was not raving,... To amuse and distract him, and also to strengthen the Burgundian influence, the Duke of Burgundy provided him with a fair child as playmate and mistress. To the sway once held by Valentine over Charles there now succeeded Odette. She was little more than a child, but she became mistress as well as playfellow of the mad king. Of humble origin (daughter of a horse dealer), she wears in court history a name better than that she was born to, Odette de Champdivers; and the people, indulgent of the sin of the mad king, called her "la petite reine" She was happy, it seems, and kind to the king, amused him, was loved by him; and, more true to him than was quite pleasing to the Burgundians, did not play false to France in later years when Burgundy and England were leagued together.

WOMAN

In all ages and in all countries

VOLUME V

WOMEN OF MEDIÆVAL FRANCE

BY

PIERCE BUTLER, PH. D.

Of Tulane University of Louisiana

Illustrated

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PUBLISHERS

TO

M. L. B. AND J. P. B.

PREFACE

It is the customary privilege of the author to meet you at the threshold, as it were, bid you welcome, and in his own person explain more fully and freely than he may elsewhere the plan and intent of his book. After you have crossed this imaginary boundary you may judge for yourself, weigh and consider, and condemn even with scant regard for the author's feelings; for as a guest it is your privilege. But here outside I am still speaking as one with authority and unabashed; for I know not, and will not let myself fancy, how the reader will censure me. Though the little that need be said may be said briefly, I trust the reader will be a reader gentle enough to permit me graciously this word of general comment upon the whole work.

From the mediaeval Ladies' Book, of a kind that will be referred to in the following pages, to the very latest volume of Social England, or more aptly, perhaps, to the most local and frivolous Woman's World edited by an Eve in your daily paper, all the little repositories of ebbing gossip help immensely in the composition of a picture of the life of any period. They are not history; by the dignified historian of a few generations ago they were neglected if not scorned; but more and more are they coming to their own as material for history. In like manner the volume hardly claims to be a formal history, but rather ancillary to history. It has been the aim to present pictures from history, scenes from the lives of historic women, but above and through all to give as definite an idea as might be of the life of women at various periods in the history of mediaeval France.

The keenness of your appetite for the repast spread will be the measure of the author's success. But whether I have been successful or not, the purpose was as has been said. Figures more or less familiar in history have been selected as the centrepieces; but scarcely anywhere have I felt myself bound to expound at length the political history of France: that was a business in which few women had a controlling voice, however lively their interest may have been, however pitifully or tragically their fate may have been influenced by battle or politics or mere masculine capricious passion.

"Theirs not to reason why;

Theirs but to do or die,"

may be said of the soldier. Of these women of mediaeval France, as of all in the good days of old, it might be better said that it was not even theirs to do; the relief of action was not theirs; but to suffer and to die, without question. Yet the life was not all pain and suffering and sadness, as the scenes depicted will show. It is merely that the laughter has fallen fainter and fainter and died away--comedy perishes too often with the age that laughed at it--while the tears have left their stain.

With this little hint to the reader I have done, and let the book tell him more if he please. To those who helped me in the writing of, nay, who made it possible to write this book, my gratitude is none the less strong that I do not write them down in the catalogue. Many a page will bring back vividly to them as well as to me the circumstances under which it was written. May these memories sweeten my thanks to them.

PIERCE BUTLER.
New Orleans.

CHAPTER I

IN THE DAYS OF THE CAPETIAN KINGS

In the older conception, history was a record chiefly of battles, of intrigues, of wicked deeds; it was true that the evil that men did lived after them; at least, the even tenor of their ways was passed over without notice by the chroniclers, and only a salient point, a great battle or a great crime, attracted attention. If little but deeds of violence is recorded about men, still less notice does the average mediaeval chronicler condescend to bestow upon women. History has been unjust to women, and this is preeminently the case in the history of France at the period with which we are to begin in this chapter. The age of the good King Robert was an age of warfare; the basic principle of feudalism was military service; and what position could women occupy in a social system dependent upon force? The general attitude toward women is hinted at by the very fact that, in the great war epic of Roland, the love story, upon which a modern poet would have laid much stress, is entirely subordinated; it is the hero and his marvellous valor that the poet keeps before us. The heroine, if she can be so called, the sister of Roland's brother in arms, Oliver, is not once named by the hero. In the midst of the battle, when Roland proposes to sound his horn to summon Charlemagne to his aid, Oliver reproaches him:

"Par ceste meie barbe!

Se puis vedeir ma gente soror Aide,

Vos ne gerrez jamais entre sa brace."

(By my beard! if I live to see my sister, the beautiful Aude, you shall never be her husband!) After this she is mentioned no more until Charlemagne returns to Aix with the sad news of Roland's heroic death. Then comes to him la belle Aude to ask where is her betrothed Roland. "Thou askest me for one who is dead," says Charlemagne; "but I will give thee a better man, my son and heir, Louis." "I understand thee not," replies Aude. "God forbid that I should survive Roland!" She falls fainting at the emperor's feet, and when he lifts her up he finds her dead. Then he calls four countesses, who bear the body into a convent and inter it, with great pomp, near the altar. (II. 3705-3731.) La belle Aude has fulfilled her mission when she dies for love of Roland. If she had been on the battlefield, she might have dressed Roland's wounds, since the rôle of physician and nurse was frequently played by women. Otherwise there is little use for women in an age of warfare, and so we shall find most of the good women passed over in silence, and only those of more masculine traits prominent in the earlier parts of our story.

Before we can begin the story of those women whose names have come down to us from the France of the year 1000, it is necessary to have some sort of understanding of the social, if not of the political, condition of France, to learn what sort of influences environed and moulded the lives of women in those days. Such a survey of society, indeed, will be useful for the whole period of the Middle Ages, and will serve as a background for the figures of the women we shall have to consider, whether they be saints or sinners.

At the beginning of the reign of the good King Robert, the France over which he ruled was still scarcely consolidated. The power of the kings of France hardly yet extended, in reality, over more than the little duchy of France, a territory bounded, roughly, by the cities of Orléans on the south, Sens on the east, Saint-Denis on the north, and Chartres on the west. Not only were the more powerful barons, counts, and dukes, among whom the land was parcelled out, subject to the kings only at their good pleasure, but the very people over whom they directly ruled were still dimly conscious of the fact that they sprang from different races. Even as late as the middle of the tenth century we hear of "Goths, Romans, and Salians" as more or less distinct. The fusion of the several races on the soil of France was, however, at that time probably complete in all but name, if we except the Celts in Brittany; even the latest arrivals in France, the Norsemen, had ceased to be mere wandering freebooters and were fast developing, like the rest of France, a caste of hereditary nobles whose title and power depended upon the tenure of land.

We may roughly divide the society of the period into four classes. In the first we must place the nobles and their bands of retainers. In the second we find the churchmen, the greater among whom are hardly to be distinguished from the secular nobility, Below these, and a long distance below, come the inhabitants of the larger towns, the merchants and the better class of artisans. At the bottom, trodden down to the very soil from which they are forced to extract food for all the rest, and perhaps, if any is left, for themselves, come the peasantry.

Since the disruption of the great conglomerate empire of Charlemagne, the power of the nominal kings of France had been gradually restricted. Powerless to protect the kingdom from the attacks of foreign enemies, the king was also powerless to preserve order within it. Personal immunity from force could be obtained only by the use of force; and if one were not strong enough to protect one's self, the only way was to purchase protection from a stronger neighbor. This was the reason for the growth of the complicated system of feudalism, with whose remote origins and exact details we are not here concerned.

As regards the influence of the feudal system upon the position of women, it might be safe to say that feudalism at first made little change in their condition. They enjoyed neither more nor less rights than during the ages of barbaric Sturm und Drang; but certainly they found a little greater security against violence and oppression, since greater security was the general aim and the general effect of feudalism. The weak must always occupy a relatively better position in a compactly organized society than in a democracy of violence; and so the feudal system, retaining for women such small civil rights as they already possessed, added a greater personal security.

This was not all. Though the transmission of property, on which all social standing was based, was regularly from male to male, and though female heirs might be passed over or disposed of by violence or chicanery, there were exceptions, which become more numerous as we go on. It cannot be said that there was at any time absolute prohibition of a daughter's inheriting from her father. In the Salic law, so called, there was a provision that "no part of the salic land shall pass to a woman;" but all land was not salic, or allodial, and this provision was later held to apply particularly to the lands of the crown, and hence to the crown itself, as we shall see. Under the feudal system, the fief was held on condition of military service, and each vassal, as a rule, must servir son fief (do the service of his fief) in person; but it was expressly stipulated that ecclesiastics, women, and children could perform this service by proxy, generally through a seneschal or baillie.

Though warlike churchmen not infrequently led their vassals in person, witness the Bishop of Beauvais at the battle of Bouvines, "who shed no blood, though he brake many bones with his club," women appeared but rarely in the earlier time as Amazons, and then half in sport, as in the case of Queen Eleanor in the second Crusade.

But, however they chose to perform their duty in the host summoned by the sovereign's ban general, women were recognized as members of the feudal nobility. At the very top we find them, among the immediate great vassals of the crown, the pairs de France. We find, for example, Mathilde, or Mahault, Countess of Artois, sitting as a peer in the assembly which rendered judgment against the claims of her nephew, Robert, to the countship of Artois, in 1309; and the same countess receives a special summons to attend the court of peers in 1315; and in the next year, at the coronation of Philip V., she is among the peers who hold the crown over the king's head. This function was also performed by another Countess of Artois at the consecration of Charles V., in 1364.

In less exalted stations, too, women held fiefs, and there may frequently have been personal reasons for the suzerain's preferring female vassals. For first by custom, and then by written law (see the Assises de Jérusalem and the Etablissements de Saint Louis), the suzerain exercised a right of guardianship over his female vassals, maids or widows, as long as they were unmarried. In England very serious abuses followed from this right of wardship, as it was called, and the unfortunate French girls and children who were subjected to it were no better off than the English. We are not especially concerned here with the case of minor heirs under garde-noble, or ward, except where these heirs were girls. The girl so situated must not marry without the consent of the lord who held the garde-noble of her person and of her domain. If she did so she was liable to fines and even to forfeiture of her fief; and this power was one which the feudal lords did not hesitate to exercise. We find Saint Louis objecting to the marriage of Jeanne, heiress of the county of Ponthieu, to the King of England, and to the marriage of the Countess of Flanders, widow of Count Ferrand, to Simon de Montfort, a vassal of the King of England. Both these instances show the reason which, in such a system as feudalism, underlay a power apparently so arbitrary; the suzerain, in mere self-defence, could not allow one of his fiefs to fall into the possession of a possible enemy.

There was another right, a corollary to this one. The lord could compel his female ward to marry in order that the military duties of the fief might be performed by a man. Saint Louis compelled Matilda of Flanders to marry Thomas, Prince of Savoy. The famous Assises de Jérusalem, organizing one of the most compact bodies which feudalism developed, to defend the Holy Sepulchre in the midst of hostile infidels, contains express provisions on this subject. According to this code, the baron could say to his female vassal: "Dame, you owe service of marriage." He then designated three suitable candidates, and she had to choose from among them. The regulations of the so-called Etablissements de Saint Louis on this subject are so interesting that we may give a paraphrase of a considerable portion of them. "When a lady becomes a widow, and is advanced in years, and has a daughter, the seigneur to whom she owes allegiance may come to her and say: 'Dame, I wish you to give me surety that you will not marry your daughter without my advice and consent, or without the advice and consent of her father's relatives; for she is the daughter of my liegeman, and therefore I do not wish her to be deprived of this advice.' Then it behooves the lady to give him due surety. And when the girl shall be of marriageable age, if the lady find anyone who asks her in marriage, she must come before the seigneur and the relatives of the girl's father and say to them: 'Sire, my daughter is asked in marriage, and I will not give her without your consent, nor should I do so. Now give me your good and faithful counsel; for a certain man has asked for her' (and she must give his name). And if the seigneur say: 'I do not wish this man to have her, for so-and-so, who is richer and of better rank than the one you have named, has asked me for her, and will take her willingly' (and he shall name the man); or if the relatives on the father's side say: 'We know a richer and a better man than either of those you have named to us' (and they shall name him); then shall they deliberate and choose the best of the three and the one most advantageous to the demoiselle. And he who is chosen as the best should be really thought so, for no one should make a mockery of law. And if the lady marry her daughter without the consent of her seigneur and of the relatives on the father's side, after she had been forbidden to do so, she shall lose her movable goods," on which the seigneur is given the power of distraint. There is in this enactment elaborate provision for satisfying everybody but the person one would think most interested the young lady. Her consent to the arrangement was, to the mediaeval mind, a matter of small moment.

The powers thus given to the seigneur by formal law were certainly exercised by right of custom, and probably with far less restraint of justice than that provided for in the Etablissements. For caprice, tyranny, or avarice might be satisfied by forcing an unfortunate ward into marriage. Frequently, the unscrupulous baron forced his ward to marry the highest bidder, or proposed some absolutely impossible candidate for her hand merely to have her buy her freedom. "You will either marry this decrepit old knight, to whose rank and wealth you cannot reasonably object, or you will pay me so much." We can well imagine that the impulse of youth would suggest surrender of almost any worldly wealth to have "freedom in her love." The romances are full of incidents akin to this, where the authority of either father or guardian was exerted in vain; and the romances, however fantastic in some respects, are but the reflections of actual conditions.

The unmarried woman, whether princess or mere demoiselle, was in a condition almost as dependent as the serf. If she did not choose to marry, or if her face or her fortune could not tempt anyone to ask her in marriage, she might enter a monastery. Indeed, a father unwilling or unable to provide a suitable dower for her might force her to become a nun. The eldest son must be provided for first. If the patrimony were small and the family large, younger sons had to fend for themselves, and daughters had to take what they could get. The convent was the cheapest and the safest place in which to establish them.

Yet in the age of feudalism there were certain safeguards for women, whether these were altogether of feudal origin or merely survivals of homely, common-sense custom. To cite but a few examples, we find in the Assises de Jérusalem most stringent provisions for the punishment of seduction or crimes of violence against women. The statute provides that the seducer, if he be able to do so and is approved by the parents, shall marry the girl. In another connection, we learn that in Paris it was for a while customary to marry such a couple, whether they would or not, in the obscure little church of Sainte-Marine, and with a ring of straw as a symbol of their shame. In case marriage was not acceptable to the parents of the girl, the seducer might provide for her suitably in a convent, and he himself might be punished by mutilation, confiscation of his goods, and banishment. The husband had to secure to his wife a certain proportion of, if not all, her dowry, and in the book of the customs of Anjou we find it definitely stated that: Il est usage que gentil home puit doer sa fame a porte de mostier dou tierz de sa terre (It is the custom for a gentleman to endow his wife with the third of his goods at the church door). Then, to protect widows from oppressive feudal reliefs, as they were called, the Etablissements de Saint Louis ordain that "no lady shall pay a redemption fee (to secure succession to the fief), except in case she marry. But if she marry, her husband shall pay the fee to the seigneur whose vassal she is. And if what is offered does not please the seigneur, he can claim but the revenues of the fief for one year."

Once admitted to the recognized class of the nobility, either as a wife or as one of the greater vassals, a woman's position was decidedly improved. Her rights were not many, but yet the feudal chatelaine occupied a position of some dignity and importance. She was regarded as in some sort the representative of her husband during his presence as well as during his absence. The Assises de Jérusalem provide, among other things, that she shall not be proceeded against in court as the representative of her husband until a respite of a year and a day has elapsed, to allow for his possible return; and in the chateau, at all times the lady had charge of domestic affairs, and on state occasions shared the dignity of her husband.

The feudal chateau of a great baron was not only a fortress to secure him against his enemies; it was also a home for his family and for scores of dependents and retainers, and frequently a hostelry for the entertainment of travellers of high and low degree. The moat, the drawbridge and portcullis, the strong walls pierced with narrow slits to admit scant light and air in time of peace and to deliver arrows in time of war, the battlements, and the lofty tower of strength, all these are familiar in our conceptions of the feudal castle. Many of us have followed Marmion in his mad dash under the descending portcullis and across the drawbridge of Lord Angus's castle; and we have watched the arrows flying against the walls of Front de Boeuf's donjon and old mad Ursula raving on its battlements. But the other features of the dwellings, though sometimes described with equal care by the great Sir Walter and his disciples, attract less attention and fade sooner from our memories. Such a manor hall as that of Cédric the Saxon should be kept in mind if we wish to get a fair idea of the actual life of the better classes, not only in England but in France, for the main features of the architecture and of the furnishings were the same. The nature and extent of the fortifications might vary greatly, according to the power or ambition of the owner; but the domestic arrangements of the feudal home would be substantially the same in all.

The main portion of the house was given up to a huge hall. Entering the gateway of the outer wall, one found one's self in a court, around which were ranged the great hall, the smaller sleeping apartments, the domestic offices, and the stables. Every possible provision was made for men and animals to live within the enclosure in case of siege. The great hall itself was usually at least thirty or forty feet in length, and often so wide that its high, vaulted roof had to be supported on a row of columns extending down the middle. In the ceiling was a hole, or louvre, to allow the smoke to escape when fire was lighted on the hearth in the centre of the floor for chimneys were used as yet, if at all, only in the smaller rooms. At one end of the hall there was probably a slightly elevated dais, or platform, on which were the seats for the lord and lady, and perhaps for distinguished guests. In the tall ogival windows, which were glazed only in the houses of the very wealthy, were window seats, and along the rude board or table in the body of the hall were rough benches and stools for the retainers and guests of lesser rank. And if the lord were rich, there would be a gallery, at the opposite end from the dais, for the minstrels who played during banquets. Armorial bearings and weapons and armor hung upon the walls. If the roof were so broad as to require the support of pillars, these and the arches of the roof were decorated with carving. Sometimes a further effect of color might be added by tapestries upon the walls, and sometimes, though rarely, by mural paintings, as we are told in the lay of Guingamor:

"La chambre est paint tut entur;

Venus, la devesse d'amur,

Fu tres bein en la paintur."

(The room is painted all about; Venus, the goddess of Love, was beautifully pictured in the painting.)

The floor of the hall might be of wood, though at the early period of which we write it was very commonly of earth. There were no carpets, except in palaces of great luxury, even at a much later date; instead, the floor was covered with rushes or straw. Straw was anciently one of the symbols of investiture; in the Salic law the person conveying an estate cast a wisp of straw into the bosom of him to whom the property was to be conveyed. With this custom in mind, we can understand the anecdote told by Alberic des Troisfontaines of William the Conqueror. The floor of the room in which he was born was covered with straw. The newborn child, having been placed on the floor for a moment, seized in his tiny hands a bit of the straw, which he held vigorously. "Parfoi!" cried the midwife, "cet enfant commence jeune à conquerir." Obviously, the anecdote, with its allusion to the Conquest, was made up long after the event, but it serves to show that even in the mansions of the well to do straw was the usual floor covering; and even much later we do not find the old coverings of rushes, branches, or straw displaced by carpets. In 1373 the inhabitants of a certain town (Aubervilliers) were exempted from a feudal tax on condition of their furnishing annually forty cartloads of straw to the hotel, or palace, of Charles V., twenty to that of the queen, and ten to that of the dauphin. On special occasions the ordinary straw might be displaced by fresh green boughs upon the floor and against the walls. Froissart tells us that on a very warm day "the count of Foix entered his chamber and found it all strewn with verdure and full of fresh new boughs; the walls all about were covered with green boughs to make the room more fresh and fragrant.... When he felt himself in this fresh new chamber, he said: 'This greenery refreshes me greatly, for assuredly this has been a hot day.'" When the rushes or straw remained long on the floor without being renewed, as was assuredly often the case, trampled on by men and used as a couch by the dogs of the establishment, the effect must have been quite other than refreshing. This must have been the case in many a private house, but especially in such public places as the great churches and the great university of the Sorbonne, whose students sat on the floor upon straw, and had to pay twenty-five sous each to the chancellor for furnishing it.

In the hall of the castle thus rudely furnished the inmates lived a large part of their lives. There the household assembled for meals. There the minstrel, if one chanced to be present, recited his romance. There the lord in person, or his seneschal or baillie, held his court to administer justice. It was the common room of the house, and usually contained all there was in the way of decoration. Comfort even here was hardly to be found; one can fancy that the fire on the open hearth gave out more smoke than heat, and the windows, often entirely unglazed and ill-fitting, let in more cold than light.

The smaller apartments were even less pretentious in the way of comfort. Opening out of the hall, or arranged around the court, were little cubby-holes of places to serve as sleeping apartments. The furniture in them was of the simplest description, and one was not even sure of finding a bedstead; for unless the occupant were outrageously affected by what the old folks doubtless called the degenerate effeminacy of the age--in the year 1000--his bed was apt to be made on the floor, or in a bunk against the wall. Sometimes there was a larger apartment opening from the rear of the hall and destined for the private use of the lord and his lady. As luxury increased, this apartment gradually became better furnished, and at length there developed the lady's bower, where she might retire with her maids. Of these there would often be a goodly number, some mere domestics, some young girls of good family sent to learn polite manners and domestic arts under the lady of the castle. In the bower also tapestries would be hung on the walls, and, in place of arms, perhaps there would be the various musical instruments in popular use, particularly the harp, in various forms, known as psaltérions, cythares, décacordes; the rote, which was what we should now call a viol; various forms of violins, such as the rebec and the lute; guitars; and perhaps flutes. The use of these instruments was, of course, not unknown to the ladies themselves, and we find many references in the romances to maidens at the courts playing upon the harp and singing, though the professional minstrel or the page in training was oftener the performer.

In the bower, the lady was not occupied with mere amusements. We are apt to forget that our more complex civilization has taught us to rely upon others to do many things which even our great-grand-mothers had to do for themselves. Placed in the position of Robinson Crusoe, even with the help of the simple tools which Defoe allows him to have, how helpless would be the average man of to-day, simply because, from long dependence on the little conveniences of modern life,--from Lucifer matches and cooking stoves to ready-made clothing and ready-made houses,--he would have lost the use of the most elementary faculties. So the female Crusoe, in a feudal castle lone island, far from the conveniences of town and shops, must, if she expected to get any comfort for herself and those around her, know how to do innumerable small things that even the modern shopgirl finds done for her as a matter of course.

She must know how to make bread, without question. In the romance of King Florus a faithful wife disguises herself as a page and accompanies her husband without his recognizing her. They fall upon evil days, and the wife-page earns a living for herself and her master by starting a bakery and eventually an inn. The lady of the manor must not only know how to make the greater part of the clothing that she wears, but must know how to weave the cloth of which her gown is made, and to spin the yarn from which cloth and thread alike must come, and to card the wool or prepare the flax before that. If soap be considered necessary,--and there seems to have been no excessive use of it,--it would be wise for her to know how to make it, since there might be no place near by where soap could be bought. Candles, too, of a rude sort, or some sort of rushlight, for domestic use, it would be well to know how to make; and, of course, she should know how to make cheeses and to cure meats for use during the long months when fresh meats might not be had. Even on the tables of the rich, salt meats were the staple article. Unable to provide for the feeding of large flocks through the winter--forage was scarce, root crops were little cultivated for stock, and the omnipotent potato had not yet come to its own,--the lord's steward would have a large number of animals slaughtered just at the beginning of winter, and the flesh of these had to be salted down. The good housewife would, of course, know something of the process. Though in large households the management of the male servants, the outdoor servants generally, fell to the steward or baillie, the lady even here undoubtedly had to give a general supervision, and had to provide work for and maintain discipline among the women of the household. It must have required no small amount of ability and tact, therefore, successfully to be the lady of the chateau.

We need not pause here to consider the amusements and the traditional occupations of women, such as fine sewing and embroidery, or music and the care of flowers. These can best be noticed when we examine the romances of a later age.

For women of the upper classes feudalism was not, we may say, entirely unjust or evil in its operations; but as feudalism meant oppression verging on slavery for Jacques Bonhomme, the peasant, his wife Jeanne could hardly have been in better case. With peasant marriages the seigneur could interfere even more tyrannically than with those of his feudal wards. In some places the bride and groom owed to the seigneur certain gifts called mets de manage. On the day of the wedding these "must be brought to the chateau by the bride, accompanied by musicians; the said mets shall consist of a leg of mutton, two fowls, two quarts of wine, four loaves of bread, four candles, and some salt, under pain of a fine of sixty sous." In some places that most infamous right known par excellence as the droit du seigneur was claimed, and we find a writer even as late as the seventeenth century recording the fact that the husband was sometimes required to purchase his bride's exemption from this right.

At the early date of which we write, however, there is little or no information to be had about the peasantry; the monkish chroniclers mention them but rarely, and then unsympathetically. Popular literature, with its lais, contes, fabliaux, or rude dramas in which Jacques and Jeanne appear, did not yet exist. We may, however, guess from the barbarity with which they were treated how near to that of the brutes was their condition.

About the year 997, soon after the death of the glorious Duke Robert the Fearless, the peasants of Normandy began to murmur against the wrongs they had to suffer. "The seigneurs," they said, "only do us harm; on account of them we have neither gain nor profit from our labor. Every day they take from us our work animals for feudal services. And then there are the laws, old and new, and pleas and lawsuits without end, about coinage, about forest rights, about roads, about milling our grain, about hommage. There are so many constables and bailiffs that we have not one hour of peace; every day they are pouncing down on us, seizing our goods, chasing us away from our land. There is no guarantee for us against the seigneurs and their men, and no contract holds good with them. Why do we allow ourselves to be treated thus, instead of trying to right our wrongs? Are we not men as they are? Courage is all we need. Let us therefore bind ourselves together by an oath, swearing to sustain each other. And if they make war upon us, have we not, for one knight, thirty or even forty young peasants, active, and fit to fight with clubs, with pikes, with bows and arrows, yea, with stones if there be no better weapons? Let us learn how to resist the knights, and we shall be free to cut the trees, to hunt, to fish at our own sweet will; and we will do as we please upon the water, in the fields, and in the forests." They held secret meetings, and finally formed some sort of an organization. But the seigneurs got wind of their designs. The young Duke Richard sent for his uncle, Raoul, Count of Evreux. "Sire," said Raoul, "do not you stir a foot, but leave it all to me." He collected a force of knights and men at arms, and, informed by a spy of the meeting place of the peasants, bore down upon them suddenly and arrested all the ringleaders. Then came the punishment, the like of which was not uncommon, though the victims were more numerous than usual. Some were empaled outright; some were cooked before a slow fire; some were sprinkled with molten lead. Others had their eyes torn out, their hands cut off, their legs scorched; and of these victims the few who survived were sent back among their fellows to inspire terror.

One can well believe that these horrors and the ever present sight of those who had suffered from them kept the peasants in awe, as the old chroniclers exultantly tell us. The account as given in Wace's Roman de Rou has in our eyes a pathos and a poetic grandeur far greater than the chronicler's enthusiastic record of the deeds of the great Norman dukes. With us the democratic spirit, or mere humanity, is so much stronger than with him that we read his lines with feelings of pity and indignation quite unforeseen by him. Is it not pitiful, this cry of the peasants?

"Nus sumes homes cum il sunt,

Tex membres avum cum il unt,

Et altresi grant cors avum,

Et altretant sofrir poum."

(We are men even as they are, we have limbs and bodies like theirs, and can suffer as much.) One hears the echo of Shy lock's "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" The feudal ages would have answered Jew and peasant alike with an emphatic "No!"

The barbarism in the suppression of this revolt is merely a typical instance of the prevailing cruelty of manners. It was not the peasant alone, regarded as hardly the same flesh and blood, to whom the seigneur was cruel. Let us look at a few of these famous knights, and first at the deeds of one notoriously wicked even in his own day. This was Foulques, surnamed Nerra, the black, Count of Anjou, and ancestor of the Plantagenet line. This same Foulques was twice married. His first wife, Elizabeth, accused of adultery--probably because he wished to get rid of her,--he disposed of by violent methods. One account reports that he had her burned alive; another, that he had her thrown over a precipice; and as she survived this, he, scandalized by her refusal to die in this more picturesque fashion, stabbed her himself. One is reminded of Nero, that most cheerful of the Roman murderer-emperors, who contrived an elaborate machine to drown his mother, and, when she swam ashore, was so irritated by the failure of his scheme that he had her summarily decapitated. Foulques's second wife was so ill used that she fled to the Holy Land. The pious count once burned down the church of Saint-Florent at Saumur, calling out to the saint: "Let me burn your old church here, and I'll build you a far finer one in Angers." And later he did build a huge abbey, which no one of the neighboring bishops would consecrate; but a judicious application to Rome, backed by a present, brought a cardinal to consecrate it; and the wrath of Heaven was shown, says the chronicler, for the new church was destroyed by lightning. At length the devout Foulques, who had made two previous pilgrimages to the Holy Land, was so smitten by remorse that he undertook a third. When he arrived at Jerusalem he had himself tied to a hurdle and dragged through the streets, while two of his servants flogged him, and he cried out at every blow: "Have mercy, O Lord, on the perjured traitor, Foulques!" We are not told--but it is probable--that the servants who did the flogging either did not survive very long, or else were wise enough to flog very gently. Foulques, however, died on his way back from Jerusalem.

Then there is the story of the chatelaine of the magnificent castle of Ivri, Albérède, or Aubrée, wife of Raoul, Count of Evreux, half-brother of Richard I. She employed Lanfred, the most accomplished architect of the time, who had built the strong castle of Ponthiviers (about 1090), to build the castle of Ivri, stronger and more cunningly devised than any other. When he had finished, in order that he might build no better castle, or might not reveal the secrets of the fortifications of Ivri, she had his head cut off. But Count Raoul was a prudent man, and took the hint. He had Albérède executed too.

One Norman gentleman, Ascelin de Goël, having had the good luck to capture his feudal lord, held him for ransom; and in order that he might be encouraged to pay more, had him exposed at an open north window, in his shirt, and poured cold water over him, that the winter winds might freeze it. And even the mild and saintly King Robert, in his war against the Duke of Burgundy, laid waste the country far and wide, massacred defenceless peasants, and did not spare even monasteries and churches, since peasants and monasteries alike were regarded as but the goods of the duke, which it was his right to destroy.

The Church had some redress for the evils suffered. The pious and superstitious king was tormented nearly all his life by the threats of eternal damnation which the Church held over him. This brings us to a consideration of the influence of the Church upon manners in general and upon the condition of women.

Though there were many ambitious, greedy, and cruel priests; though many of them lived in open defiance of the Church's prohibition of marriage among the clergy,--there were several married bishops at an earlier period, and one of these, the Bishop of Dole, actually plundered his church to dower his daughters,--the Church as a whole unquestionably stood for the best in manners and in morals. After Charlemagne's vain attempts to revive popular education, what learning there was existed only among the clergy. Though themselves forming part of the feudal nobility and holding fiefs for which they owed military service, the bishops, abbots, and priors almost always espoused the cause of the weak and the oppressed. Within the precincts of the church the poor fugitive from violence done in the name of justice was offered sanctuary, and the right of sanctuary was usually respected.

Within the walls of the monastery women were offered safety. There were many, of course, who might choose the quiet and the comparative ease of the cloister life from motives little better than worldly, and others who might enter with sentiments of romantic devoutness which it is hard for most of us to appreciate in this day; and both were doubtless satisfied with what they found in the convent. But there were many others who had been forced into a life absolutely distasteful to them and alien to their temperaments. How many of these withered away in discontent! how many revolted more actively and led lives that brought reproach and disgrace upon the Church! Among the earliest of the satires against social abuses we find those against hypocritical, avaricious, gluttonous, or licentious monks and nuns; and the stream of satire runs throughout the Middle Ages. Monks live in the pays de Cocagne, to gain admittance to which one had to wallow seven years in filth; monks and nuns are in Rabelais's Abbé de Thélème, and en leur reigle n'estoit que ceste clause: fais ce que vouldra; and monks and nuns again play anything but edifying roles in the fabliaux and their successors, the short tales such as one finds in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles.

Monasteries for women abounded all over France, most of them under some form of the Benedictine rule. Within their own monasteries women could govern themselves, though the whole convent was usually dependent upon male ecclesiastical control, either attached to a neighboring monastery, or under the jurisdiction of a bishop. In the great double monastic community of Fontevrault, established about noo by Robert d'Arbrissel, women were exalted above men; the nuns sang and prayed, the monks worked, and the entire establishment was under the guidance of the abbess.

The abbess or prioress occupied a position of responsibility and dignity not unlike that of the chatelaine. She too had the control of a large domestic establishment, and she was responsible not only for religious discipline but for the temporal provision for her nuns. The abbess had the power of a bishop within the limits of her convent, and bore a crosier as the sign of her rank. She might even hold some feudal tenure in the name of her convent. She drew revenues from her holdings and was in every sense the executive head of her house. At first--always under some of the stricter rules--the abbess carried on business outside the convent through some male agent. Greater freedom undoubtedly prevailed at times, however, and the rule against her leaving the convent was ignored. She was in some cases appointed, but usually elected from among the nuns, though cases are found, of course, where the abbess was the mere creature of some powerful lay or ecclesiastical authority. To become abbess of a nunnery was not considered beneath even a princess of the blood; and in some convents probably the same caste distinctions were observed as prevailed outside, and the nuns were nothing more than elegant retired ladies of birth and fashion.

The abbess appointed her subordinates, who varied in number and rank according to the power of the convent. There was generally a sub-prioress, second in authority to the abbess, and certain minor executive officers, whose duties were nevertheless important, such as the chaplain, the sexton, and the cellaress. The chaplain was in most cases a monk chosen to celebrate Mass for the nuns, since women were not allowed to become actual priests; but in some cases the officer called the chaplain was a nun, whether or not she could officiate in all capacities. The sexton was a nun whose duties were to ring the bells for services, to keep in order the chapel, the altar, and the sacred vessels, and sometimes to act as a treasurer. The most interesting of these officers, however, and the one whose position must have been really most trying, was the cellaress. It was she who had general supervision of the commissariat. She was usually chosen upon the advice, if not by the election, of the whole community, and it was especially important that she should be a tactful person and a judicious manager. As housekeeper of the establishment, she had to control the servants and to satisfy the nuns. In providing food and drink for the household, she had to manage receipts and disbursements of considerable amounts. Very frequently a farm was attached to the nunnery, or there were several farms whose produce was to be used for the support of the institution. For whatever was bought or sold the cellaress had to make an accounting. With the proceeds of her sales or of the rent of the farms under her control, or with the money allowed her, she had to buy such provisions as were needed: grain, flesh, fish,--usually a very large item, especially in the Lenten season,--condiments, such as preserved fruits, spices, salt, etc., and, where the rule did not utterly forbid it, wine or ale. Of these details we shall speak more fully in connection with the rules for a model nunnery which Abélard wrote for Héloïse and upon which she based her government of the famous monastery of the Paraclete.

DROIT DU SEIGNEUR
After the painting by Lucien Mélingue

As feudalism meant oppression verging on slavery for Jacques Bonhomme, the peasant, his wife Jeanne could hardly have been in better case. With peasant marriages the seigneur could interfere even more tyrannically than with those of his feudal wards. In some places the bride and groom owed to the seigneur certain gifts called mets de mariage.... and that most infamous right known as the droit du seigneur was claimed, and we find a writer even as late as the seventeenth century recording the fact that the husband was sometimes required to purchase his bride's exemption from this right.

Aside from the protection they afforded to women who might otherwise have been utterly lost in the rough world, the monasteries were of great importance in other ways. Whatever it may have become during the period of the decline of monastic purity, the life in the nunneries, even in the comparatively dark period about the year 1000, was not an idle one. The day was carefully portioned off into periods of work, of religious devotion, and of leisure, which long custom fixed into a routine. The occupations included what we should now class chiefly as artistic work, though much of it was at the time really useful in a more homely way,--weaving of hangings and tapestries for the church, embroidery, painting and illuminating, and copying of manuscripts. This last was, of course, work of the highest utility, though the artistic skill displayed in the writing itself and in the beautiful illuminations made it also an art. We have few names of actual scribes of either sex, since they rarely signed the manuscripts they copied; but among these few there are some of women. The magnificent tapestries, sometimes large enough to cover in one piece the side of a church, are perhaps the most noteworthy of the products of the monasteries. So famous was the work of the nuns in this particular that tradition assigned to them, though perhaps mistakenly, the production of one of the most famous historical authorities for the Norman Conquest, the Bayeux tapestries, said to have been wrought for Bishop Odo of Bayeux by nuns under the direction of Queen Matilda.

Most important of all in the activities of the convent was education. At the time of which we write, the standard of learning in the convents was higher than one would think, and higher than it was some centuries later; for Latin was still used familiarly among some of the women educated in convents. The most famous instance of learning is that of the Saxon nun Hrotsvith, or Roswitha, of the tenth century, who wrote legends of the saints, dramas on the model of the comedies of Terence, and chronicles. There were other learned nuns, though none famous in the French literature of the time, all of whom gained their knowledge in convents; for it was in convents alone that women could ordinarily receive any education at all. One of the main purposes of the convent was to train young girls. Sometimes there was only such training as would fit them to became novices and eventually nuns, and the degree of education was of course determined in part by social standing; that is, a princess would be more carefully trained than a mere demoiselle; but some convents became famous schools, where education was given for its own sake, not merely to train those who meant to become nuns. In many cases, children of both sexes were taught, and girls and boys together learned Latin. In the romance of Flore et Blancheflore, the hero recalls how he and Blancheflore loved when they were children at school, "and told each other of our love in Latin, and none understood us." But the girls were probably better educated, in our sense of the word, than the boys; for teaching a boy to avoid breaking Priscian's head was then less necessary than teaching him to break that of his opponent in battle.

Leaving the convents out of the question, the Church helped the cause of woman and of humanity by its constant endeavor to repress violence. About the year 1030 France was afflicted by a succession of bad crops, resulting, together with the constant waste and ravages of petty wars, in the most frightful famine. The people in their misery became almost inhuman; men died in such multitudes that it was impossible to bury them, and the wolves fed on their flesh; human flesh was actually offered for sale in the market of Tournus; and one monster, near Macon, living as a hermit, enticed unwary travellers into his den and there slew and devoured them! When found out he had a pile of forty-eight human skulls, those of his victims. In the midst of this horrible state of affairs the bishops and abbots of all parts of France met in council and decreed punishment upon whoever should carry arms, and upon whoever should use violence against defenceless persons, merchants, monks, and women; not even the refuge of the altar was to protect him who disobeyed this decree. Raising their hands to heaven all those present cried out, Pax! pax! pax! in witness of the eternal peace compact, the Paix de Dieu--the Peace of God. Wars had caused much of their distress, and the kingdom was indeed weary of war, but the millennium had not yet come,--philosophers still tell us that it is "just beyond the sky line,"--and the Peace of God was ineffective.

Failing to suppress war, the Church next sought, with more practical wisdom, to modify its horrors. In 1041 was proclaimed the Trève de Dieu--the Truce of God. All private feuds were to cease during the period from Wednesday evening to Monday morning, under penalty of fine, banishment, and exclusion from Christian communion. Then the days of the great feasts were included in the period of truce, as well as Advent and Lent. "Churches and unfortified cemeteries," says the chronicler Ranulph Glaber, "as well as the persons of all clerks and monks, provided they did not carry arms, were put under the perpetual protection of the Truce of God. For the future, when making war upon the seigneur, men were forbidden to kill, to mutilate, or to carry off as captives the poor people of the country, or to destroy maliciously implements of labor and crops." This last provision in particular is very interesting. Of course, powerful barons broke the truce again and again; but it was there as a real moral force of restraint, and the Church did not forget to contend for its observance, so that it must have had some effect. To no class in society could peace have been more welcome, more essential, than to women, always the sufferers in war.

We have left to the last one most important question in considering the moral influence of the Church. Surely, the sanctity of the marriage tie is one of the foundation stones of morality and of civilization; upon it rests the home, where woman has always found her greatest and surest happiness. The Church had been struggling for centuries, and was to struggle some time longer, to make effective its opposition to marriage among the clergy. Among the secular priests, those not connected with a monastic order, marriage or concubinage had not by any means ceased, and we find even bishops leading scandalous lives. But the Church continued to fulminate its decrees, and the evil grew slowly less and less, till it existed only among the lower orders of the clergy and in out-of-the-way places. Monks and nuns alike took the three vows of poverty, of chastity, and of obedience. We are not concerned with the general question of whether or not priests should be married, or whether or not it is wisdom to force the observance of a vow of perpetual chastity upon young men and women who may have taken such a vow without duly considering their own temperaments, or who have been compelled to take it against their wills. Despite the scandals,--scandal has always a noisy tongue,--there should be no doubt that in the great majority of cases the vow of chastity was sincerely kept. Within its own limits the Church discouraged and was soon utterly to forbid marriage; what did it do to sanctify and to protect marriage outside of the ranks of the clergy?

Marriage was made one of the seven great sacraments of the Church, and the breach of the marriage tie was one of the sins most severely punished. Adultery had been severely punished under the customary laws of the Franks, usually by the death of both parties with frightful tortures; and the Church added to the physical punishment inflicted by the civil law in this world the threat of eternal torments in the next. Nevertheless, according to the testimony of many who are satirists and of some who are not, it was the unmarried priest who was the most frequent offender. An anecdote will illustrate the prevailing looseness of clerical morals. Wace tells us that a sacristan of Saint-Ouen, in Rouen, fell in love with a lady who lived across the little river Robec. As he was stealing across to meet her one dark night, his foot slipped on the plank by which he was crossing the stream, and he tumbled therein and was drowned. A devil was just about to pitchfork his soul and carry it off when an angel appeared, contending that the sacristan had not yet committed the sin. The case was submitted to Duke Richard, who ordered that the soul should be returned to the body, and that he would then judge according to the sacristan's actions. Presto! it was done; and the monk, his ardor cooled by the ducking, went back to his abbey and confessed to the abbot. A popular proverb makes the story survive: "Sir monk, step lightly, and take good care when you cross the plank." Not only in the Church, but in the world, immorality was too common and too easily pardoned. It is significant that illegitimacy was the rule rather than the exception among the Norman dukes, and that William the Conqueror, himself illegitimate, was conspicuous in his age for marital fidelity.

The moral theory of the Church was correct enough, however it failed in practice. Every precaution was taken--indeed, too many were taken--to prevent hasty and ill-assorted marriages. The banns had to be read three times in the church; the contracting parties must be of proper age; they must have the consent of parent or guardian; they must not be related within the degrees prohibited by the Church; they must not be bound by any previous vow of chastity or be guilty of any mortal sin.

These provisions would seem to be in the main wise enough, and yet out of one of them grew a considerable moral evil. Divorce had been recognized by the Salic law: "Seeing that discord troubles their union, and that charity reigns not in it, N. and M., husband and wife, have agreed to separate and to leave each other free either to retire to a monastery or to remarry," without question or opposition from either party. So ran one of the formulas; and as a sign of the divorce the keys of the house were taken from the wife, or a piece of linen was torn before her. The Church, however, opposed divorce, and declared it contrary to the spirit of Christianity. Yet, if one were wealthy or powerful, it was easy to have a marriage annulled, on one pretext or another. The most frequent was the plea for divorce for reasons of conscience, since the contracting parties, being within the prohibited degrees of relationship,--a fact which they had not known at the time of the marriage,--were guilty of incest in the eyes of the Church, and prayed to be relieved from the danger of perilling their immortal souls by deadly sin. Other pleas were resorted to, but this seems to have been a favorite one. By a subtile division of a hair "'twixt south and southwest side," this might be considered as not divorce, but the mere annulment of a contract which had been illegal and unsanctified from the start; and the distinction was an important one, since the rich noble or the monarch who had disposed of an objectionable wife in this way, and who had absolved himself by proper penances and by sufficient gifts to the Church, might, and generally did, remarry.

It is with the story of a divorce or forced separation that we are concerned in the case of Queen Bertha. Robert, the son of Hugues Caput, and the first real king of the Capetian line, was a devoted friend of Eudes, Count of Champagne and Blois, who proudly styles himself, in his charters, Comes Ditissimus,--richest count of France,--and whom Robert had honored with the title of count or seneschal of the royal palace. This Eudes had a beautiful and virtuous wife, Bertha, daughter of King Conrad the Pacific of Aries, and descended from the great Emperor Henry, the Fowler. Robert, then married to a princess named Rosella, was godfather to one of the children of Eudes and his fair cousin Bertha. Both Princess Rosella and the Comes Ditissimus died. Bertha and Robert already loved each other, it would seem, since neither mourned very long. Within a few months they were married, in spite of the protests of Hugues Capet, who would have liked a more powerful alliance for his son and heir. Although Bertha and Robert were cousins, it was only in the fourth degree. This actual relationship, though within the proscribed degrees, would have been overlooked probably, as well as the spiritual relationship established by Robert's having stood godfather to one of Bertha's children, had it not been for the prince's ill luck in incurring the enmity of certain powerful and active churchmen. Archambaud, Archbishop of Tours, had issued a special dispensation, and had blessed the marriage in the presence and with the consent of several other bishops. But to understand fully the violent opposition which the marriage encountered from the papal party we must go back to an episode in the reign of Hugues Capet.

In the course of the last effort of Carl, the heir of the Carlovingian line, to recover dominion, the Archbishop of Rheims had betrayed Hugues Capet, and had agreed to introduce Carl's forces into Rheims. It was proved that this man, Arnoul, or Arnulph, had surrendered the keys of the city to the emissaries of Carl, and he himself confessed his guilt. Accordingly, with the sanction of an ecclesiastical court, Arnoul was deprived of his see, which was given to Gerbert, the tutor of the young King Robert. The papal party refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court which had deposed Arnoul, and which still kept him imprisoned at Orléans, and a special legate was sent to France to protest against this action at the very time of Robert's marriage to Bertha. The legate raised his voice in protest against the incestuous and sinful marriage. Thinking to appease him, Robert released Arnoul and restored him to his archbishopric; but to do this he had to depose Gerbert, and by so doing he made an enemy of one of the most active and able men in the Church, famous as a theologian, and afterward to become Pope Silvester II.

For a time, however, Bertha and Robert, who loved each other devotedly and lived in a simple piety quite in contrast to the licentious habits of the period, were left unmolested. The bribe to Rome was sufficient for the moment to purchase for them innocent happiness. Robert was most singularly devout, and was ranked almost as a saint by the ecclesiastical chroniclers who preserve his story for us. Though a handsome and well-formed man, and not altogether unfit for martial exercises, he delighted in pastimes rather befitting a monkish scholar than a soldier. He was gentle and kind to those about him, especially the poor and the unfortunate, and was devoted to music. He himself composed a number of Latin hymns for the Church, some of which are still retained, notably the sequence to the Holy Spirit, Adsit nobis gratia, and he set many others to tunes of his own composing. He was innocently vain of his powers as a musician and singer, and on a pilgrimage to Rome in after years, 1016, he deposited on the altar of Saint Peter his Latin poems set to music. The very graces and virtues for which his contemporaries praise Robert are the ones that make him manifestly out of place as King of France in the year 1000, and the misery of his domestic career is only more pitiful than the disorder which reigned in his kingdom. That one of the most pious kings of France should nevertheless have begun his career in opposition to the Church is very remarkable.

While Bertha and Robert were enjoying their brief respite from persecution, the papacy itself was struggling for existence.. At last the Emperor Otho fought his way into Rome, seized the leader of the popular party, John Crescentius, "Senator and Consul of Rome," and pitched him over the walls of the castle of Saint Angelo. The unhappy Pope, John XVI. was replaced by the emperor's nominee, Gregory V. Almost as soon as Gregory was seated he summoned a council (998), in which Gerbert, now Robert's bitter enemy, sat as Bishop of Ravenna. This council, largely controlled by the vindictive Gerbert, threatened the kingdom of France with a universal interdict, suspending all religious rites but those of baptism and extreme unction, if Robert would not repudiate Bertha. The decree commanded "that King Robert, who has, contrary to the holy canons of the Church, married his cousin, Bertha, shall forsake her at once, and shall perform a penance of seven years, in accordance with the rules and customs of the Church. If he obey not, may he be anathema! And so also be it as regards Bertha! That Archambaud, Archbishop of Tours, who consecrated this incestuous union, and all the bishops who sanctioned it by their presence, be refused the Holy Communion until such time as they shall have come to Rome to make amends to the Holy See!"

One can imagine that, to a nature as devout as Robert's, such a curse was almost overwhelming. Yet he and Bertha endured for some time the horrors which this excommunication brought upon them, and Robert resisted with far more spirit than one would have supposed him to possess. The curse fell upon France, and upon its king and queen, who were surely no more morally guilty than their unfortunate subjects. Awful were the effects of the curse, according to Petrus Damianus, who records with pious unction most of the signs and wonders with which the age was filled. All save a few of the lowest servants fled from the accursed presence of Robert and his queen, and even these menials, when they had prepared the king's food, deemed the very vessels from which he had eaten polluted by his touch, and purified them by fire or destroyed them. Bertha was reported to be a foul witch, and to have the foot of a goose, and was nicknamed la reine pedauque, or pied d'oie (Queen Goose-foot). In her agitation and misery, the child she should have borne was prematurely brought forth. The charitable Damianus tells us that it was currently reported to be of monstrous form, having the head and neck of a swan and not of a human being.

Whether these horrors were direct effects of God's wrath or had birth in the zealous imagination of a writer whose interest it was to lay on the colors in his description of the blasting effects of excommunication, Robert and Bertha had to resign themselves to the cruel separation. Robert's superstitious fears were worked on by his monkish advisers, particularly Abbo, Abbot of Fleury, "who incessantly reprimanded the king, in public and in, private." This holy man, says the biographer of Robert, "continued his reproaches until the good King acknowledged his fault and abandoned the wife whom it was not permitted him to possess." The separation seems to have taken place definitely about the year 1006, and Robert was to be miserable in his domestic life all the rest of his days.

He and Bertha had passed part of their married life together in the midst of a veritable reign of terror. All over Christendom the belief was general that the end of the work! was at hand. The lurid prophecies of the Apocalypse were supplemented by texts believed to be prophetic of the Judgment Day, raked together from all parts of the Scriptures and from what superstitious ignorance regarded as almost of equal authority, the Sibylline Leaves. Preachers took as their text the horrors of the approaching dissolution of the world, when, according to Revelations: "The stars of heaven fell unto the earth... and the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together;" or in the magnificent words of a hymn written long after: Dies iræ, dies illa Solvet, sæclum in favilla: Teste David cum Sybilla. (Day of wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophet's warning! Heaven and earth in ashes burning!) They supplemented this picture by accounts of the torments of hell as reported in the legends of those who had been granted a vision of them. "Repent ye! repent ye! for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Woe unto him who in that day shall be found still a sinner!" There was naturally a paralysis of all useful activities. What was the use of preparing for the morrow, if there was to be no morrow? During the last year of the century the terror reached its highest point, and only absolute needs were attended to. There were great donations to the Lord on the part of tardy sinners who thought thus to purchase remission of their sins. But there were also those who refused to repent, and who resolved, since their life was to be short, to make it as merry as it could be. While the former crowded the churches, weeping and praying and surrendering themselves to the terrors suggested by the priest, the latter gave themselves up to the wildest dissipation. The year 1000 passed away, and still the stars were in heaven, and the wicked on earth began to breathe more freely; and when the next year went by without any Day of Judgment, courage revived, and the Church began to make use of the immense gifts which impulsive sinners had turned over to her. New cathedrals and new abbeys rose all over the land.

The pathos of the story of Bertha is heightened when we look at her successor on the throne. Even in her own day Constance, daughter of Guilhelm Taillefer, Count of Toulouse, was considered harsh and cruel; one chronicler euphemistically expresses this when he says: "There was as much constancy in her heart as in her name." She probably came by her nature honestly enough, for her mother was Arsinda, sister of that Foulques Nerra of cheerful memory, who, indeed, according to some accounts, forced the weak Robert to marry his niece. She was, says the chronicler, surnamed Candida on account of her excessive fairness, and is not infrequently called Blanche, the "fair queen." Into the rather primitive court of the French king, surrounded by his monks and probably longing for the banished Bertha, she came with a scandalous display of luxury and frivolity.

The south of France, in contact with Italy, with the cultured Moors of Spain, and, through its Mediterranean ports, with the most advanced civilization then known, that of the Arabs, was far in advance of the northern provinces in civilization, or at least in luxury and knowledge of the arts usually accompanying civilization. Provence, especially, with its ancient port of Marseilles to recall memories of the most cultured nation of antiquity, was in material prosperity and in arts already advancing to that stage of civilization which was to make her, in the course of the next century, the mother of the first real literature France had known and of the first extended protest against the Church of Rome. The troubadours were soon to make Provence and the Provençal tongue famous, and the Albigenses, with their heresy, were to invite the destruction of this gay, brilliant, but unsound society. The south was already far more gay and pleasure loving than the north, where the ravages of wars foreign and domestic had been more terrible. And out of the south came Queen Constance, la Blanche, to a court where the king was more monk than king.

The northerners, always disliking the men of Provence, exclaimed in horror against the manners and the costume of the horde of Provençal attendants whom Constance brought with her. "The favor of the queen," says Glaber, "attracted into France and Bourgogne many natives of Aquitaine and Auvergne. These vain and frivolous men showed themselves to be as ill-regulated in their morals as they were immodest in their dress. Their armor and the furnishings of their horses were extraordinary. Their hair fell scarce to the middle of their heads (the fashion of shaving the back of the head was strange in northern France, though afterward so prevalent that William's Norman knights were reported by Harold's spies to be all shaven-crowned monks); they shaved their beards off as smooth as play actors; they wore boots indecently turned up in long points at the toes, robes cut off short, reaching to the knees and divided behind and before; in walking they hopped along!" Alas for France! the French and the Burgundians, formerly the most honest and sober of all nations, eagerly followed the "sinful example" set by the queen's favorites. The whole nation copied these indecent costumes, and short hair, short robes, and sinfully pointed shoes became the fashion. As the Puritans inveighed against Babylonish apparel, the livery of the "scarlet woman," in the shape of Cavalier curls and long plumes, so the divines of France made a crusade against this livery of the devil. They declared that the finger of Satan was in all this, and that the pointed shoes would infallibly carry their wearers to the realm of the master whose livery they wore. One can hear the very voice of Ben Jonson's Ananias, the Puritan, as he testifies against the costume of the Spaniard: "They are profane, lewd, superstitious, and idolatrous breeches."

Nevertheless, the satanic livery was never utterly thrown aside; and clothes were not the only things satanic about the new queen. Constance, high-tempered and energetic, reigned over France through or in spite of King Robert. Coming of a forceful and warlike race, she must have found many things distasteful in the weakness and superstition which were the chief traits she noted in her husband. She and her kinsfolk left him free to compose hymns, while they ruled France. But when one of his favorites, Hugues de Beauvais, whom he had made count of the palace, suggested to Robert that he might get rid of Constance and send for the ever-regretted Bertha, Constance notified her strenuous uncle Foulques. Foulques promptly despatched a dozen brave knights, with orders to slay Hugues whenever and wherever they found him: they found him and murdered him in the very presence of the king. Robert was too weak to resist effectively, made his peace with the queen, and gave himself up more and more to religious devotions.

He used to go to the church of Saint-Denis and sing with the choir and challenge the singers to a trial of skill. When Constance one day asked him to compose some song in her honor, he responded with a stave of his hymn: O! Constantia martyrum (O! faith and constancy of the martyrs), with which she was as well pleased as if the reference had not been a bit ambiguous. On a certain occasion, as he was besieging a castle on the feast of Saint Hippolytus, to whom he professed a special devotion, he left the army and repaired to Saint-Denis to sing hymns in honor of the saint. While he was thus engaged, the walls of the castle fell, and the king's troops entered in; a manifest reward for his singing Agnus Dei, dona nobis pacem! While he was one day at prayers, shedding many tears, as was his wont, the vain and worldly-minded Constance adorned his lance with silver ornaments. The king, finding this sinful waste, looked out of his door and saw a poor man near by. He sent him off to get some sort of tool to cut off the decorations, shut himself up in a room with the fellow, stripped the lance of its silver gewgaws, and gave them to him, bidding him begone in haste lest the queen see him. Constance asked what had become of the silver, and Robert "swore by the Lord's name, though not in earnest," that he knew not what had become of it.

In spite of this pious perjury, we are told that Robert had a great horror of lying. The proof of this statement is very interesting. He had a reliquary made of crystal, set in a golden case, and containing no relic. Upon this his nobles, ignorant of the deceit, could swear without danger of risking their souls, in case the oath was false. And as common folk had souls, too, and might endanger them by false swearing, he had a similar reliquary, made of silver, in which was deposited nothing more sacred than an egg. He was constantly endeavoring to shield the petty malefactors whom his unworldliness had tempted to wrongdoing, and whom Constance would have punished. It was his habit to have the poor fed from his table, and on one occasion he had a fellow concealed under the table at his feet. The man found time between bites to cut off a heavy gold ornament attached to the king's knee. "What enemy of God, my good lord, has dishonored your gold-adorned robe?" cried Constance. "Undoubtedly," said Robert, "he who took it wanted it more than I, and with God's aid it will be of service to him." One day he saw a young clerk named Ogger steal a candlestick from the altar in his chapel. The priests were much disturbed over its loss; and the queen, in a rage, swore by the soul of her father that she would have the eyes of the priests torn from their sockets if they did not account for what had been stolen from the sanctuary. The priests questioned Robert, who, denying all knowledge of the theft, at once sent for the thief. "Friend Ogger," said he, "haste thee hence, lest my inconstant Constancy eat thee up. What thou hast taken will be enough to carry thee to thy own country. The Lord be with thee." When the thief was beyond danger of pursuit, Robert cheerfully said: "Why all this pother about a candlestick? The Lord has given it to some of his poor."

One can well understand that however churchmen might commend this sort of meekness it was most irritating to Constance. She was full of energy and vigor, and never jested, says her biographer, about anything. She and her uncle Foulques, whom Robert had made governor of Paris, ruled France and fought against the turbulent and rebellious barons, chief among whom was Eudes II., Count of Blois, of Chartres, of Tours, and of Champagne, the son of the deposed queen, Bertha. She led in the first important attack upon heresy. Certain clerks in the city of Orléans developed a secret, heretical sect which gained many proselytes, among others a certain Etienne, who had been the confessor of Queen Constance. Their secret was discovered; they were brought to trial, refused to recant, and were ordered to execution. As they marched from the church where they had been tried to the immense funeral pyre, they passed Constance in the porch of the church. Recognizing Etienne among the thirteen prisoners, she attacked him furiously, and with a whip put out one eye of the defenceless victim. This vindictive queen, aggravating the tortures of the first victims of the new religious persecutions, is not a pleasant figure in French.

As Robert grew older and it became necessary to determine on a successor,--the right of the oldest son was not yet altogether fixed,--Constance began to intrigue against her husband. Robert was in the habit of saying: "My hen pecks, but she gives me plenty of chickens." They had had six children; but had lost their eldest son, Hugues, in 1025. Of the three remaining sons, Eudes, the eldest, was an idiot; Henry, the second, was his father's choice; and Robert, the youngest, was favored by Constance, "with her habitual spirit of contradiction." She said, with some reason, that Henry was weak, inactive, deceitful, and negligent of affairs, and could no more be king than his father could; whereas Robert had far more energy and sense than his brothers. For once, the king resisted, and with the consent of the peers assured the succession to Henry. Constance fomented ill feeling between the two sons, and between Henry and his father. Robert, with the notion that injustice had been done him, was soon in revolt against his father. But the queen had always been so harsh to all her children that none of them seem to have had faith in her or affection for her, and the two brothers, Henry and Robert, soon became reconciled to each other and made a joint invasion of their father's dominions, pillaging his castles and territories. The poor king, after many ravages had been committed, at length bribed his sons to let him sing his last hymns in peace. Henry was to succeed to the throne, and Robert became Duke of Burgundy.

The peace thus made did not long outlast King Robert. He died in July, 1031, and the monks mourned their friend and protector, and many of the poor sincerely bewailed the loss of their "good father"; but there is no sign of any excessive grief on the part of Constance. She soon gave the kingdom cause to mourn in other fashion; for no sooner was Henry I. seated on his throne than his mother began to stir up rebellion against him. She had always been violent in private as in public life, and treated Henry in particular "as if she hated him like a stepmother." Her intrigues now were so far successful that she won over to her side most of the direct vassals of the crown, and the greater number of the towns in the duchy of France declared themselves in favor of placing Robert, Duke of Burgundy, on the throne. By surrendering the county of Sens to her old enemy, Eudes, Count of Blois, Constance gained his aid. This plot of a mother against her son was successful in all but one main point: the other son, in whose name she was preparing to wage civil war, took no active part against his brother, and appears to have remained quietly in Burgundy. Perhaps he was wise enough to understand that what Constance was really scheming for was the continuance of her own power, and that if placed on the throne he would have been completely under her control.

In this crisis of the affairs of the kingdom, Henry, fleeing with a following of but twelve vavasours, called upon Normandy for aid; and most effective aid he had from one whose name was to become famous, a nucleus for the gathering of romance. This was Duke Robert of Normandy, surnamed Robert the Devil, who carried on a predatory warfare so savage and so successful that most of the revolted lords near the borders of Normandy "bowed their heads before him." Old Foulques Nerra, probably in one of his edifying fits of repentance, at length brought Constance to a reconciliation with Henry, reproaching her with the brutal fury with which she was treating her son. The miserable queen, who had caused so much unhappiness to her husband and to her sons, did not long survive the peace, dying at Melun in July, 1032. Her ally Eudes continued the struggle some little while, but was at last vanquished and forced to disgorge half of the county of Sens which Constance had given him as a bribe.

Thus ends the life of one of the first of the French queens who really took an active part in affairs. Beautiful, witty, and full of graces and caprices essentially feminine, as well as of some masculine qualities, she yet appears to have inspired no love, nothing but dread, in anyone who came near her; and the chroniclers of the time seem to delight in telling anecdotes illustrative of her wickedness as contrasted with Robert's saintliness. But we must remember that at least she accomplished something, and that her enemies tell her story.

At the period of which we write, Normandy was all powerful, and the Capets had come to look upon her dukes now as their most dangerous foes and now as their most useful friends. Duke Robert the Magnificent, as his courtiers called him, or Robert the Devil, as literature knows him, had an amour which is interesting as showing that class distinctions were not so rigid as one might think. According to Wace's story of the romance:

"A Faleize ont li Dus hante,...

Une meschine i ont amée,

Arlot ont nom, de burgeis née."

(The duke did much frequent Falaise,... There he loved a girl named Arietta, born of a burgess of the town). Arietta, the tanner's daughter, was to become a figure of romance in the story of Robert the Devil; but, romance or no romance, she was the mother of the greatest of the Norman dukes, William the Conqueror, born in 1028. William had hard work to keep his place in Normandy, but we cannot stop to tell of the long and successful struggle which he waged against the haughty barons who refused to bow to the illegitimate son of the tanner's daughter. We all know the story of how the citizens of Alençon, which he was besieging, beat skins upon the walls of one of their redoubts, crying: "Work for the tanner!" and how William captured the redoubt, cut off the hands and feet of the unlucky jokers, and threw them over the town walls.

With a man of such temper, it is not unnatural that there should have arisen a curious story of his courtship, which began soon after this episode at Alençon. Engaged in constant conflict with his neighbors, William determined at least to secure the friendship of Flanders. He sought the hand of Matilda, daughter of Baldwin, Count of Flanders. Mauger, William's uncle, objected to the marriage, because Matilda and William were cousins, and caused the clergy to prohibit it. The Pope issued a special pronouncement against it. With him William could not proceed after the manner which doubtless most commended itself to him, but when the Italian Lanfranc, at the monastic school of Bee, dared to pronounce the marriage sinful, William promptly gave orders to burn down the farms from which the monks drew their sustenance, and to banish Lanfranc. But a shrewd display of courage and wit on Lanfranc's part made William his friend; and soon it was agreed that if William would found two monasteries the sin of his marriage would be forgiven him.

The chronicles of Tours report that Matilda herself objected to wedding the bastard of Normandy. The match, however, had been agreed to by her father, and William had set his heart on it. As proof of his determination, if not of his lover-like devotion, he waited for her as she came out of church one day, and whipped her till she consented to marry him! And as some writers assert, even after the marriage he continued to use this sort of suasion with his duchess, finally causing her death by his brutality. Despite this unlovely beginning, the marriage was a happy one. Matilda was beautiful, virtuous, and of strong character, so that she won her husband's confidence and love. In an age of scandalous marital infidelity, he was faithful to her. She was his faithful friend and counsellor through life; and when he went on that perilous voyage of adventure to win the English crown, it was she who was left in charge of the duchy of Normandy; she who was praying for her husband's safety in the priory she had founded at Rouen, when she heard the news of the great victory of Hastings, and christened the church Bonne Nouvelle; she who welcomed him back to his capital of Rouen after the success in England.

The purity and devotion of the Conqueror's queen present a picture very different from that of Bertrade de Montfort, who, like the wicked Constance, was connected with the house of Anjou. Philip I., a pitiable roi fainéant, had married, in 1071, Bertha of Holland, by whom he had had three children. Having wearied of her, he sent her off to the chateau of Montreuil, prepared for her long before as a wedding bower, and then discovering one of those convenient relationships we have mentioned, succeeded in having his marriage annulled. Having thus relieved his conscience, it was but natural that he should begin to look about him--he may have looked before--for a wife whom he might keep for a while without distressing his conscience. He found this helpmeet in Bertrade de Montfort, with whom he fell in love while on a trip to Tours, in 1092. It is true that "a good man could find naught to admire in her but her beauty," and that her husband, another Foulques of Anjou, was still living. But these are small matters when one is King of France and has one's heart set upon some particular lady. Foulques was not an attractive man; he seems to have had something like a club foot, and to have worn long, pointed shoes to hide his deformity; besides, he had already been twice divorced. Bertrade, young, beautiful, ambitious, was quite ready to go to the king and replace the unhappy Bertha. She eloped on the night following the king's visit to her husband, found an escort waiting for her at Meung-sur-Loire, and was conducted to Philip at Orléans.

Philip and Bertrade decided to get married, for the duchess was anxious to be called queen. They were indignant because most of the bishops suggested that the proceeding was rather irregular, since Foulques was not only still living but at that moment actually preparing to bring back his runaway spouse by force of arms. Nevertheless, by large gifts, the king persuaded one bishop to consecrate his union with Bertrade. Foulques and the friends of the deposed queen, Bertha, made forays into Philip's territory, but accomplished nothing. Meanwhile, Philip incited one of his barons to make war on and imprison the Bishop of Chartres, who had dared to denounce the marriage with Bertrade. The whole power of the Church was soon enlisted against him, and Pope Urban II. despatched a special legate to dissolve the marriage, or to excommunicate Philip if he did not leave his paramour. The Bishop of Chartres was promptly released, and Philip attempted to forestall further action on the part of his enemies by calling a special council at Rheims to try the bishop on a frivolous charge. But the legate summoned another council at Autun, which issued a decree of excommunication against Philip and Bertrade in October, 1094.

Though Queen Bertha was now dead, the ecclesiastical censure still held good. According to one of the conditions of the decree, Philip was to put off his crown. He obeyed this to the letter, refused to wear any insignia of royalty, and feigned to have ceased all intercourse with Bertrade. The Pope gave him till All Saints' Day, 1095, to reform, being afraid to use extreme measures while a rival Pope, already sustained by the German Emperor, might entice the King of France into his following. All Saints' Day came and went, and still Philip and Bertrade were living as man and wife. Once more Philip was excommunicated, by a council held at Clermont; he again made fine promises of reformation, broke his word, and even had the audacity to have Bertrade consecrated as queen. Excommunication after excommunication was pronounced against him, and the kingdom was put under an interdict; he continued to make most generous promises about sending Bertrade back where she belonged, and still never did he do what he promised.

The terrors of excommunication had evidently lost their force, or else laymen and clerks alike were too much occupied with other important work before the council of Clermont, work whose effects were to influence profoundly the whole history of Europe and to bring about great social as well as great political changes: men were talking of the First Crusade. In the mighty stir of preparation, in the wild enthusiasm of that great movement, the king and his paramour were for the moment lost sight of. While men and women, and even children, were listening to the fierce eloquence of Peter the Hermit, and in inspired frenzy shouting out their approval: Dieu le veult! Dieu le veult! who could stop to think of the idle and shifty King of France? Were they not all going to battle in the service of a greater king than he?

Yet the motives of even these first Crusaders were in some cases far from that consistent purity which one would expect. Among the leaders is one Guilhelm, Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitiers, a gay and famous troubadour, who has founded in his own domain a maison de plaisir where the inmates are dressed like nuns, a sort of Persian heaven ("A Persian's heaven is easily made 'Tis but black eyes and lemonade"); who bids an affecting farewell "to brilliant tourneys, to grandeur and to riches, to all that enchained his heart, for he goes in the service of God to find remission for his sins;" and who yet carries with him on this holy war a perfect swarm of the beauties (examina puellarum) who enchained his heart, and continued to enchain it, probably, until they were captured by the Turks. But this Guilhelm gives a still more interesting proof of the motives of his pious warfare. Two papal legates came to Poitiers in November, 1100, to hold a council. Having preached the Crusade, they next proceeded to renew the curse of excommunication upon Philip, who was still living with Bertrade. The good Count Guilhelm, with the red cross already upon his breast, stirred up a mob against the legates, led the way into the church where the council was sitting, and encouraged his followers to stone the assembled bishops. There were broken heads, and there was some bloodshed, but enough of the bishops stood their ground to pronounce the excommunication once more.

Bertrade bore the censures with amazing effrontery, and jested about how the bells of the churches, silent during their stay, would begin to ring as they left a town; and she actually forced some priests to hold a service for her. But repeated curses, or the debauchery in which he had all his life indulged, seem to have undermined Philip's constitution. At any rate, he determined to relieve himself of the cares of government. In spite of the protests of Bertrade, who wished to prevent the power of the sceptre from going to the son of Queen Bertha, Philip, in 1100, associated his son Louis in the government.

The young man proved himself a vigorous ruler, and won the love of his subjects by attempts to punish some of the robber barons who made life miserable for merchants and travellers. He became too popular to be altogether agreeable to his amiable stepmother, who set about planning to get rid of him. Louis went to visit the English king, Henry Beauclerc, in 1102, and was received with all the courtesy and honor due his rank. Bertrade despatched after him letters, sealed with the royal seal of Philip, instructing Henry to seize Louis and confine him in prison for the rest of his days. But Henry was either too wise or too humane to perpetrate this outrage, and sent the young prince back with every honor. Louis was furious; Philip denied all knowledge of the infamous letters; and Louis, guessing whence they came, planned to kill Bertrade.

She, however, was not easily to be caught, and began devising means to procure the death of Louis. She first had resort to three clerks, who proposed to destroy the prince by means of sorcery, if they could conduct their incantations unmolested for nine days. But one of them confessed the plot, and the black art was abandoned for some surer method. The queen had Louis poisoned. He languished for several days, unable to eat or to sleep, and given over by the best physicians in France. At length, one who had learned some of the art of the Saracens volunteered his services; and under his care Louis's life was saved, though he bore traces of the poisoning all the rest of his days.

Queen Bertrade, like an affectionate mother, had hoped to see one of her own sons seated upon the throne, and was much grieved at Louis's recovery. Philip, completely under her influence, actually implored his son to forgive this second direct attempt upon his life; and Bertrade, in a great fright now that her crime had failed and had been found out, cringed before Louis like a common servant, and at length won his forgiveness.

Philip determined to be reconciled to the Church. At a council held at the close of 1104 he appeared as a sincere penitent,--barefooted, with unkempt hair and beard,--and solemnly swore never to live with Bertrade again. The curse of excommunication was removed; the council discreetly went about its business; and Philip went outside, and put on his shoes, and had his hair cut, and put on his crown, and had one ready for Bertrade, too. But the Church was tired of contending with him, and took no further notice of his irregularities, though what happened soon afterward was, if possible, more scandalous than all that had gone before.

Bertrade had the address to reconcile her two husbands; and in 1106 she and Philip actually went to visit Foulques, in Angers, where all three hobnobbed most amicably, sitting at the same table, or occupying seats of honor in the church, with Philip seated by Bertrade's side and Foulques on a stool at her feet. One can hardly credit a statement like this, but there seems to have been no limit to Bertrade's effrontery, and the complete subjection of Foulques is recorded in the Latin life of Louis the Fat: "Although he was banished outright from her bed, she so mollified him that... often sitting on a stool at her feet, he submitted in all things to her will."

Foulques, though he sat at the feet of his wife and the king's paramour, and though he ceased to make active claim to his share of Bertrade, has recorded his and his wife's infamy for us. One of his charters, for example, is dated thus: "This donation was made in the year one thousand and ninety-five after the incarnation of Our Lord, Urban being Pope, and France befouled by the adultery of the infamous King Philip." But this was in the salad days of his wrath, before Bertrade had induced him to sit on a stool at her feet and submit to her will in all things.

In the year 1108, Philip, feeling his sins and his diseases lie heavy upon him, determined to take an allopathic dose of repentance to purify himself from the first before the second carried him off. He addressed special prayers to Saint Benedict, ordered that his wicked body should not be buried in the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, and clothed himself in the habit of a Benedictine monk. Thus he expired, having existed--not reigned--as king for forty-eight years, and was succeeded immediately by Louis the Fat, who was crowned within five days after the death of his father.

This haste was not altogether without excuse, for Bertrade was still alive, and not wasting her time in prayers to Saint Benedict. Taking advantage of the disturbed state of the kingdom, she managed to form a coalition, headed by her brother, Amauri de Montfort, and by the successor of her Angevin husband, to dethrone Louis and put in his place her own son, Philip, Count of Mantes. But Louis was too active to be caught as the conspirators had planned. He summoned Philip to appear before the court of peers of the duchy of France, and, on his refusal, seized upon the strongholds of his enemies before they were prepared, and deprived Philip of his county of Mantes.

Bertrade's last card was played, and she succumbed to her defeat. Though still in the height of her beauty, with not a wrinkle on her brow, she retired to the convent of Haute Bruyère, a dependency of the famous monastery of Fontevrault. Whether or not she was truly penitent for the evil life she had led we do not know. But there was to be short time left her for the cultivation of the monastic virtues; for the austerity of the new life soon wore her out, and she died in the convent.

CHAPTER II

FAMOUS LOVERS

In Père Lachaise, the famous cemetery of Paris, there is none among the hundreds of monuments upon which the traveller looks with more interest than that of the lovely and unhappy Héloïse. There her body lies, with that of her lover-husband, Pierre Abélard. It is her story that we wish to tell; but her fame and that of Abélard are so intimately associated that one cannot tell of Héloïse without first telling something of Abélard. The debt to fame, however, is not all on her side; to translate the words of a great French historian: "Alone, the name of Abélard would be known to-day only to scholars: linked with the name of Héloïse, it is in every heart. Paris, above all,... has kept the memory of the immortal daughter of the Cite with exceptional and unchanging fidelity. The eighteenth century and the Revolution, so pitiless towards the Middle Ages, revived this tradition with the same ardor which led them to destroy so many other memories. The children of Rousseau's disciples still go in pilgrimage to the monument of this great saint of love, and each spring sees pious women placing fresh crowns of flowers upon the tomb in which the Revolution reunited the two lovers." We shall not, therefore, attempt to part those whom love has for more than seven centuries joined together, and shall tell of Abélard as well as of Héloïse.

The great University of Paris was already famous in the twelfth century. Professors, most of them ecclesiastics, lectured on all the foolish subtilties of the learning of the day to crowds of students collected from every quarter of Europe. At the monastic school of Notre Dame the most distinguished lecturer on dialectic,--meaning philosophy and logic as applied to philosophy,--at the close of the eleventh century, was Guillaume de Champeaux. The method of instruction was, necessarily, almost entirely oral, for books were worth almost their weight in coin. It was the custom for the professor to encourage discussions with the students and to overwhelm them with the weight of his wisdom and the acuteness of his reasoning. In this fashion Guillaume had long triumphed, and had, we may fancy, acquired no little of that dogmatic habit of mind which is fostered by unchallenged teaching. About the year 1100 his ascendency was seriously threatened by a young Breton, scarcely yet a man, who had come to his school as a student and had had the temerity to overcome him in argument. This was Pierre Abélard, soon famous as a logician, philosopher, and theologian, now remembered chiefly because of his connection with the fair and noble Héloïse. Abélard was born at Pallet, or Palais, not far from Nantes. He was the eldest son of a family of some distinction, and his father, Bérenger, was determined to give his son an education in keeping with his own knightly rank. Bérenger himself was better educated than most of the gentlemen of his class, and there seems to have been a decided leaning to devoutness in the family, since both Bérenger and his wife, Lucie, took monastic vows later in life. At any rate, Pierre, after a taste of learning, determined to devote himself entirely to the pursuit of knowledge. Let us see how he tells this part of his own story. "The progress that I made in learning attached me to its pursuit with an ever increasing ardor, and such was the charm that it exercised over my mind that, renouncing the glory of arms, my own heritage, my own privileges as eldest son, I abandoned forever the camp of Mars to take refuge in the bosom of Minerva. Preferring the art of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, I exchanged the arms of war for those of logic, and sacrificed trophies of the battlefield for the joys of contest in argument. I took to travelling from province to province, going wherever I heard that the study of this art received special honor, and always engaging in argument, like a veritable emulator of the Peripatetics."

In this way, Abélard, still under twenty, came to the school of Guillaume de Champeaux. Received at first with honor, as an intelligent pupil, Abélard remained some time, perhaps two years. But his restless, inquisitive, and, above all, rational mind could not accept calmly what seemed to it untrue. Abélard, a mere boy, dared to dispute with his master, Guillaume, and, what is far worse, to get the better of arguments on Guillaume's own peculiar subject. The school was divided into two parties. Guillaume, being the more influential, prevented his pupil from establishing himself as a lecturer in Paris, and Abélard removed to Melun, at that time a royal residence and a city of some importance. Here he opened a school of his own, which prospered so greatly, in spite of the jealousy of Guillaume and the older teachers, that he removed to Corbeil, near Paris, and was soon recognized as more than the equal of his old instructor. But his health broke down under the strain; he retired to rest and recuperate in his native land, and remained there several years. Returning about 1108, he again met Guillaume in argument, in the convent of Saint-Victor, outside Paris, and again vanquished him, this time so completely that Guillaume gave up his chair in Paris. His jealousy, however, still kept Abélard from establishing himself in the great city. The young philosopher opened his school on Mont Sainte-Geneviève, a hill just outside the walls of the Paris of that day, where he taught with brilliant success, till summoned to Brittany by his mother Lucie, then about to take the veil. On his return from this trip he determined to study theology. The venerable Anselm of Laon was the most distinguished teacher of theology, and to him Abélard went. Here is part of his comment on Anselm, which will help us to understand something of the writer's character.

"He enjoyed marvellous facility of speech, but his thought was without value, even without good sense. The fire that he kindled filled his house with smoke, but did not illuminate it. He was a tree dense with foliage and beautiful from afar, but found fruitless when examined more closely. I had come to him to gather fruit; I found in him the fig tree cursed by the Lord, or the old oak to which Lucan compares Pompey: But the shadow of a great name, the lofty oak in the midst of the fruitful field." With such an opinion of his preceptor, it is not surprising that Abélard grew impatient and talked imprudently. The immediate result was that the young scholar proved, to his own satisfaction and apparently to that of his hearers, that he could lecture on theology, as Anselm understood theology, by the aid of ordinary intelligence alone. The ultimate result was that he made an enemy of Anselm. He returned to Paris--about 1115--in triumph, was given the chair formerly held by Guillaume de Champeaux, and became a canon of the cathedral of Notre Dame.

During the three or four years that followed this signal triumph over his old master, Abélard enjoyed a popularity and a reputation for learning almost without parallel. He was of handsome presence, polished and winning in manners, accomplished even in the little arts and graces of the society of the period. All this would account for his personal popularity; but his was really a brilliant mind, fascinatingly if dangerously logical, and straightforward in dealing with vexed questions of philosophy and theology. And with all his learning he knew how to meet the difficulties of ordinary minds, to present his arguments in a style not only simple but lucid and entertaining. He brought to his work a precious quality--enthusiasm. From all parts of Europe students flocked to him, by hundreds, by thousands; and with the offerings they brought he was rich. Then it was that pride prepared his ruin. "Believing myself henceforth the only living philosopher, fancying that I had no more opposition to encounter or accusation to fear, I commenced to give rein to my passions, I who had always lived in the greatest continence. The more I advanced in the paths of philosophy and theology, the further I was getting, by my impure life, from philosophers and saints." How much of this confession is real humility, and how much mere pretence, exaggeration, and vain rhetoric, we cannot say. It is an unfortunate fact that what is recognized as the language of religion is so highly colored, so tropical, so manifestly not to be taken in its absolute and literal sense, that one cannot estimate a character by autobiographic testimony of this sort. What Rousseau meant when he confessed that he "gave rein to his passions" we know full well, for he tells us. What, or rather how much, Abélard means we cannot tell, since his language is evidently in large part figurative. We do not think, however, that he was ever really a libertine.

In his own account of his love story Abélard says that he was attracted by the beauty, the youth, and the mental attainments of Héloïse, the niece of Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame, who had loved her tenderly and had educated her with unusual care. Smitten more by the physical than by the mental graces of the girl, then about eighteen, Abélard sought a pretext to ingratiate himself with Fulbert, and to enter his house as a lodger. The opportunity of having his beloved niece instructed by a person of such distinction was more than Fulbert could let pass. In the intimate relations of teacher and pupil Abélard also found his opportunity; and the two were soon plainly lovers in the eyes of all the world save Fulbert, who refused to believe in the treachery of his friend and the shame of his niece. Abélard, who was in his thirty-ninth year, loved with all the ardor of youth; he wrote passionate love songs, which were long popular but have been lost; he neglected his work, and devoted his time to Héloïse instead of to his lectures on theology. At last even Fulbert could no longer refuse to believe. The lovers were separated, but continued to meet in secret. Not long after the first discovery of their relations by her uncle, Héloïse found herself about to become a mother. Abélard stole her away one night, while Fulbert was absent, and fled with her to Brittany, where she remained with his sister until after the birth of her son, whom she named Astrolabe.

To appease Fulbert, who was thirsting for revenge but dared not pursue the pair into Brittany, the stronghold of Abélard's family, Abélard proposed to marry Héloïse, provided the union be kept secret, so as not to jeopardize his interests or prospects in the Church. Héloïse, devoted body and soul to Abélard, would not hear of a marriage which might ruin his career, and was with difficulty brought to consent even to a secret union. Fulbert, seeing no other means of redress, accepted Abélard's proposition, and gave his word to keep the marriage a secret. Héloïse and Abélard secretly came back to Paris and were wedded a few days later, the ceremony being performed at dawn, in the presence of Fulbert and a few of his friends.

But the temporary disappearance from Paris of so noteworthy a person as Abélard could not be concealed. The whole town had known of his passion for Héloïse, and the gossips now guessed, no doubt, why he had disappeared, and why Héloïse also had gone. We do not need to be told that the surmises made, all so dishonorable to his niece, must have been galling in the extreme to Fulbert. He could not endure the shame of his niece, and tried to quell the scandal by letting the news of the marriage leak out. Abélard says that Fulbert told it himself, in violation of his oath of secrecy--for which we can hardly blame him as much as Abélard does. The devoted Héloïse, to protect Abélard, flatly denied the marriage; not all Fulbert's entreaties and threats could move her to admit that she was anything but Abélard's mistress. Beside himself with anger and shame, Fulbert grew so violent that Héloïse fled to a nunnery at Argenteuil, near Paris, Abélard aiding her in her flight. At Argenteuil Abélard had her dressed in the monastic habit, though she did not take the vows.

We must admit that there were some grounds for supposing, as Fulbert and his family believed, that Abélard meant to rid himself of his wife by having her shut up in the convent: and they had experienced enough of her self-sacrificing firmness to know that she would offer no resistance to Abélard's wishes, if such were his wishes. Determined at least to punish him, they bribed one of his servants, broke into his house at night, and inflicted upon him the most severe and brutal mutilation. If Héloïse was forced to be a nun, Abélard should be fit for nothing but a monk.

The perpetrators of this Draconian vengeance fled. Paris was all agog with the shame of the brilliant philosopher. There were partisans in plenty on his side, and Abélard takes pleasure in telling us that two of the perpetrators of the crime, including his servant, were captured, blinded, and mutilated as he had been. The justice of the Middle Ages never erred on the side of mercy. Abélard fell into the most abject despair, but still we see in him the same dominant regard to his career in the world. When his friends came about him, particularly the clerks, with their lamentations and their manifestations of compassion, he says: "I suffered more from their compassion than from the pain of my wound; I felt my shame more than my actual mutilation." He felt not only the shame, but the ruin of all his ambitions. "In this state of hopelessness and of utter confusion it was, I admit, rather a feeling of shame than predilection for the vocation that impelled me towards the shades of a cloister." Ever ready to obey his wishes, Héloïse took the veil in the convent of Argenteuil at the same time that Abélard entered the abbey of Saint-Denis. Héloïse was not yet twenty; did her youthful heart, full of love of life, yearn for the cramped life of the nunnery? We shall later see what she herself says upon this score; for the present suffice it to note that even Abélard pauses in the account of his woes to praise her complete abnegation of self, and to tell us that she went to the altar where the irrevocable vows were to be taken, repeating in the midst of her sobs the lament of Cornelia: "O my husband, greatest of men! worthy of a bride far better than I! Had Fate such power over a head so illustrious? Wretch that I am, why did I wed thee only to bring woe upon thee? Be thou now avenged in the sacrifice I so willingly make for thee!" --(Lucan, Pharsalia, VIII., 1. 94.) The convent was to her a punishment; but as she goes to it she does not think of her punishment, but only of his.

Let us leave Héloïse for the present and pursue the story of Abélard. His troubles were just beginning; henceforth almost everything seemed to go wrong with him. Scarcely recovered from his injuries, he was besought by his former pupils to resume his lectures, while the monks of Saint-Denis, thinking to gain credit through their illustrious recruit, also urged him to teach again. These same monks Abélard had found far from congenial. They were covetous, narrow-minded, and outrageously licentious. He was, therefore, the more willing to undertake his old work, and opened a modest school at the little village of Maisoncelle, in Brie, where the monks of Saint-Denis had a priory. Here, once more, crowds came to hear him, and he felt so encouraged that he ventured to put in book form some of his theological and philosophical opinions, at the instance and for the use of his students. Neither misfortune nor the wish of Job that his adversary had written a book had taught him caution; in his book, probably the Introductio ad Theologiam that has come down to us, he ventured to discuss even the most obscure and jealously guarded mysteries of the faith, and to discuss them with the same lucidity, directness, and acuteness of reason that had made him famous as a lecturer. He was, indeed, in the habit of acting upon one of the phrases which one may cull from his writings as characteristic of the man's mental attitude: "Understand, that you may believe." Abélard found, like hundreds of others who have proceeded in this way, that his reason could not account, to its own satisfaction, for all the things called of faith. He was constantly allowing himself to be led on in discussion until he found himself confronted with a dilemma: either to follow logic still further and end in infidelity, or to silence, as best he could, the voice of reason by an appeal to authority and to faith. On the present occasion it was an utterance on the dogma of the Trinity that his enemies seized upon. The leaders of the persecution were two former classmates, who now intrigued against him. Without examining him, without giving him a chance to discuss, justify, or explain his doctrine, a council, assembled at Soissons in 1121, condemned his book, not so much for what it taught, as because the author had presumed to teach theology without definite authority from the Church. Summoned before the council--the decision had been reached and the trial conducted without his presence--Abélard was forced to throw his book into the flames. As a confession of faith he was made to recite the Athanasian creed, and, to humiliate him still further, they brought him the text, as if he could not recite from memory that which was known by every child. The man's overwrought nature gave way under this last exhibition of petty malice. He tells us: "I read (the creed) as well as I could for sobs and tears." He was then delivered to the abbot of Saint-Médard to be confined to the monastery for an indefinite period.

He soon obtained permission to return to Saint-Denis, but here his tongue once more got him into trouble. The patron saint of the abbey, the patron saint of all France, was Saint Denis, whom the ignorant monks of the abbey, jealous of the dignity of their patron, identified with Dionysius the Areopagite, the convert of Saint Paul. Abélard pointed out to them a passage in Bede which proved the whole thing a legend. Abélard was perfectly right, but in the eyes of his brother monks he was certainly a traitor, probably an emissary of the devil. His life at Saint-Denis becoming unbearable, he fled at night to Champagne, and, after some little opposition, was permitted to retire to a desert place not far from Troyes. Here he built an oratory of reeds and thatch, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and here he dwelt as a hermit. But even here pupils sought him out. To gain his living, he opened a school; and the desert gave birth to scores of little huts and tents, in which his eager hearers lived. His own little oratory being too small to accommodate the crowds, the students built for him a new and larger temple, which, in gratitude for the consolation he had found here, he dedicated to the Trinity and named Paraclete, in honor of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.

But he was tormented by new dangers, or at least by new fears. A nature so hypersensitive perhaps conjured up hobgoblins of persecution out of pure imagination. "I could not hear of an assemblage of churchmen without thinking that its object was to condemn me." He even cherished the idea of flying from Christendom, to live among the infidels. When the abbacy of Saint-Gildas de Rhuys, a remote place on the coast of Brittany, was offered to him, he hastened to accept, thinking that if he gave up teaching the persecution would cease. This was about 1128, and for nearly ten years Abélard struggled on there. It was a struggle, for he found the monks not only undisciplined, and given to licentious pleasures, but positively criminal. One gets a picture of the abbot and the abbey in Longfellow's Golden Legend, where Lucifer, in the guise of a monk, gets into the refectory of the convent of Hirschau and tells the monks how much more delightful is life in his own abbey of Saint-Gildas de Rhuys:

From the gray rocks of Morbihan

It overlooks the angry sea;

The very sea-shore where,

In his great despair,

Abbot Abélard walked to and fro,

Filling the night with woe,

And wailing aloud to the merciless seas

The name of his sweet Héloïse!

Whilst overhead

The convent windows gleamed as red

As the fiery eyes of the monks within,

Who with jovial din

Gave themselves up to all kinds of sin!.

Abélard!...

He was a dry old fellow....

There he stood,

Lowering at us in sullen mood,

As if he had come into Brittany

Just to reform our brotherhood!...

Well, it finally came to pass

That, half in fun and half in malice,

One Sunday at Mass

We put some poison into the chalice.

But, either by accident or design,

Peter Abélard kept away

From the chapel that day,

And a poor, young friar, who in his stead

Drank the sacramental wine,

Fell on the steps of the altar, dead!

The facts here presented are essentially the same as those vouched for by Abélard himself, even to the poisoning of the young monk. There were two attempts of this kind, and the wicked monks also hired assassins to waylay their abbot, who lived in constant terror of his life. He strove to control his monks by every sort of means, but at length was forced to fly to the protection of a friend in Brittany. He did not definitely abandon his abbey for some time, probably not before 1138; but his regular connection with it ceased some years earlier.

The years of his struggle with the monks of St. Gildas were not without their periods of relief. In the midst of his selfish preoccupation with his own tribulations his thoughts were distracted by solicitude for Héloïse. Héloïse, in the nunnery of Argenteuil, had led a life so exemplary that she had won universal esteem. But it happened, says Abélard, "that the Abbot of Saint-Denis had claimed, as a dependency formerly subject to his jurisdiction, the Abbey of Argenteuil, in which my sister in Christ, rather than my spouse, had taken the veil. Having obtained possession, he expelled the congregation of nuns, of whom my companion was prioress." When this happened Abélard bestirred himself to provide for Héloïse and her nuns, and at the same time to provide for the maintenance of religious services in his old temple of the Paraclete. He returned thither, and invited the nuns to come. He donated to them the oratory and its dependencies, and Pope Innocent II. confirmed the donation to them and to their successors forever. For some time Héloïse and her nuns endured great privations, for the Paraclete, after its abandonment by Abélard, had relapsed into the condition of a wilderness; "but," continues Abélard, "for them, too, the Lord, showing himself in very truth the Comforter, touched with pity and good-will the hearts of the people in the neighborhood. In one single year... the fruits of the earth multiplied around them more than I could have made them do had I lived a century... The Lord granted that our dear sister, who directed the community, should find favor in the eyes of all men: bishops cherished her as their daughter, abbots as their sister, laymen as their mother; all admired equally her piety, her wisdom, and her incomparably sweet patience."

It has been doubted by some biographers whether Héloïse ever saw her lover after she took the veil. His language in the passage just quoted as well as that in the following would seem to leave no room for doubt that they met frequently at this time: "All their neighbors blamed me for not doing all that I could, all that I ought, to help them in their misery, when the thing would have been so easy for me to do, by preaching. Accordingly I made them more frequent visits, in order to work for their good." The voice of calumny, he continues, would not even yet be still; but, in spite of evil tongues, "I was resolved to do my best to take care of my sisters of the Paraclete, to administer their affairs for them, to increase their respect by my very bodily presence in such a way as to give me, at the same time, a better opportunity to look out for their wants." When or how often he visited the Paraclete we do not know; but in some of these visits Héloïse and Abélard must have met again.

While visiting a friend, during one of his enforced flights from Saint-Gildas, Abélard wrote the history of his woes, Historia Calamitatum, to which we owe most of the details given previously. This work, in the form of a letter, is addressed to a friend whose name we do not know. Abélard calls him "my old friend and very dear brother in Christ, my intimate companion," so that it is at least certain that he was a clerk. It may have been that this letter was meant for Peter the Venerable, who afterward showed himself a devoted friend to Abélard as well as to Héloïse. But to whomsoever the letter was written, it came into the hands of her who had sacrificed so much for the writer. All the old love awoke in Héloïse's heart when chance threw in her way the story, in Abélard's own hand, of their misfortunes. Moved beyond her powers of repression, her feelings overflowed in a beautiful letter to her lost husband. In all the literature of love there is nothing finer than this letter, either for passion or for tenderness and pathos. It is no wonder that Abélard replied, as she besought him to do. A sort of correspondence was opened; she wrote three letters in all, and he four. The actual text of these letters is in a Latin manuscript of a date one hundred years later than the time of Héloïse. The preservation of such a series of letters has seemed to some investigators improbable, but there is every reason to believe that Héloïse herself would have collected and preserved with the greatest care a correspondence so precious to her. That the letters excited the highest admiration from the very first we have ample proof, for one of the authors of the Romance of the Rose, Jean Clopinel, translated them as early as 1285. In the fifteenth century they were printed, and since then numberless translations, imitations, and perversions have appeared. We need feel no doubt, therefore, that we are reading an actual love letter, dating from about 1135, when we follow the glowing lines addressed to Abélard by Héloïse.

There is naturally a marked difference in the tone of the letters, due to a difference of character and to different environment. While passages in the first letter of Héloïse are almost lyric in their intensity, like the words of a Juliet, at times almost of a Sappho, the reply from Abélard is apparently cold in many places, certainly constrained, only occasionally throbbing an answer to the touch of her whom he had loved. As we shall have some very unfavorable things to say of Abélard's character in general, it seems but fair to say that this constraint and evident desire to suppress the violence of Héloïse's love and to direct her thoughts to the duties of her calling cannot be charged against him as a fault. Not one of his replies shows lack of affection. In justice to him we may say that he was seeking to teach her resignation; to divert her thoughts from the past, where was only storm and shipwreck in their brief love.

It is pleasant to believe that, when he wrote these letters, Abélard was in some sort aware of and repentant for the great wrong he had done. There was never a more disgustingly deliberate and inhumanly selfish seduction than that of Héloïse by Abélard. He was by nature excessively vain of his personal appearance no less than of his attainments. We have seen how he speaks of Anselm; in the same tone, in the same florid, turgid, pedantic style he was constantly boasting of his achievements. Having won all the laurels available in the intellectual world, he sought new experiences. It has been remarked, not inaptly, that this sudden awakening of the man in the scholar is a reproduction of the Faust legend with living actors. As the scholar, Faust, bent with age and labors, is suddenly transformed into the youthful, ardent, and selfish lover, so Abélard's long dormant passions transform him. But his real nature is not altered; he is always fundamentally selfish. The very terms in which he relates his first feelings toward Héloïse are almost brutal. He praises the unusual extent of her knowledge, an attraction of special force for him; and then, "physically, too, she was not bad." While he condescends to allow that Héloïse was "not bad" as regards looks, it is quite another tale with regard to himself: "Seeing her adorned with all the charms that attract lovers, I thought to enter into a liaison with her, and I felt sure that nothing would be easier than to succeed in this design. I enjoyed such reputation, and had so much grace of youth and good looks, that I thought I should have no rebuff to fear, whoever might be the woman whom I should honor with my love."

All through the man's career one finds the same exaggerated self-esteem, the same preoccupation with his own selfish interests. He positively chuckles over the perfect success of his ruse to deceive Fulbert. "Fulbert was fond of his money. Add to this the fact that he was eager to procure for his niece all possible advantages in belles-lettres. By flattering these two passions, I easily won his consent, and obtained what I desired.... He urged me to devote to her education all of my spare time, by day as well as by night, and not to fear to punish her should I find her at fault. I wondered at his naiveté!... Entrusting her to me not only for instruction but for chastisement, what was this but allowing full licence to my desires and furnishing me, even against my will, with the opportunity of conquering by blows and threats if caresses should be unavailing?" When he has ruined this niece, of whom Fulbert was so proud, a moment of apparent remorse comes to him as he witnesses the old man's distress: "I promised him any reparation which it might please him to demand; I protested that what I had done would surprise no one who had ever felt the violence of love and who knew into what abysses women had, since the very beginning of the world, plunged the greatest men. To appease him still further, I offered him a sort of atonement far greater than anything he could have hoped: I proposed to marry her whom I had seduced, on condition only that the marriage be kept secret, so as not to injure my reputation." The italics are ours; they can but faintly indicate our astonishment at the impudence no less than the selfishness of this piece of condescension. This passage is followed by four pages devoted to pedantic arguments, enforced by appeal to historic cases, seeking to prove how prejudicial a thing marriage is to holy men, to wise men, to great men, and that therefore it must be so to Abélard. All this argument he ascribes to Héloïse, who implored him not to marry her; but the tone is his own; there is never a thought of what it may mean for her, only for himself. In the same way, after Fulbert has taken vengeance on him, in two pages of lamentations over his fate there is not one word of pity for the grief of the woman who had given all to him. It is: How shall I appear in public? What a wreck I have made of my life! Not once: How shall I care for Héloïse? What amends can I make her for the wreck of her young life? One need not wonder--since this was the sentiment of the period--that he fears the vengeance of God only because he has broken the rule of continence, not at all because he has led into wrong doing one who trusted and loved him.

The shame of his punishment and the griefs of his life do seem to have made some impression on him, however. Abélard actually learns to speak of "the shameful treachery of which I was guilty towards your uncle." One can but compare him with Rousseau; those who have read the latter's fascinating, eloquent, but disgusting Confessions cannot fail to remember that there is the same inordinate vanity and selfishness in them as young men, the same misery and insane fear of foes, sometimes purely imaginary, in them as old men.

Beginning as a vulgar passion, there is no doubt that Abélard's feeling for Héloïse afterward became more honorable. After their separation, and the softening, chastening influence of his misfortunes, he developed for her a real affection. Though there is a constraint, a coldness in the address of his letters, and often too much solicitude about form and too much display of erudition, the heart of the man is moved in spite of himself. He begins his first letter to her: "To Héloïse, his well-beloved sister in Christ, Abélard, her brother in Christ;" the second: "To the spouse of Christ, the servant of that same Christ." But he shows a tenderness for her at the very start; if he has not written to her and advised her before, he says, it is because he had such absolute confidence in her judgment. He calls her his "sister, once so dear in the flesh," and sends her a Psalter, which she is to use in imploring the Divine mercy for him. He will give counsel to her and to her nuns, if she desires it. And here he can dissemble no longer: "But enough of your holy congregation,... it is to you, to you whose goodness will, I know, have such power with God, that I address myself.... Remember in your prayers him who is your very own." He sends a form of prayer which she and her nuns are to use for him. Then the man once more gets the better of the monk: "If it chance that the Lord deliver me up into the hands of mine enemies, and that they, victorious, put me to death, or if, while far from you, some accident should bring me to that goal whither all flesh is tending, let my body, whether it be already buried or simply abandoned, be brought under your care, I implore you, to your cemetery."

It is pleasant to read his letters, after one has become convinced that the man really loved Héloïse; then, one finds in them gentleness and consideration for her feelings. With patience and adroitness, he answers the questions she asks, distracts her thoughts, still too much intent on him, and works out for her an elaborate scheme of government for use in the Paraclete; and one can understand that this, if anything, would have been a consolation to Héloïse, to feel that the whole tenor of her life was regulated by the affectionate legislation of the man whom she had loved.

About the love of Héloïse we need not hesitate. "Truly, she did love him," says the old chronicler of Saint Martin de Tours, and the ages since have been but echoing this. We must try, however, to form some more definite idea of the personality of one who is perhaps the greatest figure in an actual romance that the world has known. Of her beauty there can be no question; but we neither know nor very greatly care whether she was tall and dark or slender and fair. Probably we should be safe in assuming, on general principles, that she was a blonde, since the predilection for that style of beauty was so strong that Saint Bernard devotes a whole sermon to proving that there is no contradiction in the statement in the Song of Songs: "I am black, but comely." The most remarkable thing about her was her learning. Even when Abélard first met her, she was "most distinguished for the extent of her learning,"... "in great renown throughout the kingdom" for her proficiency. Her knowledge included not only Latin, but Greek and even Hebrew, both rarely understood even among men in a day when men usually got all and women none of the education that could be had. Her monastery at the Paraclete became a school as famous in its way as Abélard had made Paris.

Of another trait in her character, too, we can speak with certainty. Together with her learning went firmness of judgment and perfect sanity, the elements which go to make up what we vaguely call character. We have seen Abélard expressing his confidence in her wisdom and judgment. Saint Bernard, the bitter enemy of Abélard, could not withhold his admiration from her, although she herself, a faithful partisan of her husband, always spoke of Saint Bernard as "the false Apostle." The latter, as was natural in a man renowned for intellect and for asceticism, was more struck by the grandeur of her character than moved by her personal charms, and he wrote a letter to the Pope, commending her as a prioress, in a tone of lofty esteem rather than sympathy. Her own conduct, we have remarked, was above reproach, and her convent was so well governed that its rule became the standard for all the convents of her day. Whatever may have been the violence of her grief over the separation from Abélard, she was too proud to expose her feelings to the world. She lived on bravely, honorably, respected by high and low, yet making no secret of the fact that she had loved and still did love Abélard. One does not wonder that she won the popular fame which has kept her name alive, and which has fixed the epithet applied by Villon some three centuries later: La très-sage Héloïse. In all the happy phrases of the Ballade des Belles Dames du Temps Jadis there is no juster epithet.

In striking contrast to the brutal selfishness of Abélard is the noble disinterestedness and complete effacement of self seen in the conduct of Héloïse. Realizing that with him success in his vocation is everything and love but an episode, she is content. More than this, she does everything in her power to make him sacrifice her for the sake of the career which she knows he is bent upon. She flatters him, feeds his vanity, already overgreat, and consistently keeps out of view her own woman's feelings. When Abélard, with what he considers unusual and exemplary generosity, offers to marry her--one can fancy that he was not very urgent--this is part of the argument she uses to dissuade him: "She asked," says Abélard, "what atonement would not the world have a right to require of her should she deprive it of such a light? What curses she would call upon her head! What a loss this marriage would be to the Church! What tears it would cost philosophy! Would it not be an unseemly and deplorable thing to see a man whom nature had created for the whole world made the slave of one woman?... The marriage would be a shame and a burden to me... What agreement could there be between the labor of the school and the cares of a house, between the desk and the cradle?... Is there a man who, devoted to the meditations of philosophy or to the study of the Scriptures, could endure the cries of a child, the singing of the nurse as she put it to sleep, the continual coming and going of the servants, the incessant worries of young children?"

That Abélard has reported her arguments with accuracy we need not doubt when we come upon this remarkable and often quoted passage in her first letter: "I never thought... of my own wishes; it was always yours, you know yourself, that my heart was bent upon satisfying. Although the name of wife seems both more sacred and more enduring, I should have preferred that of mistress, or even concubine... thinking that, the more humble I made myself for your sake, the more right I should have to your favor, and the less stain I should put upon the brilliancy of your glory."

When their misfortunes came upon them and Abélard wanted her to enter the cloister she obeyed without complaint; but the truth comes out at the close of her first letter: "When you entered the service of God, I followed, nay, I preceded you... You made me first take the veil and the vows, you chained me to God before yourself. This mistrust, the only lack of confidence in me you ever showed, filled me with grief and shame, me, who would, God knows, have followed you or have gone before you unhesitatingly into the very flames of hell! For my heart was no longer with me but with you." In this letter are the only things that even look like reproaches on her part; she complains of his not writing to her, of his grudging her even the poor consolation of a letter, when she had done all for him: "Only tell me, if you can, why, since the retirement from the world which you yourself enjoined upon me, you have neglected me. Tell me, I say, or I will say what I think, and what is on everybody's lips. Ah! it was lust rather than love which attracted you to me... and that is why, your desire once satisfied, all demonstrations of affection ceased with the desire which inspired them." She implores him, therefore, to write and silence these disquieting voices in her heart.

There was no hypocrisy in Héloïse; she never was resigned to her seclusion in the convent, and never pretended to be. She wrote to Abélard that she was continuing to live in the convent only to obey him, "for it was not love of God, but your wish, your wish alone which cast my youth into the midst of monastic austerities." From the very monastery of which she was prioress she writes her burning letters. The first is superscribed: Domino suo, imo patri, conjugi suo, imo fratri; ancilla sua, imo filia; ipsius uxor, imo soror; Abélardo Heloissa: "To her lord, nay, to her father; to her husband, nay, to her brother; his servant, nay, his daughter; his wife, nay, his sister; to Abélard, Héloïse." She seems to lack words to voice the passionate devotion of her heart, and comes at the last to the best and simplest, a veritable cry of the heart it is To Abélard, Héloïse. Even in the letters subsequent to Abélard's patient endeavor to allay the transports of devotion to a mere man in one who had vowed her life to Christ, she does not restrain her feelings entirely. She superscribes them: "To him who is all for her after Christ, she who is all for him in Christ," and finally, "To her sovereign master, his devoted slave." It is true that the passion is more under control, but it is there nevertheless; for in one of these letters she ever and anon addresses Abélard as "my greatest blessing," and deliberately says: "Under all circumstances, God knows, I have feared offending you more than I have feared offending Him; and it is you far more than God whom I wish to please; it was a word from you, no divine call, that made me take the veil." And she says, in reply to Abélard's request to be buried in the cemetery of the Paraclete: "I shall be more intent on following you without delay than upon providing for your burial."

Bigotry or narrow piety, which are so much alike as to be scarcely distinguishable, might find fault with the uncompromising frankness of Héloïse in confessing the persistence of love after she is a nun. She admits that she loved Abélard passionately; moreover: "If I must indeed lay bare all the weakness of my miserable heart, I do not find in my heart contrition or penitence sufficient to appease God. I cannot withhold myself from complaining of His pitiless cruelty in regard to the outrage inflicted on you, and I only offend Him by rebellious murmurings against His decrees, instead of seeking to allay His wrath by repentance. Can it be said, in fact, that one is truly penitent, whatever be the bodily penances submitted to, when the soul still harbors the thought of sin and burns with the same passions as of old?" She cannot bring herself to regret or even to forget and to cease to long for the pleasures of their love. "They praise me for purity of life; it is only because they do not know of my hypocrisy. The purity of the flesh is set down to the credit of virtue; but true virtue is of the soul, not of the body." These confessions, it strikes us, are proof of the purity and loftiness of her ideals; she will not accept credit for virtues that are only skin deep; she honors the robe she wears too much to soil it by any sort of indulgence that might give occasion for scandal or for irreverent scoffing. But she bravely owns: "I do not seek the crown of victory (over my evil thoughts), it is enough for me to avoid the danger."

In a person so honest with herself we are not surprised to find a charity for the weaknesses of others and a catholicity of view in regard to things moral and religious quite in advance of the rather cramped asceticism distinctive, for example, of Saint Bernard, whom we take as a typical representative of the religious feeling of the age. In the last of her letters, she shows her learning, it must be admitted, with a little too much pedantry; but that was in accord with the habit of the day. She overloads her letter with useless erudition in the way of appeals to this and that holy man or this and that text of Scripture to support a point which the reader would accept as axiomatic. But behind this there is good sense and kindness. She asks Abélard to determine, in the rule he is to make for her convent, all sorts of practical points. Can women, being physically weaker, fast as rigidly as men? Yet meat is not so necessary for women; is it really a deprivation, then, to make them abstain from meat? Women are not so prone to intemperance as men, and at times they really need some stimulant; how shall we determine in regard to wines? We should avoid, of course, male visitors; but do not vain, gossiping, worldly women corrupt their own sex just as much as men would? Above all, she says, nuns must learn to eschew Pharisaism, the better-than-thou frame of mind. "The blessings promised us by Christ were not promised to those alone who were priests; woe unto the world, indeed, if all that deserved the name of virtue were shut up in a cloister."

The close of this last letter is in a tone of religious exaltation which but poorly conceals the more human sentiments of the noble Abbess Héloïse: "It is for thee, O my master, it is for thee, as long as thou livest, to institute the rule which we are to follow evermore. For, after God, thou wast the founder of our community; it is for thee, then, with God's assistance, to legislate for our order."

The two letters in which Abélard answers this request are more coldly formal, less personal, than any of the others. At the end, for example, instead of some tender reminiscence, some hint that it was at the bidding of love that he had poured forth his erudition on the subject of the monastic life, we find merely an exhortation such as might be addressed by any father confessor to one seeking his direction: "Imitate, in the love of study and of good books, those blessed disciples of Saint Jerome, Paula and Eustochia, at whose request this great doctor wrote so many works that are a guiding light to the church."

What were the rules by which Héloïse and her nuns were to live? In essence not fundamentally different from those in use in regular monasteries of the Benedictine rule, they are yet of sufficient interest to warrant us in giving a brief account, a mere abstract, of the very lengthy and verbose commentary on monasticism which Héloïse received from Abélard. We cannot doubt that a person of her intelligence and strength of character followed the spirit, not the letter, of the law, and made her nuns live as she lived, beyond the utmost reach of evil report.

The three cardinal virtues in the view of monasticism are Chastity, Poverty, Silence. These the nuns must observe most strictly, and such observance involves the renunciation of all family ties, of all worldly affections and desires. As there is less of temptation to worldliness in the solitary places of the earth, the convent should be remote. The absurd extent to which the cult of mere chastity was exalted in the mediaeval mind has been commented on by many a writer; but one little incident or illustration from the book by which Héloïse was to govern herself and her community may be forgiven us. Abélard quotes from a letter of Saint Jerome. In the life of Saint Martin, written by Sulpicius, we read that the saint wished to pay his respects to a virgin renowned for her exemplary conduct and her chastity, who, it seems, had spent all her life since girlhood shut up in a small cell. She refused to allow Saint Martin to come into her dwelling, but, looking out of the crevice which served for a window, she said: "Father, pray where you are, for I have never received a visit from any man." Saint Martin "gave thanks to God that, thanks to such a mode of life, she had preserved her chastity." The humor, the irony, of such a remark appeals to us; but it never occurred to Saint Martin, to Saint Jerome, to Abélard, or to Héloïse, that she who had continued chaste merely because she had bottled herself up in a living tomb did not merit praise for any extraordinary virtue: one might as well praise Robinson Crusoe on his island for not indulging in the dissipations of society.

To continue the rules for the Paraclete, which was certainly situated in a place remote enough to protect its inmates from worldly intrusions, we may add that the rule advises that the grounds or inclosure of the convent should contain "all that is needful for the life of the convent, that is to say, a garden, water, a mill, a bolting house and a bakery oven," in short, everything that can be thought of, in order to obviate the necessity of communication with the outside world.

Héloïse's monastery, we may be assured, did not want for a diligent abbess, who was to be assisted by six subordinates: "For the entire administration of the convent we believe that there ought to be seven mistresses, so many and no more: the porteress, the cellaress, the vesturess (robaria), the infirmaress, the precentress (cantaria), the sacristan, and finally a deaconess, called now an abbess.... In this camp of Heaven's militia... the deaconess takes the place of the general-in-chief, to whom all are in all things obedient." The six other sisters called officers, who command under her, rank as colonels or captains. The rest of the nuns belonging regularly to the order are the soldiers of the Lord, while the lay sisters, who were employed in menial offices and were not initiated into the order, but merely took vows renouncing the world, were to be the foot soldiers.

Héloïse would accord quite well with the requirements for an abbess or deaconess. Such a one must have learning sufficient to read and to comprehend the Scriptures and the rules of her order. She must be dignified, able to command respect and obedience. "Only as a last resort and for pressing reasons should women of high rank or of great fortune be chosen as abbesses." Full of the importance of their titles, they are ordinarily vain, presumptuous, proud. Being the guardian of the whole community, the abbess should keep a close watch over her own conduct, lest she corrupt by evil example. Above all, the abbess is forbidden to "live in greater comfort, greater ease, than any of her nuns. She shall not have any private apartments for dining or sleeping; she shall share all with her flock, whose needs she will comprehend so much the better." When guests are to be entertained at table the abbess is not to make this an excuse for providing delicacies on which she herself may feast, the guest is to sit at the table with the other nuns, though a special dish may be provided for her, and the abbess herself is to wait on her, and afterward to eat with the servants. According to a maxim of Saint Anthony, as fish that are kept long out of water die, even so monks who live long out of their cells in communication with worldly folk break their vow of seclusion. We may recall that Chaucer's jolly monk held this same text "not worth an oyster"; but the abbess of the Paraclete is specially enjoined "never to leave the convent to attend to outside business." This reminds us that it was provided that the Paraclete should have a certain number of monks attached to it. Convents, indeed, were rarely if ever independent of masculine supervision, if not control, and in this case it is specially provided that the convent "shall be subject always to a monastery, in such sort that one abbot may preside, and... that there be but one fold and one shepherd." The relations, however, are decidedly to the advantage of the nuns; their subjection is only nominal, and every provision is made, in the letter of the law, that the monks shall attend merely to things outside of the convent and shall not meddle with its administration: "If we wish that the abbot... should have control over the nuns, it is only in such sort that he shall recognize as his superiors the spouses of Christ, whose servant only he is, and that he shall find pleasure in serving, not in commanding them. He should be like the intendant of a royal household, who does not venture to make his mistress feel his power.... He or his representatives shall never be at liberty to speak to the virgins of the Lord in the absence of their abbess.... He shall decide nothing concerning them or their affairs until he has taken counsel with her; and he shall transmit his instructions or orders only through her.... All that concerns costume, food, even money, if there be any, shall be gathered together and put in the custody of the nuns; out of their superfluity they shall provide what is needful for the monks. The monks, therefore, shall take charge of all outside affairs, and the nuns of all those things which it becomes women to attend to in the house, to wit, to sew the frocks of the monks, to wash them, to knead the bread, to put it in the oven and bake it. They shall have charge of the dairy and its dependencies; they shall feed the hens and geese; in short, they shall do all that women can do better than men.... Men and women both shall vow obedience to the abbess."

Though not so radical in some respects as the constitution which Robert D'Arbrissel imposed upon his monastery of Fontevrault, where women were exalted above men in all respects, the provisions cited above seem sufficient to insure the independence of the nuns. There are, of course, careful rules to safeguard the virtue of both monks and nuns in the close relations necessitated by the conventual scheme; but as these are not different from what ordinary prudence would suggest--and ordinary craft circumvent--we need not pause to give them.

The deaconess or abbess was not absolute; she must take counsel with her subordinates, and for some things she must convene the whole convent to ask advice and consent. Her subordinates had duties and responsibilities of no mean sort. The sacristan, who is also treasurer, shall have charge of the chapel and its ornaments, their repairs, etc. She must care for the things needful for the services of the church, such as the incense, the relics, the bells, and the communion wafers, which latter the nuns are to make of pure wheat flour. The sacristan, too, having to decorate the church in keeping with the seasons of the religious year, must be enough of a scholar to know how to compute and determine the feast days according to the calendar.

With the precentress, or mistress of the choir, rested the responsibility for the church music. She was to train the choir, and to teach music, in which she must be well versed. Besides this, she was the librarian, must give out and take in the books, and take care of books and illuminations. In case of the illness or other incapacity of the abbess, the precentress took her place.

One of the most trying places must have been that of infirmaress, who not only had charge of the sick in the capacity of nurse, but "must keep herself supplied with proper medicines, according to the resources of the place, and this she can do the better if she knows a little of medicine.... She must know how to let blood (the medicine of the period relied very largely upon phlebotomy), so that this operation may not require the access of any man among the nuns." Much of the simpler knowledge and practice of medicine was permitted to women; the simpler medicine, indeed, was the only hope of the unfortunate sick in the days of drastic doctoring.

The nun called the robaria, who had charge of the wardrobe, we have christened "vesturess," for lack of a better name. She provided and cared for the clothing of both monks and nuns, not so simple a matter as it might seem, for "she shall have the sheep sheared, and shall receive the leather (for shoes, etc.); she shall collect and take care of the wool and linen and see to the making of the cloth from them; she shall distribute thread, needles, and scissors (to the nuns assigned to work under her). She shall have charge of the dormitory and of the beds; and she shall be charged with directing the cutting, sewing, and washing of the table-cloths, napkins, and all the linen of the monastery.... She shall have all the necessary implements for her work, and shall regulate the tasks assigned to each sister. She shall have charge of the novices until they are admitted to the community." The novices, by the way, were regularly taught in the convent, and a good deal of the work for which religious exercises left the nuns little time was assigned to them.

The clothes worn by the nuns of Héloïse's convent were to be of the simplest kind. "The clothes shall be of black woollen stuff; no other color, for that best accords with the mourning of penitence; and no fur is more fitting than the fleece of lambs for the spouses of Christ...." And this black robe was not to extend lower than the heel ("to avoid raising the dust"), or to have sleeves longer than the natural length to cover arm and hand,--a provision which one can understand only after seeing pictures of the immense sleeves in fashion. "The veils shall not be of silk, but of cloth or dyed stuff. They shall wear chemises of cloth next the skin, and these they shall not take off even to sleep. Considering the delicacy of their constitutions, we will not forbid the use of mattresses and sheets.... For covering (at night), we think a chemise, a robe and a lamb skin, adding over these, during the cold weather, a mantle for covering to the bed, will suffice. Each bed must have a mattress, a bolster, a pillow, a counterpane, and a sheet." In order to guard against vermin and dirt, all clothing should be provided for each nun in double sets. On their heads the nuns were to wear a white band with the veil over it; when necessary, on account of the tonsure, a bonnet of lamb skin might be worn. When a nun died, she was dressed in clean but coarse garments, with sandals on her feet, and the garments sewn or fastened to the body, so that they might not be disarranged in the presence of the priests officiating at her funeral. As a special honor, the abbess could be buried in a garment of haircloth, sewn around her like a sack.

The duties of the porteress were sufficiently simple, consisting chiefly in guarding the gate and admitting only persons properly accredited. But the cellaress had duties manifold. She "shall have charge of all that concerns the feeding of the nuns: cellar, refectory, kitchen, mill, bakery, bake ovens, gardens, orchards and fields, beehives, flocks, cattle of all kinds, and poultry." With keen insight into human nature, it is especially provided that she shall not reserve any tidbits for herself at the table, with the admonition that this was precisely what Judas did.

We have given but the merest sketch of the provisions by which Héloïse was to regulate her life. The rule determines points great and small; meat can be allowed three times a week, except during Lent; wine may be used in moderation; services must be held at such and such times, with work or sleep between; nuns must never go bare-footed, nor gossip with visitors, and so on. But one thing we must add, as illustrative of the manners of the time: "There is one thing more which must be not only forbidden but held in abhorrence, although it is a custom in use in most monasteries: that is that the nuns should wipe their hands or their knives with the pieces of bread remaining from dinner, which are the portion of the poor. To save table linen it is not right to soil the bread of the poor."

In the way of actual facts little is really known of the life of Héloïse. We have sought to trace the fortunes of the man to whom she was so unselfishly yet so passionately attached and to reproduce from her own scanty writings as much as may be of her character. We must now conclude the story of Abélard. After his departure from Saint-Gildas his days were still full of trouble. In 1136 we find him once more triumphing in his old field, delivering his lectures to crowds of students upon Mont Sainte-Geneviève. Not only did his teaching draw crowds, but his book on theology was in every hand, and his doctrines spread beyond the Alps. In the words of one of his enemies, writing to Saint Bernard: Libri ejus transeunt maria, transvolant Alpes: "His books are wafted across the seas, and fly over the Alps." Arnold of Brescia, a disciple of Abélard, was preaching in Italy a more democratic religion and a more liberal form of government, stirring up the wrath of the Church as another Tribune of the People daring to incite the Italian cities to proclaim their freedom. The final conflict of Abélard's life was preparing.

At Clairvaux, in a valley so dismal as to have won the name of the Valley of Wormwood, lived the very incarnation of asceticism, stern religious orthodoxy, and uncompromising conservatism--Saint Bernard. To him, a restless, daring innovator like Abélard was abhorrent. To profess doctrines that led to the view that original sin was less a sin than a punishment, that the redemption of man was an act of pure love, not one of necessity for our redemption, that God, in short, was a God of Love, not a God of Wrath--what was all this but striking at the very root of that exquisite mortification of the flesh, the prayers, the fasting, the actual corporeal torment inflicted upon himself by Saint Bernard in the hope of purchasing remission of his sin? His sin, we may remark, consisted merely in being descended from Adam, for he had been pure in life from his youth up. Saint Bernard was looked upon even in his own life as almost a saint; his influence was tremendous. He now began to stir up the powers of the Church, from the Pope down, against Abélard. The latter, puffed up with pride at his renewed success, or perhaps willing to risk all at one throw, did not wait for the Church to proceed against him: he challenged his enemies to prove his doctrines heretical; he challenged Bernard himself to meet him in debate before a council that was to meet at Sens in 1140. Fully aware of his inferiority as a logician to this trained thinker, Saint Bernard reluctantly consented to take up the battle for orthodoxy. All was ready; Abélard appeared before the council, realized that his case was prejudged, and appealed to Rome. Nevertheless, Saint Bernard got the council to pass judgment against Abélard and to sentence him to silence and to perpetual reclusion in a monastery, and Innocent II., the next year, confirmed the finding of the council. Broken in spirit, Abélard nevertheless set out for Rome to urge his plea in person, but at Cluni he broke down in health. Tenderly cared for by the good abbot, Peter the Venerable, who effected a sort of reconciliation between Abélard and the triumphant Abbot of Clairvaux, Abélard lingered but a few months. To ease his dying days Peter the Venerable had him removed to the little priory of Saint Marcel, a dependency of Cluni, where he died, April 21, 1142.

In accordance with the wishes of Héloïse and of Abélard himself, Peter the Venerable sent his remains secretly to the Paraclete, writing to Héloïse: "May the Lord keep him for you, to give him back to you through His mercy." There was a heart still in the breast of this old monk; we trust that his prayer has been answered, even as we trust that the absolution which he sent at Héloïse's request has washed away the sins of her lover: "I, Peter, Abbot of Cluni, who received into the monastery of Cluni Peter Abélard, and granted that his body be borne secretly to the Abbess Héloïse and the convent of the Paraclete, by the authority of God Almighty and of all the saints, absolve him, by virtue of my office, from all his sins."

We hear nothing more of Héloïse, except that she provided for her child, left with Abélard's sister in Brittany; but we know that she lived her life not only bravely, but honorably. For twenty-two years more she lived on at the convent over which her husband had established her, and here she died, on the 16th of May, 1164. Her body was buried beside that of her husband in the cemetery of the Paraclete, and a touching legend relates that when, according to the order given by herself, her body was deposited in the tomb of her husband, "Abélard stretched out his arms to receive her and closed them in a last embrace." Through all the centuries love has guarded their remains; though often shifted, their resting place is still known: in the famous Cimetière de L'Est, Père Lachaise, at Paris, the traveller still sees the tomb of Abélard and Héloïse.

It is not her learning that has made Héloïse famous; it is the accident of her connection with Abélard which has served to keep her name alive. It is not because she was learned or because she was loved by Abélard that we admire her. Her greatness is a moral greatness rare in her time, and not due to her intellect or to the tragic circumstances of her life. The remarkable thing is that, overwhelmed in the ruin of her lover, forced into a convent at twenty, where she obeys him and imitates him, she yet does not change in her heart, she does not suffer the mystic death of the cloister; of her love she never repents, though she does repent of her faults; to the law of monastic asceticism her conscience refuses to submit, let Abélard preach as he will, for she vaguely feels that asceticism is in violation of some higher law of life. The great love in her heart knew no faltering; so much like devotion was it that one feels that she meant no name but that of Abélard to be associated with the words of a dirge attributed to her:

"With thee I suffered the rigor of destiny;

With thee shall I, weary, sleep;

With thee shall I enter Sion."

CHAPTER III

WOMEN IN EARLY PROVENÇAL AND FRENCH
LITERATURE

Guilhelm--or William--X., Duke of Aquitaine, remorseful because of the ravages committed in Normandy by himself and his allies in 1136, started on an expiatory pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint-James of Compostella. Before going he willed to Louis the Fat, King of France, the guardianship of his daughter, "la très noble demoiselle Eléonore," sole heiress of his extensive dominions, including Poitou, Marche, the Limousin, Auvergne, Gascony, and Guienne. This Eléanor was to be the brilliant and passionate Queen of England, mother of Richard of the Lion Heart and of John Lackland. But we will not anticipate her story, for sixteen years of her life precede the time when she became the queen of Henry II.

The youthful heiress had been left as the feudal ward of King Louis, who lost no time in securing her domain for the crown of France. Duke Guilhelm died in the church of Compostella April 9, 1137-1138. Eleanor, now Duchess of Aquitaine, was but sixteen years of age, but she was not long to remain unmarried. Prince Louis of France, accompanied by a gorgeous company of five hundred knights, under command of the Count Palatine, Thibaud de Champagne, came as her suitor,--a suitor whom she could not refuse. She was married, and crowned as future Queen of France. On their way back from Bordeaux to Paris the young couple met the news of the death of Louis the Fat. Eleanor was thus Queen of France indeed, but there was more of the south, of Toulouse and Bordeaux and the troubadours in her nature than was quite good for one who was the wife of the correct, devout, narrow-minded, though not stupid or unkind Louis VII.

She came of a race notorious for reckless love of pleasure, for sparkling wit, for vehemence of temper and strong passions, for utter disregard of the merely decorous, the sober commonplace rules of either morals or society. We have seen some of the pranks of her grandfather, William of Poitou. Her father was not less high-tempered, though less brilliant than his troubadour predecessor. His fits of extravagance were followed by fits of penitence in whose sincerity one may place some faith, whereas the troubadour was certainly never sad for long, and apparently not much imbued with religious ardor, even if he did go to the Holy Land as a pious crusader. Eleanor inherited her grandfather's temper and his love of literature, music, fighting, and all that made life worth living, according to the standards of her native land. Let us look at this land of the troubadours, from which Eleanor came, and try to picture the environment to which she was accustomed and which she abandoned to live with the sober, monkish, unlovely French king, whose court and whose city of Paris did not compare with the gay capital of Bordeaux, where her father and her grandfather had gathered the most brilliant poets and musicians of Provence.

While the northern and western portions of France, including even that muddy Lutetia Parisorum which has become the modern Paris, were for but a short time, comparatively, under Roman rule, there was a portion of France, between the Rhone and the Swiss Alps, which was so distinctively and peculiarly a part of the great empire that it was called Provincia, "the Province," or, as we know it, Provence. It was in this beautiful land, the French Riviera, that the Roman legions established their first posts, long before there was a Roman Empire. Here they found a civilization ready to their hands, for in the centre of their new Provincia was the famous port of Massillia--Marseilles--established long before by Greeks and Phoenicians. To the present day one finds at Aries, at Mimes, at Avignon, titanic ruins bearing witness to the Roman civilization. It was a fertile country, glowing with rich fruits and flowers, and favored with a climate which has made it famous since the days of Rome. While the north of France was hopelessly barbarized by Teutonic inroads and long years of barbaric warfare, the civilization of Provence was rather checked than destroyed. Marseilles was still a port, and the commerce of the east, of the Mediterranean, of Rome, came through Marseilles, not only for Gaul but for Britain. The influence of this constant intercourse, no less than the large infusion of Latin or Hellenic blood, kept the people of Provence from relapsing into the primitive state of the people further to the north. They were, moreover, a gay and pleasure-loving people by nature, and probably always less savage and rough than the Franks. We may remember that even at the beginning of our story the court of the pious King Robert, according to the monkish chronicles, was hopelessly corrupted by the attendants of his Provençal bride, Constance, with their scandalously fashioned costumes and their ungodly minstrelsy. The rich clothing, the minstrelsy, the more gracious manners, were always characteristic of the southerners, from the very first moment we hear of them until the end.

During the eleventh century, while the kingdom of France was just beginning to gain something like an ascendancy over the other provinces which were eventually to constitute a real power under one rule, the riches and the power of the Mediterranean district came to full flower. We speak of this whole territory as Provence, although in reality Provence proper was but a small portion of the whole. It would be, perhaps, better to confine one's self to the old distinction between north and south France, based on the difference in dialect. Dante, distinguishing between three groups of the tongues derived from Latin, says: Alii Oc, alii Oil, alii Si, affirmando loquuntur:--"For the affirmative, some use Oc (Provençal) some use Oil (French), some use Si (Italian)." The langue d'oc was the tongue used in that part of France south of a line drawn from the south of the Garonne to the Alps, including not only Provence but Guienne, Gascony, Languedoc, Auvergne, etc. The people and the language, however, throughout this whole territory, were generally named from that Provincia which, as we have said, was the most fertile and the most favored. Thus, in ordinary speech, a citizen of Beziers, Toulouse, or even Bordeaux was as much a Provençal as one from Aries or Aix.

Among the other influences to which Provence owed part of its culture one must not forget that of Spain. At the time of which we write a large part of the richest lands in Spain was in the possession of a race more cultured, more intellectual, more refined, despite their warlike nature, than any race with which western Europe had yet come in contact. The story of the Saracen empire in Spain, its rise, its glorious struggle, its almost fabulous luxury, and its pathetic fall, is one of the most fascinating in history. Arab songs, Arab singers, Arab instruments became known among the Spaniards, and even in the face of continual warfare some little of infidel arts and sciences and refinements penetrated and softened the rougher-mannered civilization of the Christians.

On Spain itself this Oriental influence was, of course, strongest; but the relations between Spain and the south of France were at all times close, and the relations between Provence and Spain were made still more intimate when, in the early part of the twelfth century, the crown of Provence passed to Raymond Bérenger, Count of Barcelona, who had married Douce de Provence.

Under these influences the nobility of Provence developed a culture perhaps purely artificial and exotic, but certainly far in advance of that prevailing in any other part of France. With their civilization came, of course, a knowledge of the gentler arts and a feeling for the beautiful. At a time when French literature consisted of a few fragments of documents, chronicles, or dull legends of the saints, Provence had developed a literature of most astonishing richness and delicacy. The surprising thing about this literature of Provence is that it has no beginnings, no childhood, but is almost as perfect in artistic finish, in the careful handling of most intricate rhymes and stanzas, when the first troubadour sings as it became during the two hundred years of its life. There were songs or poems in stanzas of varying structure and lines of varying length, some really lyric, and some epic. The most distinctive forms of the lyric poetry were probably the dirge or planh; the contention or tenson, a poem in which two or more persons maintain an argument on questions of love, or chivalry, etc., each using stanzas terminating in similar rhymes, somewhat like the style of poem long after known in Scottish literature as a "flyting;" and the satiric poem or pasquinade, the sirvente, often a fierce war song in which the poet lashed his foes and urged his men on to battle.

The social conditions of France during this period were such as to make caste distinctions very marked. That a roturier, a plain peasant, or even a tradesman, should become the social equal of a noble was a thing unheard of. But in Provence--curiously enough when one remembers the excessive refinement of luxury encouraged in this land of flowers--the society was much more democratic. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that among a people who had already discovered that literature and music were arts the artist was welcomed, talent was recognized and rewarded, no matter in what class it was found. Yet the troubadours as a class belong to the nobility. That this was almost necessarily so one can easily understand, for the troubadour was expected to live a life of gay extravagance in his own chateau and to travel about the country during favoring weather, accompanied by a little band of retainers who must be trained musicians, and who at the castles they visited sang or performed pieces of their master's composing.

We can imagine what a flutter there must have been in the breasts of the ladies, always the prime object of the troubadour's songs, when the gay cavalcade approached, heralded by the song of the jongleurs: "We come, bringing a precious balsam which cures all sorts of ills, and heals the troubles both of body and mind. It is contained in a vase of gold, adorned with jewels, the most rare. Even to see it is wonderful pleasure, as you will find if you care to try. The balsam is the music of our master, the vase of gold is our courtly company. Would you have the vase open, and disclose its ineffable treasure?"

The troubadour himself must go in knightly panoply, and he and his musicians or jongleurs were usually provided with rich clothing. Gifts, of course, might be accepted from a sovereign, but no pecuniary recompense; the knightly minstrel disdained to sing for hire; it was pure love of his art that inspired him, and the idea of making it a lucrative profession never occurred to him. The troubadour, therefore, had to live upon his patrimony--until he squandered it in riotous living--and only a gentleman could afford to do that. Of the scores of troubadours whose names are known to us, the great majority are nobles, though not always belonging to the higher nobility; but the artist, the musician who "found" enchanting melodies, was almost ex officio a knight, a chevalier, the terms troubadour and chevalier being interchangeable, and knighthood was considered so essential that one of the well-known troubadours was accused of having conferred the dignity upon himself, since no one else would knight him. Among the number of the troubadours one can count a score or more of reigning princes, "counts and dukes by the dozen,... many princes of royal blood, and finally four kings." Yet beside the royal troubadour, and associated with him in a perfect freemasonry of art, one finds the troubadour of humble birth. Bertrand de Born, the petty baron, was on terms of perfect equality with the sons of Henry II.: Geoffrey, he called by the nickname of Rassa, Henry was Marinier, and Richard was Richard Oc e No (Richard Yea and Nay). Pierre Vidal, the most eccentric of all the genus irritabile, was the son of a furrier of Toulouse, and yet, being a poet, was the friend of princes, notably of Alphonso, the troubadour king of Arragon. Bernard de Ventadour, who ventured, unrebuked, to send love songs to haughty Queen Eleanor, was the son of the baker of the chateau de Ventadour. There was, therefore, much greater freedom of intercourse in Provence than in the north of France, where feudalism had taken deeper root, where the warrior was merely a hard hitter, not a musician who went about equally prepared to fight or to sing.

The grace and polish of Provençal society was, of course, only relative. At best, it was merely a surface polish in many cases; and to us the manners of the troubadours might seem as coarse as their morals were corrupt. The very extravagance of the troubadour's life, with its constant demands for large expenditure in travel or in fantastic entertainments and revels at his chateau, the persistent thirst for excitement and pleasure in themselves would have been sufficient to foster licentious habits. Prodigality reduced many a troubadour to the rank of a mere jongleur or hired musician. A mediaeval moralist remarks, for the benefit of la cigale,--who probably paid no attention whatever, but went on singing,--Homo joculatoribus intentus cito habebit uxorem cut nomen erit paupertas, ex qua generabitur filius cui nomen erit derisio (He who devotes himself to minstrelsy will soon have a wife named Poverty, of whom will be born a son named Ignominy.) But whether or not the troubadour made a sinful waste of his fortune, his one business in life was understood to be making love.

Every troubadour chose some lady to whom he devoted his talents, seeking to make her

"Glorious by his pen, and famous by his sword."

Like a true knight-errant of music and poetry, he travelled over the land, singing the praises of his lady-love and upholding the superiority of her charms in the lists, in battles with the infidel, or in any chance adventure on the road. After enduring in her honor whatever fortune might send him, and singing to her in songs of triumph or in plaintive love songs, he would return to claim his reward. So far, all is romantic and innocent enough. One can indulge in lovely sentimental fancies concerning this world of gentle singers and fair ladies and poesy and sunshine. But in sober fact the loves of the troubadours were neither so romantic nor even so innocent as one would gladly think. In a certain class of modern novels, the hero rarely experiences a grande passion, as it is charitably called, except for some other man's wife; so the lady to whom the troubadour devotes himself, to whom he pours out his passion with all the cunning and warmth that art can devise, and of whose favors he sometimes most ungallantly boasts, is almost invariably a married woman. Fortunately, despite the fact that poets are given to proclaiming that truth and poetry are almost synonyms, most of us do not take them au pied de la lettre. "Most loving is feigning," says a good authority, and certainly most of the protestations in erotic poetry are hardly to be taken at their face value. So we may safely assume that the intercourse between the troubadours and the ladies to whom their songs are dedicated was generally quite innocent; and the burning desire, the tragic despair, or the exultant passion, of the poems was also largely figurative, mere squibs and crackers of love. Certainly, if it were otherwise, the husbands of Provence were most unselfish patrons of art.

Yet, making all the allowances that common sense or charity may warrant, we have to admit that there is only too much evidence of deplorable moral laxity in the days of the troubadours. The very first troubadour of note, Count William of Poitou, Eleanor's grandfather, was notorious for his contemptuous attitude toward the Church and for his licentiousness. In fact, the poems of William are coarse and almost brutal in their tone, utterly lacking in the superfine gallantry, the preciosity, which is characteristic of the love poetry of his troubadour successors. There is in the poems a sort of bold laughter and wit, and the technical part of the work shows a most surprising artistic finish, but nothing that speaks of chivalrous ideals. It is with some wonder, therefore, that we read in the old Provençal biography of this first of the troubadours that "the Count of Poitou was one of the most courteous men in the world, and a great deceiver of ladies; and he was a brave knight and had much to do with love affairs; and he knew well how to sing and make verses; and for a long time he roamed all through the land to deceive the ladies." According to all accounts, William was very successful in this gallant undertaking. It was the troubadour's business, openly avowed, to "deceive the ladies," and among a people so susceptible as those of Provence many must have been the domestic tragedies brought on by these erotic knights-errant.

When love making, or the writing of love songs, becomes a profession one need not be surprised to find that there is a great deal of pure conventionality. The love of beauty is not supreme in all hearts, even in those of poets, and so the love poetry of the troubadours is as artificial, as overstrained and oversweetened as a panegyric of an Elizabethan poet upon that very questionable beauty of the "vestal throned in the west." What was the actual standard of beauty among the ladies of Provence is hard to determine, for they are all much the same in the songs of the troubadours. The lady has skin whiter than milk, purer than the driven snow, of tint more delicate than the pearl. Upon her cheeks the roses vie with the lilies, the delicate color mounting at the sound of her praises and melting away in danger or distress. A wealth of flaxen hair, of silky texture, crowns her head, and a pair of soft blue eyes gaze languishingly upon the lover; and when they close, the sun is gone from the face of nature, so dark does the world seem to him. But when she walks abroad in smiling beauty, the very birds stop their own love making to chant of her loveliness, and the flowers turn to look at her. With all this delicacy of physical beauty goes a constitution as delicate, for she faints at the news of disaster or danger to her troubadour. When the monkish chroniclers are so very cold in their descriptions of personal charms, we are left to the poets. It may be, then, that, in troubadour eyes at least, Eleanor herself was of the type we have described.

It was from a society formed of such elements, and from the very home of music and poetry, that the young Queen of France came to Paris, at that time no doubt a very dismal place, inhabited by people who, however superior as Christians, must have seemed to her uncultured barbarians. The details of her life during the first ten or fifteen years after her marriage are obscure, and certainly of little historic interest. We can feel sure only that her union with Louis VII. must have been distinctly and increasingly irksome to both parties. With the best will in the world, historians can say no more of him than that he was a safe and conservative ruler, never achieving any marked success, and yet never incurring serious disaster. As a man he was cold, personally unattractive and unsympathetic, possessed of unquestioned physical courage, and yet at times fatally timid and irresolute; easily influenced,' especially by the one power which one might fancy most distasteful to Eleanor, the Church, for he was devout to the point of superstition. If Eleanor had been a mere sybarite, a nerveless devotee of pleasure, she might have lived in obscurity and borne with the puritanism of her husband. But her blood was too hot for that; she was full of ambition and of energy and relentless determination to realize that ambition. As Queen of France there was no great rôle for her to play. She was young, and for the moment Louis and his counsellors governed France, while she was satisfied with less ambitious occupations. One of these occupations was, no doubt, keeping up her connection with the troubadours of her native land, with whom her family and her ducal court of Bordeaux were traditionally associated. The exact dates of her friendship with various troubadours we do not, of course, know; but we do know that she made rather frequent trips to her beloved Bordeaux during these years, and that she was commonly recognized as a patroness of the troubadours.

We next hear of Eleanor in a rôle not altogether in keeping with her troubadour affiliations: one does not think of the daughter of William of Poitou as a defender of the Cross, yet it is as a crusader that Eleanor first makes a stir in history. Much has been made by historians of the influence of the Crusades; here we are concerned to remark only that the spirit of adventure spread even to the women, and that many a dame went to the Holy Land, some even in panoply of war. It was a wonderful step forward in the freedom of women, if we recall the conditions existing a generation before. Our great Provençal queen was a typical representative, not only of the chivalry and love of adventure of Provence, but of the spirit of greater independence prevailing among women. When her grave and devout husband began his preparations for the Second Crusade, in 1147, Eleanor determined to accompany him.

A woman of her energy could not, of course, be content with the fainéant rôle of spouse and consoler. Accordingly, she organized a regular band of Amazons among the great ladies of France, including the Countesses of Toulouse and Flanders and other noble dames. The costume of this troop was the most notable thing about them. The gay and extravagant queen had devoted much time and thought to the devising of a dress sufficiently showy for herself and her ladies, and, according to the accounts of the chronicler William of Tyre, to whom we are indebted for most of the details of her crusading exploits, Eleanor and her companions presented a gorgeous spectacle. Accompanied by bands of troubadours and musicians, with much flaunting of gay banners and glittering of spangles, Queen Eleanor, clad man-fashion, in glittering spangle armor, and her ladies rode in the van of the army. Their discarded distaffs these martial ladies sent to recreant knights who had preferred staying at home to crusading.

The saintly Bernard of Clairvaux, the most powerful religious influence of his time, one whose inspired preaching could move vast audiences to a perfect frenzy of religious exaltation, had been induced, almost compelled, to preach the crusade for that loyal son of the Church, Louis VII. Saint Bernard himself confessed to serious misgivings about the righteousness of this crusade, and would not be a second Peter the Hermit to lead the vast host of the Cross. One can imagine that the doings of Louis's queen must have filled the soul of Saint Bernard with misgivings still more serious. Eleanor, indeed, was incapable of religious feeling of sufficient depth to sympathize with the purer motives of fanaticism that inspired the best of the crusaders. For her it was a pleasure jaunt, a glorious opportunity to enjoy all the pomp and circumstance of being a queen, and at least the show of power. Louis, perhaps, would have been glad to leave his rather too theatrical and frivolous consort behind, for the crusade was to him a serious business; but it is likely that the large contingent of Gascons and Poitevins, devoted to their troubadour duchess, were hardly so eager about following the King of France.

The crusade, whose history we need not dwell upon, was like a triumphal procession as far as Constantinople. To be sure, there were misery and sickness and death among the hordes of poor camp followers and pilgrims who had sought the protection of the great army as they journeyed to that Holy Land whose mere sight, they fancied, would be as a balm to their seared consciences; but Queen Eleanor and her princesses experienced nothing but the vain excitement of it all, the wonders of the Greek civilization, the glitter and splendor. Warned by the disastrous experience of the Germans who had preceded him, Louis elected to follow the coast route along the shores of Asia Minor, and he and his army were safely transported across the straits by the Greeks.

In the march that followed, the vain and headstrong Eleanor more than once jeopardized herself and the whole army. She insisted on leading the van, and her too complaisant husband consented. The result was that Eleanor, with utter disregard of strategy and of ordinary military precautions, conducted her forces as if the expedition were merely a party of pleasure, selected her camps and her route according to the beauty of the landscape, and all the time flirted in the most irresponsible fashion with anyone who attracted her. It was said that she had a most shameful intrigue with a handsome young emir, accepted gifts from Sultan Noureddin, and spoke of her husband with increasing flippancy, disrespect, contempt. The army was saved in the mountain passes by a knight from Eleanor's native land, one Gilbert, of whom really nothing is known, but who has been made the central figure in a romance in which Eleanor also plays her part.

From Satalia, on the Gulf of Cyprus, the king and Eleanor, with the more well to do among their followers, took ship for Antioch, abandoning the mass of poor followers to the mercies of the perfidious Greeks and the fierce Turks. In Antioch, Eleanor was received too kindly by her uncle, Raymond, Prince of Antioch, said to have been the handsomest man of his time, and as licentious as Eleanor's own grandfather had been. Despite their relationship, Eleanor's conduct with Raymond made Louis wildly jealous. She was already talking of a separation from Louis. The daughter of William of Poitou certainly could not, as she proclaimed, put up with a monk for her husband; but it is rather amazing to find her pretending that she wishes her marriage dissolved for reasons of conscience, since she and her husband are related within the degrees prohibited by that Church of which she has always been so devout a daughter. Louis carried her off, willy-nilly, from Antioch, and we hear nothing more but complaints from him and soothing counsel from his friends until after he and Eleanor returned from this disastrous crusade. Eleanor's caprice and haughty temper had almost driven Louis to despair, and perhaps it was this constant domestic irritant which exacerbated his temper and caused those quarrels with the Emperor Conrad which resulted in the miserable failure of the Christian arms at the very gates of Damascus.

Eleanor returned to France, and continued to give her husband cause of complaint not only by her conduct but by her tongue. Yet the ill-assorted pair lived in marital relations until the winter of 1151-1152. During a journey to Aquitaine, however, a violent rupture occurred. Louis appealed to the Council of Beaugency for a divorce, declaring openly that he did not trust his wife, and could never feel sure of the legitimacy of her issue. But Eleanor, as usual, had been beforehand with him. She, too, appealed for divorce, and her appeal was in the hands of the Council before that of her husband. Less frank and more politic than Louis, Eleanor sought for an annulment of the marriage on the ground that she and Louis were cousins--they were related in the sixth degree. The Council, which might have been seriously embarrassed by discussing and recognizing such a plea as that of Louis against one of the most powerful princesses of Christendom, discreetly granted Eleanor's plea, and annulled the marriage, March 18, 1152. Louis lost a wife who despised him, and whom he dreaded for her violence and her sharp tongue. France lost all those rich provinces which had come as Eleanor's dower.

The divorced queen, now reigning Duchess of Guienne, was at once pursued by a number of suitors. With all the romance and sentiment said to be characteristic of southern France in her day it is hard to reconcile facts like those that follow. Thibaud de Blois was bent on capturing the rich duchess, and when she refused him, he plotted to capture her, to imprison her in his castle of Blois, and to force her to marry him. Fortunately, Eleanor was warned of the plot and escaped to her own frontier; but here young Geoffrey of Anjou, aged eighteen, laid an ambuscade for her on the Loire, intending to marry her himself. Again she escaped, this time to her own county of Poitou. Into Poitiers she was followed almost at once by Geoffrey's elder brother, Henry Plantagenet. Handsome, masterful, brilliant, Henry was of the very type to captivate Eleanor. It is altogether probable that she had had a previous understanding with him, and had conducted the proceedings for divorce on his advice. At any rate, they were married at Bordeaux on the 1st of May, 1152, in spite of the opposition of Louis as Henry's feudal lord. Two years later Henry succeeded King Stephen, and Eleanor was Queen of England.

A troubadour queen was certainly no fit mate for Louis VII.; and now that Eleanor has secured her divorce from Louis, and has married a man of temperament somewhat similar to her own, let us step aside from the story of her career in history to tell something more of her relation to the troubadours, and of the troubadours themselves.

Not inheriting any of her grandfather's talent as a singer, Eleanor yet made her court a haven for troubadours. Unfortunately, we know but little of her personal relations with her troubadour courtiers, though tradition has conjectured that they were by no means always platonic. It was after her marriage to Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy, that she became the special protectress of a forlorn troubadour lover, Bernard de Ventadour. He was, as we have noticed, of very low birth, the son of a baker in the Château de Ventadour; but he had risen in his lord's favor by reason of his poetic powers. The fair young Viscountess de Ventadour, a perfect angel of beauty in the eyes of the poet, delighted to listen to his songs of love. At first these songs did not distinctly refer to her; but the allusions became more unequivocal, and the songs became warmer, till one day, as they sat under the shade of a pine tree, Bernard singing to her, the viscountess suddenly kissed her minstrel. The poet tells us in a song that so great was his bliss and ecstasy that the winter landscape seemed suddenly to blossom with all the flowers of spring. And now he sang more openly of love, and at length put the fair lady's own name in his songs as the object of his passion. The viscount could no longer overlook his wife's conduct; so the viscountess was shut up in a tower and Bernard was driven out of the Limousin.

Eleanor gave the banished troubadour a kindly welcome. She listened to his songs, heard his plaintive story, and consoled him. Eleanor was unquestionably a beautiful woman, and at that time she was still in her prime. It is no wonder that the soft heart of the troubadour soon forgot its grief for the lost Lady de Ventadour in the new love for his gracious protector. Both Eleanor and the troubadour were probably really in love, for she was as susceptible as he, though neither was capable, perhaps, of lasting affection. At any rate, Bernard wrote for her songs full of love and longing, declaring that her image dwells with him always, that in her absence he cannot sleep, and that the mere thought of her is sweeter far than sleep. Henry II. was not himself irreproachable as a husband, and perhaps he thought it wise not to look too closely into what his wife was doing. Just at this time, however, Henry became King of England, and there was no need to urge Eleanor to hasten across the channel to become queen; her vanity was sufficient for that. The new queen and her troubadour were parted, and, says his biographer, from that time Bernard remained sad and woeful. He writes her that, for her sake, he will cross the channel, for he is both a Norman and an Englishman now; but we do not know that the intimacy between them was renewed.

This story is the only one of any detail showing the direct relations between Eleanor and the troubadours. There are, however, a score of other anecdotes which serve to show the relation of other women of her class--not all princesses, but at least of the higher nobility--to the troubadours. As illustrative of the position of women in Provence at this time we may select a story as famous in troubadour annals as that of Francesca da Rimini.

The Lady Margarida de Roussillon, says the Provençal biography, was the "most beautiful lady of her time, and the most prized for all that is praiseworthy, and noble, and courteous." She lived in happiness with her husband, the powerful Baron Raymond de Roussillon. But in her suite was a page, Guillem de Cabestanh, poor, but of noble birth, with whose handsome face and gracious ways the Lady Margarida fell in love. "Love kindled her thoughts with fire," till at last the passion so overmastered her that she said to Guillem one day: "Guillem, if a lady were to love you, could you love her?" "Certainly, my lady," replied the young man, "if I thought she loved truly." "Well spoken! Tell me, now, can you distinguish true love from counterfeit?"

These questions roused the smouldering love in Guillem's heart, and he gave vent to it in "stanzas graceful and gay, and tunes and canzos, and his songs found favor with all, but most with her for whom he sang." Margarida, indeed, knew that he loved her and that the songs were inspired by her, though Guillem had not as yet ventured to name her in them or to speak to her. Once again she spoke to her timid lover, and he confessed his love. Then began the love story, the troubadour pouring out his sweetest songs and trusting fondly that, because he did not name her, no one would guess their love. But the gossips began to talk of them, till at last the scandal came to the ear of Sir Raymond. "He was ill pleased and hot with rage through having lost the friend he loved so well, and more because of the shame of his spouse." Instead of taking summary vengeance, however, he bided his time till the guilty pair could be self-convicted.

One day when Guillem had gone off hawking alone Margarida saw Raymond hide his sword under his cloak and follow after Guillem. She waited in fearful anxiety till they returned, Raymond apparently in good humor with Guillem and all the world. Raymond told her that he had discovered who was the lady of Guillem's songs. Margarida's terror may be imagined. "I knew," said Raymond, "that no one could sing so well unless he loved. When I conjured him, by his faith, to tell me whom he loved, he evaded me at first, but at length confessed that it was your sister, Lady Agnes de Tarascon." He then told her that it was all true, moreover, for he had ridden to the Château de Tarascon with Guillem, and that, after some hesitancy, the Lady Agnes had admitted that Guillem was her lover. Margarida was at first dumfounded, and completely incredulous; but her husband's statements were so exact that she was finally convinced of Guillem's faithlessness.

At their first private interview she taxed him with his ingratitude, and would scarcely listen to his denials. Guillem told her that, seeing himself forced into a corner by Raymond's persistent questions, he had named the Lady Agnes in desperation, to prevent immediate discovery and death. The Lady Agnes and her husband, whom she had told of the intrigue, soon confirmed the lover's story. Lady Agnes had seen the distress in Guillem's countenance when Raymond brought him to Tarascon and asked her, in his presence, who was her lover. To save Guillem and her sister, Lady Agnes had admitted that Guillem was her lover, and she and her husband had done all in their power to convince Raymond of this fact. One need hardly remark on the social conditions or the general laxity of morals implied in the naïve recital of such an incident.

To continue Margarida's story, the lovers were reconciled and Guillem celebrated the reconciliation in a song. Unfortunately he had grown rash, and alluded too openly in this song to the very circumstances of their case. "No man," he sang, "suffers greater martyrdom than I; for you, whom I desire more than aught in this world, I must disavow and deny, and lie as if no love were in my heart. Whate'er I do through fear of my life, you must take in good faith, even though you do not see why I do it." This song, some portions of which were violently amorous, came to the hands of Raymond. He guessed the truth at once, and planned an awful vengeance.

Some days later, as the husband and wife were seated at dinner, the Lady Margarida commented on the delicacy of a bit of deer's heart which she had eaten. "Do you know," said Raymond, "what you have been eating?" "No, but I found it delicious." "This will show you," he said, raising before her the bloody head of Guillem Cabestanh. "Behold the head of the man whose heart you have just eaten!" The lady fainted at the horrible sight, and when she recovered screamed aloud that the heart she had eaten was so good and savory that never more would she eat meat. The maddened husband rushed at her with drawn sword, and she, to escape death at his hands, cast herself out of a window and was dashed to pieces.

The story has a little sequel, not less instructive and enlightening in its way. "The news of the deed spread rapidly, and was received everywhere with grief and indignation; and all the friends of Guillem and the lady, and all the courteous knights of the neighborhood, and all those who were lovers, united to make war against Raymond." King Alphonso of Arragon invaded Raymond's dominions, took him prisoner, kept him in captivity the rest of his days, and divided his property among the relatives of the murdered lovers. The unhappy pair he caused to be buried in one tomb, and erected over them a sumptuous monument, whither once a year came all the knights and all the fond lovers of Roussillon, Cerdagne, and Narbonnais, to pray for the souls of Guillem Cabestanh and the fair Lady Margarida. In the glamor of romance, morality and common decency are apt to be lost sight of. The romancer enlists all our sympathies for the guilty Paolo and Francesca of this story, while Raymond, the miserable husband, meets with captivity and the loss of his property. We may add that the main facts of this story are confirmed, even to the episode of the heart, by several accounts in manuscripts, though imagination is doubtless responsible for certain details.

In the loves of the troubadours one is constantly encountering stories not less immoral though less tragic than this one, as we may see in the story of the Lady de Miravals. The wife of Raymond de Miravals, a rich baron and famous troubadour, being neglected by her husband, had formed a secret attachment for a knight called Bremon. She was pining in secret for her lover when, to her delight, Raymond threatened to divorce her, because he himself had tired of her and was in love with another lady who insisted that he should divorce his wife. Seeing in the threatened divorce a chance of perfect liberty in her relations with Bremon, the Lady de Miravals pretended extreme grief and indignation. Such treatment from an ungrateful husband she would not stand, she said. She would send for her parents and relatives to see justice done or to take her away. To this Raymond, apparently, made no very determined resistance. The lady, with great show of wrath, sent a messenger to summon her family, secretly directing him to go to Bremon and tell him that she was ready to marry him if he would come. Bremon came with alacrity, accompanied by a troop of his knights, and halted at the gate of the castle. The expectant Lady de Miravals, seeing her lover ready, announced to Raymond that her friends had come for her, and that she would be pleased if he would allow her to leave at once. Raymond consented; in fact, he was so pleased at the prospect of being rid of his wife that, with unwonted courtesy, he himself conducted her to the castle gate. Seeing that her little plot was working so well, the runaway wife could not forbear adding one more touch to this lovely little deception. "Sir," said she to Raymond, "since we part such good friends, with no regrets, would you not be good enough to give me, no longer your wife, to this gentleman?" Nothing was easier to Raymond than unmarrying a wife of whom he was tired. With ready courtesy he gave her to Bremon, who, receiving her from her husband's hands, put the ring on her finger and rode off, in high glee, with his lady-love.

We do not know whether the Lady de Miravals and her new husband found the course of their love smooth or rough; but the too complaisant Raymond met with very bad luck, which he most richly deserved. As soon as his wife was gone, he posted off to tell his lady-love that her commands had been obeyed and that he had now come to marry her. But this lady, who seems to have cared nothing for the foolish troubadour except to have the honor of having him make a fool of himself for her, said: "It is well done, Raymond; you have sent away your wife to please me. Now go and prepare for a magnificent wedding at your castle, and let me know when you are ready to receive your bride in fitting style." The troubadour rushed home, spent weeks and squandered his substance in preparations for his bride, and went back to claim her. Alas! this very sensible lady had married another man--we hope not a troubadour--on the very day after she had sent Raymond on his fool's errand.

With all his protestations of undying devotion, it not infrequently happened that the troubadour did not continue to devote himself to one lady. Sometimes the lady found a more acceptable lover, or became tired of the love rhapsodies of her troubadour. But it was dangerous to dismiss one of these violent poets without good excuse, for he might turn from love songs to sirventes, and satirize her whom before he had extolled as a paragon. One of the most amusing of the anecdotes of the troubadours is that telling how Marie de Ventadour got rid of the attentions of Gaucelm Faidit.

The beautiful Countess Marie de Ventadour was, says the old Provençal historian quoted in Mr. Rowbotham's The Troubadours and Courts of Love, to which we are indebted for many of the facts here used, "the most esteemed lady in the province of Limousin; the lady who prided herself most on doing whatever was right and good, and who best preserved and defended herself from all evil; who always shaped her conduct by the rules of reason, and never at any time committed an act of folly." Her charms were celebrated by many a troubadour, but her most devoted admirer was Gaucelm Faidit. Gaucelm, the son of an artisan of Uzerche, had been raised from his low estate by the favor of the troubadour Richard Coeur de Lion, and his talent had assured his position in what one might call the best society. Marie, like other ladies of her time, was rather vain of her troubadour admirers, and did not disdain the brilliant but lowborn Gaucelm Faidit. But she told him that, if he was to win her love, he must show himself worthy of it by prowess in battle, and suggested that he accompany her husband--whom we neglected to mention before--on the third Crusade, just then being organized. The poet, though not very fond of fighting, took the Cross, went to the Holy Land, sent home to his lady-love most ferocious poems telling of the perils he was encountering or escaping, and then made his way back to the Château de Ventadour as soon as he could find a decent excuse for doing so. Marie, however, was not so gracious to him as he had hoped; she did not love him for the dangers he had passed, or for his telling of them. She was, in fact, decidedly cold to him. Gaucelm, in a rage, left the chateau, saying: "I shall never see you again! But perhaps I can find another lady who will treat me with more consideration." Marie was rather glad to be rid of her poet's tempestuous love; but she was afraid of his sharp tongue; he could write most bitter sirventes: what if he should avenge himself on her by turning against her all his satiric powers?

In this dilemma she resorted to a stratagem which her friend, Madame de Malamort helped her to put in practice, Madame de Malamort sent a message to the troubadour asking: "Which do you prefer, a little bird in the hand, or a crane flying high in the air?" Gaucelm's curiosity was piqued; he came to ask her to unravel this riddle. "I am the little bird," said she, "whom you hold in your hand, and Marie de Ventadour is the crane who flies far above your head. Am I not as beautiful as she? Love me who love you, and let this haughty countess find out, as she will, what a treasure she has lost." The vanity of the troubadour, incensed by what he thought unjust treatment, could not withstand this artful attack. He consented to be off with the old love, and the new love required that he take leave of the old love, not in any violent sirvente, but in a poem relentless, stern, yet calm and dignified; after which he might begin to sing as he pleased about the new love. Too proud of his new conquest to suspect the trick being played on him, Gaucelm bade farewell to Marie de Ventadour in a formal and very dignified fashion. When he turned now to sing of joy and spring and the like to Madame de Malamort he found his attentions very coldly received; and the lady soon gave him to understand that, having got her friend out of a difficulty, she cared not a fig for any troubadour. Gaucelm was nicely trapped; he could not indulge in abuse of either lady without danger of having the whole foolish tale told at his expense. He became a heretic toward love, and satirized women in general; but he soon recovered from this, and lived to be consoled by other ladies, and to be fooled by one more. This one, Marguerite d'Aubusson, pretending the most devoted and innocent romantic love for Gaucelm, used to meet her real lover under cover of Gaucelm's roof.

Though not at all essential to the story, it is a fact worth mentioning that Gaucelm Faidit himself was married while the romance with Marie was in progress. The wife of a troubadour, indeed, was not allowed to interfere with any really serious business of his career, such as a love affair with another man's wife. That this was so, in theory at least, can be seen in the story of the lives of many of the troubadours; and that the general attitude of Provençal society, as represented by this particular phase of its literature, was unfavorable to matrimony, can be seen most clearly when we look at those curious institutions called Courts of Love. It is not yet quite certain whether the Courts of Love are altogether or only partly mythical.

This century of ours is a Sancho Panza among the centuries; like that stout and excellent squire, we have unlimited faith in things material, visible, tangible, and especially eatable and no faith in things romantic, such as windmills, and knights-errant, and chivalry. Looked at from the Panzaic point of view, which we are fain to admit is also the common-sense point of view, it seems inherently most improbable that any set of people should waste their time upon anything so fantastic as the Courts of Love. Yet Panza should be asked to remember that there are and have been things in heaven and earth that surpass the limits of his philosophy; that the race among whom such institutions are alleged to have flourished was notoriously sentimental, or poetic, if you like a more respectful term; that, for a parallel, he has only to go to a famous French romance, published less than two centuries ago, which contained a grave description and map of the Country of Love, a Carte du pays de Tendre, with minute directions as to how the amorous traveller might proceed safely on his journey to the city of true love; and that Molière's Précieuses Ridicules, however overdrawn for comic effect, presents a picture of what really existed. Reason is, undoubtedly, opposed to the possibility of the existence of the Courts of Love; but, as we have said, we cannot always refuse to believe what seems to us preposterous. The historical evidence for the existence of the Courts of Love is unquestionably very scanty. Mr. Rowbotham, who believes firmly in their existence, is forced to rely upon the testimony of one contemporary witness, of very uncertain date (Andrew the Chaplain, "who lived probably about the end of the twelfth century"), and two very obscure allusions to courts and trials in the poems of the troubadours. The chief sources for our knowledge of the Courts of Love are writers long subsequent to the events, notably Jean de Nostredame, who, in 1575, published a book entitled Les Vies des plus célèbres et anciens poetes provensaux. But the tradition is so well established, and above all so intimately associated with Queen Eleanor, that we shall give a little sketch of the courts and their doings.

The tensons of the troubadours were poetic disputes on points of love and on lovers' conduct. If, says Jean de Nostredame, the disputants "could not come to an agreement they referred the matter for decision to the illustrious lady presidents who held open and plenary court at the Castle of Signe, and other places, and these gave judgments which were called the judgments of Love." If a lady treated her troubadour lover unfairly, or if a lover were guilty of any dereliction or crime in love, or if, for the guidance of future generations of lovers, a decision on a mere point of gallantry were sought, all such cases came before the Courts of Love, which had a regular code of laws, thirty-one in number, upon which decisions were based. The court, composed of a jury of the most beautiful, accomplished, and celebrated ladies of the neighborhood, and presided over by some lady of special distinction, heard the pleas on both sides, and gave judgment, which depended upon a unanimous vote of the jury. There were several of these courts, the most famous being those of Queen Eleanor of England, of her daughter, Marie de Champagne, of the Viscountess of Narbonne, and of the Countess of Flanders. The code under which these fantastic tribunals are said to have given their judgment is a very curious document. The statutes of love are hardly so rigorous as might be expected; some of them are merely proverbial bits of wisdom, with here and there a hint very far from romantic:

IV. Love never stands still; it always increases--or diminishes.

X. Love is always an exile where avarice holds his dwelling.

Some seem so distinctly suggestive of a smirk beneath all this affected seriousness that one can hardly take them seriously.

XV. Every lover is accustomed to grow pale at the sight of his lady-love.

XVI. At the sudden and unexpected sight of his lady-love the heart of the true lover invariably palpitates.

XX. A real lover is always the prey of anxiety and malaise.

XXIII. A person who is the prey of love eats little and sleeps little.

This last is, of course, a rule not only venerable, but universal. One recalls Chaucer's Squire, "as fresshe as is the moneth of May," who "coude songes make, and wel endite;... so hote he loved that by nightertale he slep no more than doth the nightingale." Others of the troubadour statutes are frankly suggestive of that moral laxity, not to say obliquity of vision, of which we have spoken before.

I. Marriage cannot be pleaded as an excuse for refusing to love.

XI. It is not becoming to love those ladies who love only with a view to marriage.

XXVI. Love can deny nothing to love.

With this little group of laws in mind one can but reflect that, pushed to their logical conclusion, they are suggestive of moral laxity. We are not, however, left to guessing. According to Andrew the Chaplain, the court of the Countess of Champagne was asked, on April 29, 1174, to decide this question: "Can real love exist between married people?" The countess and her court decided "that love cannot exercise its powers on married people," the following reason being given in proof of the assertion: "Lovers grant everything, mutually and gratuitously, without being constrained by any motive of necessity. Married people, on the contrary, are compelled as a duty to submit to one another's wishes, and not to refuse anything to one another. For this reason it is evident that love cannot exercise its powers on married people. Let this decision, which we have arrived at with great deliberation, and after taking counsel of a large number of ladies, be held henceforward as a confirmed and irrefragable truth."

Quite in line with this judgment is one reported from the court of Queen Eleanor. A gentleman, the complainant in the suit, was deeply in love with a lady who loved another. Taking compassion on him, however, she promised that, if ever she should lose her first lover, the complainant should be received as his successor. The lady shortly after married her lover. Thereupon the complainant, citing the decision of the Countess of Champagne, demanded her love. The lady refused, denying that she had lost the love of her lover by marrying him. Wherefore the complainant humbly sued for judgment, we presume it might be called a writ mandamus amare. The honorable court handed down a decision for the complainant, declaring that the solemn decree of the court of the Countess of Champagne was of force in the present case, and issuing the writ mandamus amare as prayed for: "We order that the lady grant to her imploring lover, now the complainant before this court, the favors which he so earnestly entreats, and which she so faithfully has promised."

One other decision of the gay Queen Eleanor is so righteous that we cannot forbear repeating it. A gentleman brought suit because a lady of whom he was enamored had accepted numerous handsome gifts from him and yet persistently denied him her love. We are not altogether sure whether the gentleman was not really bringing suit to recover his presents; but Queen Eleanor gave judgment: "A lady who is determined to be inflexible must either refuse to receive any gifts which are sent with the object of winning her love, or she must make compensation for them, or she must be content to be classed as a courtesan."

In all this world of love and song were the women merely objects of the troubadour's song, or merely patronesses of the troubadour? Were there no poetesses? The names of fourteen ladies who may be called troubadours by reason of their own works are all of whom we have record, and even of these fourteen not one was really a professional troubadour; in most cases it is but one song, or even one part of a tenson, which gives the lady a right to be named among the poets. We find Clara D'Anduse, the beautiful love of the troubadour Uc de St. Cyr, remembered for but one song; and but little more remains of the work of Countess Beatrice de Die, who loved Rambaut d'Orange, and who tells of how this troubadour loved her, and grew cold to her, and finally was faithless, forsaking her for another; but she and her sister troubadours are shadowy figures: the time had not come for woman to take a permanent place in literature.

In our attempt to present the literary and artistic side of Eleanor's life, and to tell something of the brilliant society of Provence in which she played no small part, we have neglected the facts of her career in England. As Queen Eleanor of England, however, we shall not have much to say of her. Even now she does not play a very prominent part in history, and the development of her character is quite in line with the moral training one would acquire in the Courts of Love. It does seem as if there were such a thing as reaping the whirlwind.

Eleanor was eleven years older than her new husband. She had despised Louis because he was too austere, too cold, too plain in mind and in morals. Her new husband soon gave her ample cause to develop a new passion jealousy. She learned to hate him for vices the very opposite of Louis's colorless virtue. She herself had been notoriously a coquette, and not an innocent one. She felt the eleven years of difference between herself and Henry. The gossips said she could hardly expect to retain Henry's affection, she who was so much older, and who had been, it was rumored, the mistress of Henry's own father. Despite the gallant principles she had professed in her own Court of Love, despite the latitude to which she had thought herself entitled, she became furiously jealous of Henry. There was, indeed, much reason for jealousy. Young, hot-blooded, passionate, as greedy of pleasure as of power, Henry lost no time in giving her numerous rivals. No means were too vile or too violent when Henry wished to gratify his passions. It is said that he even dishonored the young Princess Alice of France, betrothed to his son Richard, and for that reason would never allow Richard to marry her. There we're fierce quarrels between Eleanor and Henry, and tradition has ascribed to her the murder of Fair Rosamond Clifford, whom she is said to have pursued into the labyrinth of Woodstock and stabbed with her own hand.

Finding it impossible to avenge herself in any other way, Eleanor stirred up her sons against their father. They were all turbulent enough, and needed little encouragement. The eldest living son, Henry, injudiciously crowned king by his father's desire, persuaded himself that he must be king in deed, and was spurred on by his mother and by her friend, the restless troubadour Bertrand de Born. Raymond of Toulouse, who had been sought by them as an ally, revealed the plot of the queen and her sons to Henry. Young Henry and his brothers fled to France, where they were received by Louis with royal honors. Eleanor was imprisoned in her own duchy, and in prison she remained during Henry's lifetime. The troubadours, devoted to their duchess, sang dolorous songs upon her captivity, and voiced their hatred of her jailer, Henry, in burning sirventes. But Henry went on relentlessly in the intermittent struggle with his sons, conquered Bertrand de Born, and kept his rebellious subjects in check. Not till he died, cursing Richard and John, who had again been in revolt against him, was the queen released.

Hardly had Richard been crowned before he departed for the Crusade, leaving Eleanor as regent. Even against her own son the old queen intrigued; yet it was partly her indignant intervention which later helped to release Richard from the German prison where the emperor, instigated by Philip Augustus, would have kept him. The son whom she loved best, John, loved and trusted her no more than did Richard. In the struggle between Philip Augustus, championing Arthur of Brittany, and John, Eleanor seems to have kept faith with her son, and to have given him shrewd if cruel counsel. We hear of her but once or twice more in active affairs. In 1200 she was sent by John into Spain to bring back his niece, Blanche de Castille, who was betrothed to Prince Louis of France by one of the terms of a treaty just concluded between John and Philip Augustus. On her return, when passing through Bordeaux, a mob set upon and killed one of her party, the detested Mercader, captain of Richard's Brabançon mercenaries. Eleanor, old, and sick with fatigue and fright at this scene of horror, could proceed no further, and stayed in the abbey of Fontevrault, sending Blanche on with the Archbishop of Bordeaux. She rallied from this illness, however, and two years later had a narrow escape from being captured by her grandson, Arthur. She was besieged, and very hard pressed, in the Château de Mirebeau, when Arthur and his followers were surprised and captured by John. This episode of a grand-mother besieged by her own grandson is quite in line with the traditions of the family. "It is the fate of our family that none should love the other," said Geoffrey Plantagenet.

In the midst of the triumph of Philip Augustus over her miserable son John, old Queen Eleanor died, in the convent of Beaulieu, in 1204. The miseries of her declining years make us more charitable toward her; but it is impossible to respect a character such as that of England's troubadour queen. One sometimes finds her praised for a splendid virtue, that of impulsive generosity; but there was no generosity in her nature; she was merely lavish in spending for her own pleasure. In keeping with what a great historian has said of her son Richard Coeur de Lion, one may say that she was a bad wife,--to two husbands,--a bad mother, and a bad queen. There was in her nature none of the tenderness which alone can ensure domestic love, nor yet enough force to enable her to make herself a great queen.

Even before the death of their patroness the glories of the troubadours were fading. There was an angry murmur, growing ever stronger, against the immorality of the troubadours, and particularly against a new and formidable heresy which had gained ground rapidly in the south of France. With the doctrines of the Albigenses we are not concerned; it is difficult to discover the exact truth about them, since we must rely chiefly upon the testimony of their enemies. It is sufficiently well established, however, that the Albigenses believed in a form of Manichseism which asserted the existence of two Eternal powers, equipotent, the one a power of Good, the other a power of Evil. Since Evil ruled the world on equal terms with Good, might not man feel utterly relieved of moral responsibility? Certainly, such is the tendency of this species of Dualism.

Whether the Albigensian heresy be responsible or not, it is unquestionable that the troubadours were in nearly all cases indifferent, and in very many cases sceptical or utterly rebellious, in their attitude toward the Church and its teachings. Among the nobility the sacrament of marriage, so carefully hedged about by the canons of the Church, could hardly have been regarded with much respect, since a venal clergy was ready to sanction a union which their own Church pronounced incestuous or to dissolve one which their own Church pronounced indissoluble. Political and racial antipathy, the old ineradicable and inexplicable hatred of north for south, helped on the religious quarrel. Count Raymond of Toulouse, who seems to have been merely an easy-going man, inclined rather to religious liberty and freedom of conscience than to positive heresy, was assailed as a monster of vice. At length, in 1208, Pope Innocent III. authorized the Cistercian monks to preach a crusade against the Albigenses: "Arise! ye soldiers of Christ! exterminate this impiety by every means that God may reveal to you. Stretch forth your arms and smite the heretics, making upon them war more relentless than upon the Saracens." So ran the papal letters. The new crusade was preached far and wide over France, Germany, and Italy, and a host of crusaders, promised greater indulgences than those who went to the Holy Land, assembled to destroy Provence. Among their leaders were two recreant troubadours, Izarn, who leaves us his version of the fall of Provence, and Folquet, now Bishop of Toulouse, who is so cruel, so bitter, so treacherous in the cause of Christ that one enjoys hearing him called by the troubadour nickname "Bishop of Devils." More terrible than Folquet, because more sincere, was one Domingo, canon of Osma, a man of almost puritanic habits of mind, famous in history as the founder of the order of Fratres Predicatores, the Dominican Preaching Friars, and of an institution not less well known--the Inquisition. The military leader who really broke the back of the resistance in Provence was Simon de Montfort. The siege and capture of Beziers, where a number of those accused of heresy had taken refuge, will serve to show in what spirit the whole war was conducted. When Beziers was taken the soldiers asked Abbot Arnold, of Citeaux, who represented the Church of Mercy: "How shall we distinguish the faithful from the heretics among the people of the town?" The priest answered: Caedite eos, novit enim Dominus qui sunt ejus: "Kill them all, for the Lord will know His own." In this spirit the Albigensian war continued, with occasional respites, for more than thirty years. Over the land of the troubadours brooded the menacing figure of the Inquisition; and fair women no less than men knew the sinister meaning of "La Question" the inquisition by torture, by scores of devices of ingenious cruelty, of which the "rack" and the iron "boot" are best remembered. The brilliant life of the south was extinguished. We hear the piteous wail of the fast disappearing singers: "Oh! Toulouse and Provence, land of Agen, Beziers, and Carcassonne; as I have seen you, and as I see you now!"

While Provençal literature was thus perishing miserably, that of France was gradually unfolding; and we find here and there some grande dame named as a patroness of literature. Most of them are but names, yet we find that the Countess Marie de Champagne, Queen Eleanor's daughter, encouraged the great trouvère Chrestien de Troies. She made him introduce into his romances the notions of love and chivalry fostered in the Courts of Love, and gave him the theme of his romance of Lancelot, or Le conte de la Charrette (about 1170). For Blanche de Navarre was made a prose translation of saints' lives. A poet named Menessier completed, about 1220, for the Countess Jeanne de Flandre a poem on Perceval and his search for the Holy Grail.

One French woman of this period, moreover, won for herself an abiding place in literature. Of her personality we know nothing, and we are even ignorant of the dates of her birth and death. Gathering her materials from Welsh and Breton traditions and popular songs, she wrote a number of lays, as she called them. These lays are short poems, in verse of eight syllables, recounting some little romantic tale or adventure. There are about twenty of them, of which fifteen, at least, are ascribed to Marie. From another of her works we glean the few facts that follow, substantially all that we know of her:

"At the end of this work, which I have translated and sung in the Romance tongue (French), I will tell you something of myself. Marie is my name, and I am of France. It may be that several clerks might take it upon themselves to claim my work, and I wish none to say it is his: who forgets himself works to no purpose. For the love of Count William, the most valiant man in this kingdom, I undertook to write this book and to translate it from English into Romance. He who wrote this book, or translated it, called it Ysopet. He translated it from Greek into Latin. King Henry (some manuscripts say Alfred), who loved it greatly, then translated it into English, and I have turned it into French verse as accurately as I could. Now I pray to God Almighty that I may be given strength to do such work that I may give my soul into His hands, that it may go straight to Heaven above. Say Amen, all of you, that God may grant my prayer."

This conclusion of one of the fables in the book called Ysopet, which we have translated freely, shows us that Marie was of French birth, but that she had, probably, lived for a time in England. Who was Count William? We are free to guess, but there seems no chance of confirming the guess. Some have supposed him to be William Longsword, the reputed son of Henry II. and Rosamond; while Henry, the king who loved the book so well, might be Henry Beauclerc. But as the English book from which Marie translated is lost, there is again no chance of confirmation. It is now generally agreed, however, that Marie lived and wrote about the end of the reign of Henry II.

Ysopet, or Ysope, as it is sometimes spelled, is nothing more than the name of our dear old Æsop, whom childhood loves and whom folklore is proving a myth. The term came to be the generic one in Old French for collections of fables on the model of Marie's. Marie's fables cannot compete with those of her great French successor, La Fontaine; and yet one is always insensibly comparing them with his. The literary value of her works is not great; the recital is too cold and impersonal; there is too much of the apologue and none of that delightful individuality, the reflection of his own mind, which La Fontaine manages to impress upon his creatures; the writer shows no sympathy with the "little people" of her fables.

The lays are decidedly more entertaining, and show considerable narrative power, as well as an unconscious appreciation of the romantic beauty of the incidents, many of which have to do with fairies and enchantment. They are tales of love and adventure, full of marvels. One meets King Arthur and Tristram, and a host of knights and ladies transformed by the fairies. We may mention the pathetic Lai de Frene, a story related to the famous one of Patient Grissel; the story of Guingamor, a tale of a knight who lives three days in fairyland and comes back to find that three hundred years had passed on earth; and the story of the werewolf Bisclavret, which we may give as a specimen of this very interesting portion of Old French literature interesting, at least, to those who love literature in its infancy.

"When I set out to write lays," says Marie, "I would not forget Bisclavret. In Breton he is called Bisclavret, while the Normans call him garwalf (werewolf)." We have heard often enough, she continues, of men who became werewolves and lived in the forest. The werewolf is a savage beast, and when he is in a rage he devours men and does much damage. After this little preface, the tale goes on to tell of a knight of Brittany, courteous, rich, beloved by all his neighbors. His wife, however, was piqued by unreasoning curiosity about one thing, which was quite enough, indeed, to arouse the curiosity of any wife. This was the fact that for three days out of 'the week her husband disappeared, no one knew whither. At length, she asked her husband where he went, and, in spite of his reluctance to tell,

"tant le blandi e losenia