Women of Mediaeval France Part 5

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 Provencal 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 a.s.sured 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 Chateau 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 pa.s.sed, 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 att.i.tude of Provencal 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 inst.i.tutions 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 surpa.s.s the limits of his philosophy; that the race among whom such inst.i.tutions 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 Moliere's _Precieuses 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 ent.i.tled _Les Vies des plus celebres et anciens poetes provensaux_. But the tradition is so well established, and above all so intimately a.s.sociated 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 doc.u.ment. 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 a.s.sertion: "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 compa.s.sion 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 cla.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 lat.i.tude to which she had thought herself ent.i.tled, she became furiously jealous of Henry. There was, indeed, much reason for jealousy. Young, hot-blooded, pa.s.sionate, 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 pa.s.sions. 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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 pa.s.sing through Bordeaux, a mob set upon and killed one of her party, the detested Mercader, captain of Richard's Brabancon 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 Chateau 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 a.s.serted 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 att.i.tude toward the Church and its teachings. Among the n.o.bility 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 p.r.o.nounced incestuous or to dissolve one which their own Church p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.sailed 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 G.o.d 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, a.s.sembled 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 inst.i.tution 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 Carca.s.sonne; as I have seen you, and as I see you now!"

While Provencal literature was thus peris.h.i.+ng 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 _trouvere_ 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 aesop, 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 pa.s.sed 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 Que s'aventure li c.u.n.ta,"

that is, she wheedled and coaxed him till he told her that on three days of the week he must be a werewolf; that, going to the forest, he stripped himself and hid his clothing carefully, and then was turned into a wolf. He besought her not to reveal the hiding place of his clothing; for if, when the three days were over, he should come back in wolf form and find them gone, there would be no hope for him: he must be a wolf for the rest of his days. Now, the wife, as usually happens in such tales, was a wicked wife, anxious to rid herself of her werewolf husband and marry a knight who had long been her lover:

"Un chevalier de la c.u.n.tree, Qui lungement l'aveit amee...

E mult dune en sun servise."

To him she sends at once, and the guilty pair steal away the clothes of the poor werewolf at the very first opportunity. And thus was Bisclavret betrayed by his wife, who married him who had loved her long. The werewolf is condemned to continue in wolf form; but one must remember that there are disenchantments as well as enchantments in fairy stories, and that justice, of a kind which is frequently _sui generis_, is generally meted out to the guilty. The giant, it is true, gobbles up people and behaves horribly for a season, but there is always a giant killer in training for him. And so here, it is only for "one whole year"

that Bisclavret remains transformed; for the king goes hunting in the forest, and his hounds pursue Bisclavret till the poor wretch runs straight to the feet of the king, kisses his feet, and asks mercy in such pitiful and almost human dumb show that the king orders him spared.

Bisclavret, taken under royal protection, accompanies the court everywhere, till, on the occasion of a special a.s.semblage of the barons, the man who had married his wife comes into his presence. Straight at his throat leapt the wolf-man, and would have torn him to pieces on the spot had not the king interfered. The obvious hatred of the wolf for this particular man aroused the king's suspicions, and these suspicions were still further intensified when, not long after, the wolf manifested the same violent hatred toward his former wife, now the wife of the knight, biting her and scratching her face in spite of all that could be done. Then, upon the advice of an old knight who remembered the mysterious disappearance of Bisclavret and who knew something of Breton legends, the king put the false wife to torture, and forced from her the confession of the truth. Bisclavret, shut up in a room with the clothes he had worn as a man, is transformed into a man once more and reinstated in his possessions. The unfaithful wife, accompanied by her paramour, is driven from the land, and, as a further retribution, several of her children were born without noses, the wolf having bitten off her nose.

As Marie concludes, with triumphant rejoicing in the punishment of the wicked even unto the third and fourth generation, "'tis true, indeed, noseless were they born, and noseless did they live."

This paraphrase of Marie's work can, of course, give no idea of its literary value; but the tale itself will serve as a sample of what the first woman in French literature wrote. We have from her also a translation of the famous legend of _Saint Patrick's Purgatory_, of how a knight journeyed into the lower regions and came back to warn the world of the punishments in store for the wicked. Marie represents but a beginning--and yet it is a beginning--of the writing in their mother tongue, which was to make famous many women as well as men of France. In her day, indeed, it was a distinction to write in the mother tongue, for among the cla.s.ses which we should call literary Latin was considered the only proper vehicle for their wisdom. Long after her day, indeed, Latin still kept French from its birthright, and it will be two centuries before we come to another woman who writes in French. Though the great Helose and her letters, written not long before Marie's time, take their place in literature, it is in the literature of scholastic Latin, not of old French.

CHAPTER IV

WOMEN IN THE AGE OF SAINT LOUIS

WHILE romance has preserved many memories, and history not a few facts, of Eleanor of Guienne, the records concerning two other notable women, her contemporaries, are very scanty. Whatever her faults, Eleanor was a great and commanding personality, one that could not be overlooked because, whether for good or ill, she was always powerful. The two unhappy queens of Philippe Auguste, Ingeburge de Danemark and Agnes de Meranie, though they were the innocent causes of much distress in France, are yet hardly known to us as personalities.