Part 10 (2/2)
(Gossips, let's revel and frolic to our heart's content! The poor devil who has never put away wine will pay the score.) And then, the meal over, they come ”out of the tavern into the street,” not a little exhilarated, one may fancy, by this famous wine, and away they go singing to the fair.
Not all the pictures of women are as innocently amusing or mirthful as this one; on the contrary, the general att.i.tude of the authors of the _Fabliaux_ is distinctly unflattering, not to say hostile. Sometimes it is merely one of the infinite variations on the idea of the scarcity of virtuous wives; it is Chicheface, the cow who feeds on virtuous wives, and who is all but starved to death, while Bigorne, with less rigorous ideas as to the morals of her food, is choked, fit to burst. But in general the notion prevails, as one writer himself puts it, that ”woman is of too feeble intellect; she laughs at nothing, she cries at nothing; she will turn from love to hate in a moment. The strong hand alone can control her; and yet, beating is useless, for her faults are inherent; nature made her captious, obstinate, perverse; she is an inferior creature, by nature degraded and vicious.”
But slightly different from this is the sentiment of the _Roman de la Rose_, when we take this huge work in its complete and most influential form. The _Roman de la Rose_, to rehea.r.s.e a few well-known facts, was composed between 1225 and 1275 by two poets, one writing later than the other and under somewhat different inspiration. The story is allegorical, and its main thread has to do with the adventures of a young man, at once the hero and the poet, in his attempt to pluck a beautiful rose, which he finds hedged about with thorns in a garden full of marvels. In his attempts to reach the rose the lover is alternately aided and hindered by various allegorical personages, whose names suggest the part they play, such as Kindly Greeting and Modesty and Vanity and Pity. To the poet who first undertook the telling of this marvellous allegory, Guillaume de Lorris, woman is a superior being, almost an angel; and love is a divine thing. Love is the theme of his poem:
”Ce est li Romanz de la Rose Ou l'Art d'Amours est toute enclose.”
(This is the Romance of the Rose, wherein is all the art of love.) And it is real love that he teaches; for the G.o.d of Love himself commands the lover: ”It is my wish and my command that you centre all the devotion of your heart in one place.” His lover is gentle and courteous; we are in an atmosphere not very different from that of the romances of chivalry.
When Jean de Meung undertakes, some fifty years later, to complete the romance left unfinished by Guillaume, we find that woman is for him the incarnation of all vices; that love is a wicked thing, the root of all evil; that the art of deceiving women, not of loving them, is worth learning. Nay, the utmost libertinage is sanctioned; there is no such thing as fidelity in love, for it is contrary to the law of nature, which designed _toutes pour touz et touz pour toutes_--all women for all men, and all men for all women. Jean de Meung has absorbed all that the most cynical libertines of antiquity could teach him, and to that he has added his own rancor against woman. It is Ovid's _Art of Love and Remedy of Love_ revised for mediaeval use. Anything further from the gallantry of the romances of chivalry could hardly be found. And yet this cynical att.i.tude was, as we have attempted to show, but an outgrowth of gallantry run mad; for in the beginning, gallantry, says Montesquieu, ”is not love, but it is the delicate, the light, the perpetual pretence of loving.”
VIII
MARIE DE BRABANT AND MAHAUT D'ARTOIS
THE household of the kings of France, so lately under the wise control of Blanche de Castille or the pure influence of the good but weak Marguerite de Provence, was the scene of a court scandal which threatened serious consequences under the son of Saint Louis, that Philippe misnamed ”le Hardi.” The central figure in this unpleasant episode, Marie de Brabant, is otherwise of so little note that we shall not tell more of her than is necessary to the understanding of the little intrigue of which she was accused.
Isabelle d'Aragon, the first wife of Philippe III., had died under tragic circ.u.mstances. She accompanied her husband and Saint Louis on the latter's second crusade, and returning with the body of the saintly king, was thrown from her horse while crossing a stream in Calabria, and died a few days later (January, 1271), giving birth to a child who did not long survive. In 1274, Philippe married Marie de Brabant, sister of Duke Jean de Brabant. The new queen was young, beautiful, and _excellente en sagesse_, increasing each day in favor with the king. The favorite of Philippe at that time was Pierre de la Brosse, who had begun life, so his enemies said, as barber-surgeon to Saint Louis, but who was really of more respectable origin. He had now arrived at such a pitch of fortune as to excite the envy of the n.o.bles; since there was a clique against him, he was resolved to use every means to secure his power, for the loss of his power, as he well knew, would almost certainly involve the loss of his life.
The queen, Marie, had probably manifested dislike of this favorite and perhaps sympathy with the attempts to overthrow his power. An accident--we do not hesitate to affirm that it was an accident--gave Pierre, now her enemy, a chance to ruin her. In 1276, Prince Louis, Philippe's eldest son by Isabelle, died suddenly, or at least under mysterious circ.u.mstances. The days of poisoning were not by any means past, and poisoning was at once suggested to account for the mysterious death. Pierre de la Brosse industriously circulated the rumor that the queen had committed the crime and was prepared to do the like by the three remaining children of Isabelle, in order that the crown might descend to her children. There was, of course, much evil talk in the court, as well as plots and counterplots between the friends of the queen and the friends of the favorite. Philippe was half distracted between his love for Marie and his suspicions of her, and the latter Pierre de la Brosse took pains to keep alive. Finally things came to such a pa.s.s that resort was had to the supernatural to satisfy the doubts of the king,--no unusual method of settling difficulties in the days when the belief in things occult was still rife.
At the instance of one of the parties,--it is not absolutely certain which,--Philippe decided to refer the matter of the death of this son to the decision of a learned and devout nun, or Beguine, of Nivelle in Brabant, reputed to have the gift of second sight and mysterious knowledge of things past, present, and to be. It is not impossible that the oracle was tampered with by the enemies of Pierre de la Brosse; but, however that may be, she returned an answer that set Philippe's heart at rest. He was told to credit no ill against his good and loyal wife.
Marie was thereby saved from a most dangerous position; but she could not fail to harbor resentment against the instigator of the attack upon her.
Though, in spite of the intrigues of the queen and the n.o.bles led by her brother, for two years Pierre de la Brosse continued in favor, his fate was preparing; and in the spring of 1278 it overtook him, when letters written by him or forged by his enemies were put into the hands of the king. There was treason in these letters, alleged to have been taken from Pierre's correspondence with Spain. He was arrested and confined in Vincennes, and a court of n.o.bles, dominated by the Dukes of Burgundy and Brabant and the Count of Artois, held a sort of trial and condemned him.
The n.o.bles lost no time in disposing of the fallen favorite, whom they conducted at once to the scaffold, while the people of Paris, convinced of the fact that Pierre had been a good minister and that he was being unjustly condemned, indulged in serious riots. There was a popular belief, indeed, voiced by a Parisian chronicler, that Pierre was sacrificed to the hatred of the queen and the n.o.bles: ”Against the will of the King, as I believe, was he hanged.... He was destroyed more by envy than by guilt.” The insinuations against the queen were no doubt one of the main causes of his downfall.
History has never been able to determine whether Marie was really guilty of some attempt upon the life of the children of her husband's first wife. There is a very curious letter written by Pope Nicholas III. to Philippe and Marie that leads one to think that he at least credited the queen with some of the evil charged against her. After begging Philippe not to search deeper into the affair, since Pierre de la Brosse is dead, he fills his letter to Marie with rhetorical questions of a most disquieting nature: ”What could possibly have provoked you to inflict a death so cruel upon an innocent child (Prince Louis) whose tender years could give no just grounds for hate?” If Marie was guiltless, it is hard to believe that the Pope thought her so, when one reads phrases so equivocal. She certainly had everything to gain for her own offspring by the death of Isabelle's children; but there is no proof that she even harbored evil designs, and the whole course of her rather quiet and obscure life gives the lie to the evil insinuations. She was gentle, pious according to the habit of the day, and had received a careful education which left her not without some appreciation of arts and letters, for we find her the patroness of a poet from her native Brabant, Adenet le Roi, called ”king of minstrels.” The real facts in the case, however, we can never know; and Marie hardly appears again in history, though she lived on in apparent wealth and fair renown until 1321, when her death occurred.
Before Marie de Brabant died many other queens had come and gone in Paris, during the reigns of Philippe le Bel and his sons, Louis le Hutin, and Philippe le Long. But not one of these is of sufficient fame or notoriety to merit extended comment; instead, we may centre our attention upon a typical _grande dame_ of the period, a woman who was a direct va.s.sal of the crown and who played no small role in the affairs of her own domain, this is the Countess Mahaut d'Artois.
Mahaut, or Matilda, was one of the high n.o.bility, ill.u.s.trious in her birth and in her relations.h.i.+p to persons of some note in history, being great-niece of Saint Louis, cousin of Philippe le Bel, grandmother of a Duke of Burgundy and of a Count of Flanders, and, greater still, mother of two unhappy Queens of France, the wives of Philippe V. and Charles IV. She lived an active and a useful life, and is a character not unpleasant to consider. From the days of her impetuous grandfather, Robert d'Artois, brother of Saint Louis, her family had been fond of the battlefield, on which many of them had died. Robert, first Count of Artois, was killed at Mansourah; Mahaut's father, Robert II., had fallen in the great ma.s.sacre of the French n.o.bility at the battle of Courtrai; and her brother, Philippe, had fallen in another battle with the st.u.r.dy burghers of Flanders, in 1298. The death of this brother left Mahaut the heiress of Artois, and she succeeded to her heritage when, as we noted above, her father was slain at Courtrai, in 1302.
At that time Mahaut was already a matron and a great lady in the land; for, in 1285, she had married Otho, Count Palatine of Burgundy. Her husband was far older than she, being then forty-five, while Mahaut had scarcely reached womanhood; moreover, Otho had been a comrade of her father, and was as proud, as chivalrous, as lavish in his expenditures as any prince of his time. This habit of extravagance made Otho an easy victim for the rapacious money-lenders; and when he was in the hands of these Philistines the cautious King Philippe le Bel knew how to help him just enough to keep him a grateful and obedient va.s.sal of the crown. As early as 1291 was born Mahaut's first child, a daughter named Jeanne, who was followed by a second daughter, Blanche (about 1295), and then by two sons, Robert, and John, the latter dying while still in infancy. The ruinous excesses of Count Otho had brought him to such a pa.s.s that, in 1291, Philippe le Bel made a most advantageous bargain with him: the infant daughter Jeanne, it was agreed, was to marry the eldest son of the king and thus bring Burgundy under the power of the crown; but it was stipulated that, in the event of the birth of a son to Otho, Burgundy should revert to this son and Jeanne should marry the second son of the king. This, in fact, was what happened, for Otho had two sons. Again, in 1295, when the count was in the hands of the usurers, Philippe le Bel paid his debts, and granted him a pension and a continuance of this or part of it to his children, in return for which Burgundy was placed in the king's hands, together with the guardians.h.i.+p of the children until they should reach the age of seventeen.
What the Countess Mahaut thought of these arrangements, so largely affecting the future of her children, we cannot tell, for we have little information in regard to her life previous to the death of her husband.
This event occurred in the early part of 1303, when Otho, like so many others of Mahaut's family, was killed in battle with the Flemings; and it cannot be denied that his death was a gain rather than a misfortune for Mahaut and her children. As a widow she enjoyed the right to special protection from the crown, with which the relations of her family and of her husband had been most intimate and fortunate; and as a widow she was free to devote herself to the task of recouping the losses incurred through the bad management of her domains by Otho. As the feudal ruler of Artois and Bourgogne she would have much to occupy her time, even if her affairs had been in the best order and she had been left to manage them in peace; but this was not to be, for she had to contend for her rights during the greater part of the years that remained to her.
Before we enter upon her career as Countess of Artois, let us conclude a part of the more intimate life of Mahaut, a part full of shame and sorrow for the mother. Her son, Robert, was the object of much solicitude on the part of Mahaut, who sought in every way to give him an education not only suited for the high station in life he would be called upon to occupy, but calculated to make him a useful and a happy man. As early as 1304, when he could have been no more than seven or eight years of age, Mahaut provided him with a separate establishment, or _hotel_, under the government of two worthy gentlemen, Thibaud de Mauregard and Jean de Vellefaux. There was provided a little comrade for Robert, Guillaume de Vienne, his playmate, who was treated with as much consideration and kindness as was Robert himself. Then there was a retinue of some seven or eight servants, and two knights, old servants of Mahaut's father, to a.s.sist in the military training of the young gentlemen; and there was also a certain Henri de Besson, the pedagogue charged with the education of Robert. The child, of course, was not left solely to these attendants by his mother, who pa.s.sed a considerable part of the time with him. Games and fas.h.i.+onable amus.e.m.e.nts were not forbidden by the fond mother, and, as early as 1308, we find Robert losing his money in play at the court, and spending his gold on horses and tourneys like other young gentlemen of the day.
In 1314 he was already able to wear knightly panoply of war, and in the following year he accompanied the royal army in an aimless expedition to Flanders, while his mother stayed at home and had prayers recited for the safety of her son. But that son, whom she loved so devotedly, and whom she was doing so much to please and amuse, did not live to manhood, for he died in the early part of September, 1317, before he had received the final dignity of knighthood. From all the Church dignitaries of Artois, from all the great relatives of Mahaut, came letters of condolence upon the death of the heir of Artois, which for two days was publicly proclaimed by servants of the countess through the streets of Paris, in which city generous alms were distributed to the poor; while pilgrims were despatched at once to Saint-James of Compostella, to Saint-Louis of Ma.r.s.eilles, and to other shrines, to intercede for the soul of the dead. A few weeks later Mahaut ordered a sculptor, Jean Pepin de Huy, to erect a tomb for the _tres n.o.ble homme monseigneur Robert d'Artois, jadis fiuz (fils) de ladite comtesse_. This tomb, of white stone, bears a rec.u.mbent figure of the young count, clothed in armor, with long, flowing hair about the handsome, beardless face; it is now preserved in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, having been moved from the church of the Cordeliers, where it originally rested over the grave of Mahaut's son.
Long before the death of Robert, the Countess Mahaut's daughters had played their brief and disastrous parts in the French court. In January, 1307, in accordance with the treaty agreed to by Count Otho in 1291, the eldest daughter, Jeanne, was married to Philippe de Poitiers, second son of King Philippe le Bel. The next year, Blanche, a great deal younger than Jeanne, but already renowned for her unusual beauty, married Charles le Bel, Count de la Marche, the youngest of the three sons of Philippe le Bel, Louis le Hutin, the eldest, having married Marguerite, sister of Hugues de Bourgogne. After their marriage to the princes of France, we hear little more of Jeanne and Blanche in the accounts of their mother, though both were guests at her mansion rather frequently, and presents of various sorts were exchanged between mother and daughters, until in 1314 came the great catastrophe.
For some time there had been scandalous rumors at the court about the conduct of the three young princesses, and in the spring of 1314 the evil report received such confirmation that the old king, Philippe le Bel, gave the order to arrest them on charges of having been openly and scandalously unfaithful to their marriage vows with two young knights of their suite. Marguerite and Blanche were confined in rigid imprisonment at the famous Chateau Gaillard, built by Richard of the Lion Heart. They were stripped of all the glory of fine attire, and their heads were shaved. Meanwhile, their accomplices in adultery, Philippe and Gautier d'Aulnai, two Norman knights, were put to the torture, and confessed that during three years they had sinned many times with the princesses.
The right of trial by battle, for which the knights first asked, had been sternly denied them; there was but the rack, and after that a shameful death for those who had dared to bring shame upon the royal family. With the ingenuity of the Middle Ages in devising exquisite torments, the two young men were publicly flayed alive, cruelly mutilated, and tortured as long as life could be kept in their miserable bodies. There were other accomplices in the disgrace of the princesses; these, too, when they were not of rank sufficiently high to protect them, were tortured, sewn up in sacks, and cast into the Seine. An unfortunate Dominican monk, accused of having debauched the princesses by compounding love philtres and otherwise exercising the black art, was delivered over into the hands of the Inquisition; he was never heard of afterward.
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