Pierce Butler

“ On the one hand, an angry father, whom she loved, a mother whom she loved better, a safe home, and in it all that her simple heart desired; on the other, the great and terrible world, the armies of rough men, the dissolute courtiers, the long journeys over an unknown country, for one who had hardly stirred out of sight of Domremy church tower. Love of home, so strong in the hearts of all women, so precious to the peasant woman of France above all others, must be renounced for love of country. ”

“ Taxation is but a method of raising revenue to defray the expenses of government, and of distributing the burden among those who must bear it. The taxpayer cannot complain of the tax burden which he has to bear, who shows no inequality in the application of it. And plainly he does not show inequality merely by proving that the valuation of his property for taxation is much higher than its market or its condemnation value. ”

“ Invoking the rule now laid down, a taxpayer having no tax-exempt securities and legitimately bearing the burden of a state tax on net worth may put off the burden completely by the simple expedient of purchasing, on credit, government bonds equal in value to his net taxable assets. The success of a device so transparently destructive of the taxing power of the state may well raise doubts of the correctness of the constitutional principle supposed to sustain it. So construed, the Constitution does more than protect the ownership of government bonds from the burdens of taxation. ”

“ There is grim irony in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together. But if this is freedom of contract no one has ever denied that it is freedom which may be restrained, notwithstanding the Fourteenth Amendment, by a statute passed in the public interest. ”

“ And it is real love that he teaches; for the God of Love himself commands the lover: "It is my wish and my command that you centre all the devotion of your heart in one place." His lover is gentle and courteous; we are in an atmosphere not very different from that of the romances of chivalry.
When Jean de Meung undertakes, some fifty years later, to complete the romance left unfinished by Guillaume, we find that woman is for him the incarnation of all vices; that love is a wicked thing, the root of all evil; that the art of deceiving women, not of loving them, is worth learning. ”

“ The power to tax is not the power to destroy while this Court sits. The power to fix rates is the power to destroy if unlimited, but this Court while it endeavors to prevent confiscation does not prevent the fixing of rates. A tax is not an unconstitutional regulation in every case where an absolute prohibition of sales would be one. Hatch v. Reardon, 204 U.S. 152, 162, 27 S.C.t. 188, 51 L. Ed. 415.
To come down more closely to the question before us, when the Government comes into a State to purchase I do not perceive why it should be entitled to stand differently from any other purchaser. ”

“ When we look at Blanche the woman, we are confronted with a like difficulty. Shall we say she was a saint? Her son, the son whom she bore, whom she reared with unexampled care, whom she watched over all her life, has been called a saint, and there is no one to say him nay. Shall we say that the mother of a saint is, ex officio, or even by courtesy, also a saint? We cannot claim sanctity for Queen Blanche: there was in her a touch of the temper of her grand-mother, Eleanor of Guienne of wicked memory, or mayhap a trace of the Plantagenet. ”

“ We have had opportunity to perceive more clearly that a wage insufficient to support the worker does not visit its consequences upon him alone; that it may affect profoundly the entire economic structure of society and, in any case, that it casts on every taxpayer, and on government itself, the burden of solving the problems of poverty, subsistence, health, and morals of large numbers in the community. ”

“ Beside the quiet heroism of this rich merchant of old Calais, what tinsel seems the glory of the best of Froissart's favorite knights! "King Edward may have been the victor,... as being the strongest, but you are the hero of the siege of Calais! Your story is sacred, and your name has been blessed for five hundred years. Wherever men speak of patriotism and sacrifice, Eustace de Saint-Pierre shall be beloved and remembered. I prostrate myself before the bare feet which stood before King Edward. What collar of chivalry is to be compared to that glorious order which you wear? ”

“ But the proper defence of Jeanne d'Arc against Shakespeare and Voltaire is neither to vilify them nor to obscure the human side of her character and exalt her to something altogether faultless and divine, something altogether "too bright and good for human nature's daily food."
With or without the poetic praises of biographers, Jeanne d'Arc deserves her place as, all things considered, one of the most remarkable figures in the world's history. In spite of human defects, she is "the one pure figure which rises out of the greed, the lust, the selfishness and unbelief of the time." ”

“ Valentine was in this a good judge, for the spirited, ardent lad whom she loved for his father's sake was none other than Jean, Comte de Dunois, afterward famous among the martial heroes of France as "Le Batard d'Orléans." Valentine died on December 4, 1408, and well might they say that she had died of a broken heart; for the one great emotion of her life had been the passionate devotion to one of the most despicable men that ever had a faithful wife--a devotion generous enough, indeed, to excuse even follies and infidelities. ”

“ No Eleanor of Guienne have we here, masquerading in tinsel armor at the head of a troop of stage amazons, but a gallant lady charging her foes sword in hand. One cannot read her story without enthusiasm; and yet one would gladly know more of the woman before bestowing unreserved praise upon the countess "who was worth a man in the fight," and "who had the heart of a lion."
With all the brilliance and the heroism of these wars between England and France, the glory is not untarnished; for the very patterns of chivalry were too often guilty of most atrocious cruelties. ”

“ If one may say so, the sculptor has drawn for us Mahaut's character as well as her features; she was of the masculine type, strong and energetic rather than lovable. For a woman who would hold her own in those days, the qualities she possessed were, in fact, essential; to rule Artois in the fourteenth century there was need of an amazon rather than of a lovely, fragile, soft-hearted daughter of love. We do not mean that Mahaut was cold, heartless, merely a politician; she was far better both in morals and in kindness of heart than the average lady of her time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Great has been the change in France since Constance came from fair Provence to scandalize the monkish Robert's court; since Eleanor d'Aquitaine and her romantic troubadour friends taught France how to love gracefully and sing of love sweetly; since Mahaut d'Artois was a paire de France, with feudal power in her domain not to be questioned even by the sovereign; since Jeanne de Montfort, at the head of her knights, charged the mailed hosts. Provence has ceased either to scandalize or to enliven and instruct, for there is no more Provence save in name; no more gay and immoral troubadours ”

“ Imagine her yoked with a prince of frivolous disposition, lacking even in ordinary intelligence, so ignorant that he could scarcely read and write, and interested chiefly in the idle shows of that chivalry in whose ranks he could not shine because of his awkward and weak frame. With admirable appreciation of her duty, Anne sunk the woman in the wife and queen, subordinating her own personality to that of a man whom she could not have respected, whom it seems impossible she could have loved. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the weak and the fallen there is little of pity; a word as some brave knight falls, a word of the sorrow of those dependent upon him, and on we go to fresh fields, fresh knightly exploits and pageants. Though the very spirit of chivalry is in the air, how little thought is given to woman! It is only the rare masculine qualities of a Jeanne de Montfort that can win her grudging notice from Froissart. ”

“ Isabeau de Bavière was already of a slothful habit, to be roused only by her love of amusement, to purchase which neither she nor her young husband would spare anything. Luxury and wild extravagance in dress, in entertainments, even in funerals, was characteristic of the age; the whole kingdom gave itself up to extravagance and debauchery; existence was one mad revel, with no thought of who should pay the piper; all must dance and caper as if bitten by the tarantula. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Gentle Dauphin, I am called Jeanne la Pucelle; the King of Heaven sends you word by me that you shall be consecrated and crowned in the city of Rheims, and that you shall be his lieutenant in France. Give me, therefore, soldiers, that I may raise the siege of Orléans and take you to Rheims to be consecrated. It is God's will that your enemies, the English, shall go back to their own land; and woe be unto them if they do not go; for the kingdom shall be and remain your own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The devotion to woman which we find becoming the dominant feature of the chivalrous ideal rises at times to sheer extravagance, mere moonshine madness. A knight vows devotion to his lady-love; to prove that he is the truest lover in the world and she the fairest dame, he wears a patch over one eye and engages in mortal combat with anyone who ventures to smile at this absurdity. Another takes his station on the highway and compels every passing knight to joust with him, because he has vowed to break three hundred lances in thirty days in the honor of his lady. ”