Pierce Butler

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sweet is the savor of triumph; to all who are touched with ambition the mere joy of victory, with the homage of men and the flattery that follow in the train of victory, is so sweet that in vainglory they forget what yet remains to be done. But in Jeanne there was no ambition; she rejoiced and gave thanks to God that through her he had saved Orléans; but the glory was God's, not hers. Orléans, too, was but the first stage in her career, of whose brief duration she warned her friends, and of whose tragic end her earnest heart may already have had some forebodings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How quietly she relinquishes her authority, and how ready she is, even when that authority is at its height, to tell Thibaud de Champagne that he owes his preservation to "the great goodness of my son, the King, who came to your aid"! But it was her jealousy of Marguerite de Provence that was the great blemish on Blanche's character. It was a meanness unworthy of a nature so generous and so faithful; we can attempt no defence, we can only express regret. ”

“ It was not Charles, the miserable, ungrateful voluptuary whose character we have attempted to show, that was loved and saved by Jeanne d'Arc; it was France, represented to her in the person of the dauphin. For her, Charles was a symbol, a mere incarnate patrie for whose salvation she was commissioned by the Lord of Hosts; the man himself was nothing; in her simple peasant's heart, she hardly thought of him as a man, rather as a sort of divinity that could do no wrong, that must be worshipped, that must first of all be saved and set up safely in its tabernacle of Rouen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The little duchy of France, hedged about by vassals subject only in name, has grown into a great and almost unified kingdom, where provincial boundaries will soon be but imaginary lines on the map, a kingdom so rich and powerful, thanks to Louis XI. and Anne de Beaujeu, that it can afford to let a childish Charles VIII. dissipate its forces and its treasure in Italian wars, bringing back nothing more precious than the memory of the culture, the art, the restless new learning that make Florence, Venice, Milan glorious in this day of Renaissance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She was reared under conditions the most unfavorable to the development of independence, self-reliance, and capacity for practical affairs; for feudalism, even at its best, as we have seen, produced but few women who were capable of ruling a nation, and the spectacular chivalry of the Burgundian court found no place for woman but as an angelic, gracious, beautiful spectator of its great shows, one infinitely removed by every detail of her education and of her social life from the sordid cares of life and of politics. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”