used all her influence with her husband, Count William, and his barons, to make trouble ...  Both the ladies who stirred up these fierce enmities were great talkers and spirited as well as handsome; they ruled their husbands, oppressed their vassals, and inspired terror in various ways.  But still their characters were very different.  Havise had wit and eloquence, but she was cruel and avaricious.  Isabel was generous, enterprising, and gay, so that she was beloved and esteemed by those about her.  She rode in knight’s armour when her vassals were called to war, and showed as much daring among men-at-arms and mounted knights as Camilla ...”  More than three hundred years afterwards, far off in the Vosges, from a village never heard of, appeared a common peasant of seventeen years old, a girl without birth, education, wealth, or claim of any sort to consideration, who made her way to Chinon and claimed from Charles VII a commission to lead his army against the English.  Neither the king nor the court had faith in her, and yet the commission was given, and the rank-and-file showed again that the true Frenchman had more confidence in the woman than in the man, no matter what the gossips might say.  No one was surprised when Jeanne did what she promised, or when the men burned her for doing it.  There were Jeannes in every village.  Ridicule was powerless against them.  Even Voltaire became what the French call frankly “bete,” in trying it.

Eleanor of Guienne was the greatest of all Frenchwomen.  Her decision was law, whether in Bordeaux or Poitiers, in Paris or in Palestine, in London or in Normandy; in the court of Louis VII, or in that of Henry ii, or in her own Court of Love.  For fifteen years she was Queen of France; for fifty she was Queen in England; for eighty or thereabouts she was equivalent to Queen over Guienne.  No other Frenchwoman ever had such rule.  Unfortunately, as Queen of France, she struck against an authority greater than her own, that of Saint Bernard, and after combating it, with Suger’s help, from 1137 until 1152, the monk at last gained such mastery that Eleanor quitted the country and Suger died.  She was not a person to accept defeat.  She royally divorced her husband and went back to her own kingdom of Guienne.  Neither Louis nor Bernard dared to stop her, or to hold her territories from her, but they put the best face they could on their defeat by proclaiming her as a person of irregular conduct.  The irregularity would not have stood in their way, if they had dared to stand in hers, but Louis was much the weaker, and made himself weaker still by allowing her to leave him for the sake of Henry of Anjou, a story of a sort that rarely raised the respect in which French kings were held by French society.  Probably politics had more to do with the matter than personal attachments, for Eleanor was a great ruler, the equal of any ordinary king, and more powerful than most kings living in 1152.  If she deserted France in order to join