For us, both legends are true.  They reflected, not perhaps the character of Eleanor, but what the society liked to see acted on its theatre of life.  Eleanor’s real nature in no way concerns us.  The single fact worth remembering was that she had two daughters by Louis VII, as shown in the table; who, in due time, married—­Mary, in 1164, married Henry, the great Count of Champagne; Alix, at the same time, became Countess of Chartres by marriage with Thibaut, who had driven her mother from Blois in 1152 by his marital intentions.  Henry and Thibaut were brothers whose sister Alix had married Louis VII in 1160, eight years after the divorce.  The relations thus created were fantastic, especially for Queen Eleanor, who, besides her two French daughters, had eight children as Queen of England.  Her second son, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, born in 1157, was affianced in 1174 to a daughter of Louis VII and Alix, a child only six years old, who was sent to England to be brought up as future queen.  This was certainly Eleanor’s doing, and equally certain was it that the child came to no good in the English court.  The historians, by exception, have not charged this crime to Queen Eleanor; they charged it to Eleanor’s husband, who passed most of his life in crossing his wife’s political plans; but with politics we want as little as possible to do.  We are concerned with the artistic and social side of life, and have only to notice the coincidence that while the Virgin was miraculously using the power of spiritual love to elevate and purify the people, Eleanor and her daughters were using the power of earthly love to discipline and refine the courts.  Side by side with the crude realities about them, they insisted on teaching and enforcing an ideal that contradicted the realities, and had no value for them or for us except in the contradiction.

The ideals of Eleanor and her daughter Mary of Champagne were a form of religion, and if you care to see its evangels, you had best go directly to Dante and Petrarch, or, if you like it better, to Don Quixote de la Mancha.  The religion is dead as Demeter, and its art alone survives as, on the whole, the highest expression of man’s thought or emotion; but in its day it was almost as practical as it now is fanciful.  Eleanor and her daughter Mary and her granddaughter Blanche knew as well as Saint Bernard did, or Saint Francis, what a brute the emancipated man could be; and as though they foresaw the society of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, they used every terror they could invent, as well as every tenderness they could invoke, to tame the beasts around them.  Their charge was of manners, and, to teach manners, they made a school which they called their Court of Love, with a code of law to which they gave the name of “courteous love.”  The decisions of this court were recorded, like the decisions of a modern bench, under the names of the great ladies who made them, and were enforced by the ladies of good