In the twelfth century he wanted chiefly to please women, as Orderic complained; Isolde came out of Brittany to meet Eleanor coming up from Guienne, and the Virgin from the east; and all united in giving law to society.  In each case it was the woman, not the man, who gave the law;—­it was Mary, not the Trinity; Eleanor, not Louis VII; Isolde, not Tristan.  No doubt, the original Tristan had given the law like Roland or Achilles, but the twelfth-century Tristan was a comparatively poor creature.  He was in his way a secondary figure in the romance, as Louis VII was to Eleanor and Abelard to Heloise.  Every one knows how, about twenty years before Eleanor came to Paris, the poet-professor Abelard, the hero of the Latin Quarter, had sung to Heloise those songs which—­he tells us—­resounded through Europe as widely as his scholastic fame, and probably to more effect for his renown.  In popular notions Heloise was Isolde, and would in a moment have done what Isolde did (Bartsch, 107-08):—­

Quaint reis Marcs nus out conjeies
 E de sa curt nus out chascez,
 As mains ensemble nus preismes
 E hors de la sale en eissimes,
 A la forest puis en alasmes

E un mult bel liu i trouvames
 E une roche, fu cavee,
 Devant ert estraite la entree,
 Dedans fu voesse ben faite,
 Tante bel cum se fust portraite.

When King Marc had banned us both,
 And from his court had chased us forth,
 Hand in hand each clasping fast
 Straight from out the hall we passed;
 To the forest turned our face;

Found in it a perfect place,
 Where the rock that made a cave
 Hardly more than passage gave;
 Spacious within and fit for use,
 As though it had been planned for us.

At any time of her life, Heloise would have defied society or church, and would—­at least in the public’s fancy—­have taken Abelard by the hand and gone off to the forest much more readily than she went to the cloister; but Abelard would have made a poor figure as Tristan.  Abelard and Christian of Troyes were as remote as we are from the legendary Tristan; but Isolde and Heloise, Eleanor and Mary were the immortal and eternal woman.  The legend of Isolde, both in the earlier and the later version, seems to have served as a sacred book to the women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Christian’s Isolde surely helped Mary in giving law to the Court of Troyes and decisions in the Court of Love.

Countess Mary’s authority lasted from 1164 to 1198, thirty-four years, during which, at uncertain intervals, glimpses of her influence flash out in poetry rather than in prose.  Christian began his “Roman de la Charette” by invoking her:—­

Puisque ma dame de Chanpaigne
 Vialt que romans a faire anpraigne

Si deist et jel tesmoignasse
 Que ce est la dame qui passe
 Totes celes qui sont vivanz
 Si con li funs passe les vanz
 Qui vante en Mai ou en Avril