Chartres Cathedral has already told the story twice, in stone and glass; but Thibaut does not appear there, although he saved the Queen.  Some member of the royal family must be regent.  Queen Blanche took the place, and of course the princes of the blood, who thought it was their right, united against her.  At first, Blanche turned violently on Thibaut and forbade him to appear at the coronation at Rheims in his own territory, on November 29, as though she held him guilty of treason; but when the league of great vassals united to deprive her of the regency, she had no choice but to detach at any cost any member of the league, and Thibaut alone offered help.  What price she paid him was best known to her; but what price she would be believed to have paid him was as well known to her as what had been said of her grandmother Eleanor when she changed her allegiance in 1152.  If the scandal had concerned Thibaut alone, she might have been well content, but Blanche was obliged also to pay desperate court to the papal legate.  Every member of her husband’s family united against her and libelled her character with the freedom which enlivened and envenomed royal tongues.

  Maintes paroles en dit en
   Comme d’Iseult et de Tristan.

Had this been all, she would have cared no more than Eleanor or any other queen had cared, for in French drama, real or imaginary, such charges were not very serious and hardly uncomplimentary; but Iseult had never been accused, over and above her arbitrary views on the marriage-contract, of acting as an accomplice with Tristan in poisoning King Marc.  French convention required that Thibaut should have poisoned Louis VIII for love of the Queen, and that this secret reciprocal love should control their lives.  Fortunately for Blanche she was a devout ally of the Church, and the Church believed evil only of enemies.  The legate and the prelates rallied to her support and after eight years of desperate struggle they crushed Pierre Mauclerc and saved Thibaut and Blanche.

For us the poetry is history, and the facts are false.  French art starts not from facts, but from certain assumptions as conventional as a legendary window, and the commonest convention is the Woman.  The fact, then as now, was Power, or its equivalent in exchange, but Frenchmen, while struggling for the Power, expressed it in terms of Art.  They looked on life as a drama,—­and on drama as a phase of life—­in which the bystanders were bound to assume and accept the regular stage-plot.  That the plot might be altogether untrue to real life affected in no way its interest.  To them Thibaut and Blanche were bound to act Tristan and Isolde.  Whatever they were when off the stage, they were lovers on it.  Their loves were as real and as reasonable as the worship of the Virgin.  Courteous love was avowedly a form of drama, but not the less a force of society.  Illusion for illusion, courteous love, in Thibaut’s hands, or in the hands of Dante and Petrarch, was as substantial as any other convention;—­the balance of trade, the rights of man, or the Athanasian Creed.  In that sense the illusions alone were real; if the Middle Ages had reflected only what was practical, nothing would have survived for us.