This happened in Syria, after the total failure of the crusade in Egypt.  The ordinary man, even if he were a priest or a soldier, needed a miraculous faith to persuade him that Our Lady or any other divine power, had helped the crusades of Saint Louis.  Few of the usual fictions on which society rested had ever required such defiance of facts; but, at least for a time, society held firm.  The thirteenth century could not afford to admit a doubt.  Society had staked its existence, in this world and the next, on the reality and power of the Virgin; it had invested in her care nearly its whole capital, spiritual, artistic, intellectual, and economical, even to the bulk of its real and personal estate; and her overthrow would have been the most appalling disaster the Western world had ever known.  Without her, the Trinity itself could not stand; the Church must fall; the future world must dissolve.  Not even the collapse of the Roman Empire compared with a calamity so serious; for that had created, not destroyed, a faith.

If sceptics there were, they kept silence.  Men disputed and doubted about the Trinity, but about the Virgin the satirists Rutebeuf and Adam de la Halle wrote in the same spirit as Saint Bernard and Abelard, Adam de Saint-Victor and the pious monk Gaultier de Coincy.  In the midst of violent disputes on other points of doctrine, the disputants united in devotion to Mary; and it was the single redeeming quality about them.  The monarchs believed almost more implicitly than their subjects, and maintained the belief to the last.  Doubtless the death of Queen Blanche marked the flood-tide at its height; but an authority so established as that of the Virgin, founded on instincts so deep, logic so rigorous, and, above all, on wealth so vast, declined slowly.  Saint Louis died in 1270.  Two hundred long and dismal years followed, in the midst of wars, decline of faith, dissolution of the old ties and interests, until, toward 1470, Louis XI succeeded in restoring some semblance of solidity to the State; and Louis XI divided his time and his money impartially between the Virgin of Chartres and the Virgin of Paris.  In that respect, one can see no difference between him and Saint Louis, nor much between Philippe de Commines and Joinville.  After Louis XI, another fantastic century passed, filled with the foulest horrors of history—­religious wars; assassinations; Saint Bartholomews; sieges of Chartres; Huguenot leagues and sweeping destruction of religious monuments; Catholic leagues and fanatical reprisals on friends and foes,—­the actual dissolution of society in a mass of horrors compared with which even the Albigensian crusade was a local accident, all ending in the reign of the last Valois, Henry iii, the weirdest, most fascinating, most repulsive, most pathetic and most pitiable of the whole picturesque series of French kings.  If you look into the Journal of Pierre de l’Estoile, under date of January 26,1582, you can read the entry:—­