statue,” he says in his “Dictionary” (111, 166), “possesses its personal character which remains graven on the memory like the recollection of a living being whom one has known ....  A large part of the statues in the porches of Notre Dame de Chartres, as well as of the portals of the Cathedrals of Amiens and Rheims, possess these individual qualities, and this it is which explains why these statues produce on the crowd so vivid an impression that it names them, knows them, and attaches to each of them an idea, often a legend.”

Probably the crowd did so from the first moment they saw the statues, and with good reason.  At all events, they have attached to two of the most individual figures on the north porch, two names, perhaps the best known in France in the year 1226, but which since the year 1300 can have conveyed only the most shadowy meaning to any but pure antiquarians.  The group is so beautiful as to be given a plate to itself in the “Monographie” (number 26), as representing Philip Hurepel and his wife Mahaut de Boulogne.  So little could any crowd, or even any antiquarian, at any time within six hundred years have been likely to pitch on just these persons to associate with Blanche of Castile in any kind of family unity, that the mere suggestion seems wild; yet Blanche outlived Pierre by nearly twenty years, and her power over this transept and porch ended only with her death as regent in 1252.

Philippe, nicknamed Hurepel,—­Boarskin,—­was a “fils deFrance,” whose father, Philip Augustus, had serious, not to say fatal, difficulties with the Church about the legality of his marriage, and was forced to abandon his wife, who died in 1201, after giving birth to Hurepel in 1200.  The child was recognized as legitimate, and stood next to the throne, after his half-brother Louis, who was thirteen years older.  Almost at his birth he was affianced to Mahaut, Countess of Boulogne, and the marriage was celebrated in 1216.  Rich and strongly connected, Hurepel naturally thought himself—­and was—­head of the royal family next to the King, and when his half-brother, Louis VIII, died in 1226, leaving only a son, afterwards Saint Louis, a ten-year-old boy, to succeed, Hurepel very properly claimed the guardianship of his infant nephew, and deeply resented being excluded by Queen Blanche from what he regarded—­ perhaps with justice—­as his right.  Nearly all the great lords and the members of the royal family sided with him, and entered into a civil war against Blanche, at the moment when these two porches of Chartres were building, between 1228 and 1230.  The two greatest leaders of the conspiracy were Hurepel, whom we are expected to recognize on the pier of this porch, and Pierre Mauclerc, of Brittany and Dreux, whom we have no choice but to admit on the trumeau of the other.  In those days every great feudal lord was more or less related by blood to the Crown, and although Blanche of Castile was also a cousin as well as queen-mother, they hated her as a Spanish intruder with such hatred as men felt in an age when passions were real.