Not that all the men showed equal docility!  We must go next, round the church, to the south porch, which was the gift of Pierre Mauclerc, Comte de Dreux, another member of the royal family, great-grandson of Louis vi, and therefore second cousin to Louis VIII and Philip Hurepel.  Philip Augustus, his father’s first cousin, married the young man, in 1212, to Alix, heiress of the Duchy of Brittany, and this marriage made him one of the most powerful vassals of the Crown.  He joined Philip Hurepel in resisting the regency of Queen Blanche in 1227, and Blanche, after a long struggle, caused him to be deposed in 1230.  Pierre was obliged to submit, and was pardoned.  Until 1236, he remained in control of the Duchy of Brittany, but then was obliged to surrender his power to his son, and turned his turbulent activity against the infidels in Syria and Egypt, dying in 1250, on his return from Saint Louis’s disastrous crusade.  Pierre de Dreux was a masculine character,—­a bad cleric, as his nickname Mauclerc testified, but a gentleman, a soldier, and a scholar, and, what is more to our purpose, a man of taste.  He built the south porch at Chartres, apparently as a memorial of his marriage with Alix in 1212, and the statuary is of the same date with that of the north porch, but, like that, it was not finished when Pierre died in 1250.

One would like to know whether Pierre preferred to take the southern entrance, or whether he was driven there by the royal claim to the Virgin’s favour.  The southern porch belongs to the Son, as the northern belongs to the Mother.  Pierre never showed much deference to women, and probably felt more at his ease under the protection of the Son than of Mary; but in any case he showed as clearly as possible what he thought on this question of persons.  To Pierre, Christ was first, and he asserted his opinion as emphatically as Blanche asserted hers.

Which porch is the more beautiful is a question for artists to discuss and decide, if they can.  Either is good enough for us, whose pose is ignorance, and whose pose is strictly correct; but apart from its beauty or its art, there is also the question of feeling, of motive, which puts the Porche de Dreux in contrast with the Porche de France, and this is wholly within our competence.  At the outset, the central bay displays, above the doorway, Christ, on a throne, raising His hands to show the stigmata, the wounds which were the proof of man’s salvation.  At His right hand sits the Mother,—­without her crown; on His left, in equal rank with the Mother, sits Saint John the Evangelist.  Both are in the same attitude of supplication as intercessors; there is no distinction in rank or power between Mary and John, since neither has any power except what Christ gives them.  Pierre did not, indeed, put the Mother on her knees before the Son, as you can see her at Amiens and in later churches,—­certainly bad taste in Mary’s own palace; but he allowed her no distinction which is not her strict right.