Cathédrale de Chartres; Civilization, Medieval; Mont-Saint-Michel (Abbey : France)
For us, both legends are true. They reflected, not perhaps the
character of Eleanor, but what the society liked to see acted on its
theatre of life. Eleanor's real nature in no way concerns us. The
single fact worth remembering was that she had two daughters by
Louis VII, as shown in the table; who, in due time, married--Mary,
in 1164, married Henry, the great Count of Champagne; Alix, at the
same time, became Countess of Chartres by marriage with Thibaut, who
had driven her mother from Blois in 1152 by his marital intentions.
Henry and Thibaut were brothers whose sister Alix had married Louis
VII in 1160, eight years after the divorce. The relations thus
created were fantastic, especially for Queen Eleanor, who, besides
her two French daughters, had eight children as Queen of England.
Her second son, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, born in 1157, was affianced
in 1174 to a daughter of Louis VII and Alix, a child only six years
old, who was sent to England to be brought up as future queen. This
was certainly Eleanor's doing, and equally certain was it that the
child came to no good in the English court. The historians, by
exception, have not charged this crime to Queen Eleanor; they
charged it to Eleanor's husband, who passed most of his life in
crossing his wife's political plans; but with politics we want as
little as possible to do. We are concerned with the artistic and
social side of life, and have only to notice the coincidence that
while the Virgin was miraculously using the power of spiritual love
to elevate and purify the people, Eleanor and her daughters were
using the power of earthly love to discipline and refine the courts.
Side by side with the crude realities about them, they insisted on
teaching and enforcing an ideal that contradicted the realities, and
had no value for them or for us except in the contradiction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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