Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Part 23

When our dear Lord, who deigned to write With his own hand that in his sight Those in his kingdom held most dear Father and mother honoured here,-- When He saw His Mother's face He rose and said with gentle grace: "Well are you come, my heart's desire!"

Like loving son, like gracious sire; Took her hand gently in His own; Gently placed her on His throne, Wishing her graciously good cheer:-- "What brings my gentle Mother here, My sister, and my dearest friend?"

One can see Queen Blanche going to beg--or command--a favour of her son, King Louis, and the stately dignity of their address, while Saint Peter and the virgins remain in the antechamber; but, as for Saint Peter's lost soul, the request was a mere form, and the doors of paradise were instantly opened to it, after such brief formalities as should tend to preserve the technical record of the law-court. We tread here on very delicate ground. Gaultier de Coincy, being a priest and a prior, could take liberties which we cannot or ought not to take. The doctrines of the Church are too serious and too ancient to be wilfully misstated, and the doctrines of what is called Mariolatry were never even doctrines of the Church. Yet it is true that, in the hearts of Mary's servants, the Church and its doctrines were at the mercy of Mary's will. Gaultier de Coincy claimed that Mary exasperated the devils by exercising a wholly arbitrary and illegitimate power. Gaultier not merely admitted, but frankly a.s.serted, that this was the fact:--

Font li deables:--"de cest plait, Mal por mal, a.s.sez miex nous plest Que nous aillons au jugement Li haut jugeur qui ne ment.

C'au plait n'au jugement sa mere De droit jugier est trop avere; Mais dieu nous juge si adroit, Plainement nous lest notre droit.

Sa mere juge en tel maniere Qu'elle nous met touz jors arriere Quant nous cuidons estre devant.

En ciel et en terre est plus Dame Par un pet.i.t que Diex ne soit.

Il l'aimme tant et tant la croit, N'est riens qu'elle face ne die Qu'il desveile ne contredie.

Quant qu'elle veut li fait acroire, S'elle disoit la pie est noire Et l'eue trouble est toute clere: Si diroit il voir dit ma mere!"

"In this law-suit," say the devils, "Since it is a choice of evils, We had best appeal on high To the Judge Who does not lie.

What is law to any other, 'T is no use pleading with His Mother; But G.o.d judges us so true That He leaves us all our due.

His Mother judges us so short That she throws us out of court When we ought to win our cause.

In heaven and earth she makes more laws By far, than G.o.d Himself can do, He loves her so, and trusts her so, There's nothing she can do or say That He'll refuse, or say her nay.

Whatever she may want is right, Though she say that black is white, And dirty water clear as snow:-- My Mother says it, and it's so!"

If the Virgin took the feelings of the Trinity into consideration, or recognized its existence except as her Son, the case has not been reported, or, at all events, has been somewhat carefully kept out of sight by the Virgin's poets. The devils were emphatic in denouncing Mary for absorbing the whole Trinity. In one sharply disputed case in regard to a villain, or labourer, whose soul the Virgin claimed because he had learned the "Ave Maria," the devils became very angry, indeed, and protested vehemently:--

Li lait maufe, li rechinie Adonc ont ris et eschinie.

C'en font il:--"Merveillans merveille!

Por ce vilain plate oreille Aprent vo Dame a saluer, Se nous vorro trestous tuer Se regarder osons vers s'ame.

De tout le monde vieut estre Dame!

Ains nule dame ne fu tiez.

II est avis qu'ele soit Diex Ou qu'ele ait Diex en main bornie.

Nul besoigne n'est fournie, Ne terrienne ne celestre, Que toute Dame ne veille estre.

Il est avis que tout soit suen; Dieu ne deable n'i ont rien."

The ugly demons laugh outright And grind their teeth with envious spite; Crying:--"Marvel marvellous!

Because that flat-eared ploughman there Learned to make your Dame a prayer, She would like to kill us all Just for looking toward his soul.

All the world she wants to rule!

No such Dame was ever seen!

She thinks that she is G.o.d, I ween, Or holds Him in her hollow hand.

Not a judgment or command Or an order can be given Here on earth or there in heaven, That she does not want control.

She thinks that she ordains the whole, And keeps it all for her own profit.

G.o.d nor Devil share not of it."

As regards Mary of Chartres, these charges seem to have been literally true, except so far as concerned the "laid maufe" Pierre de Dreux. Gaultier de Coincy saw no impropriety in accepting, as sufficiently exact, the allegations of the devils against the Virgin's abuse of power. Down to the death of Queen Blanche, which is all that concerns us, the public saw no more impropriety in it than Gaultier did. The ugly, envious devils, notorious as students of the Latin Quarter, were perpetually making the same charges against Queen Blanche and her son, without disturbing her authority.

No one could conceive that the Virgin held less influence in heaven than the queen mother on earth. Nevertheless there were points in the royal policy and conduct of Mary which thoughtful men even then hesitated to approve. The Church itself never liked to be dragged too far under feminine influence, although the moment it discarded feminine influence it lost nearly everything of any value to it or to the world, except its philosophy. Mary's tastes were too popular; some of the uglier devils said they were too low; many ladies and gentlemen of the "siecle" thought them disreputable, though they dared not say so, or dared say so only by proxy, as in "Auca.s.sins."

As usual, one must go to the devils for the exact truth, and in spite of their outcry, the devils admitted that they had no reason to complain of Mary's administration:--

"Les beles dames de grant pris Qui traynant vont ver et gris, Roys, roynes, dus et contesses, En enfer vienent a granz presses; Mais ou ciel vont pres tout a fait Tort et bocu et contrefait.

Ou ciel va toute la ringaille; Le grain avons et diex la paille."

"All the great dames and ladies fair Who costly robes and ermine wear, Kings, queens, and countesses and lords Come down to h.e.l.l in endless hordes; While up to heaven go the lamed, The dwarfs, the humpbacks, and the maimed; To heaven goes the whole riff-raff; We get the grain and G.o.d the chaff."

True it was, although one should not say it jestingly, that the Virgin embarra.s.sed the Trinity; and perhaps this was the reason, behind all the other excellent reasons, why men loved and adored her with a pa.s.sion such as no other deity has ever inspired: and why we, although utter strangers to her, are not far from getting down on our knees and praying to her still. Mary concentrated in herself the whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole protest against divine law; the whole contempt for human law as its outcome; the whole unutterable fury of human nature beating itself against the walls of its prison-house, and suddenly seized by a hope that in the Virgin man had found a door of escape. She was above law; she took feminine pleasure in turning h.e.l.l into an ornament; she delighted in trampling on every social distinction in this world and the next.

She knew that the universe was as unintelligible to her, on any theory of morals, as it was to her worshippers, and she felt, like them, no sure conviction that it was any more intelligible to the Creator of it. To her, every suppliant was a universe in itself, to be judged apart, on his own merits, by his love for her,--by no means on his orthodoxy, or his conventional standing in the Church, or according to his correctness in defining the nature of the Trinity. The convulsive hold which Mary to this day maintains over human imagination--as you can see at Lourdes--was due much less to her power of saving soul or body than to her sympathy with people who suffered under law,--divine or human,--justly or unjustly, by accident or design, by decree of G.o.d or by guile of Devil. She cared not a straw for conventional morality, and she had no notion of letting her friends be punished, to the tenth or any other generation, for the sins of their ancestors or the peccadilloes of Eve.

So Mary filled heaven with a sort of persons little to the taste of any respectable middle-cla.s.s society, which has trouble enough in making this world decent and pay its bills, without having to continue the effort in another. Mary stood in a Church of her own, so independent that the Trinity might have perished without much affecting her position; but, on the other hand, the Trinity could look on and see her dethroned with almost a breath of relief.

Auca.s.sins and the devils of Gaultier de Coincy foresaw her danger.

Mary's treatment of respectable and law-abiding people who had no favours to ask, and were reasonably confident of getting to heaven by the regular judgment, without expense, rankled so deeply that three hundred years later the Puritan reformers were not satisfied with abolishing her, but sought to abolish the woman altogether as the cause of all evil in heaven and on earth. The Puritans abandoned the New Testament and the Virgin in order to go back to the beginning, and renew the quarrel with Eve. This is the Church's affair, not ours, and the women are competent to settle it with Church or State, without help from outside; but honest tourists are seriously interested in putting the feeling back into the dead architecture where it belongs.

Mary was rarely harsh to any suppliant or servant, and she took no special interest in humiliating the rich or the learned or the wise.

For them, law was made; by them, law was administered; and with their doings Mary never arbitrarily interfered; but occasionally she could not resist the temptation to intimate her opinion of the manner in which the Trinity allowed their--the regular--Church to be administered. She was a queen, and never for an instant forgot it, but she took little thought about her divine rights, if she had any,--and in fact Saint Bernard preferred her without them,--while she was scandalized at the greed of officials in her Son's Court.

One day a rich usurer and a very poor old woman happened to be dying in the same town. Gaultier de Coincy did not say, as an accurate historian should, that he was present, nor did he mention names or dates, although it was one of his longest and best stories. Mary never loved bankers, and had no reason for taking interest in this one, or for doing him injury; but it happened that the parish priest was summoned to both death-beds at the same time, and neglected the old pauper in the hope of securing a bequest for his church from the banker. This was the sort of fault that most annoyed Mary in the Church of the Trinity, which, in her opinion, was not cared for as it should be, and she felt it her duty to intimate as much.

Although the priest refused to come at the old woman's summons, his young clerk, who seems to have acted as vicar though not in orders, took pity on her, and went alone with the sacrament to her hut, which was the poorest of poor hovels even for that age:--

Close de piex et de serciaus Comme une viez souz a porciaus.

Roof of hoops, and wall of logs, Like a wretched stye for hogs.

There the beggar lay, already insensible or at the last gasp, on coa.r.s.e thatch, on the ground, covered by an old hempen sack. The picture represented the extremest poverty of the thirteenth century; a hovel without even a feather bed or bedstead, as Auca.s.sins'

ploughman described his mother's want; and the old woman alone, dying, as the clerk appeared at the opening:--

Li clers qui fu moult bien apris Le cors Nostre Seigneur a pris A l'ostel a la povre fame S'en vient touz seus mes n'i treuve ame.

Si grant clarte y a veue Que grant peeur en a eue.

Ou povre lit a la vieillete Qui couvers iert d'une nateite

a.s.sises voit XII puceles Si avenans et si tres beles N'est nus tant penser i seust Qui raconter le vout peust.

A coutee voist Nostre Dame Sus le chevez la povre fame Qui por la mort sue et travaille.

La Mere Dieu d'une tovaille Qui blanche est plus que fleur de lis La grant sueur d'entor le vis A ses blanches mains li essuie.

The clerk, well in these duties taught, The body of our Saviour brought Where she lay upon her bed Without a soul to give her aid.

But such brightness there he saw As filled his mind with fear and awe.

Covered with a mat of straw The woman lay; but round and near

A dozen maidens sat, so fair No mortal man could dream such light, No mortal tongue describe the sight.

Then he saw that next the bed, By the poor old woman's head, As she gasped and strained for breath In the agony of death, Sat Our Lady,--bending low,-- While, with napkin white as snow, She dried the death-sweat on the brow.