THE OLD FRENCH COURT.*
MRS. BEA.RNE has again given us a delightful book, and, with all due allowance for the former volume containing less familiar information, we must congratulate her on the greater ease with which this continuation of her history of the Queen. Consortsof ranc,e can be read. The illustrations by Mr. Beanie are charming,—though he will have to forgive us for candidly remarking that he has much idealised some of the scenes. Mrs. Bearne's volume will put the general reader in possession of certain facts with regard to the latter end of the Middle Ages in France which will cer- tainly militate against the usual ideas of the person with a popular knowledge of history ; although, in spite of,- or because of this, she will entertain him the more. We do not know that even he, as Mrs. Bearne thinks, is ignorant enough to suppose that no career was open to talent in the Middle Ages. Ecclesiastics, who were in those days men of both worlds, were keenly alive to the advantages .of connections with great houses, and they valued, as do all men of sense, the forces that lie latent in men of pedigree, and the conveniences that ensue in dealing with people who play the game of life after the rules of gentle breeding. But, if brains and character appeared elsewhere than in scions of great houses, the ecclesiastical machinery could .deal with such men both nationally and internationally; and there were many careers that feudalism, war, and religion, and the frequent combination of all three, offered to popular abilities most easily picked out when Church and State were really identical for all practical purposes.
• Pictures of the Old French Court. By Catherine Beam. Illustrated by Edward Warne. London: T. Fisher lJnwin. [10s. 6c1.]
But persons capable of taking thought for days which are no more will not turn to Mrs. Beanie for estimates of the strength of ecclesiastical and international currents of affairs, but rather to what may be, with all respect, designated the valuable gossip which her work brings before us, and in which she illustratesfeatures and characters of the Middle Ages, —material capable of evoking alike the interest of the frivolous and the serious; for instance, as to the important influence upon dress exercised by Isabeau, Queen-Consort of Charles VI. No woman—of any importance as a woman, that is to say—can fail to note, not only that Isabeau encouraged the sugar-loaf head- dresses of the period, but that she practically fixed the fashion of low-necked Court dresses for Western Europe, which had been unknown to Christendom before the time of that able pioneer. Isabeau's claims to respect in other directions are not remarkable, we regret to say ; although she bore twelve children, she also neglected them, and the poor King, in the intervals of his insanity, seems to have had to endure some housekeeping scenes, in which he was told that the Royal children and their household had not suffi- cient to eat or to wear. The Royal lady, however, as so often happens to such women, developed a passion for pet dogs and monkeys. With her terror of thunder-storms, love of extravagance, desire for personal comfort, selfish absorption in the company of her favourite, her petty jealousies as regards what concerned herself, and her more than tolerance of scenes of disorder and license, we are at once in touch with the stamp of woman who, in the Court or in the slums, and in all intermediate gradations of abode or sojourn, thinks of nothing except how she can secure what she is often pleased to describe as a "good time." There is no case in which this does not imply that the surroundings of such a woman will have been bad. No historical ghost need come from the grave to tell us this ; another example is found in the wreckage floating round Isabeau's name, standing out, even in those days of license and Court luxury, in evil notoriety. As Mrs. Beanie says :—
"All the researches into the history of their times, from which these records are drawn, seem to prove that during the eight reigns in question most of the Queens of Prance really were dis- tinguished for their excellent qualities, and that except the unlucky Charlotte de Savoie they were all more or less good- looking ; Blanche de Navarre, Isabeau de Baviere and Marie d'Anjou being remarkably beautiful; and that at any rate Blanche de Navarre, the three Jeannes, wives of Phillippe de Valois, Jean and Charles V., and Anne de Bretagne, were highly cultivated women, possessing superior talents and strongly marked characters. In Isabeau de Baviere we find an entirely different personality?'
Indeed, the various sketches of womanhood afforded by these glimpses into old records, so admirably treated by our conversational author, rather distract us from their surround- ings. It is impossible, indeed, to read the history of France without wondering at what period and by what means that nation could have saved its soul alive, and if the Revolution last century were at all worse than many other events in the story of those who were never welded together, and who always seemed ready to develop into futile inhumanities even when most civilised. The inhumanities of the noble and the atrocities of the peasant merely differed in kind, not in degree.
But to turn to the lighter portion of the book before us. In it the reader will gain a vivid idea of the esthetic side of the Middle Ages. These times, for the convenience of historians, practically end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but they are also prolonged into the whole period covered by this book, namely, till the beginning of the sixteenth century. They mean ages of faith and of superstition, of luxury and of misery, of breadth and of narrowness. No one is con- cerned to deny the special capacity of the fifteenth century for devising and enjoying pageantry. There are many signs in our own day, and in London in particular, that to wear a badge and to see a sight, to be jostled in a crowd and to view a procession, are beginning once more to take their places in popular esteem. But for subtle devices and for costliness the shows of the Middle Ages cannot be matched, and, till lately, there was little attempt to rival them. Of course such processions have survived in some places: for
example, in the "Preston Guild" celebration that occurs Dent Hand tiCo.ng. -Us. ea. net.]
every twenty years in Preston, Lancashire, we have the un- interrupted continuance of a feature of medieval life.
Among the luxuries mentioned by Mrs. Beanie are white silk sheets, richly embroidered pillows, one of which had on it, a knight, a lady, two fountains, and two lions," all kinds of jewelled embroideries and dresses, five new bellows carved and ornamented with gold," houppelandes, worn both by men and women,—" an enormously long trailing robe or mantle with loose sleeves, made of cloth, silk, or velvet, and trimmed with furs and rich embroideries.- The spoils accumulated by the monasteries were such as to make some of them into most wonderful museums, and even the mediceval fair was an educational exhibition of the fine arts, as far as esthetics were concerned. It was the place to which all the merchants and travellers took their spoils, and, while private views took place at any palace, to the fairs people looked for their news and opportunity to purchase their costly dowries and other gifts. Mrs. Beanie's volume takes us back to times which were mad and bad and sweet, and the actors in them were very merry and often very miserable indeed.
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