CHAPTER X.
CHARMS AND PHILTRES.
Let no one hastily conclude from the foregoing chapter that I attempt to whiten, to acquit entirely, the dismal bride of the Devil. If she often did good, she could also do no small amount of ill. There is no great power which is not abused. And this one had three centuries of actual reigning, in the interlude between two worlds, the older dying and the new struggling painfully to begin. The Church, which in the quarrels of the sixteenth century will regain some of her strength, at least for fighting, in the fourteenth is down in the mire. Look at the truthful picture drawn by Clémangis. The nobles, so proudly arrayed in their new armour, fall all the more heavily at Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt. All who survive end by being prisoners in England. What a theme for ridicule! The citizens, the very peasants make merry and shrug their shoulders. This general absence of the lords gave, I fancy, no small encouragement to the Sabbath gatherings which had always taken place, but at this time might first have grown into vast popular festivals.
How mighty the power thus wielded by Satan’s sweetheart, who cures, foretels, divines, calls up the souls of the dead; who can throw a spell upon you, turn you into a hare or wolf, enable you to find a treasure, and, best of all, ensure your being beloved! It is an awful power which combines all others. How could a stormy soul, a soul most commonly gangrened, and sometimes grown utterly wayward, have helped employing it to wreak her hate and revenge; sometimes even out of a mere delight in malice and uncleanness?
All that once was told the confessor, is now imparted to her: not only the sins already done, but those also which folk purpose doing. She holds each by her shameful secret, by the avowal of her uncleanest desires. To her they entrust both their bodily and mental ills; the lustful heats of a blood inflamed and soured; the ceaseless prickings of some sharp, urgent, furious desire.
To her they all come: with her there is no shame. In plain blunt words they beseech her for life, for death, for remedies, for poisons. Thither comes a young woman, to ask through her tears for the means of saving her from the fruits of her sin. Thither comes the step-mother—a common theme in the Middle Ages—to say that the child of a former marriage eats well and lives long. Thither comes the sorrowing wife whose children year by year are born only to die. And now, on the other hand, comes a youth to buy at any cost the burning draught that shall trouble the heart of some haughty dame, until, forgetful of the distance between them, she has stooped to look upon her little page.
In these days there are but two types, two forms of marriage, both of them extreme and outrageous.
The scornful heiress of a fief, who brings her husband a crown or a broad estate, an Eleanor of Guyenne for instance, will, under her husband’s very eyes, hold her court of lovers, keeping herself under very slight control. Let us leave romances and poems, to look at the reality in its dread march onward to the unbridled rage of the daughters of Philip the Fair, of the cruel Isabella, who by the hands of her lovers impaled Edward II. The insolence of the feudal women breaks out diabolically in the triumphant two-horned bonnet and other brazen-faced fashions.
But in this century, when classes are beginning to mingle slightly, the woman of a lower rank, when she marries a lord, has to fear the hardest trials. So says the truthful history of the humble, the meek, the patient Griselda. In a more popular form it becomes the tale of Blue-Beard, a tale which seems to me quite earnest and historical. The wife so often killed and replaced by him could only have been his vassal. He would have reckoned wholly otherwise with the daughter or sister of a baron, who might avenge her. If I am not misled by a specious conjecture, we must believe that this tale is of the fourteenth century, and not of those preceding, in which the lord would never have deigned to take a wife below himself.