Robert's scruples were laid at rest when this very questionable document, of which nobody had ever heard a word, was put into his hands. He wrote to his brother-in-law, now King of France, to demand a new investigation of the claims to Artois. Meanwhile, the Countess Mahaut set about collecting testimony in rebuttal, aiming especially to show the falsity of the alleged document containing the treaty. She arrested two servants of Jeanne de Divion, who testified, in the presence of several witnesses and of a notary who took down the depositions, that the treaty in question had been written by one Jacques Rondelet, clerk of Arras, at the dictation of Jeanne de Divion, on her recent visit to Arras. Moreover, the countess had the wisdom to get these witnesses to testify that they had not been coerced by her but testified of their own free will and accord. Then she interrogated Jacques Rondelet, who confirmed all that the servants had said, adding that he had written at dictation, and under oath of secrecy, from a document which Jeanne de Divion would not let him see.
The proofs of the forgery, one would think, were sufficient before the cause came to trial; yet, after a statement of the principal allegations on both sides, the king adjourned the hearing to another day. But that day was not to dawn for Mahaut. On November 23, 1329, the countess was at Poissy, where she dined with the king, going on to the convent of Maubuisson to pass the night, and thence to Paris next day. Here she fell suddenly ill; and her own physician, Thomas le Miesier, was sent for in all haste from Arras. The crude or dangerous remedies of the medicine of the day were powerless to relieve Mahaut; phlebotomy and purgatives probably served but to exhaust her already depleted strength, and the physicians recognized that her end was at hand. Couriers rode in haste from the Hotel d'Artois in Paris to Queen Jeanne, to the Duke of Burgundy, to the Count of Flanders, on the 26th, and as many as three to the king next day, bearing news of the great countess's peril. Jeanne came to her mother with all speed, but the end had come before she could reach Paris; the good Countess of Artois breathed her last on November 27th.
She who had expended considerable sums in the pomp of funerals, tombs, and effigies for others was buried very simply, at her own request, in the Abbey of Maubuisson, where her grave was marked at first by a plain, flat copper plate, hardly raised above the level of the pavement. In accordance with a custom not unusual in her day, the body was opened and the heart taken to the Franciscan Church in Paris, where it was interred, as she had directed, juxta sepulturam Roberti carissimi filii mei--"beside the grave of my very dear son Robert."
Judging from the features of a statue representing Mahaut, which was formerly in a church in Arras and was copied in miniature by an artist of the seventeenth century, the countess was a woman of large and commanding figure, with features rather masculine and strongly marked in their regularity. If one may say so, the sculptor has drawn for us Mahaut's character as well as her features; she was of the masculine type, strong and energetic rather than lovable. For a woman who would hold her own in those days, the qualities she possessed were, in fact, essential; to rule Artois in the fourteenth century there was need of an amazon rather than of a lovely, fragile, soft-hearted daughter of love. We do not mean that Mahaut was cold, heartless, merely a politician; she was far better both in morals and in kindness of heart than the average lady of her time. She was generous, and yet not a hopeless spendthrift; she was pious and devoted to the glorious memory of her great-uncle Saint Louis, whom she must have seen when a child, and yet not a narrow bigot, displaying her religious feeling rather in acts of charity than in acts of pure devotion. No niche awaits her among the heroines of France, for she is a figure neither heroic nor romantic; but she lived her life, the full, healthy, and useful life of a stirring and good lady of the manor in the fourteenth century.
CHAPTER IX
JEANNE DE MONTFORT
WE are now coming to a period in the history of France when woman, though she may not play a part either more prominent or more honorable, will be a centre of universal interest to the subjects of France and of England. Much ink and much fluid of a brighter hue and a more precious quality will be shed in the war between the lawyers and the soldiers of France on the one hand, and those of England on the other; and all to establish the legal status of woman in the eyes of the French law. The great question is: Shall the succession to the crown of France be governed by the laws and customs prevailing in many other countries and in a large part of France itself, whereby women are entitled to inherit equally with men; or shall the ancient law of the Salian Franks apply, the Loi Salique, "let no part of the Salian land pass into the hands of a woman"? Since the question has been argued by many a scholiast and many a historian and settled for all time by the arms of Frenchmen defending their right to rule France as seemed best to them, we shall give but small attention to the niceties of the legal argument; but an exposition of the principal facts seems essential.
The argument of the French lawyers was that the Salian land was now represented by domains of the crown; and since the protection of the Salian land necessitated the guardianship of a man, a fortiori must the guarding of the kingdom demand the power of the sword rather than the gentler distaff. Feeling that we owe some apology for clothing in figurative language the simple statement that no woman could wear the crown of France, none more apt can we find than a literal transcription of one of the arguments used by the French lawyers, which suggested the unfortunate distaff. It ran thus: In the Gospel of Saint Matthew (6: 28) one reads: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet 'I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Now France was the kingdom of the lily, witness the fleur-de-lis upon the royal arms; lilies, according to Scripture, are gloriously arrayed, though they cannot spin: ergo, the kingdom of the lily should never pass to the distaff.
There were of course arguments of more weight than this, which we have ventured to present merely for the sake of its quaintness, characteristic as it is of the day when tireless pedants were wont to debate in this fashion all things in heaven and on earth. Closer study of the Salic law itself, nevertheless, was not reassuring to the adherents of France; for there they found one of the formulas of Marculf proving that, from the days of the Merovingian kings, the terre salique, the allodial land, could be inherited by a woman. This ancient act reads: "To my dear daughter: It is among us a custom ancient but impious that sisters shall not share with their brothers in the heritage of the paternal land. I have considered that you all came to me alike from God, that you should therefore find an equal share of love in me, and, after my death, enjoy equally the heritage of my worldly goods. For these reasons, my sweet daughter, I constitute you by this letter a legitimate and equal co-heir with your brothers in all my estate, in such sort that you shall share with them not only the acquired property but the allodial land." In the abstract, therefore, as much could be said for as against the claims of a woman to succeed to the crown of France. There could be no question, however, that the long established custom of the kingdom had excluded women, and that this exclusion had operated to the great profit of the kingdom, by keeping it under the stronger rule of men, and more still by preventing it from passing under the control of foreign princes who had married French princesses. As a French constitutional lawyer has remarked: "France is the only one of the great states of Europe where we see the crown remaining for more than eight centuries in the same family.... It is to the Salic Law that France owes the long persistence of the Capetian dynasty."