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.

Specially remarkable in the moving tale of _Griselda_ is the fact,
that throughout her heavy trials, she never seeks support in being
devout or in loving another. She is evidently faithful, chaste, and
pure. It never comes into her mind to love elsewhere.

Of the two feudal women, the Heiress and Griselda, it is peculiarly
the first who has her household of gentlemen, her courts of love, who
shows favour to the humblest lovers, encouraging them, delivering, as
Eleanor did, the famous sentence, soon to become quite classical:
"There can be no love between married folk."

Thereupon a secret hope, but hot and violent withal, arises in more
than one young heart. If he must give himself to the Devil, he will
rush full tilt on this adventurous intrigue. Let the castle be never
so surely closed, one fine opening is still left for Satan. In a game
so perilous, what chance of success reveals itself? Wisdom answers,
None. But what if Satan said, Yes?

We must remember how great a distance feudal pride set between the
nobles themselves. Words are misleading: one _cavalier_ might be far
below another.

The knight bann