trees. In
the palace there is music and singing. Christine is seated in a
tapestried hall with one or two esquires who prefer to discourse of
love to joining in the jollity. After a time the talk turns on fickle
men, and Christine brings forth from her vast storehouse of knowledge
classical and mediaeval examples. As she mentions Theseus, and recalls
his baseness to Ariadne, she points to the tapestry on the wall before
them, where the story is woven. This little touch makes the scene very
real to us, for the record of the purchase of this tapestry, with the
price of twelve hundred francs paid for it, may still be found amongst
the royal inventories.

There is such a volume and variety of works from Christine's pen that
it is no easy task to make a fair selection. One of the most
significant, since it deals with a subject which permeated mediaeval
thought, and on which she was wont to dwell, is _La Mutation de
fortune_, "Fortune more inconstant than the moon," says Christine. In
it she writes with her heart in her hand, as it were, telling first of
the sore havoc Fortune has wrought amongst those most dear to her. Yet
though her own heart has been torn on the Wheel of Fortune, she stands
before her fellow sufferers like some figure of Hope pointing upward,
where, she says, wrong is surely righted. And thus she turns to the
world in general, not in the spirit of the pessimist, but rather in
that of the philosopher. She well knows that Fortune is no blindfolded
goddess turning writhing humanity on a wheel, but a something rooted
in ourselves, and she has pity for "la povre fragilite humaine."
Though so independent and advanced in thought, she is still found
clinging in her writings to mediaeval forms. As a setting for her
thoughts on Fortune's changes, she makes use of the favourite simile
of a castle--here the Castle of Fortune--as representing the world,
wherein the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, jostle one
another. She criticises all men, from the prince to the pauper, but
not women, since these have been sufficiently criticised and decried.
It is like the prelude to a _Dance of Death_. Then she tells of the
paintings on the walls of this imaginary castle, and uses this
mediaeval fancy, itself borrowed from the classics (_Met._ ii. 5. 770),
to give what is really a history of the world as she knew it, written
to demonstrate the instability of all earthly conditions.

Once again, with her versatile gifts,