Ch. 11 - The Three Queens

After worshipping at the shrines of Saint Michael on his Mount and
of the Virgin at Chartres, one may wander far and wide over France,
and seldom feel lost; all later Gothic art comes naturally, and no
new thought disturbs the perfected form. Yet tourists of English
blood and American training are seldom or never quite at home there.
Commonly they feel it only as a stage-decoration. The twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, studied in the pure light of political
economy, are insane. The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers
under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the
eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and
greatest deity of all, the Virgin. Very rarely one lingers, with a
mild sympathy, such as suits the patient student of human error,
willing to be interested in what he cannot understand. Still more
rarely, owing to some revival of archaic instincts, he rediscovers
the woman. This is perhaps the mark of the artist alone, and his
solitary privilege. The rest of us cannot feel; we can only study.
The proper study of mankind is woman and, by common agreement since
the time of Adam, it is the most complex and arduous. The study of
Our Lady, as shown by the art of Chartres, leads directly back to
Eve, and lays bare the whole subject of sex.

If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that
Nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the
superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study
of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and
especially with queen bees. Precisely where the French man may come
in, on the genealogical tree of parthenogenesis, one hesitates to
say; but certain it is that the French woman, from very early times,
has shown qualities peculiar to herself, and that the French woman
of the Middle Ages was a masculine character. Almost any book which
deals with the social side of the twelfth century has something to
say on this subject, like the following page from M. Garreau's
volume published in 1899, on the "Social State of France during the
Crusades":--

A trait peculiar to this epoch is the close resemblance between the
manners of men and women. The rule that such and such feelings or
acts are permitted to one sex and forbidden to the other was not
fairly settled. Men had the right to dissolve in tears, and women
that of talking without prudery .... If we look at their
intellectual level, the women appear distinctly superior. They are
more serious; more subtle. With them we do not seem dealing with the
rude state of civilization that their husbands belong to .... As a
rule, the women seem to have the habit of weighing their acts; of
not yielding to