Ch. 13 - Les Miracles de Notre Dame - Page 2

after all, not wholly inconsequent; their attachment to
Mary rested on an instinct of self-preservation. They knew their own
peril. If there was to be a future life, Mary was their only hope.
She alone represented Love. The Trinity were, or was, One, and
could, by the nature of its essence, administer justice alone. Only
childlike illusion could expect a personal favour from Christ. Turn
the dogma as one would, to this it must logically come. Call the
three Godheads by what names one liked, still they must remain One;
must administer one justice; must admit only one law. In that law,
no human weakness or error could exist; by its essence it was
infinite, eternal, immutable. There was no crack and no cranny in
the system, through which human frailty could hope for escape. One
was forced from corner to corner by a remorseless logic until one
fell helpless at Mary's feet.

Without Mary, man had no hope except in atheism, and for atheism the
world was not ready. Hemmed back on that side, men rushed like sheep
to escape the butcher, and were driven to Mary; only too happy in
finding protection and hope in a being who could understand the
language they talked, and the excuses they had to offer. How
passionately they worshipped Mary, the Cathedral of Chartres shows;
and how this worship elevated the whole sex, all the literature and
history of the time proclaim. If you need more proof, you can read
more Petrarch; but still one cannot realize how actual Mary was, to
the men and women of the Middle Ages, and how she was present, as a
matter of course, whether by way of miracle or as a habit of life,
throughout their daily existence. The surest measure of her reality
is the enormous money value they put on her assistance, and the art
that was lavished on her gratification, but an almost equally
certain sign is the casual allusion, the chance reference to her,
which assumes her presence.

The earliest prose writer in the French language, who gave a picture
of actual French life, was Joinville; and although he wrote after
the death of Saint Louis and of William of Lorris and Adam de la
Halle, in the full decadence of Philip the Fair, toward 1300, he had
been a vassal of Thibaut and an intimate friend of Louis, and his
memories went back to the France of Blanche's regency. Born in 1224,
he must have seen in his youth the struggles of Thibaut against the
enemies of Blanche, and in fact his memoirs contain Blanche's
emphatic letter forbidding Thibaut to marry Yolande of Brittany. He
knew Pierre de Dreux well, and when they were captured by the
Saracens at Damietta, and thrown into the hold of a galley, "I had
my feet right on the face of the Count Pierre de Bretagne, whose
feet, in turn, were by my