Chapter 38 - Page 2

the stanza about the
Duchess Margaret coming to watch the builders on
her palfry white. Then there came to me something
in regard to the moon shining on winter nights through
the cold clere-story. The tone of the place at that
hour was not at all lunar; it was cold and bright, but
with the chill of an autumn morning; yet this, even
with the fact of the unexpected remoteness of the
church from the Jura added to it, did not prevent me
from feeling that I looked at a monument in the pro-
duction of which - or at least in the effect of which
on the tourist mind of to-day - Matthew Arnold had
been much concerned. By a pardonable license he
has placed it a few miles nearer to the forests of the
Jura than it stands at present. It is very true that,
though the mountains in the sixteenth century can
hardly have been in a different position, the plain
which separates the church from them may have been
bedecked with woods. The visitor to-day cannot help
wondering why the beautiful building, with its splendid
works of art, is dropped down in that particular spot,
which looks so accidental and arbitrary. But there
are reasons for most things, and there were reasons
why the church of Brou should be at Brou, which is
a vague little suburb of a vague little town.

The responsibility rests, at any rate, upon the
Duchess Margaret, - Margaret of Austria, daughter of
the Emperor Maximilian and his wife Mary of Bur-
gundy, daughter of Charles the Bold. This lady has
a high name in history, having been regent of the
Netherlands in behalf of her nephew, the Emperor
Charles V., of whose early education she had had the
care. She married in 1501 Philibert the Handsome,
Duke of Savoy, to whom the province of Bresse be-
longed, and who died two years later. She had been
betrothed, is a child, to Charles VIII. of France, and
was kept for some time at the French court, - that of
her prospective father-in-law, Louis XI.; but she was
eventually repudiated, in order that her _fiance_ might
marry Anne of Brittany, - an alliance so magnificently
political that we almost condone the offence to a
sensitive princess. Margaret did not want for hus-
bands, however, inasmuch as before her marriage to
Philibert she had been united to John of Castile, son
of Ferdinand V., King of Aragon, - an episode ter-
minated, by the death of the Spanish prince, within a
year. She was twenty-two years regent of the Nether-
lands, and died at fifty-one, in 1530. She might have
been, had she chosen, the wife, of Henry VII. of Eng-
land. She was one of the signers of the League of
Cambray, against the Venetian republic, and was a
most politic, accomplished, and judicious princess.
She