s; for as a guest it is your privilege. But here outside
I am still speaking as one with authority and unabashed; for I know not,
and will not let myself fancy, how the reader will censure me. Though
the little that need be said may be said briefly, I trust the reader
will be a reader gentle enough to permit me graciously this word of
general comment upon the whole work.

From the mediaeval _Ladies' Book_, of a kind that will be referred to in
the following pages, to the very latest volume of _Social England_, or
more aptly, perhaps, to the most local and frivolous _Woman's World_
edited by an Eve in your daily paper, all the little repositories of
ebbing gossip help immensely in the composition of a picture of the life
of any period. They are not history; by the dignified historian of a few
generations ago they were neglected if not scorned; but more and more
are they coming to their own as material for history. In like manner the
volume hardly claims to be a formal history, but rather ancillary to
history. It has been the aim to present pictures from history, scenes
from the lives of historic women, but above and through all to give as
definite an idea as might be of the life of women at various periods in
the history of mediaeval France.

The keenness of your appetite for the repast spread will be the measure
of the author's success. But whether I have been successful or not, the
purpose was as has been said. Figures more or less familiar in history
have been selected as the centrepieces; but scarcely anywhere have I
felt myself bound to expound at length the political history of France:
that was a business in which few women had a controlling voice, however
lively their interest may have been, however pitifully or tragically
their fate may have been influenced by battle or politics or mere
masculine capricious passion.

"Theirs not to reason why;
Theirs but to do or die,"

may be said of the soldier. Of these women of mediaeval France, as of
all in the good days of old, it might be better said that it was not
even theirs to do; the relief of action was not theirs; but to suffer
and to die, without question. Yet the life was not all pain and
suffering and sadness, as the scenes depicted will show. It is merely
that the laughter has fallen fainter and fainter and died away--comedy
perishes too often with the age that laughed at it--while the tears have
left their stain.

With this little hint to