, since Pierre de la Brosse is dead,
he fills his letter to Marie with rhetorical questions of a most
disquieting nature: "What could possibly have provoked you to inflict a
death so cruel upon an innocent child (Prince Louis) whose tender years
could give no just grounds for hate?" If Marie was guiltless, it is hard
to believe that the Pope thought her so, when one reads phrases so
equivocal. She certainly had everything to gain for her own offspring by
the death of Isabelle's children; but there is no proof that she even
harbored evil designs, and the whole course of her rather quiet and
obscure life gives the lie to the evil insinuations. She was gentle,
pious according to the habit of the day, and had received a careful
education which left her not without some appreciation of arts and
letters, for we find her the patroness of a poet from her native
Brabant, Adenet le Roi, called "king of minstrels." The real facts in
the case, however, we can never know; and Marie hardly appears again in
history, though she lived on in apparent wealth and fair renown until
1321, when her death occurred.

Before Marie de Brabant died many other queens had come and gone in
Paris, during the reigns of Philippe le Bel and his sons, Louis le
Hutin, and Philippe le Long. But not one of these is of sufficient fame
or notoriety to merit extended comment; instead, we may centre our
attention upon a typical _grande dame_ of the period, a woman who was a
direct vassal of the crown and who played no small role in the affairs
of her own domain, this is the Countess Mahaut d'Artois.

Mahaut, or Matilda, was one of the high nobility, illustrious in her
birth and in her relationship to persons of some note in history, being
great-niece of Saint Louis, cousin of Philippe le Bel, grandmother of a
Duke of Burgundy and of a Count of Flanders, and, greater still, mother
of two unhappy Queens of France, the wives of Philippe V. and Charles
IV. She lived an active and a useful life, and is a character not
unpleasant to consider. From the days of her impetuous grandfather,
Robert d'Artois, brother of Saint Louis, her family had been fond of the
battlefield, on which many of them had died. Robert, first Count of
Artois, was killed at Mansourah; Mahaut's father, Robert II., had fallen
in the great massacre of the French nobility at the battle of Courtrai;
and her brother, Philippe, had fallen in another battle with the sturdy
burghers of Flanders, in 1298.