hree years they had sinned many times with the princesses.
The right of trial by battle, for which the knights first asked, had
been sternly denied them; there was but the rack, and after that a
shameful death for those who had dared to bring shame upon the royal
family. With the ingenuity of the Middle Ages in devising exquisite
torments, the two young men were publicly flayed alive, cruelly
mutilated, and tortured as long as life could be kept in their miserable
bodies. There were other accomplices in the disgrace of the princesses;
these, too, when they were not of rank sufficiently high to protect
them, were tortured, sewn up in sacks, and cast into the Seine. An
unfortunate Dominican monk, accused of having debauched the princesses
by compounding love philtres and otherwise exercising the black art, was
delivered over into the hands of the Inquisition; he was never heard of
afterward.

The confessions of their lovers left no doubt as to the guilt of Blanche
and Marguerite. The former, still but a girl, had been led into her evil
ways by Marguerite, and pitifully owned her sin, pleading for
forgiveness in accents of such sincere repentance that all who heard her
were moved. But her husband was inexorable; and she remained in prison
until 1322, when Charles, having become king, obtained a dissolution of
the marriage on the ground that Mahaut had been his godmother and that
this established a spiritual relationship for which he had forgotten to
ask a dispensation when he married Blanche. Then Charles married Marie
de Luxembourg, and his unhappy divorced wife was compelled to retire to
a nunnery.

It was said that in her prison of Chateau Gaillard she had suffered
violence from her jailer; it is more charitable to suppose that this is
so than to assume, as some do, that she was so depraved in morals as
voluntarily to abandon herself to debauchery; and one must always
remember that it was to the interest of the court party to represent her
in colors as dark as possible. The belief in her guilt, nevertheless,
cannot be avoided; and even her mother gives silent proof of her belief
in it, for after the disgrace of her daughter, that daughter's name
appears no more in the accounts of Mahaut's household. Blanche retired
to the convent of Maubuisson, where she took the veil in 1325, and died
in the next year. Under "a large white stone, much carved and decorated
with roses, without any inscription, and bearing a figure repre