iding his time; and now an
accident supervened to revive his hopes of better fortune in a new
hearing before the royal court. Of course, there was a woman in this
case, one who does not play a very creditable part. In 1328, Thierry
d'Hirecon had been elected to the episcopal see of Arras, but had died
in a few months after his election. After his death, which was a serious
loss to Mahaut, the episcopal palace was cleansed, by her orders, of the
presence of Thierry's infamous concubine, Jeanne de Divion, who had fled
to the arms of the unscrupulous old churchman from the indignant
vengeance of an outraged husband. Jeanne de Divion, finding herself
driven forth by Mahaut, and forgotten in the will of Thierry, from whose
senile infatuation she had hoped great things, resolved to be avenged on
Mahaut. She fled from Arras to the service of the ambitious and
unscrupulous Jeanne de Valois, sister of Philippe VI., and wife of
Robert d'Artois.

Jeanne de Divion was full of vague tales of the valuable papers
belonging to the county of Artois which she had seen in the possession
of Thierry, and the two women soon saw that some capital could be made
for the claims of Robert d'Artois. Robert himself seems to have been
reluctant, at first, to have any dealings with the degraded paramour of
Thierry d'Hirecon; in place of vague asseverations of what she had seen
among the papers of Thierry he demanded the documents themselves, if
there were any. It is probable that at the time there were no documents;
but Jeanne de Divion was resourceful and not too nice in regard to
matters of conscience. Going to Arras to search among the papers of
Thierry, she returned with an alleged treaty negotiated in 1281 between
the paternal and maternal grand-fathers of Robert, under the terms of
which the customs of Artois were set aside and the succession guaranteed
to Philippe d'Artois's children, of whom Robert was the representative.

Robert's scruples were laid at rest when this very questionable
document, of which nobody had ever heard a word, was put into his hands.
He wrote to his brother-in-law, now King of France, to demand a new
investigation of the claims to Artois. Meanwhile, the Countess Mahaut
set about collecting testimony in rebuttal, aiming especially to show
the falsity of the alleged document containing the treaty. She arrested
two servants of Jeanne de Divion, who testified, in the presence of
several witnesses and of a notary who took