Eleanora completely. She despised her husband
herself, and ridiculed him to others, saying that he had made himself
look like an old priest. In a word, all her love for him was entirely
gone. Both parties being thus very willing to have the marriage
annulled, they agreed to put it on the ground of their relationship,
in order to avoid scandal.

At any rate, the marriage was dissolved, and Eleanora set out from
Paris to return to Bordeaux, the capital of her own country. Henry was
to meet her on the way. Her road lay along the banks of the Loire.
Here she stopped for a day or two. The count who ruled this province,
who was a very gay and handsome man, offered her his hand. He wished
to add her dominions to his own. Eleanora refused him. The count
resolved not to take the refusal, and, under some pretext or other, he
detained her in his castle, resolving to keep her there until she
should consent. But Eleanora was not a woman to be conquered by such a
method as this. She pretended to acquiesce in the detention, and to be
contented, but this was only to put the count off his guard; and then,
watching her opportunity, she escaped from the castle in the night;
and getting into a boat, which she had caused to be provided for the
purpose, she went down the river to the town of Tours, which was some
distance below, and in the dominions of another sovereign.

In going on from Tours toward her own home, she encountered and
narrowly escaped another danger. It seems that Geoffrey Plantagenet,
the brother of Henry, whom she had engaged to marry, conceived the
design of seizing her and compelling her to marry him instead of his
brother. It may seem strange that any one should be so unprincipled
and base as to attempt thus to circumvent his own brother, and take
away from him his intended wife; but it was not a strange thing at all
for the members of the royal and princely families of those days to
act in this manner toward each other. It was the usual and established
condition of things among these families that the different members of
them should be perpetually intriguing and manoeuvring one against
the other, brother against sister, husband against wife, and father
against son. In a vast number of instances these contentions broke out
into open war, and the wars thus waged between the nearest relatives
were of the most desperate and merciless character.

It was therefore a very moderate and inconsiderable deed of brotherly
hos