226           MONT-SAINT MICHEL AND  CHARTRES
Maintes paroles en dit en
Comme dlseult et de Tristan.
Had this been all, she would have cared no more than Eleanor or
any other queen had cared, for in French drama, real or imaginary,
such charges were not very serious and hardly uncomplimentary; but
Iseult had never been accused, over and above her arbitrary views on
the marriage-contract, of acting as an accomplice with Tristan in
poisoning King Marc. French convention required that Thibaut
should have poisoned Louis VIII for love of the Queen, and that
this secret reciprocal love should control their lives. Fortunately for
Blanche she was a devout ally of the Church, and the Church be-
lieved evil only of enemies. The legate and the prelates rallied to her
support and after eight years of desperate struggle they crushed Pierre
Mauclerc and saved Thibaut and Blanche.
For us the poetry is history, and the facts are false. French art
starts not from facts, but from certain assumptions as conventional as
a legendary window, and the commonest convention is the Woman.
The fact, then as now, was Power, or its equivalent in exchange, but
Frenchmen, while struggling for the Power, expressed it in terms of
Art. They looked on life as a drama, — and on drama as a phase of
life — in which the bystanders were bound to assume and accept the
regular stage-plot. That the plot might be altogether untrue to real
life affected in no way its interest. To them Thibaut and Blanche were
bound to act Tristan and Isolde. Whatever they were when off the
stage, they were lovers on it. Their loves were as real and as reason-
able as the worship of the Virgin. Courteous love was avowedly a
form of drama, but not the less a force of society. Illusion for illusion,
courteous love, in Thibaut's hands, or in the hands of Dante and
Petrarch, was as substantial as any other convention; — the balance
of trade, the rights of man, or the Athanasian Creed. In that sense
the illusions alone were real ; if the Middle Ages had reflected only
what was practical, nothing would have survived for us.