Eleanor of Aquitaine

by Marion Meade

  The days slipped by all too swiftly for Eleanor, who now began to understand that her carefree childhood had ended the day her father died. The momentous events of the past two months had left no time for reflection and scarcely a moment for mourning. But in the Maubergeonne Tower, memories of her great stubborn father must have descended on her in painful waves of nostalgia and, judging from her activities, she seems to have been determined to make the most of her last days in Poitiers. In Paris, she would be virtually a nobody, only the wife of the heir to the throne. According to Louis, whose knowledge of worldly amusements had been severely limited by his life at Saint-Denis, the king and queen did not appreciate singing and dancing; to Eleanor they could only have sounded like a dreary lot.

  With no father or mother, no advisers except possibly her grandmother, Eleanor was obliged to rely on her own values and inclinations as far as behavior was concerned; in the days remaining she can be seen attempting to teach her socially backward husband that life was meant to be sucked and savored, and sometimes devoured whole. Accordingly, she organized a masculine entertainment for Louis and his knights, a hunting and fishing excursion, and she dispatched them to the seaside village of Talmont, where her father had kept a richly stocked game preserve. In a holiday mood, the men set off for the ocean, forgetting the suspicious Suger’s last-minute warning about one William of Lezay, a laggard castellan who had refused to render homage to the prince and who, moreover, had appropriated both the late Duke William’s castle as well as his prized white gyrfalcons from the ducal hunting ground. This sulky baron and his almost ludicrous antics troubled them so little that, en route to Talmont, the party complacently removed their chain mail and swords, sending the bulky arms on ahead with the baggage train. To their astonishment, the first knights to enter the ducal castle at Talmont were taken prisoner by Lezay, who had been hoping to bag the prince himself and hold his royal person for ransom. Within minutes, Louis experienced his first taste of hand-to-hand combat as a sword was thrust into his hand and he fought for his life. As the fracas ended, Lezay’s men were all butchered, save for a few who escaped to the sea through an underground passage. Hearing about it later, Eleanor was both horrified and passionately pleased.

  This incident, trivial enough in itself, reveals the direction in which Louis’s character and his relationship with his wife were soon to develop, because there is no question that his derring-do, less than ordinary by standards of the day, was received with high admiration by Eleanor. Thus, the shy, hesitant husband recognized a means of winning his lady’s respect; the wife fortified her lord’s valor with ego-inflating praise. From that time forward, she would coax, suggest, cheer, and dangle before his meek eyes the carrot of her beauty and affection in order to transform him into a fearless warrior. Given the circumstances of feudal life, her efforts were far from misguided.

  During that week when Eleanor and Louis took one another’s measure in the purple Poitevin nights, a courier was burning up the road between the Île-de-France and Poitiers. On August 1, the same day that the bridal party had arrived in Eleanor’s ancestral city, Louis the Fat lay dying in Paris, “excessive fevers of summer” combining with dysentery to close his days upon the earth. He preferred to die in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, but the prelates in attendance gently dissuaded him: His weight and the gravity of his condition militated against his being moved at the last hour. Resigning himself, the old king directed that a carpet be laid upon the floor and strewn with ashes in the shape of a cross. Like a helpless infant who cannot yet sit or roll over, he was lowered by the hands of others onto the cross, where he stretched out his arms and relinquished his newly expanded kingdom to a monkish youth and a maiden he had never seen.

  On a day in late August, the young queen of France arrived in the capital of that land that John of Salisbury would call “of all nations the sweetest and most civilized,” an evocative picture with which Eleanor would never wholly agree. Dismounting, she stepped down onto a mossy stump beside an olive tree and ascended a flight of broad stone stairs leading to the Cite Palace. Knights had been known to ride their horses up the stairway and into the hall, but this was not encouraged. Crowded on the western tip of its island in the middle of the Seine, the decaying tower, which the dynasty’s founder, Hugh Capet, had inherited from the Merovingian kings, could charitably be described as cramped and drafty. In marked contrast to the Maubergeonne Tower, or even to the Ombrière Palace, the Capetian royal residence appeared uncomfortably primitive, a heap of stone that gave one the eerie feeling of living in a quarry. Little light filtered through the narrow slits that passed for windows, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that the new queen could catch a glimpse of the river below or an evening star above.

  Compounding her dismay over her new home were almost instantaneous conflicts with her mother-in-law, the Dowager Queen Adelaide. At the outset, the queen mother displayed distinct animosity toward Eleanor, indeed she may have disliked her before they met, perhaps basing her preconceptions on another southerner, Constance of Provence, who had married Hugh Capet’s son Robert. Although Constance had lived a century earlier, tales of her allegedly immodest dress and language still continued to circulate among the sober Franks. In Adelaide’s opinion, Eleanor was a good deal worse, and as a result the queen could not take a step without the dowager’s icy disapproval: She must wear modest gowns and must cultivate demureness so as not to give offense: if she continued to entertain lavishly, the royal treasury would be depleted in no time; if she would only spend more hours at her prayers and at improving her use of the langue d’oil, she would have no time to think of singing and painting her face. Nothing Eleanor did was right. Adelaide’s nagging reflected the fact that, contrary to her expectations, her influence over her son had fallen into blatant eclipse. Not only had Eleanor taken over management of the household, but she had no compunctions about telling Louis what to do. To Adelaide’s dismay, her pious boy did not object to the secular frivolities without which Eleanor could not live, nor to the good-sized entourage of morally flabby Poitevins, who not only took up space in the already crowded palace but who insisted upon behaving as if they were still in the south. For the first time within memory, the hall of the palace rang with loud laughter and the songs of minstrel and jongleur, Eleanor having had the foresight to import several music makers as part of her baggage.

  Before many weeks had passed, friction arose between mother and son, but despite Adelaide’s bitter complaints to Abbot Suger, the southern high life was well enough entrenched to withstand her displeasure. Clearly the Cite Palace could not contain two women as mutually antagonistic as Adelaide and Eleanor. As a result, the old queen retired to her dower estate near Compiègne, where a few months later, in a mood so precipitate that it seemed an act of spite, she married a minor nobleman, Matthew of Montmorency.

  As autumn advanced into winter, the days grew darker and shorter, and since at times night fell not long after four o’clock in the afternoon, sensible Parisians went to bed early. For Eleanor, shivering in the unaccustomed cold, there was of course the temptation to huddle beside a charcoal brazier and indulge her passion for reading, but instead she seems to have occupied herself with plans to make life at the Cité Palace more agreeable. Orders were given for remodeling her dilapidated apartments: The window openings were enlarged and fitted with shutters, construction began on a fireplace and chimney to replace the brazier. She took infinite trouble to reorganize the management of the palace, which, in her opinion, could only be called slovenly, unsanitary, and remarkably primitive. Tablecloths and napkins—common amenities in the south—were introduced, and pages were instructed to wash their hands before serving. She dismissed the cantor at the palace’s chapel of Saint Nicholas, replacing him with one who could conduct a decent choir. In short, she behaved as do most young brides who are whisked to new homes in strange towns; she tried to make it her own.

  Apart from the many stresses to which a new wife is subject, the life o
f a queen in France during the middle of the twelfth century was not always glamorous; it could be and often was fearfully dull. God’s good time ticked slowly when daily activities consisted mainly of prescribed female duties of the type Eleanor had always disdained. If a queen had a faculty for ennui, she could exist more or less contentedly, hawking in fair weather, sitting indoors with her ladies in foul weather, and playing chess and blindman’s buff, telling stories and guessing riddles, the sort of activities we now associate with the nursery. Neither by temperament nor experience was Eleanor equipped to play such a restricted role. Much of her behavior that was considered unorthodox by the Parisians did not result from acute ignorance of their customs; rather, it was enormously difficult for her to adjust to life in the north, and thus soon after she had settled at the Cité Palace the unhappy exile began to dream of the day when she might return to her homeland.

  Initially, Eleanor had harbored hopes of transforming Louis into a gallant knight, but as time went on, she must have realized that such a metamorphosis would not take place easily, if at all. In his personal routine, Louis seemed little changed by his marriage and succession to the throne. During those first months, he resumed his monastic studies at the Church of Notre Dame and, unlike most monarchs, dressed and behaved with such unassuming simplicity that one would not have supposed him King of France. Odo de Deuil, Louis’s secretary and, later, chaplain, paints a touching picture of a young man “whose entire life is a model of virtue, for when a mere boy he began to reign, worldly glory did not cause him sensual delight.” He could not conceive of a greater delight than decorating his chapels, assisting at the Mass, and intoning at the reading desk. Louis VII preferred the life of a monk, and any of his subjects who wished a firsthand glimpse had only to enter Notre Dame, where they could see him singing in the choir or reading the canticles. Each day, from prime through matins, he kept the vigils and on Fridays fasted on bread and water, his scrupulous devotion to the Church, unshared by Eleanor, creating perennial difficulties between them. One of Louis’s more tiresome habits was prayer. If he was not on his knees among the black and white columns of Notre Dame, he was praying in the royal bedchamber, and it is not difficult to imagine the winter nights when Eleanor shivered under the fur coverlet, eyes open, watching her husband kneel on the cold stone floor in the light of a gutted candle, with his head bowed and his lips moving fervently. In sex Louis was extremely, almost ascetically, abstemious; nevertheless, there is reason to believe that he did occasionally perform his duties because at some time during the first or second year of their union Eleanor became pregnant. She must have miscarried, however, or else the child was stillborn.

  Theoretically free to do as she pleased, Eleanor dressed as she liked and spent lavishly on banquets and entertainment without her husband’s interference. In practice, however, Louis’s lack of polish and his failure to participate in the spirit of the merrymaking cramped her style. When he did attend the gay doings in the Great Hall, the guests would find themselves in the presence of a silent, awkward youth whose uncertain expression plainly indicated that he longed to escape as soon as possible. However, the new queen’s earliest fêtes for the Parisian nobility were blighted not only by Louis’s shyness but by the backward Parisians themselves, for it was painfully clear that at Paris people did not approach life with the same flair and grace as did the Aquitainians. More often than not the men were loutish and stingy, the women prudes who dressed with abominable taste.

  In one respect, it is surprising that Eleanor experienced such profound boredom in her new city. As a person of education and exceptional intelligence, she might have found much to excite her imagination in the richly intellectual climate flourishing there. Paris in the 1130s was a city of nearly 200,000 persons squeezed into an area that could comfortably accommodate perhaps one-third that number. The marrow of “the city of light and immortality” was the Île-de-France, that almond-shaped island cradled in the arms of the Seine and dominated by the royal enclave at one end and the citadel of the archbishop at the other. Despite Eleanor’s constant comparisons with the semitropical luxuriance of the south, the city had much to recommend it. At the western tip of the island was a royal garden with wooden trellises and acanthus-bordered walks; there grew a jumble of roses, lilies, mandrakes, and dozens of other blooms; beds of leeks, pumpkins, and watercress; plots of mint, rue, absinthe, and the soporific poppy. The queen could sit under a pear of Saint-Regulus tree and gaze down the broad brimming stream at willows and horse towpaths lining the banks and at the water mills squatting under the bridge arches. Low in the water, barges bearing wheat, hides, wine, and salt plied the stream, and the air rang with the cries of the boatmen and the rumble of the mill wheels. From her garden wall Eleanor could watch, 100 yards away on the Left Bank, the well-trodden field called Pré-aux-clercs, where unruly students danced and held tournaments.

  When she ventured out from the royal enclave, she found herself in a noisy, reeking world of crooked streets darkened by the upper stories of houses, which leaned precariously forward. Due to poor drainage the lanes ran deep with mud and the contents of chamber pots and washbasins pitched from upper windows. Almost drowning out the pealing bells and majestic tones of the Gregorian chants from the Romanesque bouquet of churches came the constant clatter of street cries: the menders of furs, the candlemakers, the vegetable and fruit merchants, the wine crieurs who walked through the streets carrying a bowl that could be sampled and shouting, “So-and-so has just opened a cask of this wine. He who wants to buy some of it will find it on the Rue _” And everywhere on the twisting, turning streets were sold things to eat: waffles, small cakes, wafers, and, carried about by the talemeliers in baskets covered with white cloths, the favorite pasties, turnovers filled with chopped ham, chicken, eel, soft cheese, and egg.

  The city swarmed with students from every nation in Europe: John of Salisbury; nineteen-year-old Thomas Becket, clinging to his vow of chastity; and the sons of well-born fathers who had flocked there to plunge into philosophy, theology, medicine, or feudal law and, perhaps equally important, to taste the heady delights of the flesh and the tavern. On the quays along the Seine they slogged behind the skirts of learned doctors who discoursed on Plato and Aristotle as well as writings of the church fathers. Along the Petit Pont, the upper stories of the little buildings housed brilliant teachers, such as Adam de Petit Pont, and in order to hear their lectures students eagerly crowded into the tiny rooms and if necessary sat on the rickety stairs. In this intellectual’s paradise one could dip into the central controversy of medieval thought: the importance of the universal versus the particular. Were universals—the Church, humanity, divinity—more important than the particulars—churchmen, individuals, persons of the Trinity? Must one be able to comprehend the universals before one could understand the particular? Should one incline toward the Realists, who believed in universals, or the Nominalists, who upheld the importance of the particulars? In Paris, one could believe as one pleased, unless of course one happened to stray too far in the direction of heresy.

  Among the remarkable array of scholars assembled only a short walk from the palace of the Capets was one who stood head and shoulders above the others. Peter Abélard blazed with a glory that caused women to stare at him from their windows and men like John of Salisbury “to sit at his feet drinking in every word that fell from his lips.” His fame rested mainly on his illustrious mind but partly on his skill in the art of seduction, for some twenty years earlier he had been taken as tutor into the home of the lovely Héloïse. Books were opened, but more words of love than lessons were heard. After the birth of an illegitimate son and a subsequent marriage, Héloïse’s uncle had Abélard castrated, and finally the lovers separated, each taking monastic vows. Abélard’s troubles were common knowledge and in Historia Calamitatum he himself had written about his emasculation as well as other persecutions. By the time Eleanor arrived in Paris, the unhappy Abélard had reached his midfifties, but his sharp mind and
quick tongue continued to question ideas long taken for granted. Believing that only reason and intelligence can resolve inconsistencies in matters of faith—by doubting we are led to inquire; by inquiry we perceive the truth—he presumed to understand and explain the mystery of the Trinity. To apply the hot light of reason to all things in heaven and earth was an original, if not to say dangerous, notion and one that even then was propelling him toward fresh calamities. In an open debate at Sens in May 1140, his so-called blasphemous views on the Trinity would be challenged and condemned by Bernard of Clairvaux.

  A man like Peter Abélard. deprived of his manhood for love of a lady, would have appealed to a romantic like Eleanor, but the ideas he espoused would also have been examined with some care; at least she would not have rejected them out of hand the way her conservative husband did. It seems inconceivable that she would not have sampled the wisdom of the ages being imparted freely on bridge and street corner, especially since the intellectual life was not barred to females, and Abélard himself boasted that noble ladies thronged his lectures. If the queen believed it beneath her royal dignity to betake herself to one of the crammed rooms on the Petit Pont, she had more suitable opportunities to hear the masters. In warm weather, the royal garden threw open its gates to the schools, and there, from a front-row seat under a pear tree, she surely could have imbibed the rudiments of dialectic and the structure of the syllogism. Indeed, in later years, she would give ample demonstration that she had mastered the fine points of intellectual swordsmanship. Still, as a woman, especially as a queen, Eleanor could never truly enter into the sweetly tumultuous life of the scholar: she could only flit through its tantalizing atmosphere, alighting now and then to inhale its perfume. Nor did her temperament at that time allow for sustained interest in any subject requiring discipline.