STATUE OF MAHAUT IN ABBEY OF LA THIEULOYE, NEAR ARRAS, NOW DESTROYED.
From a Drawing, now in Brussels, made in 1602.
Amongst Mahaut’s many good works was the keeping in repair of existing religious houses, hospitals, and lazar-houses, and the building and maintenance of new ones. Of all the religious houses which she founded, her special care was for the Dominican convent of La Thieuloye, near Arras, the equipment of which, as set out in the accounts, may well serve as an example of that of the others. The items for the furnishing and instalment of the house and chapel include everything needful for the community, from gold and silver vessels, silver-gilt images of St. Louis, the Trinity, and St. John, for the sanctuary, and samite and velvet for chasubles, down to the bowls and platters for the nuns, the woollen material for their garments, and all the simple necessaries of everyday life. In the chapel of this nunnery was preserved a kneeling statue of Mahaut, representing her as foundress, in the habit of the Order strewn with the arms of Artois. Jean Aloul, of Tournai, has been suggested as the sculptor, since it is known from the accounts that he was working for the Countess at Arras in 1323. This statue (known to us through a drawing, now at Brussels, made in 1602) is of interest to-day because, judging from the character expressed in the face, it seems probable that it was a portrait, and not simply imagery. This conjecture seems all the more likely when we compare the statue with a miniature painted more than a hundred years later by Jean Fouquet in _Les Grandes Chroniques de France_ (Bib. Nat.), portraying the marriage of King Charles the Fourth with his second wife, Marie de Luxembourg. In this picture a lady, heavily coiffed, and with features suggestive of those of the statue, but with anguish written upon them, turns away from the ceremony as if it were all too painful. If this unwilling guest represents Mahaut, her woeful look is intelligible when we recall the sad story connected with Charles’s first wife, Mahaut’s daughter Blanche, married when she was but fifteen, and whose beauty was so dazzling that Froissart records that “she was one of the most beautiful women in the world.” Accused of an intrigue with a gentleman of the Court, she was imprisoned in the Château-Gaillard, where she remained, with shorn head, until, shortly after Charles ascended the throne, the Pope declared the marriage null. Then, whilst the king wedded another, the sad Blanche exchanged her castle prison-house for a convent one, where she died a year after she had taken the vows. There is no reason for supposing that Mahaut was at the wedding of Blanche’s successor save in the imagination of the artist; but for him the inclusion of such a tragic figure would add a dramatic touch to the representation of an otherwise conventional ceremony.