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Updated: June 17, 2025
In accordance with local custom, Mahaut, on the death of her father, inherited Artois, but her nephew, Robert, on attaining his majority at the age of fourteen, set up a counter-claim.
He further took advantage of the growing discontent amongst the nobles, who were gradually realising that their power was waning, to attach them to his cause, and to induce them to join him in harassing Mahaut by making raids upon her lands and her castles.
It is some consolation to think that these poor suffering folk of centuries ago were even thus well tended, but when we look at contemporary representations of the surgery of the day, we tremble at the mere thought of the heroic methods adopted. Besides the actual necessaries which she provided for the hospital at Hesdin, Mahaut constantly sent gifts of fish, game, and wine.
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.
But its very simplicity is eloquent, for around it there seems to hover that never-dying spirit of love and goodness and beauty to which, throughout her life, Mahaut contributed in such large measure, and which was her real and lasting gift to the world.
Gollut tells a story of a dowager of Arbois, mother-in-law to Philip V. and Charles IV. of France, which outdoes legend of Bishop Hatto. Mahaut d'Artois was an elderly lady remarkable for her charities, and was by consequence always surrounded by large crowds of poor folk during her residence at the Châtelaine, the ruins of which lie a mile or two from Arbois.
She employed artists to illuminate both sacred and secular works for her own use as well as for gifts gifts counted beyond compare and beside which even precious stones were deemed of less worth. To Mahaut this desire for beauty was a very lode-star.
But it is perhaps in the Chapel that we must seek the finest work, for here both Mahaut and her father, Count Robert, were lavish with unsparing hand. One Jean le Scelleur, of Paris, a carver of combs and toilet articles as well as of crucifixes and Virgins, is named as her principal craftsman.
From Hesdin Mahaut journeyed constantly through her County of Artois, visiting her castles, the towns or villages around them, and the various religious houses and hospitals she had founded, and attending in general to the well-being of her subjects. For her it was not enough that she was born to reign.
As Mahaut had no biographer, and contemporary history merely treats her as if she were one of many pawns on a chess-board, her stewards’ entries furnish the only materials from which we can weave some outline of her life, an outline, nevertheless, which enables us to reason somewhat concerning her inner life, the pattern, as it were, that is not wrought for the world.
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