intimacy with Arab and Jew disciples of Aristotle.  The position of the Bishop of Chartres between the schools had been always awkward.  As for Blanche of Castile, her first son, afterwards Saint Louis, was born in 1215; and after that time no Prodigal Son was likely to be welcomed in any society which she frequented.  For her, above all other women on earth or in heaven, prodigal sons felt most antipathy, until, in 1229, the quarrel became so violent that she turned her police on them and beat a number to death in the streets.  They retaliated without regard for loyalty or decency, being far from model youth and prone to relapses from virtue, even when forgiven and beneficed.

The Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, showed no prejudice against prodigal sons, or even prodigal daughters.  She would hardly, of her own accord, have ordered such persons out of her apse, when Saint Stephen at Bourges and Sens showed no such puritanism; yet the Chartres window is put away in the north transept.  Even there it still stands opposite the Virgin of the Pillar, on the women’s and Queen Blanche’s side of the church, and in an excellent position, better seen from the choir than some of the windows in the choir itself, because the late summer sun shines full upon it, and carries its colours far into the apse.  This may have been one of the many instances of tastes in the Virgin which were almost too imperial for her official court.  Omniscient as Mary was, she knew no difference between the Blanches of Castile and the students of the Latin Quarter.  She was rather fond of prodigals, and gentle toward the ladies who consumed the prodigal’s substance.  She admitted Mary Magdalen and Mary the Gipsy to her society.  She fretted little about Aristotle so long as the prodigal adored her, and naturally the prodigal adored her almost to the exclusion of the Trinity.  She always cared less for her dignity than was to be wished.  Especially in the nave and on the porch, among the peasants, she liked to appear as one of themselves; she insisted on lying in bed, in a stable, with the cows and asses about her, and her baby in a cradle by the bedside, as though she had suffered like other women, though the Church insisted she had not.  Her husband, Saint Joseph, was notoriously uncomfortable in her Court, and always preferred to get as near to the door as he could.  The choir at Chartres, on the contrary, was aristocratic; every window there had a court quality, even down to the contemporary Thomas a’Becket, the fashionable martyr of good society.  Theology was put into the transepts or still further away in the nave where the window of the New Alliance elbows the Prodigal Son.  Even to Blanche of Castile, Mary was neither a philanthropist nor theologist nor merely a mother,—­she was an absolute Empress, and whatever she said was obeyed, but sometimes she seems to have willed an order that worried some of her most powerful servants.