A FOURTEENTH-CENTURY 



ART-PATRON AND PHILANTHROPIST, 



MAHAUT, COUNTESS OF ARTOIS 



IT has been well said that " out of things 

 unlikely and remote may be won romance and 

 beauty.'' Perhaps the truth of this reflection 

 has never been more signally exemplified than 

 in the case of Mahaut, Countess of Artois and 

 Burgundy, the record of whose life, in the 

 absence of any contemporary biographer, has 

 been ably deciphered from such commonplace 

 material as the household accounts of her 

 stewards. 1 This great lady, one of the greatest 

 patrons of art of her time, lived at the end of the 

 thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth 

 century. She was a great-niece of St. Louis. 

 No poet has sung of her. It is merely through 

 the prose of daily expenditure that she is made 

 known to us. She stands before us, not the 

 ideal creation of the mediaeval romancer, but a 

 real woman, with her virtues and failings, her 



1 Richard (Jules Marie), Une Petite Niece de S. Louis : Mahaut, 

 Comtesse d* Artois. 



Dehaisnes (M. le Chanoine), V Histoire de Fart dam la Flandre, 

 r Artois, et le Hainaut avant le XV me siecle. 



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