He understood a little, though not much. The sixteenth century
had a value of its own, as though the ONE had become several, and
Unity had counted more than Three, though the Multiple still
showed modest numbers. The glass had gone back to the Roman
Empire and forward to the American continent; it betrayed
sympathy with Montaigne and Shakespeare; but the Virgin was still
supreme. At Beauvais in the Church of St. Stephen was a superb
tree of Jesse, famous as the work of Engrand le Prince, about
1570 or 1580, in whose branches, among the fourteen ancestors of
the Virgin, three-fourths bore features of the Kings of France,
among them Francis I and Henry II, who were hardly more edifying
than Kings of Israel, and at least unusual as sources of divine
purity. Compared with the still more famous Tree of Jesse at
Chartres, dating from 1150 or thereabouts, must one declare that
Engrand le Prince proved progress? and in what direction?
Complexity, Multiplicity, even a step towards Anarchy, it might
suggest, but what step towards perfection?
One late afternoon, at midsummer, the Virgin's pilgrim was
wandering through the streets of Troyes in close and intimate
conversation with Thibaut of Champagne and his highly intelligent
seneschal, the Sieur de Joinville, when he noticed one or two men
looking at a bit of paper stuck in a window.
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