Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/101

Rh The literary motif is not without a real foundation. Froissart actually saw English gentlemen who had covered one eye with a piece of cloth, to redeem a pledge to use only one eye, till they should have achieved some deed of bravery in France.

The extreme of savagery is reached in the vow of the queen, which ends the series in The Vow of the Heron. She takes an oath not to give birth to the child of which she is pregnant before the king has taken her to the enemy’s country and to kill herself “with a big steel knife,” if the confinement announces itself too early.

“I shall have lost my soul and the fruit will perish.”

Le Vœu du Héron shows us the literary conception of these vows, the barbarous and primitive character they had in‘the minds of that time. Their magical element betrays itself in the part which the hair and the beard play in them, as in the case of Benedict XIII, imprisoned at Avignon, who made the very archaic vow not to have his beard shaved before he recovered his liberty.

In making a vow, people imposed some privation upon themselves as a spur to the accomplishment of the actions they were pledged to perform. Most frequently the privation concerns food. The first of the knights whom Philippe de Mézières admitted to his Chivalry of the Passion was a Pole, who during