It is, however, pleasant to think that
she was happy in the love of her husband, the baron of the
forests of the Duke of Burgundy, a plain Dutch gentleman, Francis
von Borselen, the lad who, years before, had furnished the gray
gabardine that had shielded Count William's daughter from her
father's lions.
The story of Jacqueline of Holland is one of the most romantic
that has come down to us from those romantic days of the knights.
Happy only in her earliest and latest years, she is,
nevertheless, a bright and attractive figure against the dark
background of feudal tyranny and crime. The story of her
womanhood should indeed be told, if we would study her life as a
whole; but for us, who can in this paper deal only with her
romantic girlhood, her young life is to be taken as a type of the
stirring and extravagant days of chivalry.
And we cannot but think with sadness upon the power for good that
she might have been in her land of fogs and floods if, instead of
being made the tool of party hate and the ambitions of men, her
frank and fearless girl nature had been trained to gentle ways
and charitable deeds.
To be "the most picturesque figure in the history of Holland," as
she has been called, is distinction indeed; but higher still must
surely be that gentleness of character and nobility of soul that,
in these days of ours, may be acquired by every girl and boy who
reads this romantic story of the Countess Jacqueline, the fair
young Lady of Holland.
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