whole years he had in his keeping the original trial of the maid of
Orleans with all the attendant circumstances, and he introduced the
subject into chapter V. book VI. of his history. His opinion then
should be treated with consideration. He observes that the inexplicable
delay between the condemnation and execution, and still more the
extraordinary precautions that were taken to hide the victim from the
eyes of the public, are very remarkable. When she was led to the stake,
a large mitre was placed on her head, which concealed the greater part
of her face, and a huge frame, covered with insulting phrases, was
carried before her, and completely concealed her person.
In 1440, the people so firmly believed that Jeanne d’Arc was still
alive, and that another had been sacrificed in her place, that an
adventuress who endeavoured to pass herself off as the Maid of Orleans
was ordered by the government to be exposed before the public on the
marble stone of the palace hall, in order to prove that she was an
impostor. Why were not such measures taken against the real Maid of
Orleans, who is mentioned in so many public documents, and who took no
pains to hide herself?
The king of France not only ennobled Jeanne d’Arc, her father,
brothers, and their descendants male and female, by letters patent
dated 1429, but moreover wished that her brothers should take the
surname of de Lys, and in fact we find this name in the registers
already quoted.
A very remarkable extract given by Pasquier is drawn from the accounts
of the auditor of the Orleans estate, in the year 1444 (observe the
date). An island on the river Loire is restored to a brother of the
Maid of Orleans, Pierre de Lys, chevalier: “_Quie la supplication de
Messire Pierre, contenant que pour acquitter la loyauté envers le Roi
notre seigneur et Monsieur le Duc d’Orléans, il se partit de son pays
pour venir au service du Roi et de Monsieur le Duc, en la compagnie de
Jeanne la Pucelle sa seur, avec la quelle, jusques à son absentement
et depuis jusques à présent, il a exposé son corps et ses biens au dit
service et au fait des guerres du Roi, tant à la résistance des anciens
ennemis du Royaume qui tinrent le siège devant la ville d’Orléans,
comme en plusieurs voyages faits et entrepris pour le Roi, &c._”
It is scarcely necessary to observe here how very much stronger the
claims of this brother would have been, if in 1444, instead of saying
“_jusques à son absentement_,” he had brought forward the martyrdom of
this sister, as having been the means of saving France from the yoke of
England. The expression _son absentement_ may, easily be explained when
we remember that the Duke of Bedford, regent of France, died in 1435,
and that most probably Jeanne d’Arc was released from prison after this
event. It was only one year later that she married Robert des Armoises.
But we may be told that Pope Calixtus III. appointed in 1455 a
commission to inquire into the justice or injustice of the condemnation
of the maid of Orleans, and that more than a hundred witnesses were
heard during this examination without the question of the reality of
her execution being once raised. Father Vignier has met this objection
by observing that the committee of enquiry was desired to examine
exclusively whether the judges had been justified in condemning her
as a heretic and an apostate, and it was on this point only that the
inquiry touched.
The commission was by no means ignorant of the received opinion that
Jeanne d’Arc still lived, but they were bound to keep to the letter of
the instructions received.
Jules Quicherat has collected almost every item bearing upon the doubt
of the fate of Jeanne d’Arc, in the fifth volume of his work: _Procès
de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc_ (in 8ᵛᵒ. Paris
1849). 1) He gives the entire extract from the chronicle of Metz. 2)
The extract from the audited accounts of the city of Orleans for the
year 1436, according to the register preserved in the Orleans library.
3) An extract from the contract of sale of the fourth part of the
lordship of Haraucourt by Robert des Armoises and Jeanne du Lys, called
la Pucelle, his wife. 4) Other extracts from the accounts kept by the
city of Orleans and the city of Tours for presents of wine made to the
Pucelle, and expense of postage of letters from the Bailly of Tournay
to the king, touching the matter of Dame Jeanne des Armoises.
Quicherat does not admit that this Jeanne was the true Pucelle, but
those who read all his authorities will still retain strong doubts on
the subject.
In the 4th volume of the same work we find the account of the execution
of Jeanne according to the chronicle of Perceval de Cagny, whom M.
Quicherat considers to be the most complete, the best informed, and the
most honest of all the historians of “la Pucelle.”
This Perceval was in the service of the Duc d’Alençon who had constant
intercourse with the maid of Orleans and had the best opportunities
of observing and knowing her. It was in 1436 that Perceval occupied
himself in committing the facts to writing, only five years after
the execution at Rouen. Now he asserts that the victim’s face was
covered when walking to the stake, while at the same time a spot had
been chosen for the execution, that permitted the populace to have a
good view. Why this contradiction? A place is chosen to enable the
people to see everything, but the victim[32] is carefully hidden from
their sight. Does it not seem as if this was arranged with a sinister
intention?
The following words are from the chronicle: “_Les gens de la justice
du Roi d’Angleterre et la dite ville de Rouen firent appareiller lieu
convenable pour exécuter la justice, qui peult être vu de très grand
peuple. Et le dit 24ⁱᵉᵐᵉ jour de May environ l’eure de midy, la pucelle
fut amenée du Chastel, le visage embronché (recouvert) au dit lieu ou
le feu estoit prest; et après autres choses lues en la ditte place,
elle fut liée à l’estache et arse, par le rapport de ceux, qui disent
ce avoir vu._”
THE MURDER OF THE COUNTESS OF CHATEAUBRIAND.
A. D. 1525.
The tragical death of the Countess of Chateaubriand is one of the most
remarkable traditions of Brittany.
Go in the present day to Chateaubriand, that feudal city whose duke
rendered homage to the Duke of Brittany alone. Let yourself be
conducted to the castle, now transformed into the town-hall, with
a tricolor flag waving over the dilapidated arms of the Sires of
Chateaubriand. Question the first person you meet, be it a young
woman or child: either will relate to you with an air of unalterable
conviction the tragical fate of Françoise de Foix, assassinated by her
husband Jean, Count of Chateaubriand. No other proofs will be advanced
in support of the murder than the public belief transmitted from father
to son, and the traces still visible of the blood of the victim in the
room where the crime was committed. Follow your guide, who is about to
show you these bloody vestiges, which nearly three centuries have, it
is said, failed to efface.
You mount a staircase the steps of which are worn by feet; you cross
long galleries and reach at length a vast chamber stript of its
gothic furniture, but still preserving as a remnant of past splendour
decorations of faded gilt leather, a wainscot of carved oak, and some
painted panels blackened by age. It is here, you are told, that the
Countess remained a prisoner for several years; it is here that she
breathed her last sigh, exhausted by the blood that flowed from veins
opened in her hands and feet by order of her husband.
The commandant of the gendarmerie now inhabits this immense apartment,
in which the vulgarity of the shabby modern furniture contrasts with
the general aspect of the room. If you question the clerks and servants
who lodge in the interior of the ancient castle, or are obliged from
the nature of their duties to frequent these spots, they will tell
you, making the sign of the cross, that the soul of the Countess
yearly revisits the place where she lost her life, on the night of
the 24th October, the anniversary of this cruel act of vengeance.
Many witnesses will be at hand to declare that they have frequently
heard piercing cries and stifled lamentations issue from the walls at
midnight, the hour at which the Count de Chateaubriand murdered his
wife. The commandant, nevertheless, we are happy to say, contrives to
sleep remarkably well on the very scene of the alleged crime.
The story of Françoise de Foix is told as follows: Endowed with
extraordinary beauty, she was married at the age of twelve years to
the Count of Chateaubriand, who obtained her hand without difficulty,
being content to receive it with no other dowry than her youth and
loveliness. The young countess in course of time presented her husband
with a daughter, and his happiness would have been complete had he been
able for an indefinite period to conceal his treasure in the secluded
corner of Brittany in which they lived. But the reputation of his
wife’s beauty traversed the confines of the province, and when Francis
I., King of France, desired that the ladies, who had until then only
appeared at court on state occasions, should henceforward be introduced
and should take part in all the festivities, one of the first on whom
his thoughts rested was the Countess of Chateaubriand.
The count for a while evaded the royal mandate, and laid the blame
on the peculiar temperament of his wife, representing her as a wild
wayward creature whom it was impossible to subdue.
At length some urgent and unforeseen business calling the count to
Paris, he hit upon an expedient by which he hoped to escape the
importunity of the king, and at the same time reserve to himself
private communication with, and control over the actions of, his wife.
He ordered two rings to be made of a peculiar device, and so exactly
similar that they could not be distinguished the one from the other.
He gave one to the countess, and told her that during his absence she
was not to put faith in any instructions he might send her from Paris
unless they were accompanied by his ring enclosed in the letter.
He then parted from her somewhat relieved in mind, but still anxious
and doubtful as to the result of his precaution. On his arrival in
Paris he was questioned about his wife by the king, who complained
of her absence from court. The count, to excuse himself, offered to
summon her at once from Brittany, and even to write to her in the name
of Francis I., begging her to come immediately to join her husband.
But the letter, unaccompanied by the ring, produced no effect. At
length a servant of the count, yielding to the seductions of a bribe,
betrayed his master’s secret. A duplicate ring was made, and in the
next letter addressed by the count to his wife it was fraudulently
inserted. The young countess hastened to her husband’s side, and the
count’s stupefaction may be imagined on the sudden appearance of one he
so little expected to see. She showed him the second ring; he at once
perceived that he had been betrayed, and feeling sure of the inevitable
consequences under the influence of such a monarch as Francis I., he
took a hasty departure for Brittany in order to avoid being a witness
to his wife’s shame and his own dishonour.
The countess, after some little resistance, verified all his
apprehensions, and yielded to the importunities of her royal lover.
For some time she ruled the king absolutely, and provided handsomely
for her three brothers. Her husband would also have been raised to some
important office in the state, had he not indignantly refused any such
preferment. He would not even allow his wife’s name, under any pretext,
to be mentioned in his presence.
On the fall of Francis I., and his imprisonment after the battle of
Pavia, the Countess of Chateaubriand was thrown upon the mercy of her
husband, who only awaited his opportunity to revenge himself upon his
wife.
On her return to the castle in Brittany, he refused to see her, and
shut her up in apartments entirely draped in black. He allowed their
little daughter, then seven years of age, to take her meals with her
mother and to remain with her a part of each day; but after six months
the countess was deprived of this consolation by the death of her
child, and the count, having no longer this endearing object before
his eyes, to plead for the mother, gave himself up entirely to the
gratification of his vengeance.
One day he entered the gloomy prison of his wife accompanied by six men
in masks and by two surgeons. The latter bled the countess in the arms
and feet and then left her gradually to die. The count took refuge in a
foreign land to escape the pursuit of justice.
Brantôme is the first historian who has mentioned the private amours
of Francis I. and the Countess of Chateaubriand. Varillas is the first
who published the secret details of the violent death of this lady.
Since then most historians have regarded the authority of Brantôme as
indisputable, founded as it is on contemporary opinion and belief, and
sanctioned by the court itself. The details of Varillas, however, seem
to be little better than a romance, so many errors and inaccuracies do
they contain.
Before we enter upon the discussion of this tradition let us remark
by way of preface, that the historian Varillas is acknowledged by all
critics to be pre-eminently careless in verifying the sources from
which he draws his information. He would not even have deigned to
quote the documents on which he founded his narrative,[33] had not his
detractors accused him of having invented the whole of it.
His talent for exaggerating or suppressing important facts to suit his
personal views, is well known, and as he generally draws from his own
prodigious memory without consulting references, he often falls into
serious and unpardonable mistakes. His chief error in this instance is
in the date he assigns to the murder of the Countess of Chateaubriand,
viz. the 26th October 1526, when in fact she died on the 16th October
1537, as we learn from the inscription on her tomb in the church of
the convent des Mathurins in the town of Chateaubriand. The count died
on the 11th February 1543, and his natural heirs having instituted
a law suit, memorable for its duration of half a century, against
his donatee, Anne de Montmorency, the learned Pierre Hévin, a lawyer
of the parliament of Rennes, published in 1686 a memoir founded on
the original legal documents, in which he triumphantly refutes the
assertions made by Varillas.
The marriage of Françoise de Foix with the Count of Chateaubriand took
place in the course of the year 1509, and as we have said, they resided
in Brittany until the king called them to court. Brantôme tells us that
the Countess was appointed lady in waiting to Queen Claude of France.
From the year 1515, her power over the king was apparent. The alacrity
with which Francis conferred the dignity of field-marshal on her elder
brother leads to the conclusion that the king sought to obtain her
good graces as soon as he mounted the throne. Her husband was sent
to a military command in Italy, that grave of many of the flower of
the French nobility during the space of thirty years, but the count
returned to France safe and sound. Francis being taken prisoner at
Pavia, a correspondence in prose and in verse was carried on between
him and the countess. It still exists in the Imperial Library, numbered
7688, and corrections are traceable in the handwriting of the king;
but when the monarch was restored to liberty and to France, on the
10th March 1526, another beauty captivated his imagination, and the
reign of the Countess of Chateaubriand was at an end.
From the date of the imprisonment of Francis I. Brantôme, Gaillard,
and other historians shew that the countess lived on good terms
with her husband, and that she accompanied him of her own accord to
Chateaubriand, where the count falling dangerously ill, he deemed it
expedient to make some settlement for the future maintenance of his
wife. Towards the end, then, of the year 1526 he drew up a deed before
a notary, in virtue of which she became entitled to 4000 livres a
year independently of the castle. This act on the part of the count
proves that his wife was pardoned; for it is, to say the least, unusual
to begin by providing for and enriching those whom we intend to
assassinate.
Hévin, the lawyer, avers, that in 1532, the countess herself
superintended the erection of additional buildings at the castle of
Chateaubriand. Brantôme, whose authorities are generally trustworthy,
affirms that she was at court in 1533, and present at the interview
between Francis I. and Pope Clement VII. at Marseilles: and J. Bouchet,
in his _Annales d’Aquitaine_, even relates a remarkable anecdote
connected with that meeting, in which the Countess of Chateaubriand
plays a part. Lastly, a proof exists of her presence at the marriage of
her brother Lautrec’s daughter in 1535.
One strong objection that still remains to be mentioned against the
truth of the murder of the Countess, is this. Among the popular ballads
of Brittany so carefully and scrupulously collected by M. Hersart de la
Villemarqué, there is not one wherein we find the slightest allusion to
this dramatic story.
_Les lettres inédites de la Reine de Navarre_ quoted by M. de Lescure
in his _Amours de François I._, contain a document that is quite
conclusive in refuting the statements of Varillas; a document which M.
de Lescure was the first to discover.
It is a letter written by Marguerite de Navarre to her royal brother
a few days after the death of the Countess of Chateaubriand, October
1537. She died at the residence of her husband, who was very ill
himself at the time and likely apparently, to follow speedily to the
grave the wife whom he was accused of having murdered. The following
is a translation of a part of this remarkable epistle: “I have also
Monseigneur, seen M. de Chateaubriand, who has been so near death that
he is scarcely to be recognised. He expresses much regret at the loss
of his wife; your goodness to him however, and the satisfaction he felt
in seeing me, have gone far to console him.”
M. de Chateaubriand, the renowned author of Réné, Atala, &c.,
makes some interesting remarks on this subject in his _Mémoires
d’Outretombe_. He disbelieves the tragical death of his relative, and
thinks that Varillas has confounded the actual adventures of Gilles
de Bretagne, the husband of Françoise de Chateaubriand, with those of
Françoise de Foix. Gilles was confined in a dungeon by order of his
brother, Francis Duke of Brittany, at the instigation of a favourite,
Arthur de Montauban, who was madly in love with Françoise, the wife
of Gilles. On the 24th April 1450, the husband was strangled in his
prison, and his widow married the Count of Laval. We perceive, that
although the dates differ, there is a similarity in the names and
circumstances of these two stories, Varillas having only changed the
sex of his victim and substituted the wife for the murdered husband.
Nevertheless Paul Lacroix, in his _Curiosités de l’Histoire de France_,
does not yield to our view of the argument, but is still disposed to
coincide with Varillas. Didot, in his _Biographie Universelle_, also
supports the same hypothesis; but we attribute their persistence and
that of many others, to the influence exercised over their imagination
by the production of two popular novels.
Pierre de Lescouvel, a Breton author, wrote a novel on this supposed
assassination, which went through four or five editions and was at
first attributed to the Countess Murat, who had gained some reputation
as an authoress at the court of Louis XIV.
Madame de Lussan also founded a romance on this tragical event, under
the title of _Anecdotes de la Cour de François I._
CHARLES V. OF SPAIN.
A. D. 1540.
Notwithstanding the information afforded by the latest writers on the
closing years of the life of Charles V., which were passed in the
convent of Yuste,[34] the history of that monarch by Robertson and by
other authors who have adopted his views, is still received by many
as unimpeachable authority. According to these, Charles V., after his
abdication, retired to the convent of St. Yuste, in Estramadura, where
he adopted the habit of a monk, withdrew from all interference in the
government of his vast empire, occupied himself wholly with mechanism
and the construction of clocks and watches, and at length, when his
mind had become weakened and worn out, personally rehearsed his own
funeral. All this is in fact nothing but a tissue of errors, clearly
disproved by existing authentic documents. The love of the marvellous,
however, always inherent in the human mind, has fostered the adoption
of this romance, to the exclusion of truth and veracity.
The name even of the monastery has been transformed. Sancho Martin, a
Spanish gentleman, presented a small piece of land to some monks in
1408; a convent was built upon it which was called Yuste, from a small
stream of that name that trickled down the rocks and watered the garden
of the monks. It is this stream, the Yuste, that merged its cognomen,
even in Spain, into St. Juste or Justo, leading one to suppose that the
monastery was dedicated to a saint of that name.
Charles V. did not live with the monks, as is commonly asserted; he
never wore the habit of the order; and he never ceased to wield the
imperial sceptre _de facto_ and to control the affairs of the state. He
had, moreover, a residence built for himself, detached from the convent
but communicating by passages with the cloister and the church.
Except in Titian’s portrait the Emperor was never seen in the habit of
St. Jerome. He always retained his secular dress, which was a single
black doublet, exchanged during periods of illness and _déshabille_,
for rich wadded silk dressing-gowns, of which he possessed no less than
sixteen in his wardrobe, if we may believe the inventory made after
his death. In his letters to intimate correspondents we continually
find the following observation: “I shall never become a monk,
notwithstanding my respect for the children of St. Jérome.”
Far from adopting an appearance of poverty, or limiting his attendants
to twelve in number, as Sandoval and Robertson have asserted, the
household of the Emperor consisted of more than fifty individuals, the
chief of whom was the major-domo, Luis Quijada. Their annual salaries
amounted to above 10,000 florins, equal to £. 4,400 of the present day.
The profusion of plate taken by the Emperor to the monastery was
employed generally for the wants of the establishment, and for his
personal use. The dishes and ornaments of his table, the accessories
of his dressing-table, which betokened the _recherché_ nature of his
toilet, the vases, ewers, basins, and bottles of every shape and size
in his chamber, utensils of all sorts for his kitchen, his cellar, his
pantry and his medicine chest, were made of solid silver, and weighed
upwards of 1,500 marks.
All these details, which are derived from authentic documents in the
archives of Simancas, bring Charles V. before us in his convent of
Yuste in a very different light from that in which we have usually seen
him. Neither must we picture to ourselves the convent in Estramadura
as the gloomy and solitary residence it had been up to this time. It
now became a centre of life and action. Couriers were continually
arriving and departing. Every fresh event was immediately reported to
the Emperor, whose opinion and whose commands were received and acted
upon in all important matters. He was the umpire in every dispute, and
all candidates for favours applied to him. In spite of the gout with
which he was continually afflicted, he spent whole hours in reading
despatches; in fact he was almost as much immersed in public affairs in
his retreat, as he had been while actually on the throne. Although he
had delegated all official authority, he retained the habit of command,
and was emperor to the last.