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.