Et si n’y a que deux corps icy.
The tradition ran that a son of ‘Madame d’Ecouis avait eu de sa mère sans la connaître et sans en être reconnu une fille nommée Cécile. Il épousa ensuite en Lorraine cette même Cécile qui était auprès de la Duchesse de Bar . . . Il furent enterrés dans le même tombeau en 1512 à Ecouis.’ An old sacristan used to supply curious visitors to the church with a leaflet detailing the narrative. The same story is attached to other parishes, and at Alincourt, a village between Amiens and Abbeville, the following lines are inscribed upon a grave:—
Ci git le fils, ci git la mère,
Ci git la fille avec le père,
Ci git la soeur, ci git le frère,
Ci git la femme et le mari,
Et ne sont pas que trois corps ici.
When Walpole wrote his tragedy, The Mysterious Mother (1768), he states he had no knowledge of Bandello or the Heptameron, but he gives the following account of the origin of his theme. ‘I had heard when very young, that a gentlewoman, under uncommon agonies of mind, had waited on Archbishop Tillotson and besought his counsel. A damsel that served her had, many years before, acquainted her that she was importuned by the gentlewoman’s son to grant him a private meeting. The mother ordered the maiden to make the assignation, when she said she would discover herself and reprimand him for his criminal passion; but, being hurried away by a much more criminal passion herself, she kept the assignation without discovering herself. The fruit of this horrid artifice was a daughter, whom the gentlewoman caused to be educated very privately in the country; but proving very lovely and being accidentally met by her father-brother, who never had the slightest suspicion of the truth, he had fallen in love with and actually married her. The wretched guilty mother learning what had happened, and distracted with the consequence of her crime, had now resorted to the Archbishop to know in what manner she should act. The prelate charged her never to let her son and daughter know what had passed, as they were innocent of any criminal intention. For herself, he bad her almost despair.’
The same story occurs in the writings of the famous Calvinistic divine, William Perkins (1558-1602), sometime Rector of St. Andrew’s, Cambridge. Thence it was extracted for The Spectator.
In Mat Lewis’ ghoulish romance, The Monk (1796) it will be remembered that Ambrosio, after having enjoyed Antonia, to whose bedchamber he has gained admittance by demoniacal aid, discovers that she is his sister, and heaping crime upon crime to sorcery and rape he has added incest.