[48] Tallemant des Réaux, in his Historiettes, gives some details concerning this liaison of Bassompierre and the part played therein by Henri, who appears to have been made a fool of, as in several analogous circumstances. “Bassompierre,” he writes, “had the honour to have for some time the King as rival. Testu, Chevalier of the Watch, assisted his Majesty in the affair. One day, when this man came to speak to Mlle. d’Entragues, she hid Bassompierre behind a tapestry, and said to Testu, who reproached her with being less cruel to Bassompierre than to the King, that she cared no more for the former than for the latter, at the same time striking with a switch which she held in her hand the place where her gallant was concealed.”
[49] Men whose duty it was to remove the bodies of persons who had died of the plague or other contagious maladies. During several months of that year Paris was ravaged by an epidemic, which was either plague or a virulent form of typhus.
[50] Nearly two centuries later, this adventure of Bassompierre so impressed the romantic imagination of Chateaubriand, then a young man of twenty, that he made a pilgrimage to the Rue Bourg-l’Abbé and “the third door on the side of the Rue Saint-Martin.” But, to the great disappointment of the future author of René, he found himself confronted, not by the old gabled house which Bassompierre must have entered and quitted so abruptly, but by a hopelessly modern residence, the ground-floor of which was occupied by a hairdresser’s shop, with “a variety of towers of hair behind the window-panes.” And “no frank, disinterested, passionate young woman” was to be seen, but only “an old crone, who might have been the aunt of the assignation.”
“What a fine story, that story of Bassompierre!” he writes. “One of the reasons which caused him to be so passionately loved ought to be understood. At that time, France was divided into two classes, one dominant, the other semi-servile. The sempstress clasped Bassompierre in her arms as though he were a demi-god who had descended to the bosom of a slave: he gave her the illusion of glory, and Frenchwomen alone amongst women are capable of intoxicating themselves with that illusion. But who will reveal to us the unknown causes of the catastrophe? Was the body which lay upon the table by the side of another body that of the pretty wench of the Two Angels? Whose was the other body? Was it the husband or the man whose voice Bassompierre had heard? Had the plague (for the plague was raging in Paris) or jealousy reached the Rue Bourg-l’Abbé before love? The imagination can easily find matter for exercise in such a subject as this. Mingle with the poet’s inventions, the chorus of the populace, the approaching grave-diggers, the ‘crows’ and Bassompierre’s sword, and a magnificent melodrama springs from the adventure.”—Mémoires d’Outre Tombe, Vol. I.
[51] Louise Pot, second wife of Claude de l’Aubespine, Seigneur de Verderonne.
[52] Mlle. de la Patière, daughter of Georges l’Enfant, Seigneur de la Patière, and of Françoise du Plessis-Richelieu. The La Patières were friends and neighbours of Bassompierre.
[53] Jean Louis de Nogaret de la Valette, born 1554; created Duc d’Épernon, 1581; died 1642.
[54] The Duc de Montpensier died on February 27, 1608; the ballet appears to have been danced about the middle of January.
[55] Charlotte de Montmorency, daughter of the Connétable Henri de Montmorency, by his second wife, Louise de Budos. She was born in 1594 and was at this time only fourteen. By his first wife, Antoinette de la Marck, the Constable had two daughters: (1) Charlotte de Montmorency, married in 1591 to Charles de Valois, Comte d’Auvergne, died in 1636, at the age of sixty-three; (2) Marguerite de Montmorency, married in 1593 to Anne de Lévis, Duc de Ventadour, died December 3, 1660, aged eighty-three.
[56] Jean du Fay, Baron de Pérault, lieutenant of the King in the Bresse. He was married to Marie de Montmorency, a natural daughter of the Constable.