CHAPTER I
Birth of François de Bassompierre—Origin of the Bassompierre family—A romantic legend—His grandfather—His father—His early years—He and his younger brother Jean are sent to the University of Pont-à-Mousson, and afterwards to that of Ingoldstadt—Their studies at Ingoldstadt—Death of their father, Christophe de Bassompierre—Journey of the two brothers through Italy—Their return to Lorraine.
François de Bassompierre was born at the Château of Harouel, in Lorraine, on Palm Sunday, April 12, 1579, “at four o’clock in the morning.” His family, which was one of the most ancient and illustrious of Lorraine, appears to have owed its name to the village of Betstein, or Bassompierre,[1] near Sancy, which formed part of its possessions until 1793, when it was confiscated and sold by the Government of Revolutionary France, with the rest of the Bassompierre property. If we are to believe the very confusing documents which François de Bassompierre collected about his family, it descended from the German House of Ravensberg, but, according to the learned genealogist, Père Anselme, its origin can be traced to the latter part of the thirteenth century, to one Olry de Dompierre, who became possessed of the fief of Bassompierre by marriage, and whose son, Simon, adopted the name, which became that of his descendants.
However that may be, it was undoubtedly a very old family indeed, as well as a distinguished one, and, like most old families, had its mysterious traditions; but, at any rate, the legend of the Bassompierres had nothing sinister about it.
The story goes that during the transitory reign of that Adolph of Nassau who lost his Imperial crown and his life at the Battle of Spire, there lived a certain Comte d’Angerveiller, or d’Orgeveiller. This nobleman, as he was returning home one evening from hunting—it was a Monday—stopped to rest at a summer-house situated in a wood a little distance from his château. There, to his astonishment, he found a young and beautiful woman—a fairy, it is said—(She must surely have been the last of the race!)—apparently awaiting his arrival. And the pair were so well pleased with one another at this first interview, that for two whole years they failed not to meet every Monday at the same rendezvous, “the count pretending to his wife that he had gone to shoot in the wood.”
However, as time went on, the countess began to conceive suspicions, “and one morning entered the summer-house, where she found her husband with a woman of perfect beauty, and both asleep. And being unwilling to awaken them, she merely spread over their feet a kerchief which she was wearing on her head, which, being perceived by the fairy, she uttered a piercing cry and began to lament, saying that she must see her lover no more, nor even be within a hundred leagues of him; and so left him, having first bestowed upon him these three gifts—a spoon, a goblet and a ring, for his three daughters, which, said she, they must carefully preserve, as, if they did this, they would bring good fortune to their families and descendants.”
Well, a lord of Bassompierre, an ancestor of the marshal, married one of the three daughters of the Comte Orgeveiller, who brought him as her dowry, together with certain fat lands, the spoon; and, in memory of this tradition, the town of Épinal, of which he had been burgrave, was obliged to offer to him and his descendants, on a certain day each year, by way of quit-rent, a spoonful from every measure of corn sold within its walls.
The ancestors of Bassompierre had served in turn the Emperors and great princes of Germany, the Dukes of Burgundy, the Kings of France and the Dukes of Lorraine, and had ended by occupying the highest offices at the Court of Nancy. To go no further back than two generations, we find the marshal’s grandfather, François de Bassompierre, high in the favour of the Emperor Charles V, to whom he was successively page of honour, gentleman of the Chamber, and Captain of the German Guard. In 1556 he accompanied his Imperial master to the gates of the Monastery of Yuste, where he witnessed Charles’s last adieu to the world, and received from his hand a valuable diamond ring, which was ever afterwards religiously preserved in the Bassompierre family.
In 1552 Henri II, King of France, invaded Lorraine and established a protectorate over the duchy; and François de Bassompierre, who, some years before, had been sent by Charles V as Ambassador Extraordinary to Nancy to assist in the government of Lorraine, during the minority of its youthful sovereign, Charles III, was required to send his youngest son, Christophe, to the French Court, as a hostage for his good behaviour. The little boy—then about five years old—was brought up with the Duc d’Orléans, afterwards Charles IX, who “either on account of the conformity in their ages or some other reason, conceived a great affection for him,” and admitted him to the closest intimacy. In consequence, when the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis left Christophe at liberty to return to Lorraine, he preferred to remain in France, until, in 1564, when barely seventeen, he set off for Hungary to serve under one of his uncles, Colonel de Harouel, against the Turks. Here he made the acquaintance of Henri de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, who had also gone crusading on the Danube, and a warm friendship sprang up between the two lads, which lasted until Guise’s tragic death in 1589. “My father,” writes Bassompierre, “always preserved for him (Guise) his devotion and his service, and the said Sieur de Guise esteemed him above all his other servants and intimates, calling him ‘l’amy du cœur.’ ”[2]
Returning to France, after two years’ service in Hungary, Christophe de Bassompierre was entrusted by Charles IX with the command of 1,500 reiters, at the head of whom he distinguished himself at the Battles of Jarnac and Montcontour, in both of which he was wounded. In 1568 he was sent by the King with a body of reiters to the Netherlands, to the assistance of Alva, and took part in the Battle of Gemmingen, in which Alva defeated the Duke of Nassau. On his return to the French Court after the Peace of Saint-Germain, Charles IX proposed to reward his military services by marrying him to one of the two daughters of the late Maréchal de Brissac. Christophe, however, who was poor and a cadet of his House, represented to his Majesty that these damsels, who had little money and great pretensions, were ill suited to him who had none, and who needed it; “but that if he would do him the favour of marrying him to the niece of the said marshal Louise le Picart de Radeval,[3] who was an heiress, and whose aunt, Madame de Moreuil, intended to give her 100,000 crowns, it would do him much more good and make his fortune. And this the King did, in spite of her relations and in spite of the girl herself, who did not like him, because he was poor, a foreigner and a German.”