“Lou vassa de fe valan mais que lousignous in buro.”
It was only another way of saying (in the local patois) that a vassal clothed in armour was worth considerably more than one who dressed only in velvet.
The Dauphin took this to mean much, but he had a mighty envy for the Seigneur de Flandaines, and sought forthwith the ways and means by which to turn him out of his fortress abode.
The Dauphin invited the seigneur to a court ball and plied him and his retainers with food and drink, not only to excess, but to the point of insensibility. After this the troops of the Dauphin marched on Flandaines, took it without the least resistance, turned it over to the crowbars of the house-breakers, and went back and told their prince that their work was finished.
In the Chateau de Rochechinard, near Flandaines, the Dame de Beaujeau, emulator of the policy of Louis XI, martyred the poor Zizim, son of Mohamet II and brother of Bajazet. The history of the affair entire is not to be recounted here, but the Turk was exiled in France and chose this “pays de Franguistan,” of which he had read, as the preferred place of his future abode.
Louis XI arranged with one of his Dauphinese familiars to take the infidel into his chateau. The alien was at first enchanted with his new life and played the zither and sang songs to the fair ladies of Dauphiny all the long day with all the gallantry of a noble of France. He went further: he would have married with one of the most gracious he had met: “It was a thing a thousand times more to be sought for than the control of the Ottoman Empire,” he said.
For the moment it was the one thing that the Turk desired in life. Proof goes further and states that for the purpose he became converted to Christianity.
And the rest? The fair lady of Dauphiny did not marry the Turk; so he was sent a hundred leagues away in further exile and the daughter of the Béranger-Sasseange married and forgot—in fact she married three times before she eradicated the complete memory of the affair.
To-day the walls of Rochechinard are half buried in an undergrowth of vine and shrubs and are nothing more than a sad reminder of the history which has gone before.
Three leagues from Saint Marcellin and Beauvoir is Saint Antoine, a sixteenth century townlet of fifteen hundred souls which has endured much, as it has always existed unto this day. It possesses one of the most remarkable and astonishing flamboyant-Gothic churches in all Christendom.