Wars and rumors of war kept Compiègne in a turmoil for centuries, but the most theatrical episode was the famous "sortie" made by Jeanne d'Arc when she was attempting to defend the city against the combined English and Burgundian troops. It was an episode in which faint heart, perhaps treason, played an unwelcome part, for while the gallant maid was taking all manner of chances outside the gates the military governor, Guillaume de Flavy, ordered the barriers of the great portal closed behind her and her men.
Near the end of the Pont de Saint Louis Jeanne d'Arc fell into the hands of the besiegers. An archer from Picardy captured her single handed, and, for a round sum in silver or in kind, turned her over to her torturer, Jean de Luxembourg. A statue of the maid is found on the public "Place," and the Tour Jeanne d'Arc, a great circular donjon of the thirteenth century, is near by. Another souvenir is to be found in the ancient Hotel de Bœuf, at No. 9 Rue de Paris, where the maid lodged from the eighteenth to the twenty-third of August, 1429, awaiting the entry of Charles VII.
With the era of Francis I that gallant and fastidious monarch came to take up his residence at Compiègne. He here received his "friend and enemy," Charles V, but strangely enough there is no monument in Compiègne to-day which is intimately associated with the stay here of the art-loving Francis. He preferred, after all, his royal manor at Villers-Cotterets near by. There was more privacy there, and it formed an admirable retreat for such moments when the king did not wish to bask in publicity, and these moments were many, though one might not at first think so when reading of his affairs of state. There were also affairs of the heart which, to him, in many instances, were quite as important. This should not be forgotten.
In 1624 a treaty was signed at Compiègne which assured the alliance of Louis XIII with the United Provinces, and during this reign the court was frequently in residence here. In 1631 Marie de Médici, then a prisoner in the palace, made a notable escape and fled, doomed ever afterwards to a vagabond existence, a terrible fall for her once proud glory, to her death in a Cologne garret ten years later.
In 1635 the Grand Chancellor of Sweden signed a treaty here which enabled France to mingle in the affairs of the Thirty Years' War.
During the Fronde, that "Woman's War," which was so entirely unnecessary, Anne d'Autriche held her court in the Palace of Compiègne and received Christine de Suede on certain occasions when that royal lady's costume was of such a grotesque nature, and her speech so chevaleresque, that she caused even a scandal in a profligate court. Anne d'Autriche, too, left Compiègne practically a prisoner; another ménage à trois had been broken up.
The most imposing event in the history of Compiègne of which the chronicles tell was the assembling of sixty thousand men beneath the walls by Louis XIV, in order to give Madame de Maintenon a realistic exhibition of "playing soldiers." At all events the demonstration was a bloodless one, and an immortal page in Saint-Simon's "Memoires" consecrates this gallantry of a king in a most subtle manner.
Another fair lady, a royal favourite, too, came on the scene at Compiègne in 1769 when Madame du Barry was the principal artiste in the great fête given in her honour by Louis XV. She was lodged in a tiny chateau (built originally for Madame de Pompadour) a short way out of town on the Soissons road.
Du Barry must have been a good fairy to Compiègne for Louis XV lavished an abounding care on the chateau and, rather than allow the architect, Jacques Ange Gabriel, have the free hand that his counsellors advised, sought to have the ancient outlines of the former structure on the site preserved and thus present to posterity through the newer work the two monumental façades which are to be seen to-day. The effort was not wholly successful, for the architect actually did carry out his fancy with respect to the decoration in the same manner in which he had designed the École Militaire at Paris and the two colonnaded edifices facing upon the Place de la Concorde.
This work was entirely achieved when Louis XVI took possession. This monarch, in 1780, caused to be fitted up a most elaborate apartment for the queen (his marriage with Marie Antoinette was consecrated here), but that indeed was all the hand he had in the work of building at Compiègne, which has practically endured as his predecessor left it. The Revolution and Consulate used the chateau as their fancy willed, and rather harshly, but in 1806 its restoration was begun and Charles IV of Spain, upon his dethronement by Napoleon, was installed therein a couple of years later.