On the fall of Francis I., and his imprisonment after the battle of Pavia, the Countess of Chateaubriand was thrown upon the mercy of her husband, who only awaited his opportunity to revenge himself upon his wife.
On her return to the castle in Brittany, he refused to see her, and shut her up in apartments entirely draped in black. He allowed their little daughter, then seven years of age, to take her meals with her mother and to remain with her a part of each day; but after six months the countess was deprived of this consolation by the death of her child, and the count, having no longer this endearing object before his eyes, to plead for the mother, gave himself up entirely to the gratification of his vengeance.
One day he entered the gloomy prison of his wife accompanied by six men in masks and by two surgeons. The latter bled the countess in the arms and feet and then left her gradually to die. The count took refuge in a foreign land to escape the pursuit of justice.
Brantôme is the first historian who has mentioned the private amours of Francis I. and the Countess of Chateaubriand. Varillas is the first who published the secret details of the violent death of this lady. Since then most historians have regarded the authority of Brantôme as indisputable, founded as it is on contemporary opinion and belief, and sanctioned by the court itself. The details of Varillas, however, seem to be little better than a romance, so many errors and inaccuracies do they contain.
Before we enter upon the discussion of this tradition let us remark by way of preface, that the historian Varillas is acknowledged by all critics to be pre-eminently careless in verifying the sources from which he draws his information. He would not even have deigned to quote the documents on which he founded his narrative,[33] had not his detractors accused him of having invented the whole of it.
His talent for exaggerating or suppressing important facts to suit his personal views, is well known, and as he generally draws from his own prodigious memory without consulting references, he often falls into serious and unpardonable mistakes. His chief error in this instance is in the date he assigns to the murder of the Countess of Chateaubriand, viz. the 26th October 1526, when in fact she died on the 16th October 1537, as we learn from the inscription on her tomb in the church of the convent des Mathurins in the town of Chateaubriand. The count died on the 11th February 1543, and his natural heirs having instituted a law suit, memorable for its duration of half a century, against his donatee, Anne de Montmorency, the learned Pierre Hévin, a lawyer of the parliament of Rennes, published in 1686 a memoir founded on the original legal documents, in which he triumphantly refutes the assertions made by Varillas.
The marriage of Françoise de Foix with the Count of Chateaubriand took place in the course of the year 1509, and as we have said, they resided in Brittany until the king called them to court. Brantôme tells us that the Countess was appointed lady in waiting to Queen Claude of France. From the year 1515, her power over the king was apparent. The alacrity with which Francis conferred the dignity of field-marshal on her elder brother leads to the conclusion that the king sought to obtain her good graces as soon as he mounted the throne. Her husband was sent to a military command in Italy, that grave of many of the flower of the French nobility during the space of thirty years, but the count returned to France safe and sound. Francis being taken prisoner at Pavia, a correspondence in prose and in verse was carried on between him and the countess. It still exists in the Imperial Library, numbered 7688, and corrections are traceable in the handwriting of the king; but when the monarch was restored to liberty and to France, on the 10th March 1526, another beauty captivated his imagination, and the reign of the Countess of Chateaubriand was at an end.
From the date of the imprisonment of Francis I. Brantôme, Gaillard, and other historians shew that the countess lived on good terms with her husband, and that she accompanied him of her own accord to Chateaubriand, where the count falling dangerously ill, he deemed it expedient to make some settlement for the future maintenance of his wife. Towards the end, then, of the year 1526 he drew up a deed before a notary, in virtue of which she became entitled to 4000 livres a year independently of the castle. This act on the part of the count proves that his wife was pardoned; for it is, to say the least, unusual to begin by providing for and enriching those whom we intend to assassinate.
Hévin, the lawyer, avers, that in 1532, the countess herself superintended the erection of additional buildings at the castle of Chateaubriand. Brantôme, whose authorities are generally trustworthy, affirms that she was at court in 1533, and present at the interview between Francis I. and Pope Clement VII. at Marseilles: and J. Bouchet, in his Annales d’Aquitaine, even relates a remarkable anecdote connected with that meeting, in which the Countess of Chateaubriand plays a part. Lastly, a proof exists of her presence at the marriage of her brother Lautrec’s daughter in 1535.
One strong objection that still remains to be mentioned against the truth of the murder of the Countess, is this. Among the popular ballads of Brittany so carefully and scrupulously collected by M. Hersart de la Villemarqué, there is not one wherein we find the slightest allusion to this dramatic story.