Les lettres inédites de la Reine de Navarre quoted by M. de Lescure in his Amours de François I., contain a document that is quite conclusive in refuting the statements of Varillas; a document which M. de Lescure was the first to discover.
It is a letter written by Marguerite de Navarre to her royal brother a few days after the death of the Countess of Chateaubriand, October 1537. She died at the residence of her husband, who was very ill himself at the time and likely apparently, to follow speedily to the grave the wife whom he was accused of having murdered. The following is a translation of a part of this remarkable epistle: “I have also Monseigneur, seen M. de Chateaubriand, who has been so near death that he is scarcely to be recognised. He expresses much regret at the loss of his wife; your goodness to him however, and the satisfaction he felt in seeing me, have gone far to console him.”
M. de Chateaubriand, the renowned author of Réné, Atala, &c., makes some interesting remarks on this subject in his Mémoires d’Outretombe. He disbelieves the tragical death of his relative, and thinks that Varillas has confounded the actual adventures of Gilles de Bretagne, the husband of Françoise de Chateaubriand, with those of Françoise de Foix. Gilles was confined in a dungeon by order of his brother, Francis Duke of Brittany, at the instigation of a favourite, Arthur de Montauban, who was madly in love with Françoise, the wife of Gilles. On the 24th April 1450, the husband was strangled in his prison, and his widow married the Count of Laval. We perceive, that although the dates differ, there is a similarity in the names and circumstances of these two stories, Varillas having only changed the sex of his victim and substituted the wife for the murdered husband.
Nevertheless Paul Lacroix, in his Curiosités de l’Histoire de France, does not yield to our view of the argument, but is still disposed to coincide with Varillas. Didot, in his Biographie Universelle, also supports the same hypothesis; but we attribute their persistence and that of many others, to the influence exercised over their imagination by the production of two popular novels.
Pierre de Lescouvel, a Breton author, wrote a novel on this supposed assassination, which went through four or five editions and was at first attributed to the Countess Murat, who had gained some reputation as an authoress at the court of Louis XIV.
Madame de Lussan also founded a romance on this tragical event, under the title of Anecdotes de la Cour de François I.
CHARLES V. OF SPAIN.
A. D. 1540.
Notwithstanding the information afforded by the latest writers on the closing years of the life of Charles V., which were passed in the convent of Yuste,[34] the history of that monarch by Robertson and by other authors who have adopted his views, is still received by many as unimpeachable authority. According to these, Charles V., after his abdication, retired to the convent of St. Yuste, in Estramadura, where he adopted the habit of a monk, withdrew from all interference in the government of his vast empire, occupied himself wholly with mechanism and the construction of clocks and watches, and at length, when his mind had become weakened and worn out, personally rehearsed his own funeral. All this is in fact nothing but a tissue of errors, clearly disproved by existing authentic documents. The love of the marvellous, however, always inherent in the human mind, has fostered the adoption of this romance, to the exclusion of truth and veracity.