COUCY-LE-CHÂTEAU, a village of northern France, in the department of Aisne, 18 m. W.S.W. of Laon on a branch of the Northern railway. Pop. (1906) 663. It has extensive remains of fortifications of the 13th century, the most remarkable feature of which is the Porte de Laon, a gateway flanked by massive towers and surmounted by a fine apartment. Coucy also has a church of the 15th century, preserving a façade in the Romanesque style. The importance of the place is due, however, to the magnificent ruins of a feudal fortress (see [Castle]) crowning the eminence on the slope of which the village is built. The remains, which embrace an area of more than 10,000 sq. yds., form an irregular quadrilateral built round a court-yard and flanked by four huge towers. The nucleus of the stronghold is a donjon over 200 ft. high and over 100 ft. in diameter, standing on the south side of the court. Three large vaulted apartments, one above the other, occupy its interior. The court-yard was surrounded on the ground-floor by storehouses, kitchens, &c., above which on the west and north sides were the great halls known as the Salle des preux and the Salle des preuses. A chapel projected from the west wing. The bailey or base-court containing other buildings and covering three times the area of the château extended between it and the village. The architectural unity of the fortress is due to the rapidity of its construction, which took place between 1230 and 1242, under Enguerrand III., lord of Coucy. A large part of the buildings was restored or enlarged at the end of the 14th century by Louis d’Orléans, brother of Charles VI., by whom it had been purchased. The place was dismantled in 1652 by order of Cardinal Mazarin. It is now state property. In 1856 researches were carried on upon the spot by Viollet-le-Duc, and measures for the preservation of the ruins were subsequently undertaken.
Sires de Coucy.—Coucy gave its name to the sires de Coucy, a feudal house famous in the history of France. The founder of the family was Enguerrand de Boves, a warlike lord, who, at the end of the 11th century seized the castle of Coucy by force. Towards the close of his life, he had to fight against his own son, Thomas de Marle, who in 1115 succeeded him, subsequently becoming notorious for his deeds of violence in the struggles between the communes of Laon and Amiens. He was subdued by King Louis VI. in 1117, but his son Enguerrand II. continued the struggle against the king. Enguerrand III., the Great, fought at Bouvines under Philip Augustus (1214), but later he was accused of aiming at the crown of France, and he took part in the disturbances which arose during the regency of Blanche of Castile. These early lords of Coucy remained till the 14th century in possession of the land from which they took their name. Enguerrand IV., sire de Coucy, died in 1320 without issue and was succeeded by his nephew Enguerrand, son of Arnold, count of Guines, and Alix de Coucy, from whom is descended the second line of the house of Coucy. Enguerrand VI. had his lands ravaged by the English in 1339 and died at Crécy in 1346. Enguerrand VII., sire de Coucy, count of Soissons and Marle, and chief butler of France, was sent as a hostage to England, where he married Isabel, the eldest daughter of King Edward III. Wishing to remain neutral in the struggle between England and France, he went to fight in Italy. Having made claims upon the domains of the house of Austria, from which he was descended through his mother, he was defeated in battle (1375-1376). He was entrusted with various diplomatic negotiations, and took part in the crusade of Hungary against the Sultan Bayezid, during which he was taken prisoner, and died shortly after the battle of Nicopolis (1397). His daughter Marie sold the fief of Coucy to Louis, duke of Orleans, in 1400. The Châtelain de Coucy (see above) did not belong to the house of the lords of Coucy, but was castellan of the castle of that name.
COUES, ELLIOTT (1842-1899), American naturalist, was born at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the 9th of September 1842. He graduated at Columbian (now George Washington) University, Washington, D.C., in 1861, and at the Medical school of that institution in 1863. He served as a medical cadet at Washington in 1862-1863, and in 1864 was appointed assistant-surgeon in the regular army. In 1872 he published his Key to North American Birds, which, revised and rewritten in 1884 and 1901, has done much to promote the systematic study of ornithology in America. In 1873-1876 Coues was attached as surgeon and naturalist to the United States Northern Boundary Commission, and in 1876-1880 was secretary and naturalist to the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, the publications of which he edited. He was lecturer on anatomy in the medical school of the Columbian University in 1877-1882, and professor of anatomy there in 1882-1887. He resigned from the army in 1881 to devote himself entirely to scientific research. He was a founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, and edited its organ, The Auk, and several other ornithological periodicals. He died at Baltimore, Maryland, on the 25th of December 1899. In addition to ornithology he did valuable work in mammalogy; his book Fur-Bearing Animals (1877) being distinguished by the accuracy and completeness of its description of species, several of which are already becoming rare. In 1887 he became president of the Esoteric Theosophical Society of America. Among the most important of his publications, in several of which he had collaboration, are A Field Ornithology (1874); Birds of the North-west (1874); Monographs on North American Rodentia, with J. A. Allen (1877); Birds of the Colorado Valley (1878); A Bibliography of Ornithology (1878-1880, incomplete); New England Bird Life (1881); A Dictionary and Check List of North American Birds (1882); Biogen, A Speculation on the Origin and Motive of Life (1884); The Daemon of Darwin (1884); Can Matter Think? (1886); and Neuro-Myology (1887). He also contributed numerous articles to the Century Dictionary, wrote for various encyclopaedias, and edited the Journals of Lewis and Clark (1893), and The Travels of Zebulon M. Pike (1895).
COULISSE (French for “groove,” from couler, to slide), a term for a groove in which a gate of a sluice, or the side-scenes in a theatre, slide up and down, hence applied to the space on the stage between the wings, and generally to that part of the theatre “behind the scenes” and out of view of the public. It is also a term of the Paris Bourse, derived from a coulisse, or passage in which transactions were carried on without the authorized agents de change. The name coulissier was thus given to unauthorized agents de change, or “outside brokers” who, after many attempts at suppression, were finally given a recognized status in 1901. They bring business to the agents de change, and act as intermediaries between them and other parties. (See [Stock Exchange:] Paris.)
COULOMB, CHARLES AUGUSTIN (1736-1806), French natural philosopher, was born at Angoulême on the 14th of June 1736. He chose the profession of military engineer, spent three years, to the decided injury of his health, at Fort Bourbon, Martinique, and was employed on his return at Rochelle, the Isle of Aix and Cherbourg. In 1781 he was stationed permanently at Paris, but on the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 he resigned his appointment as intendant des eaux et fontaines, and retired to a small estate which he possessed at Blois. He was recalled to Paris for a time in order to take part in the new determination of weights and measures, which had been decreed by the Revolutionary government. Of the National Institute he was one of the first members; and he was appointed inspector of public instruction in 1802. But his health was already very feeble, and four years later he died at Paris on the 23rd of August 1806. Coulomb is distinguished in the history alike of mechanics and of electricity and magnetism. In 1779 he published an important investigation of the laws of friction (Théorie des machines simples, en ayant regard au frottement de leurs parties et à la roideur des cordages), which was followed twenty years later by a memoir on fluid resistance. In 1785 appeared his Recherches théoriques et expérimentales sur la force de torsion et sur l’élasticité des fils de métal, &c. This memoir contained a description of different forms of his torsion balance, an instrument used by him with great success for the experimental investigation of the distribution of electricity on surfaces and of the laws of electrical and magnetic action, of the mathematical theory of which he may also be regarded as the founder. The practical unit of quantity of electricity, the coulomb, is named after him.