Part 18 (1/2)
This, with almost everything else of any importance in Anizy, was destroyed by the English of Edward III., in the next century, one of the local seigneurs, the lord of Locq (where a chateau still represents the extinct lords.h.i.+p) and the cure of the church of St.-Peter falling valiantly in the defence of their people. The bishop-duke came over to help them from Laon, and died in his chateau at Anizy the next year.
In 1352, another bishop-duke founded a free market at Anizy for three days in each year, at the feast of St.-George, and in 1408 his successor built a grain-hall there. In 1513 Louis XII. granted the burghers a free market every Monday. This so incensed the then bishop-duke, Louis de Bourbon-Vendome, that he tried to suppress the annual market and take back the grain-hall, in return for which attempts the worthy burghers pillaged his chateau at Anizy and pulled it nearly to pieces.
Clearly the seigneurs did not have things all their own way in these good old times! For after several years of contention Louis de Bourbon-Vendome came to terms with his burghers, and matters were put upon so friendly a footing that, in 1540, the bishop-duke began the erection at Anizy of a new chateau, to be surrounded with an extensive and beautiful park. The plans were made by the first architects and artists of the Renaissance; the sculptors of Francis I. were employed to decorate the facade with statues--the new buildings were connected with what remained of the earlier chateau by a grand gallery; pavilions flanked the main edifice and adorned the grand cour d'honneur. King Francis, during his stay at Folembray, frequently visited his cousin the Bishop-duke in this chateau, one of the great chambers of which was long known as the room of King Francis. When Louis de Bourbon-Vendome died in 1557, the chateau was not entirely finished, and a lawsuit followed his death, between his personal heirs and the bishop-dukes for the possession of the buildings. It lasted for nearly a century, and when the prelates at last were declared to be the owners, in 1645, the stately edifice had fallen into a sad state of dilapidation. The Cardinal d'Estrees restored the facade in 1660, but one of his successors actually unroofed it and sold the lead. In 1750, a bishop-duke of quite another type, the Cardinal de Rochechouart, spent great sums of money upon it, restored it, and decorated it throughout, and made it one of the n.o.blest residences in this part of France. At the same time he put in order all the public buildings of Anizy, and had the roads carefully paved throughout the borough. He was followed by a prelate of a like mind, Louis de Sabran, the last bishop-duke of Laon, who is still remembered in his episcopal city for his public spirit and his benevolence, and who made the park of Anizy his special care.
Then came the Revolution.
In 1790, the local 'directory' of the district of Chauny laid violent hands upon the chateau. It was in great part demolished, and what was left of it defaced. It was robbed of its precious furniture, pictures, and ornaments, its valuable chimney-pieces, its elaborate iron and bra.s.s work. The old trees were cut down in the park, and the railings destroyed. The fine old church of Ste.-Genevieve at the same time was first turned into a hall of meeting for the electors, who distrusted each other so profoundly that when their first meeting was held, May 3, 1790, the doc.u.ments relating to the elections were locked up in a confessional, lest they should be stolen, and then deliberately wrecked and looted by the 'friends of Liberty,' or, in other words, by a squad of ruffians from Chauny and the neighbourhood, who, after putting on the sacerdotal vestments, marched about the church carrying the das, beat the crosses and the carved stalls to pieces, smashed and defaced the monuments and the altars, broke open the poor-box, and carried off all that was worth stealing. The stone slabs from the graves were sold, a saltpetre factory was established in the church, the presbytery was made a town-hall, and the 'wors.h.i.+p of Reason,' in the person of a young woman of Chauny, was solemnly inaugurated at Anizy! The chateau and the park were sold by the self-const.i.tuted dictators of Anizy to one M. Orry de Sainte-Marie on August 7, 1792, for a nominal price. This M. Orry seems to have been an 'operator.' For in June, 1793, he sold the chateau to the 'ci-devant Vicomtesse de Courval,' the mother of the then owner of the Chateau of Pinon, about which I shall presently have something to say, and bought it back from her again in March 1795, leaving her the right to enjoy it until her death, which took place in 1806. All this curiously ill.u.s.trates the perils and uncertainties of land-owners.h.i.+p in such times! In 1808, Orry de Sainte-Marie, having by that time become a justice of the peace at Anizy, and doubtless a fervent Imperialist, sold the chateau to M. Collet, Director of the Mint at Paris. From him it pa.s.sed by sale, in 1824, to M. Senneville, and in 1841 to M. Lafont de Launoy.
Let us turn now to Pinon, two kilometres to the south of Anizy, long one of the chief seats of the power of the famous Sires de Coucy, one of whom seems to have been the real author of the arrogant motto since, in one or another form, attributed to more than one great family in France:
Roi ne suis Ne prince, ne comte aussy: Je suis le Sire de Coucy.
The Chateau of Pinon was originally built by Enguerrand II. of Coucy in the twelfth century. His grandfather Enguerrand I. had been invited by the Archbishop of Reims to establish himself at Pinon, which was a part of the splendid Christmas gift made by Clovis to the see of Reims, as I have already stated, after his baptism at Reims; and Enguerrand II., who appears to have been a typical baron, finding the place favourable for the feudal industry of levying toll on trade and commerce, there erected a great castle, one of the many legendary castles to be found all over Europe which boasted a window for every day in the year. He thought fit, however, to select for this castle a site which belonged to the Abbey of St.-Crispin the Great at Soissons, and thus got himself into trouble with the Church. Strong as he was, he found the Church too strong for him. The Bishop of Soissons compelled him to agree to pay an annual and perpetual rent to the Abbey, and made him also take the cross and go to the Holy Land to expiate his sacrilege. There he fell in battle. The grandson of this baron, Robert de Coucy, in 1213 granted the people of Pinon 'a right of a.s.size according to the use and custom of Laon,' and the next year founded there a hospital. Twenty years afterwards Pinon became a commune, and John de Coucy granted the inhabitants a free market. The Chateau of Pinon pa.s.sed in the 14th century to the elder branch of the great house of de Coucy, and in 1400 it was sold, under duress to Louis of France (Duc d'Orleans) by the last heiress of the house Marie de Coucy, daughter of Enguerrand VII. by his first wife Isabel, Princess Royal of England, and eldest daughter of Edward III. by Philippa of Hainault.
A hundred years afterwards Louis XII. had taken possession of the estates and the chateau, and made a gift of these to his daughter Claude de France. In spite of this, however, the property pa.s.sed into the hands of the ancient family of De Lameth, and towards the end of the seventeenth century the Chateau de Pinon witnessed one of the most romantic and abominable murders recorded in the annals of French gallantry.
As Pinon is still, after all the chances and changes of seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather Italian than French.
Charles Marquis d'Albret, the last of that ill.u.s.trious race, Prince de Mortagne and Comte de Ma.s.sant, was the nephew of the Marechal d'Albret, and he came therefore, on the mother's side, of the royal blood of Henry of Navarre.
He loved, not wisely but too well, Henriette de Roucy, Comtesse de Lameth, called 'la belle Picarde,' whose husband was seigneur of the Chateau de Pinon. In August 1678, the Marquis d'Albret was at the Chateau de Coucy with the army of Flanders, then commanded by the Marshal-Duke of Schomberg, who afterwards fell fighting for King William III. in Ireland at the battle of the Boyne.
The Comte de Lameth, who had in some way discovered the relations which existed between his wife, 'la belle Picarde,' and the Marquis d'Albret, shut the comtesse into a room at Pinon, and compelled her, by threats and violence, to write a letter to the marquis giving him a rendezvous at Pinon. On the day mentioned in her letter the Comte de Lameth ordered six horses to be put to his coach, and (having previously put his wife under watch and ward) drove off with an escort to Laon. News of this was carried at once to Coucy. The Marquis set forth with a single attendant on horseback to Chavignon, where at the hostelry of La Croix Blanche, he was met, as from the letter of his lady-love he expected to be, by a servant from the Chateau de Pinon.
Armed only with pistols in his holsters, he mounted after dark and rode on from Chavignon to Pinon. There, as he entered the park-gates, just after midnight, three men, one of them Jocquet, the valet de chambre of the Comte de Lameth, sallied out upon him from under an archway, and, feigning to take him for a robber, opened fire upon him. He killed one of his a.s.sailants, and then himself fell.
About fifty years ago, the then proprietor of Pinon was building a lodge for one of his keepers when the workmen came upon a gold ring in digging for the foundation. It bore the engraved name of D'Albret, and the name of the royal regiment which he commanded. He had doubtless been buried where he fell in the park.
This proprietor was the father of the late Baron de Courval, formerly an officer in the French army, who, during the Second Empire, married Miss Ray of New York.
The De Courvals became possessors of Pinon through the murder of the Marquis d'Albret. The way in which this came about curiously ill.u.s.trates the course of justice and injustice under the _ancien regime_. This differed more in form than in fact from the course of justice and injustice in our own time. Claude, Comte de Lameth, the jealous husband of 'la belle Picarde,' was a great personage, not only Comte de Lameth but Vicomte de Laon, d'Anizy, de Marchy, and de Croix, and seigneur of Bayencourt, Pinon, Bouchavannes, Clacy, Laniscourt, Quincy, '_et autres lieux_.' But the Marquis d'Albret was a greater personage still, and the widow of the marquis, who refused to believe the story of his affair with 'la belle Picarde,' was a _dame d'atours_ of the queen, Marie Therese. So also was the cousin-german of the marquis, and these two dames made such a clamour about the murder that the king, Louis XIV., and of course with the king the whole court, so waged war against the Comte de Lameth that his whole family found it wise to seek safety in flight, and fearing the confiscation of all his property, the Comte (whose wife had previously gone into an Ursuline convent) sold the estate and Chateau of Pinon, with other estates, to his friend Pierre Dubois de Courval, president of the parliament of Paris.[8]
[8] The venom of this old history recurs in the Revolution, poisoning the minds of three Lameths, concerning whom Mr. Carlyle indulges in much quite unnecessary and grotesque emotion.
In 1730 Dubois de Courval pulled down the ancient Chateau de Pinon, and, on the designs of Mansard, built the present stately and imposing edifice. Le Notre laid out for him also the extensive park, and, when he died, in 1764, he left Coucy-la-Ville and Fresnes to his elder son, and to his younger, with the t.i.tle of Vicomte de Courval, the chateau and estates of Pinon.
It was the widow of this younger son, Aime-Louis Dubois de Courval, who, as I have already said, saved what could be saved of the Chateau of Anizy in 1793 by buying it from the enterprising M. Orry de Sainte-Marie.
Her husband, a man of worth and of note in the parliament of Paris, died on the very eve of the great troubles, December 1, 1788. He was then in his sixty-seventh year, and as he had done nothing but good at Pinon, not only embellis.h.i.+ng the chateau and the park, but giving much time and money to improve the condition of the people, he would probably have been sent to the guillotine at Paris by the local 'directory at Chauny'
had he lived long enough, and his property confiscated, like the property of the bishops and dukes at Anizy. His oldest son was a lad of fifteen when the storm burst in 1789. His mother took his interests resolutely in hand. She came of two aristocratic stocks, the Millys and the Clermonts-Tonnerre, but she got the better of the democrats. Like old Madame Dupin at Chenonceaux, she carried herself and her property, by woman's wit and woman's will, through the Revolution. In 1791 she contrived to get her son, then only seventeen, elected commander of the National Guard at Anizy. He ripened rapidly, under the stress of the times, bought up the 'patriots' when it was necessary--and there is abundant evidence to show that they were always in the market, even at Paris and during the worst times of the Terror--was made a baron of the empire by Napoleon, elected President of the Canton of Anizy in 1811, a councillor-general of the Aisne in the same year, and deputy in 1814.
With the Restoration he became once more Vicomte de Courval and seigneur of Pinon, having long before converted the park and gardens of the chateau into the 'English style,' with fine watercourses and an extensive lake, and died quietly at Paris in 1822. In 1794, at the age of twenty, he married a daughter of the Marquis de Saint-Mars.
His son and successor, Ernest-Alexis Dubois de Courval, was taken into high favour by Charles X., but was nevertheless made a councillor-general of the Aisne under Louis Philippe. He married the only daughter of Moreau, who was a child of nine years old when her father fell fighting against France and Napoleon in 1813. In a curious Gothic tower which he built at Pinon are still preserved some of the standards captured from the enemies of France by Moreau, and these I am a.s.sured are the only such standards, excepting those of the Invalides, recovered through the efforts of the House of Peers, which existed in France before the Crimean War. In this tower the Vicomte de Courval formed a remarkable collection of mediaeval arms and armour, antique furniture, stained gla.s.s, medals and coins. This region is very rich not only in Roman remains, but in druidical stones and other vestiges of the races which dwelt here before Caesar came. Marcus Aurelius, Trajan, Hadrian, Alexander Severus, Probus, Gordian, Constantine and Constantius are all represented on the coins found in and around the property of M.
de Courval; but one of his most interesting acquisitions was a silver coin bearing the name of Clovis, with the t.i.tle of 'imperator.' There is a record at Anizy of a treasure of coins of Aurelius, found there so long ago as in the middle of the twelfth century; and under the bishop-dukes of Laon a collection of Roman coins and vases was gradually formed at the mairie of Anizy, which 'disappeared' soon after the 'patriots' of Chauny undertook to 'liberate' that commune.
The American Vicomtesse de Courval, who now owns Pinon, and pa.s.ses a part of each year there, is the widow of a son of this Ernest de Courval.