Marguerite Eléonore Clotilde de Vallon-Chalys, or de Surville, was supposed to have been a noble lady authoress of a series of sentimental poems. She was said to have been born in 1405 in the château of Vallon. Her mother, Pulchérie de Fay Collon, had lived in the court of Gaston Phœbus, Count of Foix, and had taken advantage of his library to enrich her mind by the study of Greek and Latin authors, of French and Italian poets, and she brought up the young Clotilde with the same tastes. The girl was a precocious genius, and composed verses at the age of twelve. In 1421 she married the Chevalier Béranger de Surville, who quitted her early to fight under the command of the Dauphin, afterwards Charles VII. It was then that she wrote a Héroïde, opening with the words "Clotilde au sien amy doulce mande accolade." But the composition contains allusions, and repeats ideas of a period so much later, that suspicions were aroused as to its authenticity when published in 1803. Vanderbourg, the editor, insisted on it being genuine. He had obtained the MSS. from the heirs of the Marquess Joseph Etienne de Surville, a noble who during the period of the Revolution had been executed at Le Puy in 1798. But this de Surville was himself a poet, of a mediocre quality certainly, and it was from his leavings that the editor produced Clotilde's compositions. According to the Memoir prefixed to her poems, from the pen of the Marquess, her graceful verses attracted the attention of Margaret of Scotland, who sent her a crown of golden leaves bearing the inscription: "Marguerite d'Ecosse à Marguerite d'Hélicon." Clotilde lost her husband at the siege of Orléans after a union that had lasted but one year. About 1450 she married her son to Héloise de Goyon de Vergy. Both died in 1468, leaving to Clotilde a grandchild, Camille, who never married, and Clotilde closed a long life at the end of the fifteenth century, after having celebrated the victory of Fornoue in a poem that she dedicated to Charles VIII. That the poems are a late fabrication by the marquess, who was shot at Le Puy, cannot be doubted. In the "Verselets à mon premier né" that begin "O cher enfantelet, vray pourtraict de ton père," there is obvious imitation of a romance by Bérguin, published in 1775. But the whole tone and character of the poems make it quite certain that they were composed in the eighteenth century, to be palmed off as the literary achievements of a lady of the forger's ancestry in the fifteenth. Villemain, after showing that they are _fictions antiques_, concludes: "After one has recognised that the poems of Clotilde are a modern fabrication, betraying itself by the very perfection of the artifice employed, yet the fraud once established, the merit of the fraud remains incontestable."