At the Revolution the see was suppressed, and the small world of canons, vicars-general, and diocesan functionaries who had inhabited the capital of Cominges dispersed, and the little town sank to be a _chef-lieu de Canton_, and then lost even that dignity, which was transferred to Barbazan. S. Bertrand would be abandoned altogether by its inhabitants, who would settle on the plain were it not much resorted to by visitors from Luchon, by artists and antiquaries, and by pilgrims. There were counts of Cominges from a very early period, indeed from 900; but the county came to the Crown of France in 1442 through a domestic quarrel. Margaret de Cominges was left an heiress in 1376. She married John III, Count of Armagnac Fézansac. He died in 1391, having had by her two daughters. She then married Jean d’Armagnac Pardiac, who was aged eighteen. As she treated him with contempt as a mere boy he was offended, and left her so as to reside with his father. But after awhile, finding that Margaret had installed a lieutenant in the county, and refused him those rights in it which had been assured to him by the marriage contract, he appealed to Count Bernard VII of Armagnac for assistance. This treacherous man went over to the side of Margaret, and when John hastened to Auch to urge the Count to assist him Bernard had him arrested, carried to a castle in the Rouergue, and there blinded by a red-hot basin applied to his eyes. The poor lad died in prison in great misery. Margaret being free of her boy-husband, looked out for one who was a man, and pitched on Matthew de Grailli, brother of the Count of Foix, and married him. But Matthew proved a little too much of a man for her. He treated Margaret as roughly as she had treated Jean. He shut her up in the Castle of Saverdun, where he retained her for fifteen to sixteen years. At the end of that time she appealed to Charles VII when he was at Toulouse, and Matthew was forced to surrender her into the King’s hands. Then Margaret, to vent her spite against her husband, made over the county of Cominges, in 1442, along with all her estates, to the Crown of France. Next year she died at Poitiers at the age of eighty. The Garonne does not rise in France, but in Spain, and, by what is an apparent caprice, the frontier does not follow the crests of the highest mountains, but runs north, making a loop so as to include the Val d’Aran in Spain. But though the valley is reached by a good carriage road from France, and can communicate with Spanish neighbours only by a mule path over a pass 8000 feet high and impassable for many months in the year, yet the valley has pertained to Spain since 1192.