In legend, as well as in history, Berzé has played its part. A Seigneur of the castle, it is said, piqued by a morbid curiosity, shut up in the lowest donjon an ox and a man, that he might know which would die first. Tradition avers that his passion for knowledge remained unsatisfied, since both died together. In 1315, Geoffrey de Berzé, tiring of his diurnal occupations, namely, hunting in the morning and beating his servants at night, raised an impious hand against, and let it descend upon, the archdeacon of Mâcon, who, through the chapter, brought a complaint before parliament; with the result that Geoffrey and his successors were condemned, in perpetuity, to burn, every year, a candle of fifty pounds weight in the choir of the cathedral of Mâcon. This fine was still being paid, up to the close of the eighteenth century, when it was customary to set forth in bad verses, on a card at the foot of the chandelier that carried the candle, an explanation of this "amende honorable." Berzé-le Chatel was prominent, too, in those bloody wars of the Armagnacs and Bourguignons, which, for more than thirty years, drenched the stricken land of France in the blood of her bravest men. Later on, it fell into the hands of the Dauphin, afterwards Charles VII., who, by magnificent promises, succeeded in inducing the governor to betray the Duke of Burgundy. It did not remain long in the hands of the French; for local knowledge of the subterranean passages soon effected its recapture by the Burgundians, who, to the terror of the French soldiers, seemed to have arisen mysteriously from the earth. The last siege of the castle took place in 1591, when the Duc de Namours after making a breach in the walls with artillery, captured it for the Huguenots, whose attacks it had resisted hitherto.[94]