France and the Republic: A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889Hurlbert, William Henry
History
France and the Republic: A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces During the 'Centennial' Year 1889
Hurlbert, William Henry
France -- Description and travel; France -- Politics and government -- 1870-1940; Republicanism -- France
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 assailants, 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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