Le Comte Boulainvilliers, to whose family the Seigneurie of Courtenay, after its alienation, had been given as a royal fief, declares, in his “Dissertation sur la Noblesse de France”: “The French knew nothing of Princes among themselves; consanguinity (_parenté_) to Kings gave no rank the same as if descended in the male line. This is evident by the examples of the Houses of Dreux, of Courtenay, and the junior branches of the House of Bourbon.” Indeed, it is quite apparent to all who read early French history that the King exercised merely nominal authority over the nobility, and was considered but as a chief and leader among those of equal birth and descent, though differing in degree. It cost King Louis VI. a vast deal of trouble to reduce the pretensions of the Seigneurs of Montlehery, who, allied by marriage to the houses of Flanders and Courtenay, conceived themselves in all essentials to be equal to and independent of their titular monarch, while even more cogent testimony to the same effect, redolent also to a great degree of the atmosphere of the times, is borne by the subjoined letter from Thibaut, Comte de Champagne, to the Abbot of St Denis, Governor of the Realm in the absence of the King:—“This is to let you know that Renaud de Courtenay hath done great injury to the King, ... for he hath seized on certain merchants that are the King’s subjects, who have discharged their toll at Orleans and Sens, and hath stripped them of all their goods. It is, therefore, necessary, to order him in the King’s name, they be set at liberty and all that belongs to them restored. In case he refuse ... and you be desirous to march an army against him, ... let me know, and I will send you aid.” After the extinction of the elder branch in the persons of the Emperor Baldwin and his son, the House of Courtenay became so divided that, in the many ramifications of descent and consequent division of goods, the Seigneurs de Champignelles, de Tanlay, d’Arrablay, de Ferté Loupiere, etc., lost their pride of place, and were undistinguishable from the remainder of the nobility, direct evidence of which is furnished by the fact that Bouchet, who certainly loses no opportunity of enhancing the grandeur of the race, places over the arms of the Lord of D’Illier the nine-pointed coronet of a seigneur, and not, as on other occasions, the crown, embellished with fleur-de-lys, which designated the Royal House of France. Yet the right of the Courtenays to be considered of Royal blood is incontrovertible, testimony to it being borne by many deeds of partition and contracts of marriage to which members of the reigning family affixed their signatures, in each case describing themselves as relations and cousins. Moreover, even in the nineteenth century, the head of the House of Courtenay received a summons to the funeral of Henri Dieudonné, Comte de Chambord, Henri Cinq de France, as “notre parent et cousin.”