The mother of the runaway beauty--a certain Countess de la Varax, was determined to recover her daughter and as a bourgeoise of Berne, denounced the ravisher to the city authorities, but when informed by the countess of Beaufort that she had been married by bell and by book, and had Count Michel's promise to intercede in her favor, they declined to prosecute her or her husband. Fribourg also took the side of the lovers, and sent a letter in their behalf to the king of France. But the Countess de la Varax had already secured the support of both emperor and king, who, thinking the matter of high political importance, sent pressing letters by their ambassadors to Berne and Fribourg and, later, to the Diet of the Confederation, commanding that de Beaufort should give up his bride. Informed of these royal and imperial commands, the Sire de Beaufort declared he would die rather than give up his wife or emerge from his Gruyere asylum, and prayed the seigneurs of Berne to write to the king in his favor. Before the grave assemblage of the Confederation of the Diet at Baden, Count Michel magnificently declared that as for him he would protect the refugees at all costs, and left the matter to the justice of the delegates. The Diet as stoutly declining to dissolve a legalized marriage, defied the summons of the king and the emperor and ordered the pursuit of the lovers to cease. The two counts of Gruyere and of Beaufort were so gratified by this support that when the emperor prepared to invade Switzerland they offered to join the Confederate army in the defence of their country. With the passing of this threat of invasion Count Michel lost his last opportunity of military distinction. The remainder of his reign was one long struggle with the net of financial embarrassment which now encompassed him. The youthful impression of magnificence gained at the French court, the vanity of his extraordinary beauty, the favor of the dazzling Francois I, the actual independence of his imperial principality exalted his imagination to a pitch of pretension utterly beyond his capacity of either leadership or organization. He was fertile in imagination, persistent and indefatigable, but he had unfortunately inherited no trace of the firmness or judgment displayed by the long line of his ancestors, while from the intriguing de Vergy strain, he derived a treacherous and feeble duplicity, which lost him the confidence of the sovereigns he served and the cities with which he was allied. Although maintaining an apparent friendship with Berne and Fribourg, whose monetary assistance he constantly demanded, he succeeded by a complicated system of loans and partial payments of interest in possessing himself of a long line of chateaux-forts extending from Gruyere to the Pays de Gex. As he was the acknowledged head of the still existing league "de la Cuiller," his acquisition of this formidable line of fortresses only too clearly