His son Jacques de Breze, Comte de Maulevrier, inherited the same distinction; but having killed his wife, whose birth had shown its unfortunate effects too soon in flagrant infidelity, he was in turn disgraced and fined, but in turn was also reinstated. His son Louis de Breze was given the apparently imperishable family heirloom of the office of Grand Seneschal in August 1490, and the great seal of the Senechaussee of Normandy was henceforth his coat of arms. More of a soldier and a courtier than a man of law or of finance, this de Breze left the duties of his office to a numerous staff, whose names have been preserved in the registers of Rouen. He married first Catherine de Dreux, "dame d'Esneval," and left his brother-in-law in charge of the duties of his office, when he left it. During this period it was that Cardinal d'Amboise organised the Supreme Court of the Echiquier de Normandie (of which Antoine Bohier, Abbe of St. Ouen, was a member), in the last years of Charles VIII., which, when the Duc d'Orleans became Louis XII., was to blossom into the Perpetual Echiquier in the new "Palais de Justice." The organisation of this court did away with any practical necessity for a Grand Seneschal, but Louis de Breze was still allowed to keep the honour of the title, and even to take a seat in the court, which was soon to be called the "Parlement de Normandie" by Francois Premier. Louis de Breze's second wife was the famous Diane de Poitiers, who called herself "La Grande Seneschale" until she died, and who put up the magnificent tomb in alabaster and black marble which has preserved her husband's memory ever since his death in 1531, long after the "Palais de Justice" had been built to carry on for ever those legal functions which had once been a portion of the duties of his office. CHAPTER XI _Justice_ 'Or ca'--nous dit Grippeminaud, au milieu de ses Chats-fourrez--'par Stix, puisqu' autre chose ne veux dire, or ca, je te monstreray, or ca, que meilleur te seroit estre tombe entre les pattes de Lucifer, or ca, et de tous les Diables, or ca, qu'entre nos gryphes, or ca; les vois-tu bien? Or ca, malautru, nous allegues tu innocence, or ca, comme chose digne d'eschapper nos tortures? Or ca, nos Loix sont comme toile d'araignes; le grand Diable vous y chantera Messe, or ca'. To appreciate what was involved by the building of the famous "Palais de Justice," which is perhaps the greatest pride of Rouen, I must needs bring before you a little more of the social life which made a court of law and justice necessary; and I can make no better beginning than by quoting again, from the Record of the Fierte St. Romain, those instances after 1448 which throw the greatest light upon the manners and customs of the years when the Echiquier de Rouen first became a permanent assembly in its own House.