THE TRUE HISTORY OF AGNES SOREL.
Reading edition
BY R. H. HORNE, AUTHOR OF "ORION," ETC.
Agnes Sorel was born in 1409, at the village of Fromenteau, in Touraine. Her father was the Seigneur de St. Gérand, a gentleman attached to the house of the Count de Clermont. At the age of fifteen, she was placed as maid of honor to Isabel of Lorraine, duchess of Anjou, and accompanied this princess when she went to Paris, in 1431.
At this period, Agnes Sorel was considered to be the most beautiful woman of her day. Her conversation and wit were equal to her beauty. In the "Histoire des Favorites" she is said to have been noble-minded, full of generosity, with sweetness of manners, and sincerity of heart. The same writer adds that every body fell in love with her, from the king to the humblest officers. Charles VII. became passionately attached to her; and in order to insure her constant presence at court, he placed her as maid of honor to the queen. The amour was conducted with secrecy; but the fact became manifest by the favors which the king lavished upon the relations of Agnes, while she herself lived in great magnificence amidst a very poor court. She was fond of splendor, and has been quaintly described by Monstrelet as "having enjoyed all the pleasures of life, in wearing rich clothes, furred robes, and golden chains of precious stones, and whatever else she desired." When she visited Paris, in attendance upon the queen, the splendor and expense of Agnes were so excessive that the people murmured greatly; whereupon the proud beauty exclaimed against the Parisians as churls.
During the time that the English were actually in possession of a great part of France, it was in vain that the queen (Mary of Anjou) endeavored to rouse her husband from his lethargy. That the king was not deficient in energy and physical courage, is evident from the manner in which he signalized himself on various occasions. At the siege of Montereau in 1437, (according to the Chronicle de Charles VII. par M. Alain Chartier, Nevers, 1594,) he rushed to the assault, now thrusting with the lance, now assisting the artillery, now superintending the various military engines for heaving masses of stone or wood; but during the period above-mentioned he was lost to all sense of royal glory, and had given himself up entirely to hunting and all sorts of pleasures.
He was recalled by Agnes to a sense of what was due to his kingdom. She told him, one day, says Brantoine, that when she was a girl, an astrologer had predicted that she would be loved by one of the most valiant kings of Christendom; that when His Majesty Charles VII. had done her this honor, she thought, of course, he was the valiant king who had been predicted; but now, finding he was so weak, and had so little care as to what became of himself and his affairs, she saw that she had made a mistake, and that this valiant prince could not be Charles, but the King of England. Saying these words, Agnes rose, and bowing reverentially to the king, asked leave to retire to the court of the English king, since the prophecy pointed at him. "Charles," she said, "was about to lose his crown, and Henry to unite it to his." By this rebuke the king was much affected. He gave up his hunting, left his gardens for the field of battle, and succeeded in driving the English out of France. This circumstance occasioned Francis I. to make the following verses, which, it is said, he wrote under a portrait of Agnes:—
"Plus de louange et d'honneur tu mérite, La cause étant de France recouvrer, Que ce que peut dedans un cloitre ouvrer, Close nonnain, ou bien dévol hermite."
The king lavished gifts and honors upon Agnes. He built a château for her at Loches; he gave her, besides the comté de Penthièvre, in Bretagne, the lordships of Roche Servière, of Issoudun, in Berri, and the Château de Beauté, at the extremity of the wood of Vincennes, that she might be, as he said, "in deed and in name the Queen of Beauty." It is believed that she never made a bad use of her influence with the king for any political purposes or unkind private feelings; nevertheless, the Dauphin (afterwards Louis XI.) conceived an implacable jealousy against her, and carried his resentment so far, on one occasion, as to give her a blow.
She retired, in 1445, to Loches, and for nearly five years declined appearing at court; but the king's love for her still continued, and he took many journeys into Touraine to visit her. But eventually the queen, who had never forgotten her noble counsels to the king, which had roused him from his lethargy, persuaded her to return to court.
The queen appears to have felt no jealousy, but to have had a regard for her. It seems, also, that Agnes had become very popular, partly from her beauty and wit, partly because she was considered in a great measure, to have saved France, and partly because she distributed large sums in alms to the poor, and to repair decayed churches.
After the taking of Rouen, and the entire expulsion of the English from France, the king took up his winter-quarters in the Abbey of Jumiège. Agnes hastened to the Château de Masnal la Belle, a league distant from this abbey, for the purpose of warning the king of a conspiracy. The king only laughed at the intelligence; but the death of Agnes Sorel, which immediately followed, gives some grounds for crediting the truth of the information which she communicated. At this place Agnes, still beautiful, and in perfect health, was suddenly attacked by a dysentery which carried her off. It is believed that she was poisoned. Some affirm that it was effected by direction of the Dauphin; others accuse Jacques Cœur, the king's goldsmith (as the master of the treasury was then called), and others attribute it to female jealousy.
The account given of her death by Monstrelet is to the following effect: Agnes was suddenly attacked by a dysentery which could not be cured. She lingered long, and employed the time in prayer and repentance; she often, as he relates, called upon Mary Magdalen, who had also been a sinner, and upon God and the blessed Virgin for aid. After receiving the sacrament, she desired the book of prayers to be brought her, in which she had written with her own hand the verses of St. Barnard, and these she repeated. She then made many gifts, which were put down in writing: and these, including alms and the payment of her servants, amounted to 60,000 crowns. The fair Agnes, the once proud beauty, perceiving her end approaching, and now feeling a disgust to life proportioned to the fulness of her past enjoyment of all its gayeties, vanities, and pleasures, said to the Lord de la Tremouille and others, and in the presence of all her damsels, that our insecure and worldly life was but a foul ordure. She then requested her confessor to give her absolution, according to a form she herself dictated, with which he complied. After this, she uttered a loud shriek, and gave up the ghost. She died on Monday, the 9th day of February, 1449, about six o'clock in the afternoon, in the fortieth year of her age.
This account, though bearing every appearance of probability, is yet open to some doubts, from the manifestation of a tendency, on the part of Monstrelet, to give a coloring to the event, and to the character of Agnes Sorel. He even attempts to throw a doubt upon her having been the king's mistress, treating the fact as a mere scandal. He says that the affection of the king was attributable to her good sense, her wit, her agreeable manners, and gayety, quite as much as to her beauty. This was, no doubt, the case; but it hardly helps the argument of the historian. Monstrelet finds it difficult, however, to dispose of the children that she had by the king: he admits that Agnes had a daughter which she said was the king's, but that he denied it. The compilation by Denys Codefroy takes the same view, but nearly the whole account is copied verbatim from Monstrelet, without acknowledgment.
The heart and intestines of Agnes were buried at Jumiège. Her body was placed in the centre of the choir of the collegiate church of the Château de Loches, which she had greatly enriched.
Her tomb was in existence at Loches, in 1792. It was of black marble. The figure of Agnes was in white marble; her head resting upon a lozenge, supported by angels, and two lambs were at her feet.
The writer of the life of Agnes Sorel in the "Biographie Universelle," having access to printed books and MSS. of French history which are not in the public libraries of this country, the following statements are taken from that work: the writer does not give his authorities.
The canons of the church pretended to be scandalized at having the tomb of Agnes placed in their choir, and begged permission of Louis XI. to have it removed. "I consent," replied the king, "provided you give up all you have received from her bounty."
The poets of the day were profuse in their praises of the memory of Agnes. One of the most memorable of these is a poem by Baïf, printed at Paris in 1573. In 1789 the library of the chapter of Loches possessed a manuscript containing nearly a thousand Latin sonnets in praise of Agnes, all acrostics, and made by a canon of that city.
A marble bust of her was long preserved at the Château de Chinon, and is now placed in the Muséum des Augustins.
Agnes Sorel had three daughters by Charles VII., who all received dowries, and were married at the expense of the crown. They received the title of daughters of France, the name given at that time to the natural daughters of the kings. An account of the noble families into which they married, together with the honors bestowed upon the brother of Agnes, will be found in Moreri's "Dictionnaire Historique."