II. 1717–1764. THE SAINT-REMIS OF VALOIS.—A TRAMP UP TO THE CAPITAL.

For a couple of centuries there had resided at Bar-sur-Aube, in the Champagne, certain Barons de Saint-Remi, the first of whom was Henri de Saint-Remi, an illegitimate son of Henri II. of Valois, King of France, lover of the beautiful Diana of Poitiers; the same who had the ill luck to be accidentally killed at a tilting-match by a lance thrust in his right eye from the captain of his Scottish guards, the Count de Montgomerie, ancestor of our Earls of Eglinton. This son of his, Henri de Saint-Remi, was, in heralds’ language, “High and Puissant Lord and Knight, Baron and Seigneur of the Manors of the Chatellier, Fontette, Noez and Beauvoir, Knight of the King’s Order, Gentleman of the Bedchamber in ordinary, Colonel of a regiment of horse and a regiment of foot, and Governor of Château-Villain.” In the course of a few generations, however, the Saint-Remis appear to have fallen from their high estate, and their broad manors to have become entirely alienated from them, inasmuch as we find that Nicolas de Saint-Remi, the great-grandson of the Henri before mentioned, instead of being styled “High and Puissant Lord and Knight,” and Seigneur of various extensive domains, and the holder of numerous offices about the person of the sovereign, was merely one of the king’s body-guard in the Duke de Charost’s company. He married the daughter of Nicolas-François de Vienne, a great man in the royal bailiwick of Bar-sur-Aube, who seems at this period to have been the possessor of two of the Saint-Remi manors, namely, Noez and Fontette. The children that sprung from this marriage were two sons, the elder of whom was slain in battle, while the younger, Jacques de Saint-Remi, was father of the little beggar girl whom we found running beside the Boulainvilliers’ carriage asking alms.

Jacques de Saint-Remi de Valois, in spite of his illustrious descent, seems to have gradually sunk to the level of the peasant class, and the indigence to which he found himself reduced was aggravated by his imprudently marrying a young girl with a pretty face, but of vulgar manners and somewhat loose morals, the daughter of his concierge at the time he had a house to shelter him. The offspring of this union was a son and two daughters, born respectively in the years 1755, 6, and 7, but small as his family was, Jacques de Saint-Remi seems to have been unable to support it. One who knew him well describes the last of the barons of Saint-Remi as a man of athletic build, who lived partly by poaching and by depredations in the adjoining forest, partly by plundering his neighbours’ fields, and partly on the charity of the benevolent.⁠[1] The vast estates which formerly belonged to the now impoverished family had gradually dwindled away, some having been sold to meet the demands arising from the extravagance of successive owners, while others had passed into the hands of lawyers and money-lenders. At this period there nevertheless remained three domains of considerable extent, deeply encumbered, it is true, with debts, but still open to some real or fancied claim, which, although the beggared heir of the house of Valois had no means of enforcing it, was nevertheless the reverie and abstraction of his life. A few sheets of musty parchment, the surviving title-deeds of his house, the last wreck, so to speak, of the vast landed property of the Saint-Remis of Valois, were kept by him carefully stowed away under the straw thatch of his miserable hut. To pore at times over these old parchments was the one act of worldly vanity in which Jacques de Saint-Remi permitted himself to indulge, but the woman he had married was not so easily satisfied. The continual display of these mysterious documents kindled her ambition, until at length it was raised to such a pitch, that she prevailed on her husband to set out for Paris, there to endeavour to make interest among the great for the restoration of those rights to which as heir of the house of Valois she conceived him to be entitled.

After disposing of such few movables as they possessed, the wretched family set forth and literally tramped up to the capital, a distance of nearly a hundred and fifty miles. That they might not be burthened on the way by their youngest child, then about three years old, the unnatural parents left it behind them, exposed on a window-sill of the house of one Durand, “a wealthy and avaricious farmer,” to quote the eldest sister’s own words, “who, being in possession of a great part of my father’s estate, and having stood sponsor to this unfortunate infant, was therefore deemed the most proper person to be her future protector.”⁠[2]⁠

On their arrival in Paris, in a state of extreme destitution, the Saint-Remi family shifted their place of residence from one suburb to another until they eventually settled down at Boulogne, then merely a small village on the banks of the Seine, opposite to St. Cloud. Here they lived upon such charity as the gentry of the neighbourhood, attracted by the singularity of their story, from time to time bestowed upon them. The father at this period had fallen into a stage of dotage, and the mother’s pet idea of an appeal in high quarters for the restoration of the family estates had to be sacrificed to the powerful struggle which they were forced to make for their daily bread. Months thus passed away, until one day Jacques de Saint-Remi, for some cause or other—most likely an unpaid baker’s bill—was arrested by an officer of the marshalsea (mounted police) of Boulogne, and locked up in a loathsome cell, where he remained for six weeks. Here the poor man contracted a serious illness, and on his release, which was brought about by the intervention of the curé of the parish, the only retreat which the efforts of his neighbours, for friends he had none, were enabled to provide for him—a descendant of the blood-royal of France—was a pallet in one of the wards of the Hôtel Dieu. Here he died, a couple of days afterwards, on the 16th February, 1762.

Within a few days of the death of Jacques de Saint-Remi his wife gave birth to another daughter, and as soon as she was recovered from her confinement, the family removed to Versailles, where the mother made a practice of sending the children into the streets to beg. Jeanne, the eldest daughter, and the heroine of our story, appears to have been treated with great harshness by her mother; for unless the child brought home ten sous on ordinary days, and double that amount on Sundays and fête days, as the fruits of her mendicity, she was subjected, she tells us, to the cruellest punishment. The mother had at this time formed a disreputable connection with a disbanded common soldier—one Jean-Baptiste Raymond, a native of Sardinia—with whom mendicancy was a positive passion; for, in disregard of the authorities, he made it his daily practice to beg in the most public places of Paris, having with him the young Jacques de Saint-Remi, and the family documents, which he boldly exhibited to the passers-by in support of a pretended claim which he himself set up to the honours of the house of Valois. Jean-Baptiste was arrested by the police time after time, for plying his nefarious trade with such marked audacity, and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. He was, however, incorrigible, and the authorities at last determined upon getting rid of him. After sending him to prison for a further term of fifteen days, they ordered him to be exposed for four-and-twenty hours in the Place de Louis Quinze—subsequently the Place de la Révolution, where for two years the guillotine did its bloody work, and now the handsome Place de la Concorde—with an inscription setting forth the nature of his imposture, and copies of the titles he had falsely assumed hung round his neck. This public exhibition at an end, Jean-Baptiste Raymond was banished for five years from the capital.

When the day arrived for his departure, the unnatural mother of the young Saint-Remis set out with her paramour, leaving behind her three children, whom she promised to rejoin in eight days at the very outside, to shift for themselves. Five weeks, however, elapsed without any tidings of her, and it was at this particular moment that the poor children, deserted by their only remaining protector, and reduced almost to a state of starvation, had the good fortune to attract the notice of the kind-hearted Marchioness de Boulainvilliers.