Cardinal de Retz, Mémoires (Paris: Pléiade, 1956), p. 355.
The deputies of the parliament of Bordeaux went to the court at Libourne. They were imperiously commanded to open their gates so as to receive the king with all his troops. They replied that it was one of their privileges to protect the person of a king when he was in their town. Marshal de La Meilleraye advanced between the Dordogne and the Garonne. He captured the Château of Vayre, where Richon had three hundred men, for the people of Bordeaux, and the cardinal had him hanged in Libourne, a hundred yards from the king’s residence there. In reprisal, Monsieur de Bouillon had them hang Canolle (sic), an officer in Monsieur de La Meilleraye’s army. He then attacked the Ile Saint-Georges, which was lightly defended by La Mothe de Las and where the Chevalier de La Valette was mortally wounded.
Duke de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et mémoires (Paris: Rivages, 2001), pp. 242–3.
After that, the troops of Marshal de La Meilleraye and those of the Duke d’Epernon pressed Bordeaux more closely. They even recaptured the Ile Saint-Georges, which is in the Garonne, four leagues above the town, where some fortifications had started to be built. It was defended for three or four days with some vigour, because at each high tide a fresh regiment was sent there from Bordeaux which relieved the guard. General de La Valette was wounded there and died a few days later. But finally the boats that had brought some troops, which were due to take back those being relieved, were sunk by a battery that Marshal de La Meilleraye had set up on the bank of the river, and both the soldiers and their officers were so afraid that they all surrendered and were taken prisoners of war. So the people of Bordeaux lost the island, which was important to them, and at the same time twelve hundred men of their best infantry. This rout and the arrival of the king at Libourne, who at once attacked the Château de Vaire, two leagues from Bordeaux, threw the town into great consternation. The parliament and the people saw themselves on the brink of being besieged by the king, and they were lacking everything necessary to defend themselves. No help came to them from Spain, and fear had finally induced the parliament to assemble to debate whether deputies should be sent to ask for peace on whatever conditions it might please the king to grant them, when it was learned that Vaire had been captured and that the governor, called Richon, having surrendered on terms, had been hanged. This severity, by which the cardinal thought he would cause terror and division in Bordeaux, had quite the contrary effect; for, the news having come at a time when minds were, as I said, worried and uncertain, the Duke de Bouillon and the Duke de La Rochefoucauld were able to take such advantage of the situation that they put their affairs in a better state than they had been so far by having hanged at the same time a man called Canoles (sic), who had commanded in the Ile Saint-Georges the first time that the people of Bordeaux had captured it, when he had surrendered to them on terms. But, so that the parliament and the people should share with the generals responsibility for an action that was both necessary and daring, they had Canoles judged by a council of war presided over by the princess and the Duke d’Enghien, which was made up not only of the officers commanding the troops, but also of two deputies of the parliament, who were always present, and thirty-six captains of the town. The poor gentleman, whose only crime was his bad luck, was condemned with a single voice, and the people were so incensed that they hardly gave him time to be executed before tearing his body into shreds. This action astonished the court and gave renewed vigour to the people of Bordeaux.
Louis de Beaupoil, Comte de Sainte-Aulaire, Histoire de la Fronde, new edition (Paris: Ducrocq, 1841), vol. II, Chapter XIII, p. 40.
This was the state of affairs when a letter from the king, dated from Poitiers, announced his immediate arrival. His Majesty ordered parliament to send deputies to Libourne to receive orders and threatened severe punishment in the event of resistance. Far from being intimidated, the parliament replied with a proclamation stating that ‘Cardinal Mazarin would not be welcomed in the town; that His Majesty was very humbly entreated to enter without troops and to entrust the protection of his person to his loyal subjects, the people of the city of Bordeaux’…
Cardinal Mazarin, having no remaining hope of reaching an agreement, wished to mark the king’s arrival with some exploit that would spread fear of his might and attacked Vayres, the château of the President de Gourgues, which was fortified in the manner of the time and which defended the approaches to Bordeaux. A brave commoner called Richon, a native of Guîtres, a small town nearby, rushed to the fort with three hundred militiamen. He courageously withstood several attacks and drove back the assailants, but a soldier of the garrison, who had been bribed with money, showed the troops a secret gate. The Marquis de Biron broke into the fort, and Richon, overwhelmed by superior numbers, was forced to surrender, taken to Libourne and immediately ordered to be hanged.
The court was outraged by such severity: Mademoiselle de Montpensier and the Marquis de Biron strongly entreated that the prisoner should be spared, but Mazarin remained inflexible: ‘Richon, who was not even a gentleman, had dared to defend a château against a royal army and it was important to shock the townsfolk with an exemplary punishment.’ The unfortunate man was even refused the mercy of being beheaded, as he strongly begged, and he was strung up on a gallows that had been set up in the market place at Libourne, where his body remained exposed to view.
When the townsfolk of Bordeaux learned of Richon’s execution, they wanted in their fury to murder every royalist that the chances of war had delivered into their hands. Even the magistrates judged that this was a case when the cruel principle of reprisal should be applied, and the Chevalier de Canolles, Commander of the Ile Saint-Georges, was the designated victim. He was generally liked for his easy and sociable manner. The archers sent to arrest him found him enjoying a meal with friends. He was not at all alarmed, and when his warrant was read out to him, he could still not imagine that he was to be killed. The Princess de Condé was very concerned about his fate, being always both compassionate and fearless. She once again assembled the council of war, asked for all the captains of the Bordeaux militia to attend and tried to convince them that they were risking a great deal by following the barbarous example that the enemy had just given them. All these entreaties were useless and the princess could not even manage to obtain a stay of execution that she had demanded in the hope of allowing the prisoner to escape. The execution took place on the port of Bordeaux and Canolles’s body had to remain hanging from a gibbet facing the road to Libourne for as long as that of Richon was displayed in the market of that town.
Notes
BOOK I
NANON DE LARTIGUES
1. one quarter of a league away: A league is about four kilometres (2.5 miles); so the river was about a kilometre away.
2. You can earn a crown: In fact, an écu, a silver coin worth three livres (the livre was the basic unit of currency, originally worth one pound of silver). The value of the livre in seventeenth-century France still varied from one province to another. This is one reason why it is more or less impossible to give modern equivalents for the money of the period (even assuming that Dumas himself had any accurate notion of what the coins represented in terms of wages and purchasing power two centuries before his own time). See also notes 18 and 29, Book I.
3. letter of attestation: The term that Dumas uses is blanc seing, which is a blank document, already signed but not filled in.
4. Duke d’Epernon: Bernard de Nogaret de La Valette, Duke d’Epernon (1592–1661), was governor of the province of Guyenne.
5. Guyenne: A former province of south-west France, which in medieval times, with Gascony, formed the duchy of Aquitaine. After Bordeaux had been recaptured from the English in 1453, it became the capital of the province of Guyenne (or Guienne).
6. the horribly tight-fisted government of Monsieur de Mazarin… a lot of trouble in the capital: Cardinal Jules Mazarin (Giulio Mazarini, 1602–61), a papal envoy, was naturalized as a French subject in 1634 and
succeeded Cardinal Richelieu as prime minister in 1642. The object of much suspicion (like Queen Anne of Austria) because of his foreign origin, he was a strong supporter of the young king, and one of those who helped to found the absolute power of Louis XIV. He thus became one of the main targets of the Frondeurs, who also reacted against his taxation policies (see Introduction).
7. coadjutor: Jean-François-Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz (1613–79), was coadjutor (or assistant) to the Archbishop of Paris, a post of considerable power. He joined the Frondeurs against Mazarin, which led to his eventual disgrace and the retirement during which he wrote the most celebrated memoirs of the period, an important source for our knowledge of the Fronde (see Appendix).
8. Monsieur de Beaufort: François de Vendôme, Duke de Beaufort (1616–69), was implicated in the conspiracy of Cinq-Mars (see note 107) and a leading member of the Fronde against Mazarin. The Duchess de Montbazon was his mistress.
9. Madame de Longueville: The Duke de La Rochefoucauld’s mistress.
10. Orléans: Gaston, Duke d’Orléans (1608–60), son of Henri IV and Marie de’ Médicis, was a lifelong conspirator, involved in the Cinq-Mars conspiracy (see note 9, Book III) and subsequently in the conflict of the princes against Mazarin in the Fronde. He was exiled in 1652.
11. the Parliament: The Paris parlement was established in the mid-fourteenth century as a higher court or court of appeal, and from the following century provincial parlements were set up in a number of major towns, including one in Bordeaux, in 1462, which features in Dumas’s novel. With time, all the parlements acquired a range of judicial and administrative functions, but the one in Paris became the focus of opposition to Mazarin during the Fronde. In this translation, ‘Parliament’ refers to the Paris parlement, while the Bordeaux parlement is consistently referred to as the ‘parliament of Bordeaux’. The Paris Parliament was a body of much greater power and significance than the parliament of Bordeaux.
12. Monsieur de Condé… fighting for France: The Prince de Condé was one of the most famous and successful French generals of the time, particularly after his victory at Rocroi (1643) against the Spaniards. Eight years earlier, France had entered the Thirty Years’ War against Spain. However, shortly before the battle, in May 1643, Louis XIII died, a fact that the young Condé kept from his troops, in order to avoid demoralizing them. It was his skill in tackling a much larger Spanish force that eventually won the day.
13. the princes’ cause: The so-called princes’ Fronde was occasioned by the arrest in 1651 of the Prince de Condé (see Introduction).
14. broken on the wheel: The punishment for aristocrats, who were spared the indignity of hanging.
15. I could open the way… a successor to the Governor of Guyenne and stop the civil war: D’Epernon’s unpopularity as Governor of Guyenne was one of the causes of the Fronde and of the strength of the anti-government forces in Bordeaux (see Introduction).
16. At this maxim… Boileau would put in verse: The poet Nicholas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), one of the dominant cultural figures of his age and an important arbiter of classical literary taste, wrote in his mock-heroic poem Le Lutrin (1674–83): ‘… remember this: A dinner once reheated never tasted good’ (Book I, ll. 103–4).
17. paletot: The long, loose jacket worn by a musketeer.
18. the thousand louis: The gold louis was worth between 10 and 24 livres (see note 2, Book I).
19. Gaston d’Orléans: Gaston d’Orléans (1608–60), brother of King Louis XIII, was leader of the Orléanist faction in the Fronde (each of the main protagonists in opposition to Mazarin having his own supporters). (See also note 10, Book I.)
20. Oedipus: Oedipus, King of Thebes, gained a reputation for wisdom after solving the riddle set by the Sphinx, which had asked what animal walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs in the afternoon, and on three in the evening. The answer that Oedipus gave was: man, who walks on all fours as a baby, on two legs as an adult and with a stick in the evening of his life.
21. The Duke d’Epernon: See notes 4 and 5, Book I.
22. parliament of Bordeaux: The parlements were local courts and provincial administrative bodies. See note 11, Book I.
23. the princess: The Princess de Condé, wife of Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, a soldier, who was imprisoned because of his opposition to Mazarin (see Introduction). During her husband’s imprisonment, the princess was the figurehead of the Frondeurs.
24. my young Nestor: Nestor was the oldest and wisest of the Greeks at the time of the Trojan War (see Homer’s Iliad).
25. Agen: A town in south-west France, on the Garonne.
26. that inseparable friend of Henri IV: Jean-Louis de Nogaret, Duke d’Epernon (1554–1642), a governor of Provence who was, as Dumas says, a close friend of King Henri IV, the king who was assassinated for religious reasons by Ravaillac in 1610 and succeeded by his son, who reigned as Louis XIII until 1643.
27. Catherine de’ Médicis: Wife of Henri II, Catherine de’ Médicis (1519–89) was mother of Marguerite de Valois, who married Henri de Navarre, the future King Henri IV. After his divorce from Marguerite, Henri married another member of the Florentine Medici family in 1600, Marie de’ Médicis (1573–1642), who became regent after his death.
28. Mazarin: See note 6, Book I.
29. five hundred pistoles: A pistole was a gold coin worth about the same amount as a louis (see note 2, Book I).
30. the princes of Condé, Conti and Longueville: The three children of Henri de Bourbon, cousin of King Henri IV of France, were: Louis, Prince de Condé, his brother, Armand, Prince de Conti, and their sister, Anne-Geneviève, who married Henri II d’Orléans, Duke de Longueville. All three men – Louis, Armand and their brother-in-law, Henri – were imprisoned in 1650 because of their opposition to Mazarin (see Introduction).
31. Cyrano de Bergerac: Though he was immortalized in the nineteenth-century play by Edmond de Rostand as a frustrated lover with a large nose, Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–55) was in fact a remarkable writer, the author of essays, plays and a fantasy about a journey to the moon called L’Autre Monde (not published until 1657, after his death), which was a satire on the society, politics and religion of his time. He started as an opponent of Mazarin, then rallied to the royalist cause against the Frondeurs.
32. Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld: François, Duke de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80), who played a prominent part in the Fronde, was an ally of the Prince de Condé. He writes about the events which form the background to the novel in his memoirs, but he is best remembered for his maxims, written during his retirement after the failure of the Fronde (Maximes, 1665), which express his disillusionment in brief, witty and often cynical comments on human nature. Dumas makes him one of the key figures in this novel (see Introduction and Appendix).
33. Under the other cardinal: Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), the powerful prime minister of Louis XIII, whose death, shortly before that of the king, helped to cause a power vacuum in the country (see Introduction).
34. the Battle of Corbie: The Battle of Corbie (1636), in Picardy, took place during the campaign by Louis XIII’s first minister, Cardinal Richelieu, against the royal family of Austria.
35. Collioure: Wine from Collioure, in what is now the southern French region of Languedoc-Roussillon.
36. Perhaps too, as a Huguenot… by drinking water and eating roots: ‘Huguenot’ is a general term for the members of various Protestant faiths. The country had been divided by religious wars during the previous century, with a number of noble families adopting the reformed faiths. The St Bartholemew’s Day massacres in August 1572, instigated by Catherine de’ Médicis and her son, King Charles IX, were the most violent attempt to repress the Huguenots. During the reign of Henri IV, however, they were guaranteed certain rights by the Edict of Nantes (1598).
37. Ganymede: In Greek mythology, a beautiful Trojan youth whom Zeus took to Olympus and made the cupbearer of the gods.
38. Igne tantum perituri… who
was afraid of drowning: It has not been possible to trace the source of this obscure song, which Canolles cites for Richon’s benefit. However, the Latin verse implies that there was a prediction that the Prince de Condé would die by fire, so, during a crossing of the Rhine he was reassuring his companions that since they were with him, neither he, nor therefore they, would be drowned.
39. a martingale for trente-et-quarante: A card game, a bit like pontoon, involving two rows of cards, in which the points must not be less than thirty-one or more than forty. A ‘martingale’ is a system for winning by progressively increasing one’s stake.
40. Vayres: A small town with a castle that used to belong to King Henri IV, on the Dordogne river, north-west of Bordeaux.
41. the Crispins and the Mascarilles of his day: Typical names of servants in comedies by the dramatist Molière (Jean-Baptiste Pocquelin, 1622–73) and his contemporaries.
42. Rabelaisian: François Rabelais (?1494–1553) is famous for the bawdy humour of his stories Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534–5).
43. Céladon: the shepherd who is the hero of the pastoral novel, L’Astrée (1607–27), by Honoré d’Urfé (1567–1625). The reference is obliquely quite apt. Céladon is sent away by Astrée because she thinks that he has been unfaithful to her; he later returns in the disguise of a girl.
44. I’ll discount it: Bills of exchange (which, like promissory notes, were documents requesting a third party to pay a certain sum at a given date in the future) could be ‘discounted’ (that is bought or sold before the date when they fell due, with a deduction for interest).
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