Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy: History, Gallantry, and National Identity 9781802700305

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GENDER AND POWER IN THE PREMODERN WORLD Further Information and Publications www.arc-humanities.org/our-series/arc/gp/

AGNÈS SOREL AND THE FRENCH MONARCHY HISTORY, GALLANTRY, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

by

TRACY ADAMS

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction. Why a New Study of Agnès Sorel? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part One WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT AGNÈS SOREL AND HOW WE KNOW IT

Chapter One. Who Was Agnès Sorel? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Chapter Two. The Primary Sources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Chapter Three. The First Royal Mistress in Historical Context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Part Two THE SPECTACULAR AFTERLIFE OF AGNÈS SOREL

Chapter Four. Communicative Memory: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Chapter Five. Cultural Memory: Agnès as Celebrity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Chapter Six. Agnès la Gallante. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Chapter Seven. History, Gallantry, and National Identity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Conclusion. Agnès Sorel, Modern Celebrity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Biblio­graphy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: Jean Fouquet, “Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim.” Collection Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten— Flemish Community (CC0), inv. no. 132. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Figure 2: “Agnès Sorel.” Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Gabinetto Disegni et Stampe, inv. no. 3925. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Figure 3: François Roger de Gaignières, “Sketch of the Tomb of Agnès Sorel,” ca. 1700. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Pe 2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Figure 4: Anonymous French painter, “Bethsabée au bain.” From the Heures à l’usage de Rome de Marguerite de Coëtivy, femme de François de Pons, comte de Montfort, 1490–1500. Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 74, fol. 61. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Because I wrote

so much of this study during the Covid period, locked down in Auckland and unable to travel, I do not have as many colleagues as usual to thank for sharing ideas and allowing me to learn from them at conferences or on campuses. This study certainly could have used more communal input, but we all work within the bounds of the possible. Still, back in the days before New Zealand closed its borders, I had a few wonderful opportunities to test some preliminary ideas with colleagues. I would like to thank friends and colleagues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I had the great pleasure of giving the Mary McLaughlin Memorial Lecture in November 2018, especially Amy Nelson Burnett, Kelly Stage, Carole Levin, and Alison Stewart. My deepest gratitude to Caroline zum Kolk and Guillaume Fonkenell, organizers of the colloquium “Catherine de Médicis: Politique et art dans la France de la Renaissance” at Blois in November 2019, for the occasion to first present the Catherine and Agnès material in such a magnificent setting. (If only my twelve-year-old historical romance fan-self had known that someday I would have the opportunity to give a talk at Blois!) Thanks to É� lodie Lecuppre-Desjardin of Charles de Gaulle University, Lille 3, for the chance to present some of this material to her graduate seminar and the colleagues and students there for their intelligent, and useful comments. Also, a massive thanks to Gilles Lecuppre for his always astute feedback. Thanks so much to Indravati Félicité and Lucien Bély for arranging for me to present some of this material at M. Bély’s Sorbonne seminar, “Anthropo­logie de la diplomatie et de la vie de Cour en France et en Europe,” in December 2019. To all of you: I cannot wait to see you in person again! Thanks, as always, to Christine Adams, who read and commented on the manu­ script—what would I do without you? To Jean-Jacques Courtine, thank you not only for our many discussions, but also for checking my French before I presented the material to French-speaking audiences. The anonymous readers for Arc Humanities Press were tremendously helpful with their careful readings and comments, as was Danna Messer, acquisitions editor at the press. Thanks to you all. Finally, a special thanks to Carole Levin, who suggested this project in the first place at the annual Kings and Queens conference of the Royal Studies Network at Winchester in August 2018 and helped me work through it in Lincoln later that year. Most of all, I would like to acknowledge Carole as a role model and inspiration: for her creative, historically rigorous scholarship and her constant and generous support of other scholars at all stages of their careers. I do not know whether Elizabeth I truly uttered this aphorism attributed to her, but “Words are leaves, the substance consists of deeds, which are the true fruits of a good tree.”

Introduction

WHY A NEW STUDY OF AGNÈS SOREL? In the popular imagination the French royal mistress has always been the glam-

ourous face of court life, focus of the desire for luxury and power. But she has also always represented the court’s high-stake political intriguing and its culture of dissimulation and debauchery. Agnès Sorel (ca. 1422–1450), mistress of Charles VII (1403–1461) and the first famous female favourite of a king of France, is the exception that proves the rule. In contrast with later royal mistresses, she is supposed to have used her influence only for good, inspiring Charles VII to rout the English and restore the French monarchy. Although Chateaubriand deemed the “reign” of favourites a “calamity for the old monarchy,” he claimed that Agnès Sorel was different from her counterparts, “useful to the prince and the patrie.”1 François-Marie Cayot Délandre compares Diane de Poitiers unfavourably to Agnès, lamenting that Henri II had no Agnès Sorel.2 Even the most recent accounts of Agnès contrast her generosity with the self-dealing and greed of her successors. During the six years of her liaison with Charles VII, writes one historian, “she made use of her status as the first lady of France only with decency and sobriety.”3 “There would be in the future arrogant, insolent, hateful mistresses,” affirms another, but Agnès Sorel belongs to a different category, “that of the modest and respectful favourite, because she was of a sweet and good nature…”4 Except for the odd discordant note, the literature related to Agnès shows none of the ambivalence that marks discussion of her later counterparts. And yet, nothing in her bio­graphy predicts this status. Her perduring popularity took hold only some seventy years after her death, when her memory, carefully tended by her family and friends, was welcomed at the court of King François I (r. 1515–1547), and her celebrity increased and flourished in the culture of gallantry that characterized court and salon life in France from the mid-seventeenth century on. Embellished by writers of this tradition, the story of Agnès today remains a fixture in popular histories, novels, and documentaries, and Agnès herself enjoys a widespread social media presence, her picture adorning Internet fan sites, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Facebook.5 François-Frédéric Steenackers’s observation of 1868 has lost none of its currency: whereas the other royal mistresses “vanish or lose themselves in the distance,” Agnès’s image “is still new and alive in the minds of everyone…”6 1  Chateaubriand, Analyse raisonnée, 293.

2  Cayot-Délandre, Abrégé de l’Histoire, 2:4. 3  Castarède, Les Femmes galantes, 28. 4  Kermina, Agnès Sorel, 64–65.

5  As a quick Google or Twitter search will verify.

6  Steenackers, Agnès Sorel et Charles VII, 220–21, although this is an exaggeration. A handful of

2

Introduction

The Romance Heroine The real Agnès Sorel is in many ways a cipher. She had become very wealthy before her sudden death, as chroniclers’ complaints about her lavish lifestyle, records of the king’s gifts and her own donations, and the remaining fragments of her will all attest. But relative to later royal mistresses few of her financial details remain. Nor do any contemporary ambassador reports mention her. By the time of the next significant royal mistress, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, better known as the Duchess of É� tampes (1508–1580), mistress to François I, resident ambassadors were copiously documenting daily life at the French royal court, some casting a jaundiced eye on what they saw as the duchess’s illegitimate interference and criticizing her as flighty and meddling, even as they acknowledged her power. The political activity of subsequent mistresses is similarly well documented, often in disparaging ways. But Agnès, active from 1444–1450, before the age of intense correspondence between resident ambassadors and their lords, was never scrutinized in the same way. With so much left to the imagination, the narrative about Agnès has been recounted as a tragic love story in which she serves as muse to the king rather than political advisor, like later favourites. Her glorious beauty and witty repartee arouse the ardour of King Charles VII when she meets him in 1443; the king falls head over heels in love and showers her with gifts. Initially she wards off his advances. But no woman can resist a king, and she eventually surrenders. The lovers carry on a passionate semiclandestine affair in castles along the Loire until Agnès, worried that the king is shirking his duty by whiling away the hours with her, urges him to take up arms against the English. Spurred to action by her loving pressure, he valiantly restores Normandy to the French. Agnès is the saviour of the kingdom. But the love story has a tragic ending. Within months of Charles VII’s great victory, she dies in agony, leaving the distraught king to immortalize her in two magnificent tombs, one to contain her heart in Jumièges in Normandy where she died, the other to house her body in Loches in the Loire Valley where she and the king had passed many happy hours. The romance is not pure invention. However, it is not based on chronicle sources, which report only that Charles VII fell in love with a beautiful young woman and raised her far above her station. Rather, it is based on two iconic sources, one visual, one verbal, created shortly after her death. The first is the donor portrait known as the Melun diptych, commonly dated to shortly after 1452, commissioned by the king’s secretary É� tienne Chevalier, who was also one of the executors of Agnès’s will.7 The diptych’s two oak panels depict, on the left, Chevalier flanked by his patron saint É� tienne or Stephen, and, on the right, a lactating Virgin, whose features according to tradition were the French royal mistresses could also be regarded as celebrities, especially Diane de Poitiers and Mesdames Montespan and Pompadour.

7  On dating see Kemperdick, “Catalogue 1,” 142. The estimate is based on the fact that Chevalier’s wife, Catherine Budé, who died in 1452, is not pictured beside him; also, dendrochrono­logical analysis of the wood on which the diptych is painted verifies a date of post-1450.



Why a New Study of Agnès Sorel

3

modeled on Agnès’s.8 This association with the Virgin has done much to guarantee Agnès’s positive reputation. The second source appears for the first time in a didactic roman à clé known as the Jouvencel, composed in about 1466 by Admiral of France Jean de Bueil, father of Antoine, the husband of Agnès and the king’s daughter Jeanne.9 The admiral’s relationship with the king was rocky at times. But he immortalized Agnès in a scene where a group of lovely young women accompanies the queen to postprandial entertainment in the king’s chambers. The recovery of Normandy is the subject of the episode: specifically, the days just before the king’s deliberations with his council over whether the time was right to attack. One of the young women, traditionally associated with Agnès, addresses the king, imploring him to take arms, because “great kings are involved in great affairs.”10 The image of Agnès urging the king to valiantly lead his men against the English provided the kernel of the story of her as France’s saviour.11 These two early sources are remnants of what we might call Agnès’s “communicative memory,” to use Jan Assmann’s expression, traces of personal memories initially cultivated and transmitted by people who had known Agnès or who knew someone who had known her. Communicative memory is “noninstitutional.” It is not cultivated by specialists and is not summoned or celebrated on special occasions; it is not formalized and stabilized by any forms of material symbolization; it lives in everyday interaction and communication and, for this very reason, has only a limited time depth which normally reaches no farther back than eighty years, the time span of three interacting generations. Still, there are frames, “communicative genres,” traditions of communication and thematization and, above all, the affective ties that bind together families, groups, and generations.12

During the first decades after her death, the memory of Agnès was shared among a restricted group of family and friends, who fashioned her morally dubious story into the romance of a young woman whose love inspired the king to feats of valour. This memory was transmitted to the court of François I by individuals who had known Agnès. In this new courtly context, Agnès achieved the status of what might be called proto-celebrity and what Assmann and others designate “cultural memory.” Cultural memories are “exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sounds of words or the sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent: they may be transferred from one situation to another and transmitted from

8  Although Kurmann-Schwarz suggests that the pose represents not lactation, but a traditional baring of one breast to signify “ardent pleading by women for the benefit of sons and husbands” (76). 9  For the date of composition see Bueil, Jouvencel, 1:cccix.

10  Bueil, Jouvencel, 2:136–37. I have not been able to trace the date of the first association of the young woman with Agnès. However, as I discuss in following chapters, by the late sixteenth century at the very latest she is lauded as the saviour of France for inspiring the king’s valour. The king and his Council deliberate attacking the English in 2:144. 11  Bueil, Jouvencel, 1:clix, ccxxxvii and 2:136–37.

12  Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” 111.

4

Introduction

one generation to another.”13 They are different from knowledge about the past, or history, because, in them, the past is not preserved as such but is cast in symbols as they are represented in oral myths or in writings, performed in feasts, and as they are continually illuminating a changing present. In the context of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history vanishes. Not the past as such, as it is investigated and reconstructed by archaeo­logists and historians, counts for the cultural memory, but only the past as it is remembered.14

Laying out what is known about Agnès’s life is one goal of this study. The other is tracing the development of Agnès as a cultural memory, to better understand what she has meant and what she continues to mean.

Why a New Study of Agnès Sorel?

Agnès Sorel’s story has been recounted in many forms, serving many purposes. But no work on her surveys the primary sources and re-examines her career, taking advantage of recent methods for coaxing women’s activity out of the historical documents in which it has been hidden and taking into account recent forensic evidence. Furthermore, although Agnès’s afterlife has been traced, no study examines her status as celebrity royal mistress as it has developed from the sixteenth century onward. Last but not least, research on Agnès is written almost exclusively in French. The last bio­graphy in English, Frank Hamel’s popular study (it has no footnotes), was first published in 1905, and the rare recent historians who discuss her in English rely almost entirely on secondary sources. This study proceeds along two separate axes of inquiry, then, requiring two different approaches. The first is a straightforward study of the primary sources associated with Agnès that seeks to verify what we can say about her with certainty and show readers how to locate these sources if they wish to explore them on their own. In Chapter One, “Who was Agnès Sorel?” I strip back some common assumptions about her position—that the king awarded her an official role and that he presented her to the public as his mistress—to set the stage for a sharper understanding of who she was. In Chapter Two, “The Primary Sources,” I lay out the building blocks that can serve as a basis for reconstructing Agnès’s career. The incidents recounted in the primary sources need to be separated from the accretions that they have gathered over the centuries since Agnès became a cultural memory. All historians, especially historians of women, undertake similar work, and Agnès, like other mytho­logized figures, requires particular attention on this count. Chapter Three, “The First Royal Mistress in Historical Context,” aims to better understand Agnès’s relationship with the king and the nature of her position by examining how she fit into the royal family dynamic and the culture of deception, factionalism, and rivalry that the king’s contemporaries claim to have characterized his 13  Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” 110–11. 14  Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” 113.



Why a New Study of Agnès Sorel

5

court. Premodern court cultures with their relatively fluid bureaucracies permitted a high degree of female participation, and a number of references show that Agnès was involved in court politics. But the precise outlines of her activity cannot be accurately gauged from the references. Whereas later mistresses of the French king were at times politically powerful and accepted as such, their interventions recorded by ambassadors, no such witness remains for Agnès. And for contemporary chroniclers, the default way of imagining her was as an intruder who aroused lust and deflected the king from his duties. The second approach takes the communicative versus collective memory schema that I outlined above as a point of departure to historicize Agnès’s posthumous rise to celebrity. In Chapter Four, “Communicative Memory: The Melun Diptych and the Saviour Narrative,” I focus on the two icons cultivated by her friends and family in the decades immediately following her death that would form the basis for her later celebrity. I first explore the question of whether painter Jean Fouquet actually modelled the Melun diptych Virgin’s features on Agnès’s. I then turn to the memory of Agnès cultivated by her family and friends, particularly the story that she inspired the king to drive the English from France. We do not know how extensively the episode circulated in the early days, but it would become a stable component of Agnès’s cultural memory over the centuries. We are on firmer ground in Chapter Five, “Cultural Memory: Agnès as Celebrity,” in which I frame the sixteenth-century development of the two icons with a discussion of recent celebrity theory to help make sense of her popularity over the ensuing centuries. Agnès’s image arrives at the court of François I in the form of a crayon portrait likely based on a lost sketch by Jean Fouquet. This sketch is circulated and copied, becoming part of an album commissioned in 1526 by François I’s mother Louise of Savoy, who serves as regent while the king lingers in captivity in Spain. Still, Agnès’s progress toward celebrity is not straightforward. After her initial appearance in Louise’s album, the successive rises of two extremely powerful royal mistresses, the Duchess of É� tampes and Diane de Poitiers, deflect interest from the kind of mistress that Agnès represented. However, after Diane’s fall, Agnès’s image resurges. Portraits referencing the Melun Virgin become popular, inspiring numerous copies into the seventeenth century. Henri IV’s interest in Agnès, which leads to a new wave of paintings of her based on the Melun diptych, further solidifies her celebrity, as I show in Chapter Six, “Agnès la Gallante.” Her narrative flourishes in earnest when it is absorbed into gallant discourses and elaborated in the historical novellas popular among writers associated with salons. New elements become attached to her story, some of which are loosely based on primary sources, but most of which are purely fictitious anecdotes. Chapter Seven, “Gallantry, History, and National Identity,” reflects on why, even with the professionalization of history, these fictitious anecdotes about Agnès remain central to her story. With the rise of history as a scientific discipline over the nineteenth century, historians disentangle the fictitious elements of her cultural memory from what can be verified by contemporary documents. And yet, the boundary between Agnès as gallant heroine and historical figure remains fluid. Agnès’s cultural mem-

6

Introduction

ory supports a particular version of French national identity, a point that becomes clear when we explore nineteenth-century debates over the extent and nature of her influence on the king. When the royal mistress gains recognition as a uniquely French tradition with Agnès at its head, the association between all that she represents and national identity becomes still more striking. I conclude the chapter by turning to recent debates over the place of gallantry in French identity to show Agnès’s affiliation with this longer history. Agnès has now entered a new phase of post-mortem celebrity. In the conclusion, “Agnès Sorel, Modern Celebrity,” I turn to Agnès’s most recent fans, amateurs of popular forensic anthropo­logy. In 2005 the General Council of Indre and Loire, planning a transfer and new restoration of Agnès’s tomb, took advantage of the project to commission a study of Agnès’s remains by medical doctor and forensic historian Philippe Charlier and his team. The team uncovered clues crucial to how we reconstruct her role, verifying information about her age and number of children, and they also determined her cause of death: poisoning by ingestion of mercury. These analyses add new life to the old story that she died the victim of a political assassination. Computer reconstructions of Agnès’s face based on the remaining pieces of her skull have further increased interest in her.15 Agnès has become a truly modern celebrity. A short survey like this can only be schematic, but it aims to do some justice to both the reality of Agnès’s life as the first significant mistress of a French king and the fantasy of her afterlife as the perfect gallant lady. During her own lifetime, her presence and lifestyle struck many as exceptional and troubling. And yet, she became the ideal of the French royal mistress, a position she continues to hold today, distinguished from some of her more powerful successors who even in the most recent scholarship have retained the ambivalent status that characterized their careers during their lifetimes. The continued desire to see her as France’s saviour long after nineteenth-century historians carefully separated the mytho­logical elements of her story from the historically verifiable suggests that she functions as a “symbolically powerful parable.”16 She embodies all that is positive in the gallant tradition, her relationship with the king representing the happy complementarity of the sexes still claimed by some modern French feminists as a defining feature of the French emotional landscape. In short, she represents something central to one important version of French national identity, and, for this reason, her cultural memory resists demystification.

15  https://www.lanouvellerepublique.fr/loches/le-visage-d-agnes-sorel-aussi-vrai-que-nature. 16  Penfold-Mounce, Death, 36.

Part One

What We Know About Agnès Sorel and How We Know It

Chapter One

WHO WAS AGNÈS SOREL? Who was Agnès Sorel? Historians and history buffs with an interest in Old Regime

France are likely to reply that she was the first “official French royal mistress.” By this they seem to mean that she received an official designation, an acknowledged appointment (“élection officielle de la favorite,” writes one), as royal mistress.1 “Of course, Charles VII was far from the first king of France to have an extramarital lover,” explains a popular historian, “but he did formalize his mistress’s place at court in unprecedented ways that eclipsed the role even of the queen.”2 She is also frequently referred to as the first “maî�tresse-en-titre.”3 Another popular historian of mistresses sums it up: “The first of the great French royal mistresses was Agnès Sorel, lady-in-waiting to Isabelle of Lorraine, who attracted King Charles VII. It was for her that the title maîtresse en titre was created to denote the official mistress of the King of France, who rewarded and honoured her in every way he could.”4 And yet, the expression “maî�tresse-en-titre” was not invented for Agnès Sorel. No contemporary document refers to her in that way.5 In fact, the word “maistresse” to designate a beloved woman begins to appear only in the sixteenth century. Neither the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1330–1500) nor Godefroy’s Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle records this definition, restricting the meaning to a woman holding authority or property.6 In contrast, the first (1694) edition of the Dictionnaire de l’académie française defines the word as “girls and women sought after for marriage” and adds that it can also be applied “to someone who is loved by another.”7 But the definition articulates a trend visible earlier. Henri IV routinely addresses his favourite, Gabrielle d’Estrées, as “ma maistresse,” 1  Philippe, Agnès Sorel, 30.

2  The maîtresse-en-titre “served as a cultural patron, appeared in public functions alongside the king, and was the subject of artwork that was displayed openly at court.” Denton, Decadence, Radicalism, 97.

3  “Agnès Sorel had rapidly attained the status of official favorite (“favorite officielle”) of the king; she would be the first official mistress of a king of France.” See Michel Benoit’s recent Les morts mystérieux d’histoire, 11.

4  Griffin, The Mistress, 135. See also Denton: “The office of the maîtresse-en-titre originated in the sixteenth century [sic] when Charles VII positioned his mistress Agnès Sorel at court.” Decadence, Radicalism, 97.

5  Nor is she called the “Favourite,” an expression that appears only in the late sixteenth century. Le Roux, Faveur, 23. 6  See the entries in Dictionnaire du Moyen Français and Frédéric Godefroy’s Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française, et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle. 7  See the Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, 2:13, for the entry.

10

Chapter One

in letters of the last years of the sixteenth century.8 Brantôme, writing during the same period, refers to the Duchess of É� tampes as François I’s “principal lady and mistress” (“sa principalle dame et maistresse”). For him, however, Agnès is only “la belle Agnez” with whom the king was in love (“ennamourché”).9 As for the later addition, “en titre,” it normally means incumbent, as in “champion du monde en titre,” the current world champion, although it can sometimes mean “official,” as in “comptable en titre,” a qualified or official accountant. The composite expression “maî�tresse-en-titre” becomes common only around the mid-eighteenth century as a general way of designating a favourite or current mistress.10 Although used to refer to the king’s favourite mistress, it was by no means restricted to this use. The idea that Agnès and later mistresses occupied an official position may stem from a relatively modern misapprehension about the meaning of “maî�tresse-en-titre.” This seems to be the case when the English version, “official mistress,” appears in the nineteenth century. An early example is Hamel’s bio­graphy of Agnès from 1905, which asserts that the king decided the time had come “to acknowledge [Agnès] definitely as his official favourite.”11 And yet, no contemporary chronicle or any other document ever mentions a formal or official appointment (or even hints at a de facto one) of any kind for Agnès. She held a number of titles, but they were associated with the properties given her by the king: she was the Dame de Beauté, Roquecezière, Issoudun, and Vernon-sur-Seine.12 True, the absence of a document verifying an official appointment does not necessarily mean that none was ever given her. But no modern historian cites any source at all to support the claim that Agnès received an official appointment as royal mistress. In addition to attributing Agnès with an official position at court, some historians have further claimed that she was acknowledged as the king’s mistress with a public presentation, one writing that in 1444, the king “publicly designated Agnès Sorel as the first official royal favorite” during a joyous entry.13 But there is no trace of such a presentation in any document. The idea that royal mistresses were publicly presented may be related to the exceptional presentations at court of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the Marquise de Pompadour (1721–1764), and Jeanne Bécu, Madame Du Barry (1743–1793), both mistresses of Louis XV. All newcomers to court were officially introduced at their first appearance, and, because the king typically chose his mistresses from the “group of noble ladies already present at court, attending princesses or taking care of children,” they already would have been introduced when they 8  Henri IV, Lettres d’amour, ed. Kermina.

9  Brantôme, Œuvres complètes, 3:244; for Agnès, 9:393–94.

10  On use of the term “maî�tresse,” see Ruby, Mit Macht verbunden, 3–8. As for “maî�tresse-entitre,” I draw this conclusion from my own experience of extensive searching of seventeenth and eighteenth-century documents. 11  Hamel, Lady of Beauty, 57.

12  See pièce justificative 5 in Champion, Dame de Beauté, 175, for her many titles. 13  Wellman, Queens and Mistresses, 29.



Who Was Agnès Sorel

11

caught the king’s eye.14 Pompadour and Du Barry’s low social status, however, would have prevented either from ever appearing at court under normal circumstances. To attend, each had to be officially introduced. Pompadour was presented by the Princess of Conti on September 14, 1745 and Du Barry by the Countess of Béarn on April 22, 1769.15 However, they were officially presented only as themselves, not as the king’s mistresses, although the other courtiers undoubtedly understood exactly who they were. Whether or not Agnès’s position was in any sense official may seem a small point, a matter of how one interprets the word, which is often used in imprecise ways. Still, by definition, official has to do with a public office or duties carried out as a recognized representative of a public office. The word therefore does not describe the reality of the position of royal mistress. The very condition of the possibility for the position, at least as it developed in France, was its lack of official status. Like the king’s male favourites, “ornaments of majesty” and “true signs of power,” the royal mistress enjoyed “a situation of informal power based neither on social status nor official duties, rather on a bond of love giving form to a voluntary and affective relationship with a select few.”16 But an additional context is also crucial to understanding the position of the female favourite. Side by side with a tradition of women exercising power on their own account—Jeanne de Penthièvre, Jeanne de Belleville or Clisson, Joan of Arc, the Grande Mademoiselle, or the Frondeuses, who wielded authority, even military authority, on their own17—a tradition of female power, exercised indirectly, typically by elite women, extends as far back as the Middle Ages. Seventeenth-century writer JeanneMichelle de Pringy evokes the tradition in Les Differens caracteres des femmes du siècle: women are as intelligent and competent as men even though they cannot assume certain positions because of their inherent sexual differences. Wit (“l’esprit”) belongs to both sexes. The soul is a spiritual being capable of operating equally well in women as in men; and if men are created (“destinez”) for burdensome jobs requiring knowledge and diligence, although it is reasonable that women be excluded from such jobs because their fragility does not allow them to stand them, they are not excluded from erudition.18

14  Duindam, Vienna and Versailles, 240. See Leroux, Les maîtresses du roi, 19–26, for a wonderfully detailed analysis of the court positions of some of the families of the mistresses of Henri IV and Louis XIV.

15  The Princess of Conti agreed to present Pompadour in return for having her debts paid off; The Countess of Béarn had her debts paid off and also had her sons promoted. See Adams and Adams, The Creation of the French Royal Mistress, 134–35, citing Lever, Madame de Pompadour, 48, and Levron, Le destin de Madame du Barry, 25–32. 16  Le Roux, Faveur, 11.

17  Graham-Goering, Princely Power in Late Medi­eval France; Sjursen, “Jeanne of Belleville and the Categories of Fourteenth-Century French Noblewomen” and “The War of the Two Jeannes and the Role of the Duchess in the Fourteenth Century;” Allorent, La Fortune de la Grande Mademoiselle. 18  Pringy, Les Differens caracteres des femmes, 107–8.

12

Chapter One

If physically excluded from the official power that comes with demanding positions, women nonetheless could exercise unofficial power. Salonnières, for example, wielded political influence by holding court for communities of writers and philosophers. These women were not just arbiters of taste but “intelligent, self-educated, and educating women who adopted and implemented the values of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters” in their salons.19 Like salonnières, royal mistresses exercised power, but, unlike them, their positions were not official. As Mona Ozouf has described Montesquieu’s vision of female political activity, “anyone who observed the ministers, magistrates and prelates but neglected the influence of women would certainly see the machine in action but would miss…the hidden power.”20 This subterranean force was so strong, Ozouf continues, that it nearly effaced the difference between the sexes. To the extent that such power subsists in a modern context it is dismissed by most feminists as the tainted product of the patriarchy, but scholars writing about women of earlier ages recognize it as an important historical reality. Recent revisions of earlier notions of power as vested entirely in “male dominated political institutions, war, and statecraft” theorize female power as a broad capacity to carry out an agenda.21 Royal mistresses enjoyed access to the king and his proxies along with the ability to achieve status and gifts for themselves and their friends, which gave them genuine influence. However, the degree and nature of influence wielded by individual royal mistresses varied greatly, some working only indirectly, others sought out by foreign diplomats for their advice and aid.22 As we have seen, Agnès’s career was too sparsely documented to give an unambiguous idea of her role. Certainly, her position was considered exceptional by her contemporaries. Before Agnès, royal mistresses are barely mentioned in chronicles at all. But what did she actually do at court? Was she a frivolous fashion influencer, as some chronicles suggest? Or do we find evidence of genuine political influence in Basin’s assertion that “if any of the palace hounds had it in for a good man, all they had to do to turn the king against him was claim that he had badmouthed the beautiful Agnès, which was held to be a capital crime”? 23 The sources, as we will see, can equally well support either interpretation. As Ozouf suggests, it depends to a large extent on the lens through which we read them. In the case of Agnès, these sources were men who would have had only second-hand information about a young woman whom most of them were inclined to dismiss as an embarrassment. Although they do not give Agnès a central political role, I suggest in what follows that we can legitimately understand her influence—the favours she was able to acquire for her family, for example—as manifestations of power. Nor does it take a 19  Goodman, The Republic of Letters, 37. 20  Ozouf, Les mots, 329.

21  Daybell and Norrhem, ed., Gender and Political Culture, 3

22  See Adams and Adams, The Creation of the French Royal Mistress, for a survey of how the role developed. 23  Basin, Histoire des règnes de Charles VII et de Louis XI, 1:313–14.



Who Was Agnès Sorel

13

great stretch to construe certain references in depositions to her influence over the king as proof of genuine political clout. Nonetheless, I will also propose in the following chapters that her power was not comparable to that of many of her successors. No record exists of ambassadors seeking her favour, and if Charles VII regularly relied on her as an advisor, this was not perceived by any beyond her innermost circle. The modern notion that “men like Pierre de Brézé, Jacques Cœur, and É� tienne Chevalier were introduced into the government through her influence” remains a hypothesis, seductive as it is.24 Whatever the reality of her influence, the fact that contemporaries by and large did not consider Agnès to be politically active seems to have been positive for her afterlife. The difference between Agnès’s reputation and that of her cousin Antoinette Maignelais, Dame de Villequier, mistress of Charles VII after Agnès’s death, is instructive in this regard.25 A variety of documents suggest that Antoinette was fully enmeshed in political life.26 Bio­grapher of Charles VII Fresne de Beaucourt describes a “marvellous festival” held on June 5, 1451 in her honour by Charles of Anjou, the king’s brotherin-law. She was in full favour, “and foreign princes sent their regards to her in order to ingratiate themselves with the king,” writes the historian, citing instructions from the Duke of Savoy to the Bailli of Beaugency to speak “to the king, the members of his Council, and to Madame Villequier…”27 Another bio­grapher of the king, Auguste Vallet de Viriville, suggests that Antoinette was involved in the downfall of Jacques Cœur, who was accused of poisoning Agnès, and proves that she profited from it.28 Chronicler Jean Chartier describes festivities to mark the Duke of Brittany’s homage to the king for his duchy and the county of Monfort, remarking that at that time “Monseigneur de Villequier” and “Madame,” his wife, held great authority at the royal court.29 The Cronique Martiniane claims that shortly before the king’s death, Antoinette received letters from the dauphin Louis, whom she is alleged to have been supplying with information about the royal court.30 Is there a relationship between contemporary perceptions of the cousins’ power and the fact that fifteenth-century chroniclers are more morally condemnatory of 24  Denieul-Cormier, Wise and Foolish Kings, 294.

25  Antoinette was Agnès’s first cousin, daughter of Agnès’s mother’s brother. See Anselme, Histoire généalogique, 8:541. The assumption that she was the king’s mistress is based on the observations of Chastellain and Du Clercq and also on the gifts given to her by Charles VII in the years after Agnès’s death. See Vallet de Viriville, Charles VII, 3:247n1 for the references to the relevant documents. 26  See Guitton, “Fastes et malheurs,” especially 154–61.

27  Fresne de Beaucourt, 6:29, citing BNF MS français 18983, fol. 24r. Surely it is significant that Antoinette figures at the head of a list of officers. 28  Vallet de Viriville, Charles VII, 3:286–99; 454–55. Post 1858, Vallet de Viriville dropped “de Virville.” To avoid confusion, I refer to him by the longer form, whatever the year of the publication. 29  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:249.

30  On the letters and their possible status as forgeries see Le Clerc, Cronique Martiniane, 108–10. If they are forgeries, they nonetheless suggest that Antoinette was visibly involved in politics.

14

Chapter One

Antoinette than of Agnès? The difference in description is striking. Chronicler Jacques Du Clercq writes that Antoinette “governed” the king just as Agnès had before her,31 but then makes Antoinette into a procurer for the sexually insatiable king.32 In 1455, he writes, the Dame of Genlis brought the extremely beautiful Blanches Rebreuves to court.33 The minute that Antoinette laid eyes on Blanche she tried to persuade the young woman to remain with her. Horrified by court life, Blanche begged off, stating that she wished to remain in her father’s house. But she was forced by her venal family to accept Antoinette’s proposition and found herself conducted back to court by her brother, who was also awarded a position with Antoinette, as grand carver. Soon Blanche’s lifestyle had become more opulent than the queen’s. After the death of Charles VII, Antoinette followed the king’s courtiers to the Breton court of Duke François II, future father of Anne of Brittany, whose mistress she had become by the end of the 1450s.34 At Nantes, she was at the centre of politics, bearing the duke four children, and overshadowing the duchess. Accounts of her by Breton chroniclers are unflattering, with Alain Bouchart writing that the young and handsome duke took Antoinette to Brittany where he maintained her publicly until her death in “great estate” alongside his wife, a woman of the greatest virtue, daughter of the Duke of Brittany, granddaughter of the King of Scotland. Bouchart concludes: “And this relationship between the duke and the aforementioned Antoinette had greatly damaging consequences for the male posterity of the line of Brittany, as many wise men said at the time and also as we have seen since.”35 For nineteenth-century historians Agnès and Antoinette were not cut from the same cloth. Charles VII’s bio­grapher Auguste Vallet de Viriville, who cannot praise Agnès highly enough, asserts that the king created a public scandal with Antoinette because the relationship was doubly adulterous: the king married the young woman to his favourite André de Villequier in 1450. Picking up on Du Clercq, Vallet de Viriville adds that: Antoinette further besmirched the role that she accepted by pimping for the king; she later took over supervision, like the Pompadours and Du Barrys, of royal debauchery. She squandered her favour in low and vulgar intrigues, to the great prejudice of public affairs and of Charles VII, who dishonoured his youth with his licentious old age.36

Even the most recent bio­graphers draw a similar distinction between the cousins. Agnès’s “replacement was greedy and cynical,” according to one; whereas “Agnès had 31  After the deaths of her husband in 1454 and the king in 1461, Antoinette became the mistress of François II of Brittany, father of Anne of Brittany. Anselme, Histoire généalogique, 8:541. 32  Du Clercq, Mémoires, 90–91.

33  Fresne de Beaucourt notes that this lady was Marie d’Amboise, sister-in-law of Guillaume Gouffier, favourite of Charles VII and, as we will see, Agnès’s protector, Histoire de Charles VII, 6:10n1. Madame de Genlis was married to Jean d’Hangest, counsellor and chamberlain to Charles VII. Their son Jacques was the father of Hélène, the Dame de Boisy, whose album I discuss in ch. 5. 34  Du Clercq, Mémoires, 91.

35  Bouchart, Les grandes croniques, 215r. 36  Vallet de Viriville, Charles VII, 3:247.



Who Was Agnès Sorel

15

brightened the maturity of a fragile and tormented man, raising him above himself; Antoinette lowered him to the level of a lustful old man whose excesses outraged his entourage.”37 We cannot know for certain whether Agnès was less politically active than Antoinette. But surely Antoinette has at least as good a claim as Agnès to be immortalized as the first significant French royal mistress. And yet, unlike Agnès, Antoinette did not achieve post-mortem celebrity status—on the contrary. Somehow in her afterlife Agnès has escaped the disapprobation shown Antoinette to become the very ideal of the royal mistress, a cultural icon, popular to this day. How this happened requires some explanation. First, however, we examine the primary sources associated with Agnès to establish what we can actually know about her life and position.

37  Kermina, Agnès Sorel, 166.

Chapter Two

THE PRIMARY SOURCES Returning to the primary sources directly related to Agnès to evaluate what they

suggest about the real person and her role at court is an enterprise fraught with peril. Most chroniclers had no personal access to women at court, depending instead on informants who may themselves have been biased against women. The genre of the memoir with its focus on personal relationships did not exist in the fifteenth century—although we see leanings in that direction in some chronicles—which means that we have very few close observations of individual women.1 Moreover, the primary sources do not offer a sustained narrative, but rather give us disconnected bits and pieces. Agnès is summoned abruptly into male-dominated episodes and then dismissed too soon for us to get much concrete information about her. Further complicating the matter, her narrative purpose is often more symbolic than realistic: she distracts the king after the manner of Phyllis and Aristotle or Bathsheba and David. Reconstructing her story means piecing snippets together, and, then, to avoid mistaking allegorical for literal meaning, checking the reconstructed story against a larger historical context to see if it seems plausible. But this creates still another problem, because this larger historical context is just another construction based on the very texts that we are trying to understand how to read. Were contemporaries genuinely disapproving of Agnès or is this an impression created by chronicles?2 And yet, primary sources are all we have, unless we opt for historical nihilism. In Agnès’s case, even if the primary sources demonstrate nothing else for certain, one thing is clear: relative to the Duchess of É� tampes some ninety years later, Agnès flummoxed contemporaries, who did not know what to make of the king’s raising an unknown young woman to such a position of luxury. Charles VII’s court lacked any concept of the royal mistress as a powerful and iconic figure; the role, like that of the mignon, was discursive, in the sense that it came into existence when the king and his courtiers tacitly agreed that it did and accorded it a significance expressed symbolically. Legitimacy and authority are produced as much through symbols and ritual as force. The king could ensconce his mistress wherever he chose. But this did not automatically create a position for her that others acknowledged and accepted. Agnès may be the first widely known favourite royal mistress of a French king, but no evidence suggests that her role was recognized as one. Although she would eventually and retrospectively be written in the tradition of the French royal mistresses, in the 1440s the structures for conceiving of such a position did not exist. Lacking these, Agnès “destabilized the place of women in princely government by breaking the code of adultery of the period.”3 1  Mathieu discusses the growing distinction using the example of Angevin chronicler Jean de Bourdigné, “Jean de Bourdigné.” 2  Gabrielle Spiegel warns that any interpretive attempt that relies on “recourse to history as ‘reality’ begins to look like an exercise undertaken backwards.” Past as Text, 22.

3  Chaigne-Legouy, “Le ‘dossier Agnès Sorel,’” 172. See also Firges, “The Tacit Rules,” which dissects

18

Chapter Two

Approaching Agnès Beyond demonstrating ambivalence and confusion about Agnès’s role, the primary sources offer valuable information about how she was perceived by some. In these cases, however, interpretation is required to make the documents speak. Although throughout this study I draw conclusions based on primary sources, I make clear for readers where the source ends and my conclusion begins, and, furthermore, what those sources are so that readers can verify them for themselves. Popular and even scholarly historians often insert their conclusions about Agnès into their work in such a way as to give readers the impression that their independent extrapolations are part of the primary source material. Or they cite a secondary source as evidence without verifying what the secondary source itself offers as evidence. Or they fail to cite any sources at all. This is especially true of French historians, who often write for popular audiences. Two important exceptions are Marion Chaigne-Legouy’s recent short article on Agnès which works only from primary sources to reconstruct her position at court, and Christine Henzler’s study of the women associated with Charles VII and Louis XI.4 But, on balance, the result is that a substantial number of anecdotes about Agnès finding no support in the primary sources are presented to readers as if they derived from contemporary witnesses. That is to say, Agnès is often depicted as more significant and visible in secondary sources than the primary sources warrant. I have mentioned the example of the “official royal mistress” which finds no support in primary sources. To demonstrate more precisely the sort of confusion so often found in histories of Agnès, I offer one more related example. A recent bio­graphy of Agnès opens with a discussion of the discovery in 2005 that she died by poison. Most of the work is historically accurate. But it also presents authorial assumptions about Agnès’s role as if they were facts. One such assumption comes inserted in a discussion of the royal court’s sojourn in Châlons in June 1445 during negotiations with the Duchess of Burgundy, Isabelle of Portugal, on behalf of her husband, Duke Philip. Agnès was by this time in the household of Queen Marie of Anjou. It is safe to assume that she would have accompanied the queen to Châlons. Olivier de La Marche refers to her presence there, as we will see. A second document, a deposition of Jamet de Tillay related to the death in August 1445 of the dauphine Marguerite of Scotland, places Agnès at Châlons in a quick reference.5 We return to this deposition later in this chapter and examine it in detail in Chapter Three. And yet, the author states as if it were a verifiable fact that during the time in Châlons the king resided not with the queen but with Agnès in the manor of Sarry, the bishop’s residence about three miles down the Marne.6 While it is true that the king was staying at Sarry, as several deponents in the Jamet de Tilly case indicate, the under what circumstances female adultery was permissible in seventeenth and eighteenth-century French noble society. 4  Chaigne-Legouy, “Le ‘dossier Agnès Sorel’”; Henzler, Die Frauen. 5  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:47. 6  Kermina, Agnès Sorel, 23.



The Primary Sources

19

sources do not specify whether the king and queen resided there together, nor do they mention where Agnès was stationed. The Délibérations du Conseil de Châlons-sur-Marne have the queen in Châlons and the king moving back and forth between Châlons and Sarry; the chronicler Mathieu d’Escouchy reports that the king took up residence in the hotel of the Archbishop in Sarry, but says nothing about the queen; another deposition related to the Jamet de Tillay case places the queen in Sarry.7It might well be that the king and Agnès shared living quarters. However, there is no evidence that they did, and readers have the right to know that no historical record suggests, even indirectly, that this was the case, because this suggests in turn that Agnès may have been perceived by her contemporaries as too insignificant to mention in 1445. Similarly, we are told that the king took part in a joust against his favourite Pierre de Brézé (close ally of Agnès, as we will see), showing himself to advantage before Agnès’s gaze. During the dancing that followed, we read, all eyes fixed on Agnès, who inspired the king to outdo himself, while the queen remained invisible to all.8 The source for the joust between the king and Pierre is the semi-fictitious chronicle recounting the life of knight Jacques de Lalain, although the author of the bio­graphy of Agnès does not footnote the source at all; the source is clear to someone familiar with fifteenth-century chronicles, but no one else would know. Most important, this chronicle does not so much as mention Agnès’s name.9 No one believes that the chronicle faithfully reflects reality, but, once again, if Agnès were given a role in it we would know that a rough contemporary thought her a significant figure. Also problematic is that although this chronicle records a joust between the king and Pierre, just as the author narrates, it refers at numerous points to the queen, never Agnès. In other words, Marie of Anjou was the centre of attention, according to the contemporary writer. In fact, no extant source places Agnès among the spectators at the joust let alone claims that she was the focus of anyone’s gaze. She was probably there, but the author has no basis for asserting that her presence at the festivity was a cause for gossip. The confusion between what is in the primary source material and the author’s own additions is all the more disconcerting because the author at times follows the chronicle of Lalain very closely, even quoting almost word for word from a conversation between René of Anjou’s brother, Charles, and the Count of St. Pol, whose sister Charles had recently married.10It is not at all certain that the conversation recorded in Lalain ever took place in reality. But the point is that non-specialist readers of the popular history have no way of knowing whether material is stated in the primary sources or invented by the author. The confusion between authorial conclusions and what is in the primary sources leads readers in this case to conclude that Agnès’s position was much more obvious to contemporaries than the sources actually give us reason to believe. 7  Louis XI, Lettres, 1:199–200; Escouchy, Chronique, 1:55; Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:17. 8  Kermina, Agnès Sorel, 25, 26.

9  Chastellain, Chronique de Jacques de Lalain.

10  Chastellain, Chronique de Jacques de Lalain, 48.

20

Chapter Two

Once again, this does not mean that Agnès was invisible. But her position may have been more officially obscured than secondary sources typically assume. To avoid confusion, in dealing with primary sources throughout this study I specify where I am extrapolating and direct readers to the primary sources to let them test my conclusions. Many of these sources are easily accessible in electronic form, although I have not given the links because digitization is happening so quickly that it is impossible to keep up. Even the sources that remain unedited can often be read in the form of partial transcriptions appended to nineteenth-century histories as pièces justificatives. Where I cite a secondary source, that source either offers a transcription of the original or directs the reader to the source. Most of the primary sources not available in digital form can be consulted in person, although that of course eliminates the possibility of viewing the original for many. Where this occurs, I translate and cite the relevant parts of the unedited material. In rare examples, historians that I cite have themselves cited a source that has since been lost, leaving us to rely on a reference that cannot be independently verified. When this occurs, I indicate it. In Chapter Three, I weave sources that mention Agnès directly into a historical narrative of Charles VII’s reign from 1444–1450, that is, the part of the reign during which Agnès was the king’s mistress. But, for the moment, I consider only those sources that mention Agnès. As we will see, none of them suggests that she was perceived as the holder of an official position during her lifetime, or even that she was widely known beyond the king’s intimate circles.

Agnès in the Primary Sources: The Chronicles

Although Agnès does not figure in all contemporary chronicles, the attention that she receives far surpasses that devoted to any other woman of comparable rank of her time. The chroniclers who mention Agnès and were either rough contemporaries or active within about fifty years after her death and therefore able to consult people who had known her include the following, all their works available in edited versions: É� léonore of Poitiers (ca. 1444–1509); Thomas Basin (1412–1491); Jean de Bourdigné (ca. 1480–ca. 1547); the Bourgeois of Paris (text covers 1404–1449); Jean Chartier (ca. 1390–1464); Georges Chastellain (ca. 1405 or 1415–1475); Sébastien Mamerot (after 1418), who translated and continued the Chronicon pontificum et imperatorum of Martin de Troppau as the Chronique Martinienne or Martiniane (1458) and Jean Le Clerc (ca. 1440 – 1510), author of one of the interpolations of the Chronique Martiniane; Jacques Du Clercq (1420–1501); Mathieu d’Escouchy (1420–1482), continuator of Enguerrand de Monstrelet’s chronicle; Robert Gaguin (1433–1501); Nicoles Gilles (d. 1503); Jean Juvénal des Ursins (1388–1473);11 Olivier de La Marche (1425–1502); Thierri Pawels (1416–?); and Pope Pius II, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405–1464). 11  The mentions of Agnès are not, however, found in the chronicle commonly attributed to Juvenal des Ursins, but his political writings, and he does not actually mention her by name, although historians agree that the reference is to her.



The Primary Sources

21

What do we learn from these chroniclers? Jean Chartier and Olivier de La Marche were eyewitnesses to the scenes involving Agnès that they describe. Chartier’s chronicle, in particular, is a precious source. Continuator of the Grandes Chroniques de France, official chronicle of the French royal house until Charles VII’s death in 1461, Chartier accompanied the king during the reconquest of Normandy in 1449 and was present when Agnès joined the king there in the weeks before her death. It is not clear whether Chartier actually saw her during her final days, but he was in the area and would have had access to information about the events.12 Still, it is important to note that Chartier strove to present the king in the best possible light, which means that the advantage of his proximity might be cancelled at times by his bias. La Marche, a Burgundian courtier, might be expected to have been unbiased, but his contact with Agnès was less sustained: he seems to have seen her only once, during the king of France’s 1445 negotiations with the Duchess of Burgundy at Châlons. Other chroniclers were writing close enough to Agnès’s lifetime to have consulted eyewitnesses. Of course, eyewitnesses may be partially or fully wrong, and oral histories, even centuries old, may be correct. As Ernest Renan famously noted, “the celebrities of the people are rarely those of history.”13 In any case, the information that the chroniclers impart is similar in one regard: they emphasize Charles VII’s passionate love for Agnès, her great beauty, and the inappropriate material favour that the king bestowed on her. Chartier notes that she was called “la belle Agnès.”14 La Marche refers to her as “one of the most beautiful women” he had ever seen.15 Nicole Gilles describes a most beautiful demoiselle called “Agnès Sorelle, who was greatly in the king’s grace.”16 Chastellain writes that the king loved her madly, spent vast sums on her, and kept her outfitted with beautiful clothing and an entourage worthy of a princess.17 Basin writes that the king, suffering from excessive libido, had taken “quite a beautiful little minx” popularly known as the “belle Agnès.”18 For Du Clercq, the king “took up with a young woman called ‘la belle Agnès’” who was one of the most beautiful women in the realm and set her up in estate greater than that of the saintly queen.19 For Pope Pius she was one of the king’s “concubines,” and she was nicknamed “bella.”20 For Gaguin, Agnès was called “belle” for her singular and special beauty; she was “elegant and eloquent, courtly, taking excessive glory in 12  See Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:180. Chartier “certifies having seen and been present, enduring great cold and suffering many vexations, although I was and am salaried and reimbursed for expenses related to myself and my horses by the command and will of the king.” 13  Renan, “La poésie,” 429n2.

14  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:181. 15  La Marche, Les Mémoires, 2:54–55.

16  Gilles, Annales et croniques de France, fol. 269r. 17  Chastellain, Œuvres, 4:365–66.

18  Basin, Histoire des règnes, 1:313. 19  Du Clercq, “Mémoires,” 175.

20  Piccolomini, Pii secundi, 160 and 163.

22

Chapter Two

pomp and sumptuousness of clothing,” and, because of the sums that the king spent on her, he adds, concubinage was suspected.21 Who was this beautiful woman? To begin with her birth date, no contemporary document attests it. Thomas Basin reports that she passed away in the “flower of her youth.”22 Given that she died on February 9, 1450, according to the black marble plaque under which her heart once lay in the cathedral at Jumièges, or February 11, 1450, according to Chartier’s chronicle, one might guess that she was born around, say, 1425.23 But, as we will see, many later historians believed that she had been born earlier in 1409 or 1410. The chroniclers say almost nothing about her family, although La Marche gives her rather modest origins, writing that in 1445 the king had recently elevated a “poor young woman, a gentlewoman.”24 Based on the birthplace given by Du Clercq in his memoirs, a “small place” in the area of “Thouar,” she was long believed to have come from Fromentau, in Touraine. But it seems that she was born rather in the region of Compiègne in Picardy. The mistake arose from an early manu­script misreading, perpetuated in printed versions.25 Consulting the manu­script original of Du Clercq in 1861, Achille Peigné-Delacourt discovered the chronicler had written that Agnès was born in “Trort.” Peigné-Delacourt subsequently identified the place as Thourotte, near Compiègne, an interpretation that has won universal agreement.26 About her childhood, Bourdigné writes that before joining the royal court to serve Queen Marie of Anjou, Agnès had been “loved and raised from an early age” by Isabelle, Duchess of Lorraine in her own right and wife of René of Anjou, brother of the queen. Isabelle, Bourdigné continues, gave Agnès so many gifts that she “maintained the estate of a princess.”27 The chronicle of Pope Pius, too, states that Agnès began her career with Isabelle before moving to the household of the queen.28 As for the date of the transition from the Angevin to the royal court, Chartier explains that at the time of her death Agnès “had been in the service of the queen for about five years,” which means she must have made the move in about 1444–1445, given that she died in early 1450.29 Did her intimate relationship with the king begin at the same time? Basin dates the beginning of the affair to just after the truce with the English, presumably spring 1444. If this is correct, the relationship lasted about five and a half years, which 21  Gaguin, Croniques, fol. clxix verso. It is clear that later chroniclers like Gaguin read their predecessors. It is not always possible to know whether they had corroborating knowledge of the incidents they report. 22  Basin, Histoire des règnes, 1:314.

23  For the plaque see Pierre Champion, Dame de Beauté, 64; Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:184–85. 24  La Marche, Les Mémoires, 2:55. 25  Du Clercq, “Mémoires,” 175.

26  Peigné-Delacourt, “Agnès Sorel,” 15–16. 27  Bourdigné, Chroniques d’Anjou, 2:199. 28  Piccolomini, Pii secundi, 163.

29  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:181.



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comports with Du Clercq’s statement that “she did not last long and died.”30 Based on chronicle evidence, then, it seems safe to assume that the liaison dates from roughly 1444 and that this is also the date for Agnès’s entry into the service of Marie of Anjou. As for the young woman’s life at the royal court, Chartier claims that the queen, not the king, was entirely responsible for Agnès’s lavish lifestyle, writing: It was even counter to [the king’s] wishes that the said Agnès maintained such a grand estate. But because this was at the good pleasure of the queen, he tolerated the thing as best he could no matter how much he knew and perceived that the situation redounded and turned to his disadvantage.31

As we have seen, Chartier aimed always to justify the king’s behaviour. Of course, it may be a modern reaction to assume that the queen would not voluntarily support the lavish lifestyle of her husband’s mistress. But other chroniclers offer a different vision of Marie’s attitude, La Marche reporting that the queen suffered on account of her husband’s young lover.32 He writes that “the queen offered [Isabelle of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy,] great honour and intimacy, because they were both already aged princesses and safe from gossip,” adding that they “suffered from the same pain and illness, which we call jealousy, and that they often discussed their sorrows secretly, which was the reason that they spent time together.”33 Chastellain, too, attributes “affliction and anguished heart” to Marie, complaining that to avoid discord and safeguard her own estate she was forced to suffer a situation that no other woman of her time would have tolerated, the presence of a “trollop,” a “handmaid of low birth.”34 Regarding Agnès’s presumed political role, no chronicler assigns her anything approaching one, although Pope Pius seems to suggest that the king sought her counsel: “Charles VII clung to Agnès, unable to bear her absence at the table, in bed or at his council (“consilio”).”35 There is no record of her attending the king’s council, although of course she may have been present unofficially.36 La Marche writes that Charles VII had recently “placed [Agnès] in such triumph and power (“tel triumphe et tel povoir”) that her estate (“estat”) might be compared to that of the great princesses…”37 One might read something formal into these words, but the comment just as likely refers to the sumptuous clothing and accommodation mentioned by other chroniclers, like Chastellain, who complains that Agnès was given her own household at court. Chastellain writes that her quarters in the household of the king (“son quartier de maison en l’hostel du roy”) were better ordered and appointed than the queen’s, that Agnès had more ladies than the queen, and that the barons and nobility of the king treated her 30  Du Clercq, “Mémoires,” 175.

31  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:182. 32  La Marche, Les Mémoires, 2:55. 33  La Marche, Mémoires, 2:55. 34  Chastellain, Œuvres, 4:365.

35  Piccolomini, Pii secundi, 163.

36  See Vallet de Viriville, Charles VII roi de France et ses conseillers, and Gaussin, “Les Conseillers.” 37  La Marche, Les Mémoires, 2:55.

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as if she were the queen.38 At the opposite extreme, Chartier attributes to Agnès no power whatsoever.39 In fact, she was not even the king’s mistress, he asserts, explaining that he had examined courtiers under oath about her.40 Based on his inquest he claimed that the king enjoyed her for her youth, her fun, her joyfulness, her honest and polished language, because among the beauties, she was the youngest and the most beautiful. But there was no sexual relationship. “It is not realistic (“vraisemblable”) that the king conducted himself in such a way,” Chartier claims. As evidence, he points out that the king had never stopped sleeping with the queen; that the queen, not the king, as I noted above, was responsible for Agnès’s large entourage; that the king saw Agnès only in groups and was never seen to touch her below the chin. 41 Of course Agnès was the king’s mistress: as we will see, the king’s three daughters by Agnès were acknowledged by the king himself and, as siblings, by the king’s son and successor, Louis XI. However, Chartier may have been right that her role was less flagrantly obvious than modern historians often assume. I return to the point in this chapter’s conclusion. Other chroniclers fall in between La Marche and Chartier, recognizing Agnès as the king’s especially favoured mistress. Although they make no reference to her “triumph and power,” they note, as we have seen, her presence at court and her lavish lifestyle. It is clear that they consider such extravagant trappings for a woman who was not a queen or princess outrageous. La Marche owns that Agnès “has brought much good to the kingdom of France; she brought before the king young men-at-arms and excellent companions, by whom the king has since been well served.42 But other chroniclers moralize about her bad influence on court fashion and behavior. Chastellain complains that she wore trains a third longer than any princess of the realm, headdresses higher by half, costlier dresses, all of this encouraging the debauchery and dissolution that she produced and initiated. She left her shoulders bare and, in front, her breasts; she promoted lasciviousness among men and women; frittered away time day and night to lead people astray…It was a pity that in most of France and the adjacent marches the entire sovereign sex dirtied itself following her morals. And the nobility of the realm did the same, given almost entirely over to vanity at her urging and example…43

In the same vein, Jean Juvenal des Ursins describes court fashion as inappropriate, lamenting outrageous headdresses and décolletage, although he does not single Agnès out by name. He advises the king to control the clothing of the people of his hotel, mentioning in particular “openings [in dresses] in the front through which one can 38  Chastellain, Œuvres, 4:365–66.

39  There is no evidence, but it is possible that the king himself influenced either Chartier’s inquest, Chartier’s reporting of the inquest in the chronicle, or both. He must have been aware of the image of himself as a lecher. 40  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:181–86. 41  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:183. 42  La Marche, Les Mémoires, 9:403–4. 43  Chastellain, Œuvres, 4:366.



The Primary Sources

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see the breasts and nipples of women, and long furred trains, chains, and other things, because these are displeasing to God and to the world, with good reason,” and urging that “in his hotel and that of the queen and his children infamous and debauched men and women of dubious morals and sinful in other ways not be tolerated…”44 Chartier, too, mentions Agnès’s “large and excessive headdresses, pretty dresses, furs, gold necklaces, and jewels…”45 His tone, however, is more indulgent than those of Juvenal des Ursins or Chastellain, stressing Agnès’s youth and high spirits. If chroniclers are silent on Agnès as a political player, a few remark on her relationship with the dauphin Louis in a way that might suggest Louis saw her as a rival. Pope Pius II dissects the terrible relationship between the king and the dauphin that led to the latter’s flight in 1447 from the kingdom to the Dauphiné where he remained until the king’s death. For Pius, a primary reason for the bad relationship was a power struggle between Louis and his maternal uncle, Charles of Anjou, who had procured young women for the king. According to the pope, Charles of Anjou made himself odious to all with his arrogance and monopolization of the king. To rid themselves of him, the barons urged the dauphin to expel Charles from the court. In addition, the barons urged the expulsion of the king’s girlfriends. That the group included Agnès becomes clear when Pius describes Louis drawing his sword to chase one of the young women and then later reveals that woman to have been Agnès.46 More significant, Pius asserts that “this Agnès, who had escaped from the hands of the dauphin, as we have shown, was, according to common opinion, the reason that the dauphin had to flee.”47 É� léonore of Poitiers, too, asserts that Louis had been exiled from court by the king because of a conflict of which Agnès was said to be the cause. Unfortunately, É� léonore offers no more information.48 Jean Bouchet, rhétoriqueur poet who wrote the Annales d’Aquitaine in 1545, claims to have read in the chronicle of Robert Gaguin that the dauphin was required to absent himself from his father the king for having given Agnès a slap (“soufflet”) and further states that no such detail exists in the chronicles of Gilles or Chartier.49 To date no one has ever been able to locate the pertinent passage in Gaguin, but Bouchet’s description of the slap has been widely reproduced. Du Clercq writes that in 1446 the dauphin fled to the Dauphiné, where Louis had supposedly learned that the king secretly sent Antoine de Chabannes to escort him back to court. Du Clercq admits that he is not sure why, although he has heard the king was unhappy that his son was taxing the Dauphiné so heavily. He then adds: “And some think that the dauphin had already caused the death of a demoiselle named the Belle Agnès, who was the most beautiful woman in the kingdom and with whom the king 44  Juvenal des Ursins, Écrits politiques, 1:547, see also 1:531, although there he refers to male and female fashion. See also 1:328 where he complains about fornication. 45  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:181–82.

46  For chasing a young woman with a sword see Piccolomini, Pii secundi, 160. On 163, the young woman is revealed to be Agnès. 47  Piccolomini, Pii secundi, 160.

48  É� léonore de Poitiers, Honneurs de la cour, 94. 49  Bouchet, Annales, 259.

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his father was entirely in love…”50 Du Clercq later repeats that some believed Agnès to have been poisoned, although he does not suggest a possible perpetrator at that point.51 Le Clerc’s interpolation in the Chronique Martiniane also ties the dauphin’s hatred of Agnès to her sudden death: The reason for the king’s hatred of the dauphin, his son, was that some said that the dauphin treated his subjects in the Dauphiné too harshly, especially bishops, prelates, and other people of the church, taking their goods against their will to promote and take care of his own estate; for this reason, the king gave him nothing more. Others said that the father hated his son because of the death of the Belle Agnès, who died from poison… The dauphin had blamed his father several times and complained about him because of the Belle Agnès, who was as a matter of fact the most beautiful young women of her time, and who was in the good graces of the king as much as could possibly be.52

Burgundian chronicler Thierri Pawels explicitly claims that the dauphin arranged the murder of Agnès, or, at least, the murder of an unnamed lover of the king. He writes that the king took a lover once the queen was dead (this is not true because the queen in fact survived the king) and that this lover hated the dauphin, who, seeing himself despised, slaughtered her. This caused great discord in the kingdom.53 Was the dauphin’s hatred inspired simply by loyalty to his mother? He was ostentatiously pious.54 Or did he resent Agnès’s political influence on his father? If so, did he really have some hand in the young woman’s mysterious death? Although many accusations of poison during the Middle Ages were false, many were also true. Whatever its cause, death overtook the first memorable mistress of a king of France in early 1450, shortly after she had joined the king in Normandy. Chartier gives the most complete version of her abrupt demise, reporting that she had journeyed to the abbey of Jumièges, where Charles VII was residing after restoring Normandy, “to warn the king and tell him that some people wanted to betray him and deliver him into the hands of his old enemies the English.”55 The king, Chartier continues, “did nothing but laugh.” But Agnès may have received plausible intelligence to have travelled so far.56 Regarding her cause of death, although Chartier notes that she gave birth to a baby girl who did not live, his timeframe is vague, and he does not attach this birth to Agnès’s death. Rather than an illness related to childbirth, he claims that Agnès died of emotional distress. He notes that she claimed the king fathered the baby but that he denied paternity. On hearing that bad things were being said of her, she experienced 50  Du Clercq, “Mémoires,” 95.

51  Du Clercq, “Mémoires,” 175.

52  Le Clerc, Cronique Martiniane, 95.

53  Pawels, Chroniques relatives à l’histoire de la Belgique, 254. 54  See Frizet, “Louis XI et le partage familial de la dévotion.” 55  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:181.

56  See Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:217.



The Primary Sources

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such intense chagrin that she fell ill with a flux in the stomach and died in the throes of agony on February 11, 1450.57 The chronicles, then, offer a skeletal narrative of a beautiful young woman who rapidly rose to glory as the king’s mistress, accumulated wealth, and suddenly died of mysterious causes in the prime of life. A number of other primary sources allow us to fill in at least some of the gaps in Agnès’s narrative.

Agnès in Other Primary Sources

Seventeenth-century genealogist of the nobility Père Anselme is a crucial source for information about Agnès’s immediate family, working from primary sources, although some of these have since vanished.58 He writes that Agnès’s father, Jean Soreau, was a counsellor to the Count of Clermont in 1425. Nineteenth-century historian Vallet de Viriville picks this up, although neither he nor Anselme provides the source, and uses it to explain how Agnès might have landed in the household of Duchess Isabelle of Anjou. The Count of Clermont, later Charles, Duke of Bourbon (1401–1456), was a devoted follower of Charles VII (although he turned against the king during the Praguerie) and was therefore often in contact with the king’s brother-in-law René, Duke of Anjou.59 Vallet de Virville speculates that the Duke of Bourbon might have passed along to René that his counsellor had a beautiful young daughter. Agnès’s mother was Catherine de Maignelais, chatelaine of Verneuil, daughter of Raoul, also known as Tristan, seigneur of Maignelais.60 Père Anselme further records that the couple had four sons in addition to their one daughter, Agnès. The earliest known trace of Agnès is an account that includes her in a list of employees in the household of Isabelle Duchess of Anjou. The account covers the six months beginning in January and finishing on July 29, 1444. A copy can be viewed on folio 697 of MS français 7855 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Listing the wages of the ladies and officers, the document records that “Agnès Sorelle” received 57  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:184–85.

58  It may seem odd to rely so heavily on such a late source as Père Anselme (1625–1694). However, his multi-volume genealogy is generally (although not always) reliable where it can be verified, and it informs much of what we know about medi­eval and early modern noble French family histories. Born Pierre de Guibours in Paris 1625, he entered the Order of the Discalced Augustinians in 1644. He remained for the rest of his life in the Convent of the Petits Pères, attached to the Basilica of Notre-dame des Victoires, devoting himself to his research. When he died in 1694, he left a twovolume version of the Histoire généalogique et chrono­logique de la maison royale de France. The work was continued, resulting in the massive version that we know today, first published in 1726–1733. Père Anselme is not always accurate:he seems to have been responsible for the misapprehension, noted above, that Agnès was native to Fromentau, writing that she was born in that village. Vallet de Viriville amends Anselme’s entry on the Sorels, adding some ascendants whom Anselme omits. Histoire de Charles VII, 3:11n1. 59  See Vallet de Viriville, “Nouvelles recherches,” 22–24.

60  Anselme, Histoire généalogique, 8:540, 701. Antoinette de Maignelais was the daughter of Catherine’s older brother, Jean, 8:541.

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ten pounds. This puts Agnès at the low end of the scale of earners, indicating that her service was insignificant, largely honourific, or that she left Isabelle’s service early in the year and that her salary was reduced accordingly.61 Whatever the case, the document gives an important clue: although we can only guess at the date of her departure, Agnès had to have been in Isabelle’s service for at least the first month of the account period, which means that she was still with the Duchess in January 1444. The no longer extant account from the second half of the same year would have helped pinpoint that date, as would the relevant accounts from Marie Anjou’s household. However, the queen’s accounts are very incomplete, covering only November 1422 to March 1426, with fragments for 1457–1458, and nothing for the period of Agnès’s tenure.62 The next trace of Agnès comes in the form of documents recording her valuable gifts to the collegiate church of Saint Ours in Loches in 1444: a golden cross intended to enclose a piece of the True Cross earlier donated by Count Fulk of Anjou and a silver gold-covered statuette of Mary Magdalene.63 These records refer to Agnès as the noble “demoiselle mademoiselle de Beaulté,” demonstrating that before the end of 1444 Charles VII had already gifted her with the Château de Beauté. Further documents offer glimpses of Agnès’s spectacular rise, with Père Anselme specifying the gifts that she was able to acquire for her family members. Her mother received a pension after Agnès’s death.64 Her uncle Geoffroy Sorel was awarded administration of the abbey of Saint Crépin of Soissons in 1447 and raised to bishop of Nî�mes in 1450; her brother Charles was part of the king’s household; brother Louis was a squire for the king; brother Jean, seigneur of St. Géran, was the Grand Huntsman of France; the youngest, André, only sixteen when his sister died, was put under the guardianship of his uncle Geoffroy and was awarded five thousand livres in Agnès’s will for his upkeep and purchase of a house; he was a canon in Paris in 1452.65 In addition to Beauté, Agnès received the seigneuries of Bois Trousseau and Anneville, the castle of Roquecezière, and the chatellenies of Issoudun, and Vernonsur-Seine.66 The epitaphs on both of her tombs noted that she governed under one rule “Roquecezière, the people of Vernon and elsewhere, along with the people of Issoudun.”67 A further sign of her extraordinary favour is a pension of three thousand 61  Printed in Champion, Dame de Beauté, pièces justificatives, 173. 62  They are collected in AN KK 56 and K 530–32.

63  See the details on the primary sources in Vallet de Viriville, “Recherches historiques,” 319. 64  Anselme, Histoire généalogique, 8:540.

65  Anselme, Histoire généalogique, 8:701; Vallet de Viriville unearthed further information about Geoffrey Sorel, “Recherches historiques,” 298–300.

66  Vallet de Viriville, “Recherches historiques,” 305, 314–15; Fresne de Beaucourt, Charles VIII, 3:177–78. 67  Champion reproduces the epitaphs, Dame de Beauté, 65.



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livres granted her in 1447.68 On her deathbed she was in a position to give large gifts to Jumièges and Loches.69 Fragments of her will reveal how wealthy she was when she died.70 Although only a few leaves remain of what was once a document including something like sixty folios, these leaves detail some of the inventories taken of the belongings that remained in the various castles where she had resided and demonstrate the lavishness of what some chroniclers called her “grand estate.” Along with dozens of costly silver table services, salt shakers, and sets of silverware, for example, she possessed linens, tapestries, chandeliers, decorated boxes, crystals, and an illuminated almanac. She owned numerous black gowns for “female usage” of various rich materials trimmed with sable. Among the bills left to pay was one for forty large ermines to trim capes and the sleeves of dresses, a detail that evokes, as we will see, the ermine-decorated gown of the Melun Virgin whose features supposedly mirror Agnès’s.71 The folios also give the names of several of her ladies, Jehanne Benoiste, Jehanne Dumans, Jehanne Cousue, Agnès, and servants, Jehan de Chinon, Bureau, Le Pelletier, François, Estienne, Micheau, Bergier, Le Bastart, Gillet Lalemand, Le Taburin, Pousquenet, Le Mareschal, Gervoise, Anthoine de La Mothe, two Guillaumes, Pierre Chance, the German, and Master Colart.72 Supplementing the narrative of Agnès’s adversarial relationship with the dauphin recounted in some chronicles, a letter of 1452 from Louis relieves Jean de Daillon of responsibility for a set of tapestries that the dauphin had given to Agnès.73 Louis explains that he had confiscated the tapestries during a campaign on the king’s behalf against the Count of Armagnac in October 1443 and, after ordering Daillon to take the tapestries into safekeeping, had them removed from Daillon’s care and given to Agnes. Vallet de Viriville, noting that Louis had rejoined his father at Montils-lès-Tours in April 1444 to celebrate the truce with the English, proposes that at some point during the month of festivities the dauphin had gifted Agnès with the tapestries, which he would have had with him.74 In light of this gift, it is especially interesting that Agnès left a magnificent set of tapestries of the chaste Susanna to the church of St. Ours of Loches.75 68  Vallet de Viriville, “Recherches historiques,” 314

69  For Jumièges, see Vallet de Virivlle, “Recherches historiques,” 317–18, 320, 322–23; for Loches, 319–21, 325–26. 70  The remaining folios were discovered by Cavailler and printed in her article, “Le compte des exécuteurs.” 71  Cavailler, “Le compte des exécuteurs,” 109.

72  Cavailler, “Le compte des exécuteurs,” 109–11.

73  See Vallet de Viriville, “Recherches historiques,” 321.

74  Vallet de Viriville, “Recherches historiques,” 321. See also Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:30–31. Kendall, Louis XI, has Louis presenting Agnès in 1446 with “a handsome set of tapestries which he had appropriated two years before from the castle of the Count of Armagnac,” 65, but offers no explanation for the date. 75  They are mentioned in an inventory of Agnès’s belongings at the castle of Croisette in Issoudun, just after her death. Cavailler, “Le compte des exécuteurs,” 102, 104.

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Are these the tapestries initially offered by Louis?76 Unfortunately, Louis does not specify the theme depicted in the tapestries in his letter. In any case, the significance of the anecdote about the gift is that before the dauphin hated Agnès, he apparently attempted to win her over by offering her something valuable. Either he was in love with her himself and possibly unaware of his father’s interest, or he wanted to gain her favour to influence his father. If the former, the father-son rivalry takes on a still darker aspect. If the latter, Pius’s assumption that the dauphin’s hatred was caused by the insult to his mother that Agnès represented loses some of its force: jealousy over Agnès’s sway with the king seems more plausible in this case. Five letters allegedly written by Agnès to three recipients show her intervening on behalf of others. The recipients are the lady of Belleville (possibly Marguerite, natural daughter of Charles VI, or her daughter, Marie, dame de Soubise, who was in the queen’s service); the Prévôt of Chesnaye; and Agnès’s ally (“compère”) and favourite of the king, Pierre de Brézé. Agnès requests that the Prévôt of Chesnaye drop charges against some impoverished men who had taken wood from the forest.77 As for Pierre, she asks that he help the father of one of the girls of her household who had recently lost revenue associated with a butcher’s stall. Fresne de Beaucourt disputes Agnès’s authorship of the letters to Madame de Belleville and Pierre, citing paleo­grapher É� tienne Charavay, who affirms that the letters are not auto­graphs. 78 Champion, too, claims the letters to be “obvious forgeries,” writing that they were put in circulation by Pierre Clément in his study of Jacques Cœur. But neither Fresne de Beaucourt nor Champion denies that the “forgeries” may have reproduced authentic letters. Neither left any reason to exclude this possibility. A letter of 1448 from Pope Nicolas V concedes to his “beloved daughter in Christ noblewoman Agnès Sorel” the right to travel with a portable altar.79 Elected to replace the antipope Felix V the previous year, Nicolas V would have been happy to indirectly do a favour for Charles VII, who would be instrumental in securing Felix V’s resignation of 1449.80 Several depositions reveal that Agnès was at least somewhat active in political life at court and an ally of Pierre de Brézé. The first reference to Agnès’s intriguing comes in a deposition of Jamet de Tillay, royal squire and intimate of the king, whose slander of the dauphine Marguerite of Scotland was believed by Marguerite’s allies to have led indirectly to her death in 1445. Various sets of depositions on the incident were recorded when the king and later the dauphin attempted to understand exactly what had happened. Although Agnès’s name does not appear in the reports of witnesses relating the story of Jamet’s attacks, Jamet is asked on June 1, 1446, how he knew that 76  Vallet de Viriville believes this to be the case, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:29.

77  See Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 259–62. Champion, Dame de Beauté, 165. 78  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:441–42. 79  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 173.

80  On Charles VII’s role in bringing this Schism to a close, see Stieber, Pope Eugenius IV, 322–30.



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the queen, the dauphine, and Agnès wanted to replace one of the dauphine’s ladies with another, presumably more to their liking.81 We will examine the significance of this story and what it might reveal about Agnès in the following chapter. The deposition of Guillaume Benoist is similarly suggestive of Agnès’s involvement in court politics. Benoist, erstwhile soldier and man of Jean de Bueil, author of the chivalric romanà-clef the Jouvencel, reports on October 27, 1446 what he has heard about factions at the royal court. Everyone is lining up against Pierre, he claims, who controlled the king with the help of Agnès. Finally, records related to the trial of a spy, Guillaume Mariette, who was apprehended and later executed for trying to stir up trouble between the king and the dauphin, make a similar claim about Agnès’s influence.82 This incident ended with Pierre being tried in 1448 and extracting himself from trouble, possibly with Agnès’s support. There is also the matter of Agnès’s children with the king: Marie, Charlotte, Jeanne, and the fourth premature baby who died with Agnès. Except for the last, none of the birth dates of the children has left a trace. But the girls’ marriages as well as their relationship to the king are verified in several extant documents and also in several that have vanished since being recorded by Père Anselme. According to Anselme, Charlotte was the oldest of Agnès’s children. In 1462 she married Jacques de Brézé, son of Pierre.83 This marriage ended in tragedy; arriving home from hunting one evening, Jacques surprised his wife in flagrante delicto with one of his officers and slew both with his sword.84 The second child, according to Anselme, was Marie, who married Olivier de Coëtivy in 1458 (Anselme is incorrect in naming her Marguerite, as contemporary documents signed by Charles VII in her favour demonstrate; one of her daughters was named Marguerite).85 The youngest child was Jeanne, who married Antoine de Bueil in 1461.86 Fresne de Beaucourt convincingly revises the birth order, assuming Marie to be the oldest. She was the first married. Fresne de Beaucourt also signals the special care that the king took to emphasize his paternity in 1458 along with the dowry he details for her marriage to Oliver de Coëtivy.87 81  Several of the depositions are edited in the preuves, Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:47–48.

82  For the deposition of Guillaume Benoist in 1446, see Jean de Bueil’s Jouvencel, 2:342; for the deposition relative to accusations waged against Jamet du Tillay, see Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:42–43; for the bizarre story of Mariette, see the documents collected by Fresne de Beaucourt in volume 3 of Chronique de Mathieu d’Escouchy. See also the chronicler’s brief discussion of the case, 1:135–38. 83  Anselme cites a document, no longer extant, in which Charlotte is referred to as the natural sister of Louis XI, 1:119. 84  On the trial see Douët d’Arcq, “Procès criminel.”

85  See Marie’s letters and the three letters from Charles VII, appended to Marie’s, in which he calls her his beloved natural daughter. Marie de Valois, “Lettres de Marie de Valois,” 38–40. Vallet de Viriville too discusses the contemporary documents related to the daughters, “Recherches historiques,” 477–88. 86  See the letter of Louis XI in which he refers to his “natural sister Jeanne,” married to the Count of Sancerre, Antoine de Bueil. Printed in Delort, Essai critique, 202.

87  See Fresne de Beaucourt, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 218–19. Among the “Registres de la

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Chapter Two

Another type of primary source, forensic evidence, has recently revealed several significant facts about Agnès. In 2005 a team led by Philippe Charlier examined Agnès’s exhumed remains. I summarize their findings, discuss reactions to them, and cite some of the many sources in which the findings are recorded in the conclusion; I therefore do not duplicate that material here. Still, it will be useful to note some of the most relevant details. First, an examination of Agnès’s teeth shows that she was between 23 years 9 months and 27 years 9 months old at the time of her death. Her teeth also reveal that she had been pregnant three times. As we have seen, Agnès is supposed to have given birth to a fourth child who did not live long. Charlier explains that it is normal that the rings indicating this fourth pregnancy had not yet appeared in her teeth before she died. Second, the highly elevated presence of mercury in hairs from her head, eyebrows, and pubic region demonstrates that she died of an acute overdose of this substance. The amount of mercury and its location in the hairs rule out death from prolonged exposure of the sort that would result from the use of mercury-based makeup. Nor is she likely to have died of an overdose of mercury administered therapeutically, as a cure for the roundworms from which laboratory tests discovered her to have suffered. Rather, a dose that large must have been administered deliberately or suicidally by Agnès herself. Two last bits of evidence, one positive, the other negative, throw into question how public Agnès’s liaison with the king ever was. Agnès was indisputably Charles VII’s mistress, despite Chartier’s claim. And yet, Chartier might have a point when he claims that the queen was the motivating force behind Agnès’s riches and that there was no affair. Neither is literally true. But relative to the later significant royal mistresses, who, beginning with the Duchess of É� tampes, were highly visible figures, Agnès seems to have occupied a much more subdued role. She is not even cited among the king’s most intimate favourites in a revealing piece of intelligence of 1447 collected for the Duke of Burgundy to keep him apprised of the power dynamics at the royal court. The document gives code names for various political players, who are listed according to their intimacy with the king. Five men are classified as “those who are often with the king in private” (“ceulx qui se tiennent souvent devers le roi en son retrait”).88 Agnès’s name figures last among a list of thirty-two who are seldom with the king in private (“pou se tiennent ou retrait du roi”). Even to courtiers, Agnès did not appear to spend extraordinary amounts of time with the king. Then there is the negative evidence: no sign of her quarters in the king’s principal residences. Later mistresses were accorded their own luxurious quarters within the king’s principal residences. Despite the impression left by Chastellain, Agnès could not have enjoyed such accommodation at the royal court. Women at late medi­eval European courts led minutely ritualized lives, their positions constructed in hierarchies that they enacted continually through words and gestures. In her memoir of Burgundian court etiquette É� léonore of Poitiers illustrates the complexities of rank at court. chancellerie royale ‘stricto sensu’” for Charles VII, in AN JJ 187 are an act of legitimation for Marie, as well as a letter dated October 1458 detailing her dowry for her marriage to Olivier de Coëtivy. 88  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:319.



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The French royal court was less formal than the Burgundian court. Still, had Agnès simply appeared as the king’s mistress and been allotted a large household of her own, as Chastellain suggests, the exceptional situation would have been such a breach of protocol that surely it would have left traces. Scattered references to Agnès’s ladies, such as those found in her will, must refer to her household at the properties awarded her by the king. Unfortunately, no chronicler describes the relationship between Agnès’s life at these properties and her life at the royal court: at some point she must have become relatively independent of the queen, but we do not know how or when. Agnès’s tombs and the Melun diptych offer further evidence; I examine these important primary sources in Chapter Four.

Chapter Three

THE FIRST ROYAL MISTRESS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT Although the primary

sources leave many gaps, they allow us to form an outline of Agnès’s life, and this skeleton can be fleshed out to some extent with evidence from other sources not directly related to Agnès. In this chapter I draw on some of these to animate Agnès’s story while retaining a distinction between what the evidence says and my own conclusions. I begin with a discussion of the young woman’s move to the royal court. Then, to create the context for her activity there, I cut away from Agnès herself to focus on her environment, turning first to the royal family, whose problematic relationships represent the background against which the king formed his attachment to Agnès. What might have motivated Charles VII to enter into such an apparently intense liaison at that moment? I then broaden the scope to court factionalism, going into some detail about the conflicts that divided the court during Agnès’s tenure, proposing that although to modern eyes these quarrels often seem to focus on gossip and petty jealousies, they represented deadly serious plays for power in a society where the signs of status often had material consequences. After reconstituting this context, I bring Agnès back into the story, examining the references to her political intriguing in greater detail against their larger background. I conclude with a discussion of her mysterious death, prepared by the discussion of factionalism. Throughout I am conscious of manoeuvring between the related problems of historical timidity, given the relative dearth of sources, and unjustified ambition, given the relative abundance of them. But I hope to establish parameters for imagining what her role plausibly might have been by forming an idea of the world in which Agnès lived.

Agnès Arrives on the Scene

A long tradition held that Yolande, Duchess of Anjou (1379–1442), regent after the death of her husband in 1417 and mother of the duke’s heir, Louis (1403–1434), Marie (1404–1463), René (1409–1480), and Charles (1414–1472) spotted the beautiful Agnès at the Angevin court and, hoping to influence Charles VII through her, proposed to the king that he take the young woman as his mistress. However, the dates do not match up. As we have seen, Isabelle of Anjou’s household account demonstrates that Agnès joined the queen’s household at the earliest between January and July of 1444. This means that Yolande, who died November 14, 1442, is unlikely to have had anything to do with Agnès’s move, unless she planned it very far in advance. In fact, no one knows for sure how Charles VII and Agnès met and began their affair. One possibility is that the king fell in love with her during a convocation in Montils-lès-Tours, beginning on April 17, 1444, to solemnize a truce with the

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English.1 The French and English, mired since 1337 in the off-again on-again series of conflicts known collectively as the Hundred Years War, had agreed to the truce just days before the king, along with the Queen Marie and the dauphine Marguerite of Scotland, welcomed the English delegation led by the Duke of Suffolk. This truce was one step in the gradual expulsion of the English from France following Joan of Arc’s rapid ascent and execution in 1431 and Charles VII’s reconciliation with the Burgundians in 1435. Although the truce did not bring a definitive end to hostilities, which continued for nearly another decade, the occasion was marked by great festivities and the proxy marriage of Marguerite of Anjou, daughter of René and Isabelle (and therefore niece of the king and queen), to the English king Henry VI.2 On May 20 the truce was agreed upon; on May 24 the betrothal took place in the church of St. Martin of Tours; on May 28 the Treaty of Tours was signed.3 Agnès, too, must have taken part in the celebration. If she was not yet in Marie of Anjou’s service, she would have accompanied Isabelle and Marguerite, who departed Isabelle’s principal residence in Angers on May 4 for Tours.4 The king may have noticed Isabelle’s beautiful young attendant during the festivities and extended an invitation then to join the royal court. Or, if Chartier’s account carries a seed of truth, it may have been the queen who approached Agnès and engineered her transfer from the household of her sister-in-law to her own. The Angevin court was renowned for its lively culture and had been stationed for several years in Naples, a major Mediterranean crossroads between East and West. Imprisoned by the Duke of Burgundy in 1434, René of Anjou in that same year inherited Anjou, Provence, Maine, and Naples. He made Isabelle his regent, sending her to Naples,5 where she governed until he was released and rejoined the family there in 1437. Isabelle returned to Lorraine in 1440 where she continued to rule.6 Agnès may have been adept at court life, expertly mentored by Isabelle, and well-travelled. In other words, she may have been a fine catch for Marie of Anjou. 1  For the date see Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:274. The ambassador’s report to which Fresne de Beaucourt refers is easily accessible in numerous sources; I cite and translate from Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, 123n2, citing Harleian Library, Digby, fol. 155v. “The following day the aforesaid ambassadors of the [English] king were led into the presence of the king of the French some miles outside the aforementioned city where the king, guarding his status, received with a glad countenance the letters from our king from the hands of Lord Suffolk and other ambassadors, in the presence of the King of Sicily, the dauphin, the Duke of Calabria and of others named above, who, received by the king, and with permission granted, were brought to the aforesaid Duke of Orleans and into the presence of the Queen of France in whose chamber, where the aforesaid queen in such a manner maintained her status with the dauphine and with other nobles and lords and some fifty noble great-hearted women…” 2  On Marguerite of Anjou’s marriage to Henry VI, see Cron, “The Duke of Suffolk.” 3  Vallet de Viriville, Histoire de Charles VII, 2:541.

4  For the relevant documents, see Vallet de Viriville, Histoire de Charles VII, 2:452n1. 5  Lecoy, Le roi René, 1:113–14. 6  Lecoy, Le roi René, 1:198–99.



The First Royal Mistress in Historical Context

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Another possibility is that Agnès had met the king in 1443 and already become his mistress well before the festivities surrounding the truce at Montils-lès-Tours. Many historians assume that Charles VII met Agnès and began the affair with her during a visit to Isabelle and René’s chateau at Saumur in Anjou in September of 1443. 7 Whichever the case, the king and Agnès must have begun their affair by the time the gathering in Montils-lès-Tours came to an end and the king set out on July 10 to assist René of Anjou in laying siege to Metz.8 Located in the heart of the Duchy of Lorraine, Metz was one of three bishoprics excluded from the duchy by the Holy Roman Emperor when René claimed it on behalf of Duchess Isabelle in 1431. Because it was disputed whether Metz owed obedience to France or the Empire, the city was a frequent source of strife. 9 On September 20, the king arrived in Nancy, some thirty miles south of the city, where he would install himself to oversee the siege. 10 Was he accompanied by Agnès? She leaves no trace in documents for the spring and summer of 1444. However, the record noted above of her gift to St. Ours of Loches refers to her as the Dame de Beauté, demonstrating that the king thought enough of her to gift her with the lovely property of Beauté-sur-Marne sometime that year. It therefore seems plausible that she accompanied him to Metz and Nancy rather than remaining with the queen.11 Wherever Agnès spent the summer and fall of 1444, by Christmas she must have been in Nancy with the royal family, a participant in the events that followed. The court began the new year in splendid style, but slander was soon on the rise among the courtiers, who were always jockeying for position, and, some months later, the always complicated relationship between the king and the dauphin took a turn for the worse. As that relationship deteriorated over the course of the following two years, Pierre de Brézé and Agnès began to attract the ire of the dauphin. Tensions eventually came to a head in 1447, when the dauphin fled the royal court for the Dauphiné. He never saw his father again. In the following two sections I temporarily put Agnès on hold to recreate the setting that will allow us to contextualize the handful of references to her political activity. In the first of these sections, I review what contemporaries wrote about the difficult royal family dynamics that formed the backdrop for Agnès’s life with the king.

7  Fresne de Beaucourt details the itineraries to show the overlap, Histsoire de Charles VII, 3:290–91. See also Lecoy, Le roi René, 1:228. 8  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:47.

9  See Kekewich, The Good King, 27–42, for the context of the strife. 10  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:52.

11  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:172, writes that she accompanied the king to Nancy and Châlons, “without any doubt,” but the evidence that he offers, the deposition of Jamet du Tillay, Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:47–48, does not corroborate the assertion. Theoretically, Agnès might have travelled to Nancy with the queen for Christmas; nothing in that source says she was already in Nancy with the king.

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Relations within the Royal Family In 1440, the teenaged dauphin joined a group of rebellious lords hoping to wrest the throne from his father in staging the uprising known as the Praguerie. Charles VII put down the revolt, and father and son reconciled. But by 1446 the dauphin had once again begun to plot a coup. Historians have long pondered what kind of father Charles VII was that he incited such disloyalty in his son12 and what kind of son Louis was that he so betrayed his father.13 To assume as we often do in the face of complicated personal situations that the fault lay equally on both sides is lazy. And yet, if the primary sources taken together suggest a dynamic of controlling father hesitant to award much responsibility to an ambitious son who very much wanted to prove his mettle, none offers enough detail to let us judge which party was more to blame. Modern historians tend to be more favourable to Charles VII, highlighting the father’s willingness to forgive his son and continue to delegate authority to him, and, when the son fled the royal court definitively, repeatedly beseech his return. Even Paul Murray Kendall’s sympathetic bio­graphy of Louis XI begins with a long apo­logy for Louis’s contemporaries to show that the king was a product of his environment and right leader for the time, a “man of extraordinary powers wrapped in a personality so agile and various as to encompass the range of a dozen ordinary temperaments.”14 Although he blames the dauphin’s contempt on Charles VII’s “dolorous kingship” and “weakness of will,” Kendall grants that armed rebellion against one’s father contravened convention.15 Whoever was more responsible for the situation, contemporary descriptions of father and son conjure up a relationship characterized by resentment and fear of treachery on both sides.16 Charles VII was criticized as particularly fickle and intriguing. For this reason, writes Chastellain, “leagues” and “bands” rose to power at his court, “and the watchful king, with his subtle regard, would play the factions off against each other and profit from the situation. Keeping everything within his gaze, he created a situation where all courtiers, no matter how great, felt threatened, had no idea where they stood, and lived in constant fear of losing favour.” 17 The king possessed innate “sens,” the chronicler continues, opining that the perils Charles observed during his life “honed his wit” and also gave him the resources to handle one of his great innate vices, mutability, which he turned into a sort of virtue. Although Chastellain does not list them, some of these perils included the following: as a boy the king witnessed the conflict between his uncles and cousins degenerate into 12  Major bio­graphies of Charles VII include Contamine, Charles VII; Vale, Charles VII; Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII; Vallet de Viriville, Histoire de Charles VII.

13  Major bio­graphies of Louis XI include Kendall, Louis XI; Favier, Louis XI; Champion, Louis XI; Thibault, La Jeunesse de Louis XI. 14  Kendall, Louis XI, 28. 15  Kendall, Louis XI, 44.

16  See Beaune’s survey, “L’historio­graphie de Charles VII.” 17  Chastellain, Œuvres, 2:181–82.



The First Royal Mistress in Historical Context

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the Armagnac-Burgundian war; while living with his mother Queen Isabeau just after he became dauphin in 1417, he saw the queen’s officer Louis de Bosredon arrested, tied into a sack, and tossed into the Seine by the Armagnacs and the queen herself exiled to Tours; during the Burgundian massacre of May 29, 1418, he barely escaped prison or assassination, spirited away by faithful servant Tanguy du Chastel; in 1419 he oversaw the murder of Jean of Burgundy to avenge the murder of Louis of Orleans, which sparked the Armagnac-Burgundian war; a year later he was disinherited through the Treaty of Troyes of 1420 by his own father, the mad Charles VI, in favour of Henry V of England; throughout the 1420s and 30s, his court saw several factional coups and political assassinations, his mother-in-law Yolande of Anjou teaming up with the connétable Richemont to supervise the assassination of Charles’s favourites Pierre de Giac and Le Camus de Beaulieu and install Georges de la Trémoï�lle, who then usurped Richemont’s power, resulting in a damaging private war between the latter two; the king appears to have barely escaped an attempted poisoning in 1432, and, in that same year, just avoided being delivered into the hands of the Count of Foix;18 in 1433 he witnessed an attempt on the life of La Trémoï�lle engineered by his royal mother-in-law and Richemont, aided by Jean de Bueil, Prégent de Coëtivy, and Pierre de Brézé and aimed at installing Yolande’s son Charles of Anjou as royal favourite; after the Treaty of Arras of 1435 finally brought peace between the old Armagnac and Burgundian factions, in 1437 the dukes of Bourbon and Alençon felt disadvantaged by the rapprochement and nearly rebelled; they then instigated the Praguerie in 1440, enticing the dauphin to their side by promising to put the young man on his father’s throne; and in 1447 the dauphin fled to the Dauphiné, where he remained. According to a document put together by Louis XI’s secretary, Jean Bourrée, soon after the new king’s ascension to the throne in 1461, at least one case of treason was tried each year between 1445 and 1458.19 As for the dauphin, he too was reputed to be cunning. La Marche writes that he was very subtle in his affairs: “[he] had a manner such that, when he wanted to serve the count [of Charolais], he treated him well and spoke against the duke of Croÿ; and when he wanted to serve the duke of Croÿ, he treated the count of Charolais badly.”20 Louis’s champion Commynes also describes a figure adept at ruse. Depicted as frenetically busy in the Mémoires, Louis seems to have loved to divide and conquer, like his father.21 “When Louis XI was at repose,” writes Commynes, his mind was working “because he had business going on in many places at once and interfered as much in the business of his neighbours as his own, and placed his men in all the great families and 18  Fresne be Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 2:287, citing Juvenal des Ursins. For the projected turning over of the king to the Count of Foix, see Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 2:287–91.

19  See Vale, Charles VII, 70. See also Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 5:85–86. The document itself is MS français 20491 of the BNF, a collection of letters and orders from Louis XI’s reign. See fol. 31r–v. 20  La Marche, Mémoires, 3:1.

21  See Slattery’s article comparing Chastellain and Commyne’s views of Louis XI: “King Louis XI—Chivalry’s Villain or Anti-Hero.”

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thereby divided their authority as much as possible.”22 He also resembled his father in his changeability, “longing for peace or truce when at war, but, once at peace, unable to stand it.” In addition, “he meddled in many insignificant goings-on in the kingdom” better left alone. But such was his personality” (“complexion”). In one area, however, father and son seem to have differed dramatically. In contrast with Louis, who appears never to have trusted a woman except for his daughter Anne (Brantôme alleges that he called her the “least foolish woman in the world, although not the wisest, because there no wise ones”),23 Charles VII invested confidence in several women throughout his life.24 Separated from his mother in 1413 at the tender age of ten to join the family of his Angevin bride, he remained with his new family from February 1413 until 1416. But, with the death of his uncle Jean, Duke of Berry, in June of that year, Charles returned to Paris to assume captaincy of the city, render homage for the duchy of Touraine, take his place on the Royal Council, and rejoin his mother’s household.25 When he suddenly became dauphin in 1417, his two older brothers having died in quick succession, the Armagnacs, fearful of Isabeau’s potential influence over her son, incarcerated the queen, as we have seen. Eventually she was delivered from prison by Jean of Burgundy, with whom she took control of the mad king and set up a government. With the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip, she worked to bring about the Treaty of Troyes of May 1420, which disinherited Charles. And yet, Charles remained in contact with her, through messengers.26After the Treaty of Troyes, he publicly defended her in letters explaining that she was under the control of the Burgundians and not acting according to her own will.27 Another important woman in Charles’s life was his mother-in-law Yolande, his “très-chière et amée mere la Royne de Sicile,” who backed his struggle for the throne and played a prominent role in his government throughout the 1420s and 30s. 28 In addition to persuading Arthur of Richemont, brother of John VI, Duke of Brittany, to leave the English and join Charles VII as connétable of France in 1425 as a counterweight to Georges de La Trémoï� l le, 29 Yolande was an early supporter of Joan of Arc. 30 Yolande herself was possibly involved in helping to bring the Maid 22  Commynes, Mémoires, 489–90.

23  Brantôme, Œuvres complètes, 8:105. 24  See Pélicier, Essai, 44–46.

25  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 1:18–19. 26  Calmette and Déprez. “Un Essai d’union nationale.” 27  Pons, L’Honneur de la couronne, 124.

28  For the relationship generally, Rohr, Yolande of Aragon, 93–100. See also the citations amassed by Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 2:301n6, 302nn1–3. Yolande resided at the royal court from 1423 until 1427, Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 2:185n1, citing AN KK 244 and following. She sat on Charles VII’s council from 1423 to 1430 and 1432 to 34, present twentyeight times. Gaussin, “Les Conseillers,” 105. 29  See Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 2:70–78, for a discussion of Yolande’s involve­ ment and the documents that verify it. 30  Rohr, Yolande of Aragon, 144–65.



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to Charles VII’s attention and certainly in verifying the young woman’s claim to be a virgin. 31 Joan of Arc is perhaps the best-known female figure in Charles VII’s bio­graphy. Although he gradually began to dissociate himself from the Maid with the failure to take Paris in September 1429 and later made no move to rescue her from her Burgundian captors, or, more plausibly, effect a prisoner exchange for her, throughout the period of her successes, he was dependent on her aid,32 and he demonstrated his confidence when he let her lead him to Rheims to be crowned after the recovery of Orleans, Jargeau, Meun-sur-Loire, Beaugency, and Patay. Joan’s continued desire to attack clashed with the king’s eventual plans to reconcile with the Duke of Burgundy, but for a brief period Charles VII believed in her.33 The king also appears to have appreciated his wife, at least early in their marriage. Monstrelet reports that in 1418, after they had taken control of the government, Queen Isabeau and the Duke of Burgundy sent the dauphine to the dauphin in Anjou to cajole him into returning to Paris and the king.34 The evidence amassed by Bernard Chevalier suggests that the king and queen were close in the 1430s.35 In 1433, during the overthrow of La Trémoï�lle, the chronicler Gilles le Bouvier affirms that the queen appeased the terrified king. 36 The queen also served as the king’s regent in 1434, and her influence on the king is presented as equal to that of her mother and brothers in a document in which Hugues de Lannoy advises his lord the Duke of Burgundy on how to deal with France. In order to reach the king, Hugues writes, the duke should call on his prisoner “Monseigneur of Bar [René of Anjou], brother of the queen of France, and on Charles of Anjou, who has great authority over the king, and if you got into the good graces of said Monseigneur of Bar you could have the help of the queen of France his sister, the queen of Naples [Yolande], his mother, and Charles of Anjou, his brother, to help get the matter to the king of France.”37 The king’s reliance on the queen is further attested in 1437. With the king in Montpelier, she requested that the leader of the écorcheurs, Rodrigo de Villandro, spare the Touraine, and he complied.38 Similarly, the king called on the queen during 31  See Contamine, “Yolande d’Aragon.”

32  Contamine’s hypothesis that the king lost faith in Joan when she began to lose seems reasonable; her divine mission had supposedly been confirmed by a sign from God when she won back Orleans, but maintaining belief in her became difficult when she was captured by the English. Charles VII, 199–202. 33  See the touching comment in Cagny, “The king made a grand feast and experienced great joy at the coming of the Maid, the Duke of Alençon, and their company,” Chroniques de Perceval de Cagny, 156. 34  Monstrelet, Chronique, 3:292. Many thanks to Alexandra Forsyth for the reference. 35  Chevalier, “Marie d’Anjou.”

36  Bouvier, Les Chroniques, 157.

37  For the documents proving the queen’s regency in 1434, see Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 302n3; Chevalier, “Marie d’Anjou;” Hugues de Lannoy, “Avis sur la paix de France et d’Angleterre,” cited in Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:82. A survey of Vallet de Viriville, Charles VII roi de France et ses conseillers, and Gaussin, “Les Conseillers” bears this out. 38  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:45, cites the relevant documents.

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the conference at Châlons to help finalize a settlement between René of Anjou and Duke Philip of Burgundy.39 As we will see, however, shortly thereafter, both René and Charles of Anjou temporarily left court, either dismissed by the king or acting on their own volition, and the queen’s standing seems to have diminished at around the same time. A deposition by the queen relative to the Jamet de Tillay incident reveals that in August 1445 her relationship with the king was so distant that instead of going to him to ask him when her entourage was to leave Châlons, she accepted instructions from Jamet that she would travel on her own, separate from the king. She appears to have been confused and hurt by the instructions, because she immediately sought to verify them, asking two others who both denied that the king would order such a thing. But the deposition makes clear that she did not ask her husband for clarification. 40 Two possible reasons might explain a distance between the king and queen at that time: Charles VII’s suspicion of his brothers-in-law may have extended to his wife; or Agnès’s presence might have created the rift. By August 1445, Agnès was either pregnant or had already born the king a child. Given that she bore the king three living daughters and a fourth who died prematurely in early February 1450, this must be the case, and it must have attracted the queen’s attention. Charles VII, then, was willing to rely on women in positions of trust. Although Agnès, unlike the Duchess of É� tampes and Diane de Poitiers, who were reputed to dominate their kings, did not exercise political influence visibly enough to elicit comment, the value of the gifts that Charles VII awarded her, the length of their liaison, and the lavishness of the tombs he had constructed in her memory suggest that she played a significant role in his life. We can only speculate on why the king became so attached to Agnès when he did, but several plausible possibilities suggest themselves. It may have been the need to compensate for the loss of Yolande, whose death in 1442 deprived the king of a source of moral support at just the time that factional competition, temporarily diminished after the Praguerie, was beginning to heat up. Or, conversely, it may have been the freedom to take a lover now that he was liberated from Yolande’s watchful eye.41 Or it may have been relief at the perfect loyalty that Agnès and her family would have represented, in contrast with the conflicts of interest that inevitably complicated his relationship with the queen’s Angevin family. Or it may simply have been the sudden overwhelming passion of a middle-aged man for a lovely and entertaining young woman.

39  Escouchy, Chronique, 1:83–84.

40  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:48–51. 41  See Collard, “Excès débilitants,”401.



Court Factionalism

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Throughout Charles VII’s reign the royal court was characterized by struggles for primacy of varying degrees of bitterness and intensity among factions whose members shifted with relative frequency. During Agnès’s years with the king, the most significant quarrels were those among Pierre de Brézé, the dauphin, and the queen’s brothers. Born into the minor Angevin nobility in about 1410, Pierre initially served Yolande of Anjou, helping her displace La Trémoï�lle, as I have noted. In 1437 he was appointed seneschal of Anjou and Captain of Angers. 42 His presence on the Royal Council is attested from that same year,43 but his great rise at court begins with the Praguerie, during which he supports the king, who names him seneschal of Poitou in the very midst of that revolt.44 In the fall of 1443, according to Guillaume Gruel, chronicler of the life of the connétable Richemont, Pierre “enter[s] into government along with Jamet de Tillay and Jean de Mesnil-Simon, sire de Maupas.” 45 He is also listed, once again along with Jamet and Jean and a few others, as one of those most often with the king in private (“en son retrait”).46 Pierre plays a preponderant role in the truce of 1444 with the English (and is accused of making quite a sum of money in the process).47 He then accompanies the king and René to Metz and Nancy.48 But by 1445 he seems to have grown too powerful in the eyes of the dauphin and the Angevin brothers, who over the following years try to unseat him in a series of intrigues. The rivalry between the dauphin and Pierre is recorded in numerous sources. The first signs of the dauphin’s resentment can be traced to late 1444, when the royal court was in Nancy. During the summer, shortly after the truce with the English celebrated at Montils-lès-Tours, the dauphin was entrusted by the king with assisting Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, engaged to royal daughter Radegonde, in fighting off the Swiss Confederation.49 The army the dauphin led was made up of the notorious écorcheurs, whose destructive energy the king wanted to rechannel. These bands of professional soldiers laid waste to the French countryside, pillaging and ransoming to support themselves when they were not engaged as mercenaries. They had become a serious disturbance after the Treaty of Arras, and the recent truce with the English put them out of work again, causing them to create new bands. On July 28, the écorcheurs assembled in Langres, in northeastern France. From there, Louis, accompanied by Jean de Bueil, led them on to Basel. On August 26, Louis led them against the Swiss just outside of Basel, in the Battle of St. Jakob an der Birs, dealing the Swiss a total 42  See Favreau, “Pierre de Brézé,” 37n5; Favreau does not cite his source.

43  His presence is recorded forty-two times between 1437 and 1461. Gaussin, “Les Conseillers,” 110. 44  For the source see Favreau, “Pierre de Brézé,” 37n6. 45  Gruel, Chronique d’Arthur de Richemont, 183. 46  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:319.

47  Bueil, Jouvencel, 2:342, deposition of Guillaume de Benoist.

48  Favreau, “Pierre de Brézé,” cites the primary sources, 37nn15 and 16; for Metz and Nancy, see Escouchy, Chronique, 1:28nn4 and following. 49  On the expedition, see Hardy, “The 1444–5 Expedition of the Dauphin Louis.”

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defeat. The dauphin then led the army north into the Vosges, laying siege to Dambach, where he was wounded by an arrow in the leg on October 7. The king ordered his son to return.50 But the dauphin had not been seriously injured and was carried south to Ensisheim in Alsace, where he concluded peace with the Swiss on October 28. Early November found the dauphin making plans for the dauphine Marguerite to join him in Alsace, although the trip never materialized for reasons unknown.51 Marcel Thibault writes that the Alsatians were regrouping and assumes the dauphin recognized that if Duke Philip of Burgundy decided to enter the fray, the dauphin’s own troops would be blocked in Alsace. The dauphin therefore decided to head for Nancy earlier than planned, joining the royal family there in February 1445 where the court was enjoying the hospitality of René, especially lavish that year because of the wedding of the duke’s daughter Yolande and Ferry II of Lorraine Vaudémont.52 On the surface, the mission to Germany bespeaks Charles VII’s faith in his son. And yet, things are not so straightforward. Benoist’s deposition of October 27, 1446, states that far from seeing the charge as an honour, the dauphin resented Pierre for persuading the king to send him to Germany.53 According to Benoist, Pierre had not given the dauphin sufficient provisions in the first place and then had recalled some of the dauphin’s soldiers, leaving him unprepared.54 It must be noted that the dauphin’s words are hearsay, reported through Benoist and recorded by a scribe. Still, a letter from Louis to the people of Senlis laying out his dire financial situation and asking them for money to complete the mission lends credence to Benoist’s testimony.55 In addition, the dauphin’s resentment against Pierre must have been fuelled by his father’s failure to adequately recognize his military achievements and accord him commensurate responsibility. Even before completing the mission against the Swiss, the young man acquitted himself ably in Languedoc from the spring of 1442 until midAugust 1443 and afterwards in Dieppe, coming to aid the inhabitants against the English. Following this successful campaign, the king called him to Tours to celebrate him before sending him south to deal with the troublesome Count of Armagnac, whom he subdued and imprisoned in Carcassonne.56 Having redeemed himself for his involvement in the Praguerie, the dauphin might reasonably have expected to occupy the position of second in command next to the king. However, the king kept Pierre in the position. If Benoist’s deposition is accurate, Louis was nursing a grudge against Pierre 50  Tuetey, Les Écorcheurs, 2:519.

51  Tuetey, Les Écorcheurs, 2:56–57.

52  Jeunesse de Louis XI, 382–86; Louis XI, Lettres de Louis XI, 1:49, letter from Dijon to council, February 4, from Nancy. On the mistaken notion that Marguerite of Anjou celebrated a marriage by proxy at this same time, see Cron, “The Duke of Suffolk.” 53  Bueil, Jouvencel, 2:342, deposition of Guillaume de Benoist. 54  Bueil, Jouvencel, 2:342, deposition of Guillaume de Benoist. 55  Louis XI, Lettres, 1:22.

56  See Monstrelet, Chronique, 6:77–82; Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:38–42.



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when he rejoined the royal court at Nancy in February 1445, although he may not have shown his hand at that point. Tensions between the dauphin and his Angevin uncles, eager to retain their priority in the government, likewise grew throughout the year, as did those between Pierre and his former Angevin allies. Trouble was forecast by a number of incidents that transpired during the conference with the Burgundians at Châlons between early May and early July. In April 1445, the court started out from Nancy for Châlons to negotiate a massive list of items including the ransom that René of Anjou still owed the duke.57 The queen, the dauphin, and dauphine arrived in Châlons the first week of May.58 The king, and possibly Agnès, arrived in Châlons around June 1, accompanied by René and Charles of Anjou.59 By this time the dauphin’s jealousy had already been reported as a serious problem. The Milanese Ambassador, in a letter from Châlons dated May 26, 1445, draws particular attention to the dauphin’s rivalry with René. As to what is occurring here, we inform your Lordship that, as far as we understand, there are in the House of France great wars and divisions. First, none could be greater than that between the illustrious lord dauphin and the king Rene. This is because it is King Rene who controls everything that is done in the kingdom. It is he who has had created this ordonnance and reduction of men-at-arms, of which we have sent a copy to your Lordship. Besides this, there is little contact between the duke of Orleans and King René, also because of jealousy on the subject of government.”60

Escouchy’s chronicle hints at the king’s frustration with René during the conference, shedding some light on the family dynamic at that moment.61 The reason for the conference, writes Escouchy, was to settle outstanding grievances between the king and the Duke of Burgundy, and between René and the duke. René apparently found the king’s approach too conciliatory and did not bother to conceal his annoyance: “Day after day he complained, to the King of France, to the dauphin his nephew, as well as to other great lords, claiming that the [Burgundian] conditions had been and were still too harsh, and that the King should not put up with this, but rather make use of his greater power, given that the two were so closely related.”62 It was common knowledge, continues Escouchy, that René and some others of his factions were looking for war with the Duke of Burgundy.63 Others, especially the king, strenuously opposed the idea. Discord raged until the very signing of the treaties, with René refusing to soften

57  For the points of contention to be negotiated, see Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:136–39. On René’s perspective see Lecoy, Le roi René, 1:244–48. 58  See Louis XI, Lettres, 1:199. 59  Louis XI, Lettres, 1:199.

60  Osio, Documenti diplomatici, 3:368. 61  Escouchy, Chronique, 1:40–48. 62  Escouchy, Chronique, 1:44. 63  Escouchy, Chronique, 1:45.

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his tone. Finally, the king called on the Duchess of Burgundy and the queen to conclude the mission.64 One can imagine that René’s intransigence and demands would have led the king to turn even more frequently to Pierre, whose career depended entirely on the king and who could therefore be counted on for unconditional support. This would have further fuelled the resentment not only of the Angevin brothers but also of the dauphin. Despite the conviviality and pleasure evoked by chroniclers’ descriptions of the magnificent tournaments and jousts that took place during the negotiations, suggestions of jealousy appear between the lines.65 La Marche’s account, for example, stresses Pierre’s superiority over all the others. Present were “the king Rene of Sicily [and Duke of Anjou], [Charles of Anjou] the count of Maine, his brother, the duke Jean of Bourbon, the count of Foix, the count of Saint Paul, and many others,” but above all the seigneurs of France, [Pierre] de Brézé, seigneur of La Varenne, seneschal of Normandy [sic], was the centre of attention for being a courteous knight, honorable, and the most pleasant and gracious conversationalist in the world, wise and energetic. And of the kingdom and the majority of the princes of France he governed the greatest part.66

Pierre seems to have sensed trouble brewing because he soon raised the alarm against René. According to Gruel in an entry for July 1445, Pierre perceived a threat to his supremacy and reacted by asserting that a revolt to be led by René and Charles of Anjou, Richemont, and Charles of Anjou’s new father-in-law was in the making. The warning followed on the engagement of Charles to Isabelle of Luxembourg, finalized on the last day of June; they married in early July. Given that Isabelle was the sister of Catherine of Luxembourg, recently married to Richemont,67 Pierre must have understood an alliance between Charles of Anjou and Richemont as a menace to himself, or, at least this is the impression given by Gruel, who follows his account of the marriage with Pierre’s claim about a new Praguerie: Then there was a quarrel raised by the great Seneschal of Poitou [Pierre de Brézé] because he feared that the King of Sicily [René of Anjou] and Monseigneur the connétable [Richemont], Monseigneur of Maine [Charles of Anjou] and Monseigneur of St. Paul [Peter of Luxembourg, Charles of Anjou’s father-in-law] who had joined together, would start a Praguerie; this was wrong, because they were not plotting this at all.68

Gruel, who was Richemont’s squire, would have been unlikely to admit that his lord had been plotting to overthrow the king. Pierre of course may have been crying wolf as a way of causing strife between the king and the new alliance that he believed to 64  Escouchy, Chronique, 1:47–48.

65  Escouchy, Chronique, 1:40–48; Chastellain, Chronique de Jacques de Lalain, 46–77; La Marche, Mémoirs, 56–61.

66  La Marche, Les Mémoires, 2:56. La Marche mistakenly names Pierre “Jehan,” nor was Pierre the seneschal of Normandy yet in 1445. 67  Isabelle of Luxembourg was Richemont’s third wife:he had married Marguerite of Burgundy, widow of the dauphin Louis, Charles VII’s oldest brother. 68  Gruel, Chronique d’Arthur de Richemont, 187.



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be about to move against himself. But, as we will see, Pierre’s accusation receives corroboration in 1446. A related set of tensions, this time between the king and dauphin, reached one of its many high points several weeks after the conclusion of the conference with the death of the dauphine Marguerite on August 16. A window onto the situation is provided by the depositions related to the Jamet de Tillay affair. The overarching significance of the questions and answers recorded in the depositions is difficult to interpret, but, at the most basic level,it seems that Jamet actively schemed to discredit the dauphin by casting aspersions on the dauphine. Certainly Jamet, beloved squire of Charles VII and bailiff of the Vermandois, would take the king’s side against the dauphin. Firmly ensconced along with Pierre in the king’s inner circle, he receives mention for his loyalty in 1430, when he is cited by Chartier for coming to the aid of the French during the siege of Compiegne.69 He appears on the Royal Council in 1423, 1444–1445, and 1454.70 Jamet fired his opening shot months earlier when he first shamed the dauphine for her late nights and enthusiastic composition of poetry. His insulting moralizing would later include accusations that she was personally responsible for her failure to become pregnant. Although married for nearly a decade when Jamet began his harassment, the dauphin and dauphine had produced no heir, a situation that visibly worried the king and lent itself to the sort of malign manipulation that Jamet practised. True, Jamet eventually realized that his scheming had gone too far and tried to extricate himself. Long before the dauphine suddenly fell deathly ill and excoriated him with her dying breath, he had undertaken damage control. His punch had landed, however. When the dauphin learned that his wife blamed his father’s intimate servant for her death, he determined to get to the bottom of the affair. The king ordered the initial investigation, but the dauphin, apparently not satisfied, ordered further depositions of Jamet and numerous witnesses.71 Jamet explains that he initiated his harassment around Christmas time, one evening at about 9 p.m. while the court was at Nancy and the dauphin still in Alsace. Along with Regnault de Dresnay, Louis’s knight, counsellor, and chamberlain, as well as master of the dauphine’s hotel, 72 Jamet entered the dauphine’s chamber. There the men found Marguerite lying on her couch, and several other of her ladies were around here; and also there was Messire Jean d’Estouteville, Seigneur de Blainville, leaning against the lady’s couch, and another whom he did not know; and because the said lady was in her chamber without the torches lit, the speaker said to Messire Regnault, master of the said lady’s hotel, that it was a great scandal (“paillardie”) for [Regnault] and the other officers of the said lady that torches had not been lit, and [Jamet] said that he said these words for the good

69  Chartier, Charles VII, 1:123.

70  Vallet de Viriville, Charles VII roi de France et ses conseillers, 9, 21, 28, although Gaussin, “Les Conseillers,” 125, suggests that the Jamet du Tillay who sat on the council in 1423 was the father of the Jamet who sat there in 1444 and 1454. See also Escouchy, Chronique, 3:319. 71  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:26, 48.

72  For Regnault see Louis XI, Lettres, 1:217.

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and honour of the said lady and her household; because it seemed to him, and it seems that given her status, that the torches should have been lit at that hour and especially so because the lady was in a foreign land [Lorraine]…73

According to Jamet, he meant the dauphine no disrespect. Rather, he had spoken out for the benefit of the lady and her house.74 It would be easier to see his tirade as a well-intentioned if overbearing blunder had Jamet not chosen to humiliate the dauphine in front of the dauphin’s man and had the case been isolated. It is true that at the time Marguerite and her entourage were the guests of René of Anjou and that any hint of scandal would have been embarrassing. However, other depositions reveal that Jamet kept up the insinuations and that their effect was devastating for the dauphine. According to multiple witnesses, the young woman lamented to her entourage throughout the final spring and summer of her life that she hated Jamet beyond all others for accusing her of terrible things and for ruining her standing with the king and the dauphin. Worse, she blamed Jamet for causing her death with his vicious slander, various deponents claiming that she thumped her chest as she lay dying and cried out “oh oh Jamet, you got what you wanted!”75 She even refused on her deathbed to pardon Jamet, relenting only under the pressure of her doctor and confessor Robert de Poitevin.76 It should be noted that the dauphin’s doctor, Guillaume Léotier, ascribes the death to an illness the dauphine contracted following a short pilgrimage with the king on August 7 to the basilica of Notre-Dame de l’É� pine, roughly six miles from Sarry.77 “[Because] it was very hot,” Léotier recounts, “profusely sweating, she took off her clothes, as her ladies said, and she stayed in her underdress in a cold room below so that the next day she was all stuffed up and coughing…”78 Léotier also affirms that this illness affected the dauphine so adversely because she stayed up too late, which corrupted her blood and the humours of her body; her brain weakened; nature always sends superfluities or corrupt humours to the weakest in body and those whom she finds the most enfeebled. Therefore a cold took root in [the dauphine’s] brain which caused an appostume. And it could be said that her brain fell through drops from these corrupt humours into her lung…”79

However, the dying dauphine left no doubt as to whom she blamed for her demise.

73  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:42–43. Jean d’Estouteville wrote poetry with Marguerite’s circle. See Higgins, “Love and Death,” 165n35. See also Père Anselme’s high praise of Jean in Histoire généalogique de la Maison Royale de France, 8:87. 74  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:42–43.

75  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:29–30, 36. 76  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:34–35.

77  For the pilgrimage, see Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:106n1, citing letters of August 10, 1445, AN JJ, 178, no. 44, in favour of the church, which he says he visited in pilgrimage. 78  Deposition of Guillaume Léotier, in Dupuy 762 of the BNF, fol. 51v, quoted in Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:106–7.

79  Deposition of Guillaume Léotier, in Dupuy 762 of the BNF, fol. 51r, quoted in Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:106–7.



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Jamet tried to backtrack even before the dauphine fell ill. He was very defensive, testified Marguerite de Villequier in her deposition of October 12, 1445, when about eight days before the dauphine took to her bed, he had approached Marguerite on the field in front of the Sarry chateau and begged her to excuse him to [the dauphine] explaining that he had never spoken badly about her and begged [Marguerite] also to find out from the said lady who was repeating the words to her, saying to the deponent that he really wanted to know who had reported those words so as to excuse himself to the said lady, and say to them in the presence of the said lady that it was not his fault.80

Marguerite carried the message to the dauphine, but “the said lady responded that [Jamet]…should not bother to excuse himself and that she did not care about his excuses because she knew very well that he had said the words.”81 Jamet’s attack on the dauphine was two-pronged. First, as I have noted, he insinuated that she was a woman of loose morals. His obsessive referencing of her interest in staying up late to discuss courtly poetry casts such activity as licentious. It also seems that Jamet spread the rumour that the dauphine’s fatal malady was lovesickness, although he denies this charge,82 and he further claims that he had never said the dauphine behaved more like a harlot (“paillarde”) than a great lady.83 In addition, Jamet is accused of having said that the still childless dauphine deliberately sought to avoid pregnancy. Under questioning, he denies having said she would never bear children; but he adds that after her death, while the court was still in Châlons, he heard Monsieur de Charny repeat that rumour. At that point, Jamet admits, he himself repeated something that he had heard, that the dauphine ate so many sour apples and drank vinegar so often that her ability to bear children may have been affected.84 He is further accused of suggesting that the couple may not have been engaging frequently enough in sexual relations to guarantee pregnancy and asked whether he had said that the dauphin did not love the dauphine because their sex life was not good. He denies this and also denies having said the kingdom would be better off if the dauphine were dead (presumably because the dauphin could marry a more fecund bride).85 It was of course worrisome that after nearly ten years of marriage the dauphine had not yet produced an heir. If she herself were to blame the scandal would be all the greater, raising serious questions about her fitness for her position and jeopardizing her marriage. The king himself betrays his anxiety regarding the lack of an heir when 80  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:32. 81  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:33.

82  Although his rumour-mongering may have had an effect. It appears that Marguerite’s gift of 600 golden écus to a young knight participating in a joust further raised eyebrows and added to her already damaged reputation, as reported by Annette and Jeanne de Guise. See the incident recorded in manu­script Dupuy 762 of the BNF, fols. 52r–54v. 83  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:55–6. 84  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:47. 85  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:47.

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he asks Jamet whether the dauphine’s illness might be a sign of pregnancy, according to Jamet’s testimony. It was the king who escorted the dauphine on the fateful pilgrimage to the basilica of Notre Dame de l’É� pine, a church that attracted pilgrims praying for fertility. Constructed on the site where, on the Feast of the Annunciation in 1400, shepherds were visited by the Virgin with child standing in the middle of a crown of thorns, the church was blessed with a well with miraculous waters.86 Jamet aggravated the king’s concerns by raising doubts about the dauphine’s morality and her willingness and capacity to bear children. Such aspersions, coming from one of the king’s closest advisors at a time when relations between the king and dauphin were strained, could only have deepened the rift, rattling the king and leaving the dauphin fearful and defensive. And then the dauphine died. In addition to this tragic climax, the sojourn in Châlons closed with certain departures from court, according to Escouchy. It is interesting that, under questioning, Jamet describes a conversation with the king just before the dauphine’s demise where the squire confides that “greater melancholy had entered the land than ever before in any land, pervasive factionalism, all the lords fighting. The loss of the dauphine now would be the greatest loss possible.”87 We do not have enough information to fully understand the connection Jamet appears to have made between the infighting and the then still hypothetical death of the dauphine. But, after the funeral, the king left for Sens, and, simultaneously, some grands seigneurs were dismissed from the royal court because of advisors’ “tribulations roiling within” and told not to return until they were sent for.88 Who were these great lords? Although Escouchy reveals no names, both René and Charles of Anjou depart the court. As Fresne de Beaucourt documents, Charles of Anjou disappears from the royal council from October 1445; René disappears as of September, with just one exceptional appearance in May 1446.89 René’s itinerary shows that by October 17, 1445 he was in Angers and that in early 1447 he descended into Provence. The brothers returned, Charles reappearing on the Royal Council in 1447, René accompanying the king in his reconquest of Normandy in 1449.90 It has been argued that because the separations were temporary they could not have resulted from an imbroglio.91 But, as we have seen, some sources claim that the king received news of a possible revolt that included René and Charles, and Escouchy’s entry on the dismissal of certain great lords from the court just after the dauphine’s death provides further evidence of the tension. 86  See https://www.jebulle.com/suggestions/PCU0000000001115/detail/l-epine/basiliquenotre-dame-de-l-epine; https://www.tourisme-en-champagne.com/basilique-notre-dame-delepine/lepine/pcu0000000001115. 87  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:53. 88  Escouchy, Chronique, 1:68–9.

89  See Gaussin, “Les Conseillers,” appendix of counsellors and the dates of their attendance; also Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:103nn2 and 4; and Vallet de Vivirille, Charles VII Roi de France et ses conseillers, 22–23. 90  For René’s itinerary see Lecoy, Le roi René, 2:447–52; for his return, 1:252n1. 91  See Kekewich, The Good King, 104–5.



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From Châlons, the court passed through Sens, then on to Montils-lès-Tours, finally taking up residence at Razilly, where they remained until the following autumn.92 In October the king’s chancellor opened an investigation into Jamet’s part in the death of the dauphine. The king opened a further investigation the following June. Finally, the dauphin, apparently still not satisfied, demanded another that took place in July and August.93 During this same period the dauphin took his plotting to a new level and implicated Charles of Anjou. According to the deposition of Antoine de Chabannes, taken on September 27, 1446, the dauphin was scheming to overthrow the king with the aid of Charles. Chabannes himself may have been implicated in the plot, and it must be kept in mind that accomplices are not necessarily honest deponents. Still, Chabannes’s testimony supports Pierre de Brézé’s earlier claim that a plot against the king was afoot. Although now the dauphin was the main impetus behind the conspiracy, Charles of Anjou, and, as we will see, René, were alleged to have been involved, just as Pierre warned. Chabannes testifies that one day the dauphin rode close to him, took him by the neck, and told him the only thing to do was cast all the king’s men aside (“mettre ces gens dehors”).94 He then proceeded to demand that Chabannes contribute five or six of his own archers to the cause. The dauphin also asserted that his uncle Charles of Anjou would give him Nicole de Chambre, captain of the king’s guard.95 Chabannes further reveals that Louis planned to coax even the king’s mignons to his cause, explaining that the dauphin assured him that after the revolt that was plotted against the king he “will take good care of them” (“les contenterons bien”).96 All together, Charles of Anjou had an adequate supply of men to take the chateau of Razilly, according to the dauphin. Pierre, too, was taken account of in the scheme. Once the dauphin took power, he would be happy to leave Pierre in place, allowing the seneschal to work for him instead of the king. A much-cited entry in the dauphin’s household account for the period extending from October 1, 1444, to September 1445 lends credence to Antoine’s words, showing Louis courting Pierre with a gift of twenty-five queues of Rhineland wines, which were delivered to Chinon in January 1446.97 The Scottish guards, questioned as a consequence of Antoine’s deposition, agreed that the dauphin had designed to overthrow the government.98 Catching wind of “insults said and proffered by some regarding certain great lords of his council,” the king then requested several more depositions, which were recorded on October 18. Again the deponents reveal a plot to take control of the government, but now the plan is to assassinate Pierre. A squire, Thibaut Gouvin, reports he had been told that certain 92  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:169–70.

93  According to the depositions. See Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:26, 41, and 48. 94  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:64. 95  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:65. 96  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:66. 97  Louis XI, Lettres, 1:196.

98  Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:73.

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men were going to lose their lives, and, when asked who these men were, he replies “the seneschal.” When asked how he knew for sure Pierre was the one, he explains that everyone was saying this.99 Finally, the deposition of Guillaume Benoist on October 27 corroborates an assassination plot against Pierre. Like Gouvin, Benoist mentions no plot to overthrow the king, but claims Pierre himself was to be assassinated. According to the deposition, everyone had joined the dauphin, turning against Pierre, that is, “[René and Charles of Anjou], and everyone except for the Duke of Brittany and [the Count of] Foix.”100 Le Clerc’s addition to the Chronique Martiniane further fleshes out the plotting against Pierre. In the year 1446, Monseigneur the dauphin was very unhappy with the grand Seneschal of Normandy for certain things not recorded, and Monseigneur the dauphin decided to have him killed. And he approached [Antoine de Chabannes] Count of Dammartin to whom he gave 10,000 écus, about the matter; and the said count promised him to undertake the said execution.101

But Antoine’s brother Jacques, learning of the plot, convinced his brother not to participate, writes Le Clerc, and Antoine returned the money to the dauphin. Still, the king learned what was being planned and summoned the dauphin. Louis blamed Antoine, claiming he had only acted at his advice. The king then called on Antoine, who swore that the dauphin ordered the murder. Furious, the king banished Louis for four months. The dauphin departed the room, according to Le Clerc, with these words: “By my head upon which there is no hat I will avenge myself on those who have thrown me out of my own home.”102 And he decamped to the Dauphiné. The chronicle later resumes the drama with the story of the king sending Antoine into the Dauphiné to bring Louis back, “by love or by force.”103 A rumour was circulating that if the dauphin were returned to the king, he would face certain danger, because the king was planning to make his heir his second son, Charles, commonly called the “petit seigneur.” Louis, therefore, went into hiding and avoided being taken. Whether the rumour was true cannot be verified, but, given the circumstances, one can understand why the king would have contemplated such an action and why the dauphin would have feared the same. To return to the plausibility of the depositions, Antoine de Chabannes is often regarded as an unreliable witness. Accused in 1463 of counterfeiting a report, he was temporarily exiled, a fact that has further solidified his reputation for lying.104 As for the story of Louis’s plans to overthrow his father, we cannot be sure that is true. Antoine may have been involved in the very plot that he discloses. Still, whoever was 99  Bueil, Jouvencel, 2:332–33. 100  Bueil, Jouvencel, 2:342.

101  Le Clerc, Chronique Martiniane, 58. 102  Le Clerc, Chronique Martiniane, 60. 103  Le Clerc, Chronique Martiniane, 98.

104  Brown and Claerr, “Fraude, fiction et ‘faulseté.”



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involved, the existence of such a plot is the key point, and the existence of such a plot to push either the king, Pierre, or both from power is verified by multiple sources. Moreover, Charles of Anjou’s participation is cited by more than one source. We have seen that the dauphin was reputed by some to hate his uncle. But alliances were based on utility, and it seems that the young man was happy to make use of Charles to further his cause when possible. The dauphin initially hoped to do the same with Pierre, but the seneschal’s devotion to the king was too firmly established for the dauphin to pry him away. The final outcome of the years of intrigue was that Louis left the royal court for the Dauphiné on or around January 7, 1447, shortly after the birth of his brother, Charles, who would grow up to be a thorn in his side. By January 1447, the dauphin was in Lyon on his way to the Dauphiné.105 The precise circumstances under which the dauphin departed remain a mystery. It appears that the king did not intend for his son to leave the court forever. But Louis never saw his father again. Malcolm Vale writes that the king sent Louis south so that he would be ready to participate in the recovery of Asti, but this is not verified in any document. If it is true, nothing came of it: the dauphin remained in his territory and the recovery never happened.106 The dauphin continued his intriguing from a distance. Escouchy writes that, in 1448, several great lords of France, some related to the king, some not, hated Pierre because he had “already been in the government of the king for a long time and [he] conducted the affairs of the kingdom mostly according to his own pleasure.”107 Among the detractors was the dauphin, he notes, then living in the Dauphiné, who had Pierre accused of many crimes and evil deeds against the king and the lords of his great council. Escouchy then adds a story about a certain Guillaume Mariette, who had worked for both the king and the dauphin, a story which reveals a tangled web of conspiracies implicating both the dauphin and Pierre. He writes that a secretary of the king named Master Guillaume Mariette was taken prisoner at Tours in Touraine for certain serious crimes and evil acts toward the king. He was then taken to Paris, where he was examined several times by the king’s justice and the authority of the Parlement on the above crimes said to have been committed by him, of which he acknowledged the majority, and, among others, that he had counterfeited the seals of the king and the dauphin and used them to make letters of credence for himself addressed to several great lords and countries; and he had told princes of great abuses with the intention of inciting hatred among them…But once his misdeeds had been sufficiently proven at Paris, he was brought back to the said Tours in Touraine, and there, for his bad acts, he was decapitated and publicly drawn and quartered.108

Arrested initially in Bourges in October 1447 on an unrelated charge, Guillaume was quickly discovered to be carrying various papers, mémoriaux, containing information that he was meant to feed to the Duke of Burgundy and Charles VII. He was meant 105  See Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:201. 106  Vale, Charles VII, 104.

107  Eschouchy, Chronique, 1:135.

108  Eschouchy, Chronique, 1:137–38.

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to tell the duke about the divisions at court and the king about the dauphin’s plot to overthrow him. Guillaume was imprisoned in Loches and then transferred to Lyon, but he quickly escaped. Recaptured, he was interrogated but escaped again and fled to the Dauphiné. However, both the king and the dauphin were determined to discover who was behind the mémoriaux and what exactly the motive was. Several months after the escape, the dauphin’s men re-arrested Guillaume, and, after questioning him, moved him to Paris for the trial.109 Under torture, Guillaume confessed that the mémoriaux had been dictated to him by Pierre who was trying to gather intelligence about possible scheming against himself and deepen the rift between the king and his son.110 The mémoriaux include letters addressed to the Duke of Burgundy, presumably by Pierre, which the possessor, presumably Guillaume, was to use as a sort of script to speak to the duke about the conflicts at the royal court for the purpose of eliciting information from him about whether he, the duke, and dauphin were plotting against Pierre. The letters created with the king in mind show that Guillaume was meant to tell the king about the dauphin’s plans to overthrow him and Pierre. Guillaume was also to explain to the king that the dauphin had the support of most of the council members.111 Asked how and where he had performed the scripts, Guillaume explained that prior to appearing before the king he had rehearsed with Pierre in the chateau of Chinon in one of Pierre’s rooms behind the chapel.112 As for the Duke of Burgundy, he had spoken to him in Brussels.113 The details revealed by Guillaume have the ring of truth with their precise dates and places of his conversations with Pierre. Without doubt, someone put Guillaume up to the scheme: surely a minor officer of the king and dauphin’s court would not have taken it upon himself to gather such intelligence for no one in particular. But was it Pierre? And what was the dauphin’s role in the plot? In any case, the revelation of the mémoriaux caused major worries for Pierre, who was investigated by the king’s commissaries.114 He of course denied any involvement.115 Pierre then requested the opportunity to defend himself, which the king granted, and, after pleading his case before the Parlement in Paris in April 1448, the eloquent seneschal was acquitted.116 Guillaume was not so lucky.117

109  Escouchy, Chronique, 1:137. 110  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:305. 111  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:307. 112  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:315. 113  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:316.

114  See Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:78.

115  Duclose, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:75–76.

116  See Escouchy, Chronique, 1:135–37 for a discussion of the accusations and Pierre de Brézé’s defence of himself. 117  Escouchy, Chronique, 1:138.



Agnès and the Factions

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Having explored the situation at court during Agnès’s tenure, we return to Agnès. She was surely—inevitably— involved in the factionalism, named in depositions as exerting influence over the king, but was her clout real or mostly the perception of observers scandalized by the favour shown her? Did she actually “unite around her a faction of ‘new men,’ particularly Pierre de Brézé, É� tienne Chevalier…and Jacques Cœur, who dominated the government around the middle of the century”?118 The strongest pieces of evidence for Pierre de Brézé’s special alliance with Agnès are references to her political intrigue in the depositions, which I discuss below. In addition, it appears that Agnès lent Pierre support in his defence against the accusations stemming from the Mariette affair. The Bourgeois of Paris’s journal records that during the time when Pierre’s trial would have been in process, Agnès made her only recorded trip to Paris, appearing in Paris the last week of April and departing on May 10.119 Fresne de Beaucourt produces an account showing that Agnès travelled from Tours to Paris during that period on a pilgrimage to St. Geneviève, accompanied by Guillaume Gouffier and Poncet de Rivière.120 For Fresne de Beaucourt, the pilgrimage was a pretext. The timing is surely no coincidence, nor is the fact that the king quickly exonerated Pierre.121 Another possible connection is suggested by Pierre’s Angevin origins. They may have met at one of the Angevin courts before Agnès joined the royal court. As for Chevalier, born at Melun around 1410 to a relatively modest family, he studied law and then entered first into the service of the connétable Richemont and, in 1442, of the king.122 In 1443 he became secretary to the king and controller general of aides in Languedoï�l, and in 1452 the treasurer of France. He was sent on several diplomatic missions to England and Brittany. A renowned patron of the arts, his taste was legendary: his townhouse on the rue de la Verrerie was considered a gem for its splendid glass windows, and, of course, the Melun diptych immortalized him along with Agnès. According to a long tradition based on no-longer-extant icono­graphy in his townhouse, Chevalier loved Agnès himself.123 He is supposed to have had himself painted with a banner displaying a sort of word puzzle issuing from his mouth, a Rebus de Picardie, that spelled out the following words by means of pictures of homophones of the words “Tant, elle, vaut, celle, Pour qui je, meurs, d’amour” (So much, she, is worth, she, for whom I die, of love). Moreover, an anagram of “Agnès Surel” is supposed to have been engraved on a stone door beam of his townhouse in large old-fashioned letters decorated with leaves of gold: “Rien sur L n’a regard” (nothing surpasses her). 118  Chaigne-Legouy, “Le ‘dossier-Agnès Sorel,’” 172. 119  Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, 387–88.

120  Vallet de Viriville, Charles VII, 3:140–41; Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:216. Poncet de la Rivière was another of the king’s squires along with Agnès brothers. See Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:179. 121  For the letter exonerating Brézé, see Duclos, Histoire de Louis XI, 3:74–82. 122  For the following see König, 61–69; Förstl, “É� tienne Chevalier,” 3. 123  See Grésy, Recherches sur les sépultures.

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In addition, two arcades of carved stone were adorned with a lover’s knot and large E, standing for É� tienne.124 Although the romantic legend is unverifiable, a close friendship between Agnès and Chevalier is suggested by his commission of the diptych and Agnès’s naming him as one of the executors of her will. Jacques Cœur, born in Bourges around 1395 to a wealthy merchant family, was called to royal service when Charles VII named him grand argentier du royaume, charged with handling all of the kingdom’s expenses, in 1438.125 Between that time and his 1451 downfall when he was accused first of poisoning Agnès and then of financial tergiversations, Cœur became enormously wealthy and acquired several government posts, including membership on the royal council. He was ennobled in 1441. Michel Mollat suggests that his dazzling success was due in part to Agnès’s influence.126 Like Chevalier, Agnès appointed him one of the executors of her will, indicating a high level of trust. When her death deprived him of her influence, he was rapidly taken down by jealous creditors.127 Agnès certainly had relationships with Brézé, Chevalier, and Cœur. In addition to the concrete signs that I have cited, the fact that her rise took place at around the time that the three men reached the apogee of their power hints, although does not prove, that these ascensions were connected. As for Agnès’s relationship to other “new men,” following the Praguerie, the king had begun to gather around himself a group of minor nobles too young to have been directly implicated in the long-term conflicts manifested in the revolt.128 The coterie is collectively described as the mignons of the king by historians and some contemporaries; as we have just seen, Chabannes reports the dauphin using the term to refer to the favourites whom he hoped to rally to his own cause. Regarding a possible connection between the rises of Agnès and the mignons, beyond the concordance of dates, Olivier de La Marche suggests that she somehow influenced their rise. Describing the negotiations in Châlons, the chronicler records that the queen and the Duchess of Burgundy met privately and commiserated over the state of their marriages. In fact, as we have seen, the queen and the duchess were surely more intensely occupied with political negotiation than discussion of their marriages, acting as mediators for their husbands. But, more important, in this same para­graph La Marche remarks that Agnès did much good for the kingdom “by bringing before the king young men-at-arms and excellent companions, by whom the king has since been well served.”129 124  Godefroy, Charles VII, 886.

125  See Mollat, Jacques Cœur, 32–33; Heers, Jacques Cœur, 1400–1456, is very detailed on the nature of Cœur’s work for the government and his dealings. 126  Mollat, Jacques Cœur, 282. As one example of Agnès and Jacques’s common interests, Mollat notes, for example, that in June 1447 the king and Agnès resided in the chateau of Bois-sire-Amé, just south of Bourges, which the king had repaired with Jacques’s help. 127  Mollat, Jacques Cœur, 282–84. See also Clément for details of the fall, Jacques Cœur et Charles VII, 2:144–74.

128  Contamine, “Pouvoir et vie de court,” 545–46; Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:177–79 for evidence of gifts; Vale, Charles VII, 88. 129  La Marche, Mémoires, 2:55.



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Who were the mignons? La Marche reveals no names. Malcolm Vale designates Pierre the first of the mignons, although no contemporary source refers to him as such, and Mollat describes Jacques Cœur, although he was not in his “first youth,” along with É� tienne Chevalier, using the same terms.130 Although older than the mignons, these men shared a key characteristic with the young men: they were not great lords and therefore potential targets for jealousy. Other identities can be gleaned from the king’s accounts. Fresne du Beaucourt cites documents showing that Guillaume Gouffier, an Angevin who had served Charles of Anjou before the king, began to receive gifts around the time that Agnès began her relationship with the king.131 Tasked, as we have seen, with accompanying Agnès to Paris during Pierre’s trial in 1448 for a supposed pilgrimage to St. Geneviève, as well as on her fatal trip to Normandy in late 1449, he may have been a special favourite of Agnès.132 Guillaume’s sons by his second wife, Philippe de Montmorency, served François I, and, as we will see in Chapter Four, they would have been well placed to transmit knowledge about Agnès to François I’s court.133 Chastellain, in addition to royal accounts cited by Fresne du Beaucourt, signals the king’s closeness to André de Villequier, whom Charles VII would marry in October 1450 to Agnès’s cousin Antoinette de Maignelais. Described by Chastellain as a “mignon” who “very young climbed higher on Fortune’s wheel than any other of his time,” André remained in the good graces of the king until his own premature death in 1454.134 He began to receive gifts from the king in January 1444, coinciding with Agnès rise.135 Other mignons include François de Clermont, lord of Dampierre, married to one of the queen’s ladies, Jeanne de Montbéron, and Antoine d’Aubusson, who married Marguerite, sister of André de Villequier.136 Additional groups of young “gentilhommes” for whom Agnès might have sought the king’s favour were the royal squires, who included Agnès’s brothers among their numbers, and the king’s guard.137 The royal favour shown to these young men excited the anger of the great lords of the kingdom, who perceived their own power to be eroding. A list of the complaints they put to the king when they assembled in Nevers in March 1442 reveals them demanding that they be treated as in past times, like princes and great lords of his royal lineage, and that the king safeguard their authority and prerogatives.138 Furthermore, they requested that the king choose for his great council “notable God-fearing men, wise and expert, renowned for their prudence, and not extreme or passionate 130  Vale, Charles VII, 89.

131  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:178nn3 and 4. 132  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:215.

133  For Gouffier’s life see Monks, Déclaration des Hystoires, 9–16.

134  See Contamine, “Pouvoir et vie de court,” 545, citing Chastellain, Œuvres, 3:18. 135  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:177n5.

136  See Fresne de Beaucout, Charles VII, 4:178–79; Vallet, Charles VII, 3:242–43. 137  Fresne de Beaucout, Charles VII, 4:179–80. 138  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:76.

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members of the factions existing in the kingdom,” and that he select a good number of such counsellors rather than relying exclusively on a just a few.139 For the dauphin, too, the mignons, particularly Pierre, represented a threat, blocking his access to the king. This is where Agnès comes in: the dauphin trained his ire on Pierre for the reasons that I have discussed, and Agnès was closely associated with Pierre. But sources that directly implicate Agnès in factional intrigue are sparse and indirect. Chrono­logically, the references begin with a mention of her in a deposition related to the Jamet de Tillay incident. As we have seen, on June 1, 1446, Jamet testified that he had entered the dauphine’s chambers back around Christmas of 1444 and complained about the lack of lights; in addition, he was asked to admit or deny having uttered a number of very specific injurious statements about the dauphine and other courtiers. The last question that he was asked that day was how he knew that the dauphine, the queen, and Agnès had attempted to have Marguerite de Villequier removed from her position in the dauphine’s household and replaced with the queen’s lady-in-waiting Prégente de Melun. His response was that he knew nothing about the situation.140 We have no immediate context for the question, no explanation of its possible significance. However, given the pattern of the testimony, that is, the series of questions focused on driving Jamet to admit that he had uttered a series of incriminating statements, we can assume that in this case too he had been accused of making a false or compromising statement. Earlier in his testimony, Jamet disdains Prégente as a poet and one of the young women who kept the dauphine up at night writing her own verse.141 Moreover, Prégente seems to have been an enemy of the dauphin’s man Regnault de Dresnay and a confidant of Pierre.142 It looks therefore as if Jamet had been floating the rumour, or perhaps revealing the secret, that the queen, dauphine, and Agnès were collaborating to install a woman among the dauphine’s intimates of whom the dauphin would have disapproved. Moreover, Marguerite de Villequier was married to André d’Aubusson, Prégente to Pierre de Courcelles, both of them royal mignons. For the delicate job of moving women in that network in and out of court positions, Agnès, with her connections to both the queen and the king, may have been the best equipped to negotiate with the king. The next such reference to Agnès is marginally more straightforward, but, once again, leaves much to the imagination. It comes in Benoist’s deposition detailing the plan to topple Pierre. Benoist recounts the words of his friend Galchaux who claimed 139  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:77. 140  Duclos, Louis XI, 3:47. 141  Duclos, Louis XI, 3:43.

142  BNF Dupuy 762, fol. 54r, deposition of Annette de Guise, who testified that she had overheard Regnault saying that he was going to tell Pierre, who trusted Prégente, that Prégente was a traitor. Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:89, writes that Prégente was married to Jacques de Courcelles in 1448, but her husband was in fact Pierre de Courcelles. See Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 5:425. See also Louis Prince Courtenay, Mémoire, 217. On the other hand, see Anselme, Histoire généalogique, 5:243. Some sources give the marriage date as 1435. For Pierre de Coucelles as squire to the king see Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:179. On Prégente and Marguerite’s literary interests see Higgins, “Parisian Nobles,” 163.



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that Benoist would soon see a new government, because the seneschal “ruins everything, destroys, takes money everywhere. He made four thousand écus from the truce [with the English]; for rendering homage to the Duke of Savoy he got the county of Maulevrier and lots of money.”143 Moreover, Pierre keeps the king “under the control of that Agnès who serves the queen.” Agnès also appears in the Guillaume Mariette drama, in the first lines of the mémoriaux. The documents begin by showing that Guillaume was to warn the Duke of Burgundy that Pierre was out to destroy him and that things at the royal court had changed because of the bad blood between the dauphin and Pierre. Presumably the duke was meant to understand that Pierre was turning the king against the dauphin, which, by extension, would be bad for the duke.144 As proof Guillaume was to warn the duke that his situation vis-à-vis the king was very bad because Pierre had the king’s ear, and Guillaume was to add that this was partly through the help of Agnès, “from whom Pierre has whatever he wants.”145Pierre, Guillaume was to say, had informed the king that the dauphin was so upset with the king that he, the dauphin, was going to put things in order himself and chase Agnès away. In short, the trial record suggests that Pierre was a political schemer and Agnès, whom he treated as an accomplice, a reliable means of exerting power over the king. Pierre’s confidence in her influence is reflected in the code name given her in Guillaume’s correspondence: Helyos, possibly the sun, an image evoking a brilliant and powerful presence, but, more likely, Heloise, beloved of Abelard.146 Still, to return to the point with which I began this section, whether Agnès was in some direct way behind the rises of Charles VII’s new men, a number of historians have seen Pierre’s career as intertwined with Agnès’s. Although Pierre got himself a reprieve in the Mariette case, his career seems to have foundered after Agnès’s death. Following his temporary disgrace over the Mariette drama, he was back on the king’s great council by May 14, 1448. He fought beside the king for the recovery of Normandy and was named seneschal of that duchy in September 1450, removing him from the heart of court life and the royal government. Pierre Bernus remarks that one “cannot help but see a correlation between the favor of [Pierre] and that of the mistress, that developed, as mathematicians say, one as a function of the other.”147 Even if Pierre’s distance from court resulted from his assuming administration of Normandy, he was no longer influential with the king, as in the past.148 143  Bueil, Jouvencel, 2:342.

144  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:268. 145  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:268.

146  Escouchy, Chronique, 3:320. Heloise was often spelled “Helyos” in late-medi­eval French texts. See BNF MS français 920, “La vie et les epistres Pierre Abaelard et Heloys sa fame.”

147  Bernus, “Le Rôle politique,” 319. When the dauphin ascended the throne as Louis XI in 1461, he would initially throw Pierre in prison. However, Louis was always more practical than vengeful, and he later recalled Pierre, who would die defending Louis against rebellious lords at the Battle of Montlhéry in 1465. 148  See Chastellain’s lament for the imprisoned Pierre, Œuvres, 7:37–65. As much as Chastellain may have disapproved of Agnès, he has nothing but praise for Pierre.

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Agnès’s Death

By 1449 the truce with the English was being breached regularly on both sides. When on March 24, 1449, Aragonese mercenary François de Surienne, acting at the behest of the English, seized the Breton town and castle of Fougères on the Norman border, Charles VII initiated plans for the recovery of Normandy.149 Agnès would remain in Loches, as Fresne de Beaucourt shows, citing accounts that prove that the king left her in the care of Guillaume Gouffier.150 Departing from Razilly in May 1449, by July 17 the king had arrived in Les Roches Tranchelion where he assembled his Council, remonstrating against the English and sending ambassadors seeking reparations.151 They were rebuffed, and the war was on.152 By August his army had retaken Verneuil, which had fallen to the English in 1424. They headed north, and on November 10, 1449, the king made his solemn entry into Rouen.153 At the end of November he departed, first for Caudebec, then Montivilliers, where he watched over the siege raised on Harfleur on December 8. The English capitulated and handed the city over on Christmas day.154 On January 5, the king moved on to the Benedictine abbey of Jumièges, situated on the bank of the Seine five “lieues downstream from Rouen.” There “he relaxed for a time,” while preparations were being made to besiege Honfleur.155 And there, according to Chartier, he found “a demoiselle named the belle Agnès.”156 This means that in late 1449 or early 1450, Agnès crossed some 350 kilometres (200 miles) of frozen landscape between Loches in the Loire valley and the abbey at Jumièges in Normandy, heavily pregnant, to join the king. Why she undertook such an arduous journey in her condition is not known, but Chartier reports that she had come “to warn the king and tell him that some people wanted to betray him and deliver him into the hands of his old enemies the English.”157 Although the king “did nothing but laugh,” according to Chartier, surely Agnès must have believed him to be in real danger to have travelled so far.158 The history of plotting against the king lends credence to the existence of a new plot. Who were the enemies against whom Agnès warned the king? No concrete evidence has ever been uncovered that Louis was plotting against his father in early 1450. Despite Vallet de Viriville’s assertion in his bio­graphy of Charles VII that Louis 149  On the period see Vale 115–34; Contamine, chap 8, “Le recouvrement de Normandie.” 150  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:217nn2 and 3.

151  Ordonnances 14: 55. His path can be followed through the places from which he issues ordi­ nances. See 61, 64. 152  See Escouchy, Chronique, 3:245–51.

153  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:160–72. 154  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:178. 155  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:181. 156  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:181. 157  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:181.

158  See Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 4:217.



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coveted governorship of Normandy, the office that went to Pierre in September 1450,159 the historian’s footnotes yield little. Vallet de Viriville cites Nicolas Chorier’s 1672 Histoire Générale du Dauphiné, which discusses Louis’s alliance with the Duke of Savoy against their mutual enemies, among whom Louis counted “all the ministers of the court of France.”160 But the work gives no indication that the alliance resulted in a plot against the king. Only one of Vallet de Viriville’s sources even hints at such a plot. This undated document has Louis swearing his fidelity to the king on the relics of St. Antoine in the Vienne and performing repentance. If he ever moves against the king again, the dauphin will renounce any right that he might have to the crown of France.161 The vow suggests that the dauphin had recently been caught scheming, but nothing in the short document allows us to hazard a guess as to the nature of the act for which he asks forgiveness or when he committed it. Shortly after her arrival, Chartier writes, Agnès was struck with a flux in the stomach.162 Drawing on the deposition of Agnès’s confessor, an Augustinian named Master Denis, Chartier describes her death. She repented her transgressions, recalling that great sinner of the flesh, Mary Magdalene. With tremendous devotion she then called on God and the Virgin to help her. She received the sacraments, called for her prayer book to read the verses of St. Bernard, and made several last requests for the distribution of alms. She appointed the executors of her will, Cœur, Poitevin, and Chevalier. Realizing that her situation was growing worse, she called out to those around her— Tancarville, the wife of Pierre de Brézé, Gouffier, and all her ladies—that “it is a small thing, rotting and fetid, our fragility.” Her words acquire their full meaning when we recall that she suffered from roundworms, a horrifying affliction and stark reminder of mortality. And then she let out a great cry and died.163 Some contemporaries attributed the death to poisoning. The accusation may well have been true. Agnès passed her days in an atmosphere of plotting and deadly rivalry, and the discovery that she died of a massive overdose of mercury certainly raises suspicion of murder. If she was indeed murdered, it would not be the first time that the mistress of a powerful noble had been killed. Alison Du May, mistress of Charles Duke of Lorraine, was assassinated by a mob in Nancy shortly after the duke’s death; lover of crown prince Peter of Portugal, Inês de Castro, was beheaded in front of her own children at the order of the king; Agnes Bernauer, mistress and then wife of Albrecht, 159  See Bernus, “Le Rôle politique,” 305.

160  Viriville, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:181. Chorier, Histoire générale du Dauphiné, 2:444; for the alliance of Briançon with the Duke of Savoy, see Pilot de Thorey, Catalogue des actes, 1: no. 719, 256. Vallet de Viriville gives the date as August 10; according to Pilot de Thorey, it is August 2.

161  Vallet de Viriville, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:364n1. The document was collected in the manu­ script formerly known as Résidu St. Germain 143, reclassified today as BNF MS français 15537, fol. 27r–v. The manu­script is entitled “Collection of original pieces related principally to the disputes between Louis XI, then dauphin, and Charles VII (1420–1500).” 162  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:184–85. For a description of the Jumièges abbey church and the house in which Agnès died, see Black, Normandy and Picardy, 39–40. 163  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:185–86.

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heir of Duke Ernst of Würtemberg, was ordered to be drowned by her father-in-law; a failed attempt was made on Federico II Gonzaga’s favourite Isabella Boschetta by Isabella’s own husband. I have now detailed the extent of the evidence for Agnès’s political involvement. I conclude this discussion by noting the very few hints that chroniclers offer about Agnès’s personal qualities, besides her great beauty. On the negative side, according to Thomas Basin, the king was not faithful to her, nor she to him. However, no other evidence corroborates the statement. The Bourgeois of Paris depicts her as haughty, asserting that on her one recorded trip to Paris, she departed in high dudgeon because the Parisians “did not do her the honour that her great pride demanded.”164 This is the only evidence of Agnès’s pride. As for positive traits, as we have seen, according to Chartier’s inquest, Agnès spoke a language that was “honest and well-polished,” and she gave generously to the poor.165 The same source relates that the dying Agnès asked for the verses of St. Bernard that she had written with her own hand, suggesting not only piety but a high level of education. Although a show of repentance on one’s deathbed does not necessarily indicate a holy life, Agnès’s deathbed devotion to Mary Magdalene, when coupled with her gift of a statue of Mary Magdalene to the collegiate church of Loches, seems potentially meaningful, hinting at a way of conceptualizing her own life. As the king’s mistress in a period before female courtiers routinely associated themselves with figures from classical mytho­logy, Agnès had very few models to choose from. In addition to her penitence, the late medi­eval and early modern Mary Magdalene was known for her devotion to books: Roger van der Weyden, the Master of the Female Half-lengths, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Ambrosius Benson, and Adriaen Isenbrandt are just a few of the painters who depict her engrossed in reading.166 In the next chapter we turn to the earliest images of Agnès, including her gisants. Although the restored gisant representing Agnès on her tomb at Loches folds her hands in prayer, the original held a book. The elimination of this attribute requested by Agnès on her deathbed seems like a genuine loss.

164  Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, 388.

165  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:183. Chartier reports on Agnès’s generosity toward the poor on the same page. 166  See, for example, Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen, 96–99.

Part Two

The Spectacular Afterlife of Agnès Sorel

Figure 1: Jean Fouquet, “Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim.” Collection Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten—Flemish Community (CC0), inv. no. 132. Photo: Hugo Maertens. Reproduced with permission.

Chapter Four

COMMUNICATIVE MEMORY: THE MELUN DIPTYCH AND THE SAVIOUR NARRATIVE The first attempt

to preserve Agnès’s image for posterity after her premature death comes in the form of the gisants on her two tombs commissioned by the king. Agnès’s heart was laid to rest in the abbey church at Jumièges, in accordance with her dying wishes. Jean Chartier explains that the young woman had given the abbey a large donation for this purpose.1 Although this tomb was damaged by Huguenots and destroyed during the Revolution, descriptions of it passed down in numerous documents reveal it to have been a black marble bed, rising three feet above the floor, on which a kneeling white marble Agnès offered her heart to the Virgin.2 At the base of the tomb, which stood in the middle of the chapel of the Virgin, lay another marble heart. Four separate epitaphs, two in French, two in Latin, praised her. As for Agnès’s body, it returned to the collegiate church of St. Ours of Loches. Her tomb there subsists, although it too was heavily damaged during the Revolution and restored by Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet.3 Comparison of the Beauvallet’s restoration with a sketch of the original from the collections of François Roger de Gaignières (1642–1715) (Figure 3) shows certain differences. Gilles Blieck, conservator of Historical Monuments within the regional direction of the Cultural Affairs of the CentreVal de Loire (DRAC), enumerates the changes. Whereas Beauvallet’s Agnès sports the crown of a duchess, the original wore a simple band around her head.4 The other repairs involved “the nose, one ear, the hands (joined without a book), a large portion of the body, the wings and hands of the angels, the head of the lamb on the right, the muzzle of that on the left, and the horns of both.”5 According to another of Gaignières’s drawings, a now-lost bronze epitaph resembling those of Jumièges decorated the tomb at Loches, displaying Agnès, once again with a band around her head, kneeling with St. Agnès before the Virgin. The epitaphs on both tombs stressed Agnès’s charity toward the Church and the poor.6 They also praised her administration of La Roquecezière, Vernon, and Issoudun, describing her as “gentle in her words, soothing quarrels and 1  Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, 2:186.

2  See, for example, Deshayes, Histoire de l’abbaye royale, 98–109.

3  For details see Blieck, “Le tombeau d’Agnès Sorel,” 34–37; Merkel, “Agnès Sorel, 250; and Billon, “Les restaurations.” 4  Although an epitaph that graced both tombs tells observers not to be surprised that in appearance (“species”) she is depicted as a duchess. For the epitaphs, see Champion, Dame de Beauté, 64–68. 5  Blieck, “Le tombeau d’Agnès Sorel,” 36. 6  See Champion, Dame de Beauté, 64.

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scandals,” and, in a clear reference to the assumption of the Virgin, as ascending into heaven where she would take her place on a throne surrounded by saints.7 These sumptuous funerary decorations manifest the profundity of the king’s attachment to his mistress. And yet, the white marble representations of Agnès’s angelic face and the inscriptions testifying to her charity and amiable disposition are not the real causes of Agnès’s celebrity. She owes that rather to the brilliantly coloured two-panel donor painting commissioned by É� tienne Chevalier known today as the Melun diptych. A consensus holds that Jean Fouquet intentionally gave the Virgin of this diptych (Figure 1) the features of Agnès Sorel, but, whether or not this is true, the association has helped guarantee her positive posthumous reputation.

The Melun Diptych: But is it Agnès Sorel?

Images have been important in perpetuating the fame of later royal mistresses: Diane de Poitiers, Mesdames de Montespan, Pompadour, and Du Barry are all stars. However, no other image associated with a royal mistress is so iconic, so widely recognized. But is it even Agnès? It depends on what one means. No historian believes that the Virgin before whom Chevalier kneels is a portrait of Agnès, or even that the Virgin necessarily closely resembles the real woman according to modern conventions of similarity based on photo­graphic reproduction. Notions of likeness shift across cultures, and late medi­eval French portraits seek not to reproduce their sitters’ features exactly but rather to reference their known traits.8 Similar to the principle behind modern caricature, the argument about the Melun Virgin holds quite simply that Fouquet gave the Virgin some identifying features of Agnès Sorel.9 The argument may or may not be true, but the possibility itself is not controversial. Numerous art historians have attested to the presence of crypto-portraits in late-medi­eval works.10 Fouquet himself painted several known crypto-portraits; for example, in his painting of “Adoration of the Magi” he gave one of the kings the face of Charles VII, identified by the long nose and lips that also characterize his portrait of the king.11 As for the specific pairing of a royal mistress with the Virgin, it was not unknown. Italian painters applied the features of their courtesan models to depictions of sacred and profane women,12 and connoisseur of art and contemporary of Caravaggio Giulio Mancini wrote that Caravaggio’s Virgin in “Death of the Virgin” was reputed to have been modelled after a prostitute.13 Peter Lely’s 1664 Virgin with the features 7  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 65.

8  See Rice and Drimmer’s article on the subject, “How Scientists Use and Abuse Portraiture.”

9  On why the Virgin’s features are believed to reflect Agnès’s see Lombardi, Jean Fouquet, 129–30, who suggests that the Virgin’s strikingly white skin symbolizes her recent death, and Champion, Agnès Sorel, 138–48. 10  See for example, Kroke, “Redecorating the Palazzo Vecchio,” 222; Voorn, “The Ghent Altarpiece.” 11  See Schaefer, Jean Fouquet, 44.

12  See, for example, Syson, “Belle:Picturing Beautiful Women,” 246–48. 13  Askew, Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, 50.



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of Charles II’s mistress, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, and her son with the king offers a particularly audacious example. The Melun diptych, commissioned by Chevalier in about 1452, is typically described as a donor portrait. The genre was devotional, featuring an image of the donor and, often, the donor’s family, in prayer. Although it has existed from late antiquity,14 the type represented by the Melun diptych was popular between roughly 1400–1540 among the wealthy and elite in the Burgundian Netherlands, and, to a lesser degree, northern France.15 Recent scholarship stresses the dynamic purposes of these images, Stephanie Porras emphasizing that they often responded to multiple ambitions.16 Certainly they served to evoke empathy in support of a type of private devotion that included intense self-examination, and, in such cases, they often remained within the home until the donor’s death. But, in addition, donor portraits memorialized the donor and family and displayed the family’s wealth and status. They were often positioned near the family tomb, to solicit prayers and give a focus for masses said for the donor. Composed on 36 × 32 inch (90 × 80 cm) oak panels, the Melun diptych represents Chevalier on the left flanked by his patron saint, É� tienne or Stephen, and, on the right, the Virgin with child. Claude Schaefer has drawn attention to similarities between the Melun Virgin and the imagery evoked in Agnès’s epitaphs: whiteness of skin, dovelike qualities, duchess-like aspect, and ascent into heaven.17 The diptych in life is striking, reproductions failing to capture the otherworldly effect of the Madonna’s pearly skin. Porras notes that the Virgin’s skin “contrasts sharply with the precise naturalism of Chevalier and Stephen’s visages, which Fouquet has endowed with visible stubble and wrinkles.” 18 Indeed, the two parts of the diptych seem at first glance to represent separate worlds, different from many donor paintings where the worldly and holy figures inhabit the same space. And yet, a close examination reveals that the spaces are not entirely distinct. Although the Italianate realistic style of Chevalier’s panel contrasts to some extent with the more Gothic style of the Virgin’s panel where three-dimensional space is not clearly indicated—the Virgin is neither sitting nor standing, according to modern conventions of perspective—the fringed and pearl-encrusted onyx knobs decorating the heavenly throne look genuine, the tiny reflection of a window with 14  On the early history see Mackie, Early Christian Chapels, 98.

15  Scholars of donor portraiture point out that a variety of different secular figures can appear in religious paintings and caution against use of the term, which they regard as anachronistic. I retain it here because the Melun diptych displays only the donor, that is, É� tienne Chevalier, among the holy figures. See Falque’s discussion of terms in Devotional Portraiture, 4–6; also Scheel, Das altniederländische Stifterbild, 17–18. For a history of donor portraits see Gelfand, “Fifteenthcentury Netherlandish devotional portrait diptychs,” 39. 16  Porras, Art of the Northern Renaissance, 86. See also, in addition to Falque’s Devotional Portraiture, by the same author, “Du dynamisme,” and Scheel, Das altniederländische Stifterbild. 17  Schaefer, Jean Fouquet, 27–29.

18  Porras, Art of the Northern Renaissance, 87. For these details, see Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet, 121; Schneider, The Art of the Portrait, 42.

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four panes visible in one of them. The Virgin’s torso is stylized with the impossibly spherical exposed left breast placed at a bizarre angle relative to the other, but the face and clothing are realistically depicted. Moreover, the Virgin is a veritable midfifteenth-century court fashion plate, clad not in her usual flowing robes, but a tightfitting cerulean-blue gown and ermine-lined cloak, presumably recalling the ermine itemized in Agnès’s will. In addition, she carries a purse which is itself hidden from view but identified by the braided belt that attaches it to a bodice loosely closed with a lace so detailed that one of its tips to prevent shredding is visible. Chevalier looks at the baby Jesus who stares back, pointing a stubby index finger at him. Stephan Kemperdick explains that the Melun Virgin was not the first version of the painting. An x-ray image of Fouquet’s portrait of Charles VII reveals that a Virgin and child whose size and contours match the figures of the diptych had been painted over to make the royal portrait possible.19 Susie Nash writes that the first incomplete version may have been commissioned by the devastated king, to commemorate Agnès as she could not have been in real life: “Agnès as queen and Agnès as mother to a son, a future king, all in the guise of the Virgin.”20 Why the painting was abandoned no one can say; perhaps Chevalier, knowing of the effaced work, commissioned a new version to bring honour to himself and the king. Kemperdick, citing Claude Schaefer, suggests that Chevalier intended his commission in part as an homage to Agnès and further notes that it may have been intended as an homage to the king, as well. 21 The diptych may have been housed in Chevalier’s home as an aid for his private devotion until his death in 1474 and then donated to the Collegiate Church of Notre Dame of Melun, but, given its size, it was more likely always intended as an altarpiece for the chapel containing the Chevalier family tombs.22 In any case, the diptych remained in the church until 1773 when the canons sold the panels to raise money for repairs.23 The panels were separated at some point after that, and the Virgin’s panel has resided in Antwerp’s Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten since the early nineteenth century, Chevalier’s in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie since 1896. Returning to the question of whether the Virgin’s features refer to Agnès, four sixteenth-century sketch portraits collected in albums that label the sitter as Agnès hold important clues. The drawings are generally assumed to be based on a fifteenthcentury original, also by Jean Fouquet,24 Katrin Dyballa noting that their lines suggest the sort of cartoon sketch that Fouquet is known to have prepared before paint19  Kemperdick, “Fouquet le peintre,” 25–26. 20  Nash, Northern Renaissance Art, 287.

21  Kemperdick, “Fouquet le peintre,”25–26.

22  See Kemperdick, “Fouquet le peintre,” 31–32, and König, “É� tienne Chevalier as a Client of Jean Fouquet,” 61. 23  On the fate of the diptych, see Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet, 125; Champion, Agnès Sorel, 141–42.

24  Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet, believes that the sketches are based on an earlier original by Fouquet, 150–52.



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Figure 2: “Agnès Sorel.” Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Gabinetto Disegni et Stampe, inv. no. 3925. Reproduced with the permission of the Uffizi Gallery.

ing. An infrared image of the Melun Diptych itself reveals such an underlying sketch.25 The sketches, two residing in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in the Département des Estampes, as Rés. Na 21, fol. 13 and Rés. Na 21, fol. 28, along with an almost identical version of the latter sketch residing in the Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, as inv. no. 3925 (Figure 2), all of them skillfully rendered and a fourth, less skillful sketch residing in the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence as Rés. ms. 20, fol. 29, show the same woman in the same position. Moreover, the face depicted in the sketches refers quite clearly to the same face as that of the Virgin in the Melun diptych. François Avril observes of the Uffizi sketch that a comparison between it and the Virgin’s face (figures 1 and 2) leaves no doubt: the noses with the pointed, elfin tip, the distinctive chins, bow-shaped mouths, the pencil-thin eyebrows, and rounded foreheads refer 25  Dyballa, “Portrait of Agnès Sorel,” 176.

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to the same woman.26 To draw the obvious conclusion: if the sixteenth-century sketches were based on a lost sketch of Agnès, Agnès’s features were almost certainly the model for the Virgin’s. Some scholars have seen a similarity of features between the gisant on Agnès’s tomb at Loches and the Melun Virgin, which would further confirm the identity of the Virgin. The problem is that the gisant, to return to my earlier discussion of this statue, was partially destroyed and then restored, and, even after its first restoration, reworked yet again. This means that we do not know to what extent the restoration reproduces the original facial features. Kerstin Merkel rightly explains that any similarity between the gisant and the Melun Virgin might result from Beauvallet relying on the Virgin as a model rather than Fouquet and Beauvallet both relying on Agnès. However, I would add one further point of comparison that strongly suggests a connection among the original gisant, the Melun Virgin, and the sketches. The drawing by Gaignières (Figure 3) of the original gisant’s face is roughly done and ambiguous in particular with regard to the statue’s hairline, sketching what appears to be either a very low hairline or a wispy fringe peeking out from beneath the band that circles the statue’s brow. The rest of Gaignières’s hair conforms precisely to the hair of the restored gisant. One can imagine that in sketching the original gisant Gaignières misinterpreted the frontlet, that is, the small u-shaped ribbon or fillet visible on the forehead of the Melun Virgin and the crayon portraits. The object extending from the band onto the forehead, rendered in Gaignières’s sketch as hair, cannot represent a hairline in the original, because it is far too low for beauty. Nor did women wear a fringe in the 26  See Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet, 148. See also 129–30; and Champion, Agnès Sorel, 138–48.

Figure 3: François Roger de Gaignières, “Sketch of the Tomb of Agnès Sorel,” ca. 1700. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Pe 2. Reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.



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mid-fifteenth century. Gaignières therefore likely mistook the frontlet for a wispy fringe, a hairstyle with which he would have been familiar from seventeenth-century portraits. If so, the frontlet connects the original gisant to the woman depicted in the portraits, all of whom wear a frontlet, and, via Agnès, to the Virgin, whose forehead is also adorned with that ornament. It is significant that in this last context the frontlet makes no sense. A large, heavy duchess crown like the Virgin’s could not have been pulled on or adjusted by a small ribbon but would have been set on the head by an assistant. It therefore seems probable that the useless frontlet of the Melun diptych derives from, or is an identifying reference to, Agnès herself or an earlier sketch of Agnès in a headdress appropriately outfitted with a frontlet. The original gisant, which, according to Gaignières’s sketch, appears to have worn a frontlet, then corroborates the identification. Taken together, the three sources—gisant, Virgin, and sketches—suggest that the frontlet was identified with Agnès. The regular facial features of these portraits might reference any number of attractive young women.27 However, the frontlet, although not rare, is still unusual enough that its presence may be a defining feature. Kemperdick adds the frontlet to his more general argument in favour of identification, first noting that the Virgin’s fashionable dress is “completely unprecedented in representations of the Madonna,” even among other of Fouquet’s Madonnas. Regarding the Virgin’s headdress, Kemperdick writes that other Virgins have fashionably high foreheads and white skin, but the forehead of the woman in the diptych is blatantly shaved, and the black fillet under the crown further emphasizes the stylish, erotic aspect of her appearance. Such ribbons, placed beneath a headdress, were part of the adornment of noble women and are frequently seen in representations of noble ladies, but never of the Virgin Mary.28 Turning now to arguments against identification, Albert Châtelet has proposed that the Melun Virgin rather than the living Agnès may have served as the model for the sixteenth-century sketches, given that no fifteenth-century original has ever been discovered.29 This is not impossible. And yet, Dyballa’s point that the sketches resemble the type of cartoon sketch that Fouquet is known to have created before painting convincingly suggests that the later sketches were based on such a cartoon sketch. In addition to the lack of any original that would prove the relationship between the portraits and the Virgin, dissenters raise three principal arguments. They point out that no written record mentions the identification before 1608; they offer alternate explanations for why the Melun Virgin might have been identified with Agnès; they argue that giving the Virgin the features of the king’s mistress would have been quite simply too scandalous and therefore impossible. 27  See, for example, the portrait of Elizabeth Woodville of ca. 1471 whose features and colouring are similar to the Melun Virgin, but which lacks a frontlet: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:ElizabethWoodville.JPG. 28  Kemperdick, “Fouquet le peintre,” 24. 29  Châtelet, “La ‘Reine blanche,’” 134.

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To address the first, there is no reason to expect written identifications. In the first decades after her death, her image was curated by her family and friends. Few outside the royal circle would have known who Agnès was. She spent her life in the king’s chateaux along the Loire, with the exception of the unpleasant trip to Paris, and, among family and friends, there would have been no particular reason to discuss Chevalier’s diptych. After all, as we have seen, Agnès was represented in two glorious marble sculptures in Jumièges and Loches, and, as we will see in the next chapter, no extant written source mentions these earlier than the sixteenth century. Chevalier himself would have had no motive for widely publicizing that the model for the Virgin in the donor portrait hanging in his home or in the Collegiate Church of Notre Dame in Loches was Agnès. Of the members of the church where the painting hung until 1773, only a select few ever would have recognized Agnès’s features in the painting if the resemblance was obvious, and those who were aware of the identification would not necessarily have had any reason to write about it. As for a wider public, no record shows Agnès ever visiting Melun; moreover, the chances seem remote that someone who had caught a glimpse of Agnès at some point and then later viewed the portrait in the church would have recognized her. Or, if that had happened, the result would been the invention of an oral tradition, which is precisely what in fact occurred.30 Furthermore, even after Agnès was identified with the Melun Virgin, the identification appears to have been little known. The first written identification crops up in the entry for March 10, 1608, in the diary of Jean Héroard, tutor of the dauphin who became Louis XIII, that he and the dauphin had gone to marvel at “the painting of the beautiful Agnès and that of É� tienne Chevalier…[It] seemed brand new, having been so well preserved.”31 But a tradition surely already existed by that point, circulating orally in royal circles or in earlier written mentions that have vanished: Héroard did not suddenly conclude on his own in March 1608 that the Melun diptych represented Agnès Sorel. Even after 1608 only two more mentions identify the Virgin as Agnès before the nineteenth century: a long description by Denis Godefroy, who visited the church in 1660 while researching his bio­graphy of Charles VII, a description to which we will return, and a note dated 1775 on the back of the painting itself that reads: The Holy Virgin with the features of Agnès Sorel, mistress of Charles VII king of France, who died in 1450. This painting, which was in the choir of Notre Dame of Melun, is a votive of Monsieur É� tienne Chevalier, one of the executors of the will of Agnès Sorel. 1775. Gautier avocat.32

Regarding the question of identification, author of gallant romance and, for a short time, one of King Louis XIII’s official historio­graphers, Charles Sorel, sieur de Souvigny (1602–1674), who falsely claimed to be related to Agnès, offers another important clue. He shows that even after the identification had been made in court circles, some 30  See in this regard Rouillard, Histoire, who references the diptych, writing that it has inspired much fanciful embroidering, without repeating the rumours. 31  Héroard, Journal, 1:323.

32  Förstl, “É� tienne Chevalier,” 6.



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extremely well-informed partisans of Agnès did not know that the Melun diptych existed at all. In a work of 1640, he refers to what are certainly late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century copies of the Melun Virgin that excise the baby Jesus, and he even identifies two distinct versions of copies: in one version the Virgin wears late sixteenthcentury clothes, in the other fifteenth-century garb trimmed with ermine. He writes: Many are curious to see [Agnès’s] portrait, even though the majority of these are not as attractive as the statue on her tomb. Moreover, there are some that represent her with her bodice undone and one breast uncovered. These portraits are fake as we can see from her clothes, which are the sort that were worn during the time of Charles IX. In the authentic portraits her dress is old-fashioned with ermine, and in some she has a countess’s crown on her head. But some ignorant painter, having heard that she was the mistress of a king, wanted to paint her as a courtesan and, not content with her modest style, uncovered her breast. It is easy to see that this does not match with her half-closed eyes, and in some of the old paintings she even has her hands joined.33

Achille Peigné-Delacourt comments on what must be some of these same paintings in an article of 1861: The portrait of Agnès painted by Fouquet…represents her as the Holy Virgin nursing the baby Jesus. The copies of Melun, the gallery of Versailles or of the Chateau d’Eu offer the same motif; but in these, the child is no longer there; and, because Agnès has her breast uncovered, the effect is strange and indecent. I saw a copy of this type in the gallery of Monsieur the baron of Torcy in the chateau of Authies, near Montreuil-sur-Mer. It comes from the chateau of Ugny-le-Gay, near Chauny. This last painting belonged to a branch of the Sorel family that died out at the beginning of the [eighteenth] century. Another copy by Janet resides in the chateau of Mouchy in Oise. Here Agnès holds a book in her left hand.34

But whereas by Peigné-Delacourt’s time, the identification of Agnès with the Virgin was known to all, Sorel is unaware of it. Had he known the Melun diptych, he would have grasped the original sense of the bare breast of the later copies, and he would have named the Virgin as the model. Even after the first identification of Agnès with the Virgin had been made in writing, then, we see little evidence that it circulated widely. It may well have been reserved for an “in-group.” As for the second objection, Albert Châtelet lays out a representative version of it. Paintings of women with one breast bared were all the rage around the time of Leonardo’s Joconde nue, Châtelet writes, and the “temptation to baptize [the image] with an illustrious name would have been equally natural: there was a vogue for historical portrait galleries. The relationship between É� tienne Chevalier and the royal mistress for whose will he was the executor could not have been forgotten, at least at Melun. From there it was just one step to creating a seductive icono­graphy of Agnès Sorel; at the same time, maybe, to develop the legend of a romantic liaison between these two people was just one step”.35 33  Sorel, La Solitude et l’amour philosophique, 325. 34  Peigné-Delacourt, “Agnès Sorel,” 2n2. 35  Châtelet, “La ‘Reine blanche,’”134.

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There is nothing implausible about Châtelet’s suggestion. However, it is not an argument against the identification: both could be true. Furthermore, he provides no justification whatsoever for announcing immediately afterward that with “the legend abandoned, let’s return to the facts,” meaning his hypothesis that the Virgin bears the features of Chevalier’s wife, which he presents without the slightest bit of evidence. Finally, we turn to the problem of scandal. No doubt, the idea of giving the Virgin the face of the king’s mistress seems a bit startling today. But, as I have noted, analogues exist. Moreover, as I suggest in the following section, mid-fifteenth century French visual culture was a context within which such an identification would not have seemed terribly problematic.

Agnès and the Concept of Personnage

The Virgin must be regarded not simply as a devotional object but as part of a more generally theatrical culture in which visual images and human beings shared similar “representational potential,” as Laura Weigert writes.36 Painted and sculpted images of the period, once celebrated for their budding realism, have more recently been reexamined as part of a wider performance culture. In this context, images and actors occupied the same register of reality. Early-modern spectacles made use of various forms that were “not limited to, nor did they privilege, the human body as a primary conveyor of meaning: they were populated by many different kinds of entities—both animate and inanimate—all of which contributed to the living art of performance in the period.”37 This is not to say that spectators did not recognize the difference between a saint enacted by a human and one by a statue, Weigert insists, but that the difference did not matter as it would to a modern audience.38 Actors and objects could both be conceived of as performers. Drawing on medi­eval vocabulary, Weigert explains that the concept of personnage, which encompassed both actors and objects, implied not the relationship between what we today think of as the actor and the character but rather the process by which an actor “assumes the guise of a character while retaining [his or her] distinctive qualities and identity…”39 The actor did not become the character he or she represented nor did the enactment create a fictive world separate from the real world. Rather, the fictive quality of the enactment was constantly present in a world that remained rooted in the present. Before returning to the Melun Virgin to consider what light the concept of personnage sheds on the possible relationship between the painting and Agnès, it will be useful to focus for a moment on the medi­eval religious theater and the role of personnages in this context. The salient point is that holy figures were routinely enacted by local 36  Weigert, French Visual Culturel, 7. 37  Weigert, “Stage,” 38. 38  Weigert, “Stage,” 41.

39  Weigert, “French Visual Culture, 7.



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people in local spots. There was no real medi­eval stage; religious theater was performed in towns, sometimes in the streets, sometimes on pageant wagons, sometimes in the space in front of a church, that is, in familiar settings. Biblical locations were therefore mapped onto the city.40 Enacted in already meaningful spaces, the spectacle fused the “symbolic space of the performance” with the “real space” of the physical setting in which it was performed.41 The physical setting acted as a revelatory framework, activating the relationship between actor or object and characters that it represented in a sort of “performative repetition intended to invoke, conjure, or make present some event.”42 A similar relationship between sacred and profane is evoked by Charles VIII’s 1486 entry into Troyes, when the king “was welcomed as Christ and led into ‘his celestial city’ by the townspeople.”43 Steeped in fifteenth-century visual culture, spectators familiar with Agnès would have understood the relationship between Agnès and the Virgin as one of personnage. The problem of blasphemy would not have arisen for viewers of the diptych any more than it would have for church-goers kneeling before a statue of the Virgin or a public gathered to watch a mystery play. Moreover, I suggest, the diptych would have been understood instinctively as a frame that revealed Agnès’s function as a political figure: the young woman would have worked her positive influence at court by making “present,” or by adding “a bodily dimension to, a narration that is already in some sense real,” to borrow William Egginton’s apt expression, which is to say, the narration of the Virgin as mediator between God and humanity.44 Like the mystery play, the Virgin-Agnès mediates a relationship between the observer, who is actually a participant rather than mere observer, and the sacred reality that it represents: or, more precisely, it illustrates such a mediation taking place between Chevalier and God via the Virgin-Agnès. The image thus reflects in a sacred register the principal function of the royal mistress, who was the mediator par excellence, the person whose goodwill was more valuable than any other courtier because of her special access to and influence with the king.

The Family Legend: Agnès in Communicative Memory

I began with the Melun diptych, chrono­logically the first of the important icons associated with Agnès, and I return to it, chrono­logically, when it becomes the basis in the sixteenth century for Agnès’s development as a court celebrity. In the meantime, the rest of this chapter traces the curation of Agnès’s image by her family and those who had known her, either personally, or at a few removes. If mistresses were undoubtedly a feature of French noble life, no tradition of a royal mistress installed at court in an accepted although discreetly ignored position 40  Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, 59. 41  Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, 59. 42  Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, 36. 43  Murphy, “Renaissance France,” 179.

44  Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, 50.

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yet existed during Agnès’s lifetime.45 A quick survey of Charles VII’s predecessors— Charles VI, grandfather Charles V, Jean II, Philip VI—shows that no such tradition had been established, with the single well-known royal mistress, Odette de Champdivers, brought in to distract the king from injuring the queen during his fits of insanity, serving as the exception that proves the rule.46 Charles VII had fled Paris during the Burgundian attack of 1418. He never again lived there, residing primarily in the Loire Valley where his romantic liaisons were less obvious than they might have been had he lived in Paris. Agnès’s clan could have let her name slip quietly into oblivion when she died. And yet, on the contrary, they seem to have promoted her image, asserting and sharing in her symbolic capital. As we have just seen, as late as the eighteenth century a portrait of Agnès based on the Melun Virgin still hung in the chateau of Ugny-leGay in Picardy, seat of one branch of the Sorel family.47 This is especially interesting because no trace of a similar effort to safeguard the image of Antoinette remains. One reason may be that the king fathered none of Antoinette’s children. Two of her sons, Artus and Antoine, were fathered by André de Villequier, and two sons and two daughters by Duke François II of Brittany.48 We have seen that the king recognized his three daughters by Agnès and that all were handsomely married. It was these daughters and their families who assumed the task of shepherding Agnès’s positive image into future generations. In addition, the fact that the king never arranged a marriage for Agnès may have encouraged her family to regard her as special: perhaps the king’s affection for her surpassed any he ever felt for another woman. Antoinette’s relationship with the Duke of Brittany, which may have overlapped with that with the king, undoubtedly diminished her prestige, creating the impression that greed rather than love motivated her.49 The efforts of her family to promote Agnès took various forms, one of them the enduring image in the Jouvencel, written by the father-in-law of Agnès’s daughter Jeanne, of Agnès inspiring the king to glory. Another means of adorning Agnès’s reputation was to justify her adultery by depicting her as initially resistant to the enamoured king’s advances. In her study of mistresses of Italian despots 1350–1485, Helen Ettlinger reveals a similar strategy deployed by the families of some of these women. In a book of poetry commissioned by Lord of Rimini Sigismondo Malatesta for his mistress Isotta degli Atti, dialogues between the lady and father record the father insist-

45  On the prevalence of mistresses among the nobility during the period, see Chaigne-Legouy, “Le ‘dossier-Agnès Sorel,’” 174–75. 46  On the woman known as the “little queen,” see Vallet de Viriville, “Odette or Odinette de Champdivers.” 47  Peigné-Delacourt, “Agnès Sorel,” 2n2.

48  Anselme, Histoire généalogique 2:1332; 8:54. On Artus and Antoine see Charles VIII, Lettres de Charles VIII, 332. 49  See Guitton’s assessement, “Fastes et malheurs,” 155.



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Figure 4: Anonymous French painter, “Bethsabée au bain.” From the Heures à l’usage de Rome de Marguerite de Coëtivy, femme de François de Pons, comte de Montfort, 1490–1500. Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 74, fol. 61. Reproduced with the permission of the Musée Condé.

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ing on his blamelessness because he had opposed the liaison while the lady claims that her great love for Sigismundo was ennobling.50 In Agnès’ case, a miniature in the Book of Hours of Marguerite de Coëtivy, Agnès’s granddaughter, makes the argument. The miniature shows King David leaning out the window of a structure that recalls the Sainte Chapelle to ogle a Bathsheba who has been associated with Agnès by James Kren.51 Kren explains that Bathsheba as religious icon assumed different meanings depending on the reader’s gender, resulting in her being treated differently in men and women’s books of hours, “sometimes dramatically so, other times with subtle nuances that shift emphasis away from the image’s sensual appeal.”52 The Bathsheba created for Marguerite, nude except for a sheer scarf strategically draped over her private parts, stands demurely in a fountain, her eyes cast downward.53 In a departure from contemporary more male-oriented depictions of the scene featuring playful, responsive fully nude Bathshebas aware of the king’s gaze, the young woman in this miniature has no idea that the king has spotted her.54 Pointing out the resemblance between Marguerite’s Bathsheba (Figure 4) and the Melun diptych, “the small but pronounced chin,” along with “the tall forehead and long nose,” Kren speculates that in the eyes of Marguerite, the depiction “honoured the controversial Agnès’s position as object of royal desire.”55 In support of Kren’s identification of Bathsheba with Agnès, I would emphasize the figure’s frontlet. Strikingly, Bathsheba’s small head dress, a bejeweled band identical to the one worn by the gisant in Gaignières’s drawing, is also decorated with a frontlet like the band in the drawing and in all the other images associated with Agnès. Assuming that the identification is valid, the Bathsheba miniature suggests that neither Agnès nor her family can be blamed for her surrender to the king; she simply responded to royal orders. The attitude of this Agnès recalls that of her gisant, decorated with gentle creatures like doves and lambs suggesting her docility, modesty, and obedience. Moreover, the attitude reappears in another instance of familial curation, a series of frescoes depicting Agnès that once decorated the walls of the Chateau de La Guerche. The territory of La Guerche became the property of André de Villequier and Agnès’s cousin Antoinette in October 1450.56 The frescoes prove that either Antoinette or her offspring sought to maintain Agnès’s prestige. These paintings, no longer extant, are 50  See Ettlinger, “Visibilis et Invisibilis,” 775.

51  The manu­script resides today in the Musée Condé in Chantilly as MS 74, fol. 61r. 52  Kren, “Bathsheba,” 170.

53  See Kren, “Bathsheba,” 176–77; also Vadillo, Bathsheba, 40, who discusses the popularity of the nude or “slightly” veiled Bathsheba in France beginning around the middle of the fifteenth century. 54  On sensual late fifteenth-century Bathshebas in Valois territories, see Kren, “Looking at Louis XII’s Bathsheba,” 55–58. 55  Kren, “Bathsheba,” 178.

56  Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 5:63–64. Le Roux reports that the Château of La Guerche itself was constructed in 1454. Le Roux, Faveur, 109.



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detailed in a 1778 article in the periodical Bibliothéque universelle des romans.57 The article examines Agnès’s portrayal in histories of Charles VII, viewing her sympathetically. The king required love and support to do great things, and the queen, recognizing that the king was not in love with her, decided that she could offer him only the counsel of “reason.”58 Agnès, therefore, was left to inspire the king through love. But if the queen was complacent, the dauphin Louis was another matter, the author explains. Despite Agnès’s gentle character, the young woman aroused the jealousy and hatred of the dauphin Louis, who was rumoured to have had her killed. 59 As for the now vanished frescoes, at the time of the article’s publication, the Château de La Guerche belonged to one of the editors of the periodical, the Marquis de Paulmy d’Argenson, which explains how the author, who claims to have witnessed them personally, received access to them. According to the author, the frescoes traced the events of Agnès’s life, illustrating a “beautiful person” in the midst of “different ornaments and allegorical figures related to the different situations of her life.”60 One illustration drew on the familiar trope of innocent beauty modestly trying to dodge the attentions of a powerful lord. Agnès was shown discouraging the king’s advances, initially refusing a shower of royal gifts. “She put up a righteous resistance; the paintings of the Chateau de La Guerche teach us this,” affirms the author. But she eventually gives in, because everything conspires to push her into the arms of a king. She is carried off, like Ganymede, and boasts in a Latin motto that she gave herself only to the “king of the birds.”61 The chronicles of hostile witnesses like Chastellain might have won out as the frame for the reception of Agnès’s story, leaving to posterity a story more closely resembling that of Antoinette than the one that circulates today. Although the court society that nourished Agnès’s communicative memory had begun to develop an avid interest in the querelle des femmes, the woman question, which would debate the merits of women—at times playfully, at times seriously, at times viciously—into the eighteenth century, it was not a given when Agnès died that her supporters would win over detractors. The pro-female arguments of the querelle did not save Antoinette’s reputation. Still, the important context of the late-medi­eval poetic love debate, which flourished at courts and cities throughout the kingdom and in Burgundy, is worth noting. Traditionally crediting Christine de Pizan with firing the debate’s opening salvo in her attack on Jean de Meun’s misogyny, literary historians see some of the earliest interventions in the querelle as Alain Chartier’s Querelle de la Belle Dame sans mercy (1424), Martin le Franc’s Le Champion des dames (1440–1442) and Pierre Michault’s Le Procès d’honneur féminin (after 1461). Each of these works, among other episodes, 57  For the article see “Histoire d’Agnès Sorel,” 115–206. The author is not named. The periodical ran from 1775 to 1789. For more information see Poirier, La Bibliothèque universelle des romans. 58  “Histoire d’Agnès Sorel,” 142. This strand of Agnès’s narrative was being elaborated in contemporary histories. Cf. Baudot de Juilly, Histoire de Charles VII, 2:218, 252. 59  “Histoire d’Agnès Sorel,” 167.

60  “Histoire d’Agnès Sorel,” 129–30, 141. 61  “Histoire d’Agnès Sorel,” 142, 129.

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offers a defence of women by lively sets of allegorical characters. As Emma Cayley details, such debates were as much poetic competitions as discussions about defamation, love, and female reputation; nonetheless, they offered ways of thinking positively about a mistress.62 The picture of the individual female figure that arises out of the poetry is often contradictory and sometimes unflattering, but the debates are also vigourous in their defences. Agnès is not mentioned by name in any of these debates. Indeed, Le Franc lauds Marie of Anjou’s “virtuous suffering” in what may be a discreet reproach of Agnès.63 Still, one can imagine that the reputation of an equivocal figure like her would have found support in the court societies where women were valued for their beauty and poetically courted. In such an atmosphere, the verbal and visual icons that I have discussed in this chapter must have exerted a powerful emotional influence on some observers. By the time of the Duchess of É� tampes’s rise under François I, royal mistresses were a known quantity at court, even if they were not as politically influential as É� tampes and her immediate successor, Diane de Poitiers, would later become. When Agnès’s image, verbal and visual, reached the court of François I, it was accepted into a pre-existing framework that lent it a new coherence and prestige. And, as I argue in the next chapter, this court society displays characteristics of what we might call a proto-celebrity culture. I now leave the realm of communicative for collective memory to trace Agnès’s ascent as celebrity in the early sixteenth century.

62  A complete history of the querelle des femmes in its early years has never been written. For a summary of the quarrel and its historio­graphy see Wilkin, “The Querelle de femmes;” For the fifteenth century see Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, especially 24–28 and 136–88; Swift, Gender, Writing, and Performance especially 1–17; Alain Chartier: the quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy, ed. McRae, 7–14, which focuses on this one quarrel begun by Chartier, but gives an idea of the types of arguments that were debated in the early stages of the querelle. 63  Le Franc, The Trial of Womankind, 174. “For with virtue-laden patience,/ Amidst the confusion of the crowd,/ She has shown greater valiance/ Than would wise prince or monarch proud” (lines 5469–72).

Chapter Five

CULTURAL MEMORY: AGNÈS AS CELEBRITY At some point

in the early decades of the sixteenth century, Agnès, formerly a woman whom living people had known personally or known about through others who had known her, becomes a cultural memory, a figure of “objectivized culture,” that is, a figure known only through texts, images, or monuments.1 Agnès’s image, in the forms that I have just discussed, was transmitted to the court of François I where courtiers accustomed to crossing paths with a highly visible royal mistress appreciated and adapted it, setting the “objectivized meaning into [their] own perspective, giving it [their] own relevance.”2 The visual images, coupled with the narrative of Agnès as saviour of the realm, gave the long-dead royal favourite a renewed presence among a relatively large audience. With her transition to cultural memory, Agnès also attains what I suggest we can most usefully understand as posthumous celebrity, as a figure who fascinated and continues to fascinate primarily for her beauty and fashion. As helpful as the concept of cultural memory is for recognizing the values that Agnès came to symbolize long after her death, the notion of posthumous celebrity allows us to make still better sense of her afterlife’s trajectory and the status that she still retains today as a popular figure in historical romance, documentary, and on numerous social media platforms. It is true that Agnès’s celebrity is a strange case even among posthumous celebrities, whose rise normally begins while they are still alive. And yet, the concept provides precisely the right framework for exploring how a young woman whose most obvious attributes, according to contemporary chronicle accounts, were loveliness and charm became an internationally recognized icon long after her death. The nature of her fame is easily distinguishable from that of someone like Cleopatra or Elizabeth I, who were powerful queens. The concept also helps clarify her status within the genealogy of the French royal mistress, where she can be contrasted with members who never became celebrities, or, conversely, later royal mistresses like Diane de Poitiers or the Marquise of Pompadour, who were celebrities in the sense that they were observed as glamourous court figures while also being recognized as political actors. We can date Agnès’s budding celebrity to the 1520s. The process was interrupted, however, by the consecutive reigns of Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, Duchess of É� tampes (1508–1580), and Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois (1499–1566). These women offered a completely different model for the role of royal mistress, deflecting attention away from the narrative that had developed around Agnès. Agnès’s story languished. But it reappears in the early 1570s after the fall of Diane and onset of 1  See Assmann’s definition of cultural memory, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 128–33. 2  Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” 130.

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her “black legend.” From that point on, Agnès becomes a near constant in a variety of genres, written and visual. True, she has not always been lauded, occasionally cast as the temptress who seduced, even emasculated, the king, and distracted him from his warrior duties. Still, far more often, she appears as the gentle beauty whose love motivated the king to rise to the occasion that history offered him.

The Sixteenth-Century French Royal Court and Celebrity Culture

Celebrities rarely survive their own deaths. And yet, recent work on posthumous celebrity makes clear that dead celebrities do not always sink quietly into oblivion. Early death sometimes even increases visibility, writes John David Ebert in his study of the type of celebrity “that does not become less famous with the passage of time, but rather more so.”3 Ruth Penfold-Mounce, too, notes that “death can be positive as it enables the survival of a celebrity image and career and creates a successful posthumous existence that wields power and influence.”4 Indeed, death at times is “not the end but a new phase for celebrity careers.”5 Celebrity is typically considered a relatively modern phenomenon. A number of scholars date celebrity culture to the eighteenth century, when the rise of the printing press facilitated a public life with groups gathering in public spaces to discuss current events and challenge the narratives specifically created to prop up the political elite.6 Others give the onset a still later date, particularly those interested in the discursive circuits of power that produce celebrity and the networks that make large-scale celebrity possible. For such approaches, celebrity requires, by definition, a wide public. And yet, a mass audience is not necessarily the phenomenon’s defining characteristic. Celebrity society, Robert Van Krieken writes, “is firmly anchored in the world of the theatre, and in the theatrical dimensions of social life more generally.”7 Enacted before an audience, live or virtual, celebrity also requires an asymmetrical relation of interest between the celebrity and audience, the former less interested in the latter than the reverse.8 Moreover, celebrity is frequently defined as fame for fame’s sake, resulting not from talent or deeds but from the staging of what are sometimes called pseudo-events. 9 Long before the wide circulation of images and narratives about celebrities that characterizes modern celebrity cultures, environments existed where actors staged pseudo-events when they enacted their personae for a public or micro3  Ebert, Dead Celebrities, XIX. 4  Penfold-Mounce, Death, 9.

5  Penfold-Mounce, Death, 36.

6  Inglis proposes that celebrity as a phenomenon is no more than 250 years old, A Short History, 12; most scholars see print culture as a prerequisite for its applicability. For consideration of celebrity in relation to the early modern period, see, for example, Lilti, Figures publiques. 7  Van Krieken, Celebrity Society, 11. 8  Marcus, “Salomé!!” 999–1000.

9  See Hillman’s study of Juliette Récamier’s celebrity, “Empty-handed Beauty,” 204–5.



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public.10 Celebrity can therefore be distinguished from renown or heroism. Although certain heroes might also be celebrities, the two are not the same. Celebrities might be famous for some skill that they possess, but they are often famous simply for their appearance. Defined in this way, celebrity is a process that can be historicized, and I suggest, along with Van Krieken, that early modern French court society represented a version of celebrity culture that we can easily recognize as such. Historians have written at length about the increasingly theatrical nature of French court life during the sixteenth century, a process that reveals itself in multiple ways. Royal entrances become more theatrical, more dependent on classical than biblical figures. The court masque, as a live performance and, more generally, the mask as a concept related to self-representation, were obsessions at François I’s court. And ever more elaborate rituals and festivals led sixteenth-century theoreticians of monarchy to describe the court as a stage upon which the king performed his power before an audience. Foreigners, Budé writes, “greatly desire to see the kings of France, who, for this reason, carefully maintain appearances of grandeur.” 11 In addition to enacting his power before an audience, over the course of his reign François I established new stages on which to manifest his kingly virtues, instigating renovations of his seats of government. Most important for the rise of the royal mistress, the king was joined on these stages by fellow performers, many of whom were female. A rise in numbers of women, who formed both a corps of actors and an audience, began under Anne of Brittany (1476–1513).12 While married to Charles VIII, Anne of Brittany was served by sixteen dames and eighteen demoiselles, a number that increased to 59 dames and 41 demoiselles in 1498, when she became queen to Louis XII. Queen Claude, Anne of Brittany’s daughter and François I’s wife, continued her mother’s tradition of nurturing young women, her entire household numbering 285 people.13 Further increasing the numbers of women at court, Queen Claude’s entourage was often joined by those of the king’s mother and his sister, Marguerite, Duchess of Alençon and later Queen of Navarre. The numbers of females at the royal courts continued to grow throughout the sixteenth century. In 1585 Catherine de Médicis’s retinue would include 112 ladies. 14 Positions at court were highly prized and competitive. One of the ladies’ most important functions was to provide an image that could be observed with pleasure. This female corps represented not only the queen’s dignity but also served as a constituent component of royal grandeur in general. 10  See Marshall, Moore and Barbour, “Persona,” 291.

11  In a treatise on kingship first presented to the young François I in 1519, Guillaume Budé describes the effects of such a setting, where people gather to watch “as at a spectacle of honor” and a “theatre of nobility.” Budé, Le Livre de l’Institution du Prince, 25–26. 12  This queen nurtured groups of young women, forming “a very lovely school for ladies.” Brantôme, Œuvres complètes, 7:314–15. 13  Zum Kolk, “The Household of the Queen of France,” 12. 14  Zum Kolk, “The Household of the Queen of France,” 20.

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Certain female members of the court possessed power in their own right, whether genuine or symbolic: Queen Claude, followed by Queen Eleanor, the king’s mother, Louise of Savoy, and the king’s sister, Marguerite. But the majority of women at court served one of these women, and such entourages provided cover, facilitating the rise of the politically influential royal mistress. While performing on one stage, so to speak, a royal mistress might serve as lady-in-waiting to the queen or governess to the royal children, but, on a different stage, she could act as political advisor to the king. That is to say, the proto-celebrity culture of François I’s court offered women both the opportunity to enjoy celebrity based on charm and appearance and the possibility of using their celebrity to mask real influence. Examples of the functioning of this proto-celebrity culture can be found from the first years of François I’s reign. Federico Gonzaga, sixteen-year-old heir to the duchy of Mantua, held as a hostage at the French court 1515–1517, witnessed a banquet in July 1516 where the king had fourteen young women dressed “alla italiana,” that is, in rich dresses that he had transported from Italy. Among them, Federico’s secretary Gadio singles out Madame de Chateaubriand, Françoise de Foix, François I’s first highly visible mistress, “dressed in crimson velvet all embroidered with gold chains with silver bars…”15 Letters to Henry VIII of England about preparations for the “Field of the Cloth of Gold” show a similar attention to female beauty and dress in a theatrical atmosphere. Queen Claude and the king’s mother, Louise of Savoy, were gathering together the “fayrest ladyes and damoiselles that may be fownden” to be on display during the festivities.16 An account of 1538 detailing the sums that François I disbursed on sumptuous clothing for certain ladies of the court further demonstrates the king’s continued desire to showcase female beauty, evidence again for a culture in which courtiers competed for visibility.17 Particularly significant to the rise of the royal mistress, the renovations at Fontainebleau beginning in 1527 reinforced a theatrical atmosphere, enhancing it with feminine imagery, as many scholars have noted. Françoise Bardon describes the chateau as a sort of “osmosis between the untamed forest, home of brute pleasures, and the refined interior of a palace which borrowed from brilliant mytho­logical compositions of the Italian school for its décor.”18 Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf emphasizes how the decoration at Fontainebleau foregrounds “female power,” describing a “Venus world dominated by sensual pleasures, water, and fertile lands and woods with springs, fruits and animals” where the “slender naked female figure recurring as the nymph, as Venus, and as symbol of pleasure is the characteristic visual sign of the place and the style of its imagery.”19 The accent on female figures from classical 15  Tamalio, Federico, 277. For more detail on François I’s interest in Italian fashion for the ladies of his court, see Croizat, “‘Living Dolls.’” 16  SP, 6:56.

17  See Laborde, Les comptes, 2:399, cited by Croizat, “‘Living Dolls,’” 119n59. 18  Bardon, Diane de Poitiers, 19.

19  Lagerlöf, Fate, Glory, and Love, 79.



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antiquity amounted to nothing less than a redefinition of the then prevalent vision of manliness as warlike, explains Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier. In the newly decorated palace, women, “conflated with culture, were being placed at the centre of the civilizing function assigned to the king’s court,” where they complicated traditional notions of the warrior.20 A number of primary sources show the king moving among mytho­ logically-themed decorations, drawing connections for his guests between himself and the ancient exploits illustrated in painting and sculpture within his chateaus.21 The king’s sister, Marguerite, imagines Fontainebleau as a theatre for the king when she describes the palace without his presence as a lifeless piece of scenery. “[Y]our walls, without you,” she writes, “are just a dead body…”22 Augmenting the sense of theatre, the massive paintings created by the Italian artists whom François I enticed to his court convey an impression of three-dimensional spaces, small worlds within which figures, male and female, from antiquity and classical mytho­logy carry out adventures. These small, self-contained worlds within the world lined long galleries where observers could gaze into alternate realities. The gallery of François I, which was private, offered the opportunity for those admitted to stroll, as the Italian architect Sebastiano Serlio wrote, to escape from crowds, to look around, to contemplate.23 The increasing presence of ambassadors at the French court from the early sixteenth century also added to the court’s growing theatricality. Ambassadors were themselves actors in the drama of court life. Catherine Fletcher notes that “envoys made a distinction between their own ‘self ’ and their representation of their principal.” The work that they did gave reason to “simulate and dissimulate, and when the circumstances demanded, [they] could manipulate these two selves.”24 But, more important, ambassadors formed an audience, closely observing the most important courtiers. An ambassador’s “most important function,” writes M. S. Anderson, “was the gathering and sending back to his government of information about the state in which he was stationed, its ruling personalities and their outlooks and plans.”25 To return to the asymmetrical relationship between observer and observed as a feature of celebrity, ambassadors were more interested in deciphering courtiers’ performances to glean intelligence than courtiers were in engaging with ambassadors. The French king and royal family, more visible to visitors than other European ruling families, were the most sought-after sources of intelligence, of course. But royalty had always had audiences before which they enacted their power through carefully staged rituals. Born to their celebrity, or “ascribed” to it, to use Chris Rojek’s term, they commanded a public by virtue of who they were. What is different about the 20  Wilson-Chevalier, “Feminising the warrior,” 26. 21  See Rearick-Cox, Collection, 47.

22  See Marguerite’s letter to the king, Lettres, 382. 23  Cited in Galletti, “The Royal Gallery,” n8.

24  Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome, 3.

25  Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 12–13.

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court of François I is that along with ascribed celebrities—the king, the queen, the dauphin and dauphine, the king’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre—we begin to see the first signs of a society in which celebrity might be “attributed,” to use the term, once again, of Rojek, that is, in which a person who has done nothing in particular might become famous. We find a new awareness that some performed better than others at court, becoming “stars.” Success at earlier courts had always required a close attention to one’s words, actions, and appearance, evidenced by works like the Facetus and other anti-courtly literature decrying the duplicity of court life and, less often, works manifesting the opposite perspective, admiration at the ability to hide one’s ulterior motives. In a memorable description, Thomas Becket is praised for his “pious deceit,” for his talent for “concealing from view the motivations of his deeds,” for being “an ornament of all wisdom and knowledge by which often he dissembled no less wisely than knowingly what was being done, so that one thought that that was happening which was not really happening and that was happening was not in fact happening.”26And yet, if courtiers had always strategically lied, beginning in the sixteenth century, they begin to thematize dissimulation in a way that we do not see earlier. Different from earlier court cultures where the ability to dissimulate is nearly always criticized,27 the sixteenth-century court begins to regard the ability to theatrically present an attractive but secretive persona as an advantage.

Agnès and Celebrity

During her own time, Agnès was regarded primarily as an outrageous fluke, an embarrassment, because of her luxurious clothing and lifestyle. Contemporary reactions to her were by no means entirely negative. But she did not have a large audience eager to observe and solicit her in the same way as the Duchess of É� tampes. The exuberant environment of François I’s court where women were prized and visible, both in the decorative arts and in reality as members of the queen’s entourage and sources of information for ambassadors, provided a background against which Agnès’s image could be remembered and invested with new life. Agnès’s posthumous ascent to celebrity was instigated by the mother of King François I, Louise of Savoy, and, although this ascent came to a halt during the tenures of the Duchess of É� tampes and Diane de Poitier, it was revived under the regency and later career of queen mother Catherine de Médicis. Before considering the images through which Agnès was known to the mother of the king, it will be useful to consider why this long-dead royal mistress might have appealed to Louise. 26  Cited by Jaeger, Courtliness, 62–63.

27  Dissimulation never loses its detractors, of course. Well into the sixteenth century, critics like Jean Bouchet, Antoine de Saix, Eustorg de Beaulieu, and Eloi d’Amerval complain at length about “masks,” railing against courtiers who conceal their intentions behind pleasant words. See Smith, The Anti-courtier Trend, 78–83.



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Louise, wife of Charles, Count of Angoulême, was an influential force in her son’s life, his fiercest champion. Widowed in 1496, she never remarried but devoted her life to her young children, Marguerite and François. When King Charles VIII died suddenly in 1498 and his second cousin once removed ascended the throne as Louis XII, François became heir presumptive. Great-great grandson of King Charles V, he was the new king’s closest male relation. When François ascended the throne in 1515, Louise became his most valued adviser, serving as his regent when he led troops into Italy hoping to take Milan, and again while he was held by Imperial troops in Spain for over a year after the devastating French defeat at Pavia in 1525. Even when the king was in France, ambassadors often dealt with Louise, aware of her clout.28 The Duchess of É� tampes rose to power only in the late 1530s, after Louise’s death in 1531. Louise is reputed to have gone to greet the king on his return from Spain in 1526 accompanied by the young Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, not yet Duchess of É� tampes, deliberately seeking to displace the king’s mistress, Madame de Chateaubriand, with the younger woman. Although no contemporary evidence verifies the story, several later histories, including the Histoire généalogique de la maison de France, first published in 1619, imagine the scenario: “We note one fault in [the king], that he let himself be carried away by pleasure and sensuality. Anne de Pisseleu, Duchess of É� tampes, of excellent beauty, accompanied the Regent to the border when the king was returning from Spain, and he was ardently taken with her.”29 Brantôme mentions a tradition holding that Louise chose Anne de Pisseleu for her son and hints that she wanted to push Françoise out. “I have heard it said and I believe to be true,” he writes, “that Madame the Regent had taken [Anne] with her as one of her ladies and produced her for the king François on his return from Spain, in Bordeaux, which lady he took for his mistress and left the afore-mentioned Madame de Chateaubriand.”30 Whether or not Louise should be credited for the switch, Françoise was soon deposed and Anne installed as the king’s favourite mistress. No document records Louise objecting to any of her son’s mistresses, but at no time did any of them surpass her in influence. The image of Agnès cultivated by her family and passed down over the following generations must have comported nicely with Louise’s conception of a suitable royal favourite, evidenced by the inclusion of a sketch of Agnès in the collection of crayon portraits known today as the Aix or Montmor album that Louise commissioned in 1526.31 The album contained drawings of a group of François I’s courtiers, most of them living, with just a few, like Agnès, recently dead.32 28  For example, the comments of English ambassador William Fitzwilliam, LP, 3: July 9, 1521, no. 1404; 3: July 28, 1521, no. 1441; 3: August 5, 1521, no. 29; 3: October 9, 1521, no. 1651; 3: Septem­ ber 8, 1522, no. 2522. 29  Sainte-Marthe, Histoire généalogique, 1:751. 30  Brantôme, Œuvres complètes, 9:512.

31  On this album see Zvereva, “‘Chose qui me donne.’”

32  All were drawn by the same hand, the artist evaluated by Zvereva as not terribly talented. “‘Chose qui me donne,’”185.

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The story of this album with its sketch of Agnès is complicated, leading us back to Charles Sorel, whom we met in the previous chapter collecting information about Agnès, whom he claimed as an ancestor. In his La Solitude et l’amour philosophique de Cléomède of 1640 Sorel discusses an album of sketch portraits:33 “[The king], having discovered a book of diverse sketches in the home of Catherine [sic] d’Hangest, wife of Artus de Boisy, grand maî�tre of France, who enjoyed painting, wrote some mottoes or verses for each, and for that of la belle Agnès he wrote a quatrain with his own hand, which can still be seen in this book which is carefully kept in a cabinet of curiosities.”34 Sorel’s bio­grapher, É� mile Roy, speculates that Sorel was alerted to the album by a member of the Sorel d’Ugny branch of the family, who preserved her legend, as we have seen.35 This album, distinguished by the quatrain honouring la belle Agnès, disappeared from view for centuries. Later scholars searched long and hard to recover it. Similar collections resided in the department of prints in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. None, however, contained the quatrain. But in 1864, É� tienne-Antoine Rouard happened on the elusive album in the Bibliothèque d’Aix and detailed his discovery. The Aix album, Rouard explained, bears the date 1515 and the title “Portraits of François I and some princes, princesses, and notable people of the court, sketched from life by a lady of the same court, with their devises.” 36 Most important, it contains the famous quatrain on the sketch of Agnès, which, roughly translated, reads: You deserve more praise and honour Being the cause of the recovery of France Than a nun working inside a cloister Or a desert hermit.37

The album does not name its artist. Still, Rouard assumes based on Sorel that Hélène (whom Sorel misnames Catherine) d’Hangest, Madame de Boisy, was indeed the artist of the album’s sketches. How did Sorel himself come up with the attribution, which does not appear in the album? He claims to have read the album in the home of the d’Hangest family and, although Rouard does not address the point, Sorel may have been transmitting family oral tradition. Hypothetically, he may also have seen a notice subsequently effaced from the album which, as he describes, had been rebound and given a second title page in the mid-seventeenth century and therefore may have lost some of the original information visible to Sorel. 33  For his appointment as official historio­grapher see Fossier, “La charge d’historio­graphe,” 79. As for his invented relationship to Agnès see Rioiui, “Charles Sorel historien,” 152. 34  Sorel, La Solitude, 26–27.

35  Roy, La vie et les œuvres, 424–25.

36  Rouard, François I chez Madame de Boisy, 2–4.

37  Rouard, François I chez Madame de Boisy, 6, 39–46. That François I actually wrote the quatrain has generally been dismissed by historians. Comparing the hand with known examples of the king’s writing, Champion claims that the two are not the same, Dame de Beauté, 114. For a perspective on the quatrain see Kane, “Sur un poème.”



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Still, the date of 1515 seems wrong to Rouard. He explains that, based on details related to some of the people represented in the sketches, 1525 would seem more likely. To reconcile the date problem, he posits that the portraits must have been sketched and collated gradually over the entire period between 1515 and 1525.38 He notes that Sorel designates Madame de Boisy as the wife, not widow, of Artus de Boisy, who himself died in 1519, which makes sense if one assumes that the work was begun before Artus’s death and completed afterward. Alexandra Zvereva has recently disputed both the 1515 date and the attribution to Madame de Boisy found in the Aix album, making the compelling case that the album was commissioned by Louise of Savoy in 1526. Zvereva points out that Louise’s daughter Marguerite is called “Madame la duchesse d’Alençon” in the album but that she is dressed in widow’s garb, giving us a terminus post quem of April 1525, when Marguerite’s husband, Charles of Alençon, died, and a terminus ante quem of 1527, when Marguerite married Henri of Navarre. This date means that the album was created during the king’s imprisonment in Spain as the captive of the emperor following the French defeat at Pavia in February 1525, and, in this context, Louise becomes the likely patron.39 On February 24, 1525, imperial forces decisively defeated the French army, taking the king prisoner and capturing or killing most of the high French nobility. As regent, Louise was based with Marguerite in the Abby of St.-Just outside of Lyon when the news of the disaster reached them on March 1, 1525. On hearing that her beloved only son had been taken and forced to submit to his vassal and great enemy, Charles V, Louise initially despaired, temporarily retiring to the monastery of the Celestins.40 But she quickly regained her composure and took charge. She and Marguerite initiated ransom negotiations, and the regent, occupied with governing, sent Marguerite to deal with the emperor.41 The album may have been an attempt to assert symbolic control over a fluid and frightening situation by recreating the court in the king’s absence. But if Louise commissioned the album, how to explain Sorel’s story of Madame de Boisy as its creator? Zvereva notes that the sketches of the Aix album are the “work of a copyist reproducing at a single stroke an already-formed original rather than, as Rouard imagined, the work of a lady of quality sketching her acquaintances from life over a period of several years,” adding that all of the portraits were inspired by sketches done by royal artists, especially Jean Clouet.42 This misstates what Rouard writes, however. Far from suggesting that the Aix album is the work of Madame de Boisy drawing her friends from life, he posits that the album that he, Rouard, held in his hands and described, which was also the same album discussed by Sorel, was a copy of an original vanished 38  Rouard, François I chez Madame de Boisy, 8–9. 39  Zvereva, “‘Chose qui me donne,’” 188.

40  Report of Sébastien Moreau de Villefranche, référendaire général for the duchy of Milan, cited in Champollion-Figeac, Captivité, 81 and 394. 41  On this frenzied period see Michon et al., Les Conseillers de François Ier, 199–200. 42  Zvereva, “‘Chose qui me donne,’”185.

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album that Madame de Boisy had created with her own hands. Rouard even proposes that Madame de Boisy’s original album ended up in the St. Peterburg library, based on an inventory description that he had recently read.43 Nor does Rouard believe that Madame de Boisy worked from life in creating her original, but even names the probable royal artists on whose works she based her own in his discussion of the individual sketches. Another solution, although Rouard does not propose it, is that Madame de Boisy might have merely collated the original album. Rouard’s argument is in fact compatible both with the account of the album’s genesis put forth by Sorel and Zvereva’s convincing argument that Louise was behind the version of the album that today resides in the library in Aix. In other words, Madame de Boisy was the artist (or compiler) of a now-missing collection that she copied or had copied from portraits done by royal artists, and Louise’s collection was copied for the most part from Madame de Boisy’s original. Moreover, one of the arguments that Zvereva forwards to make the case that Louise commissioned the album works even better as an argument in favour of Madame de Boisy as the album’s creator. Seeking to explain the presence of the portrait of the already-dead Artus de Boisy in the album, Zvereva points out that he was formerly François I’s grand maître d’hôtel and a particular friend of the king.44 And yet, the presence of Artus, Madame de Boisy’s husband, who was not yet dead in 1515, can also be explained by assuming that Madame de Boisy was the original artist. I insist on the connection between Madame de Boisy and the Aix album because it explains Agnès’s presence among the ranks of François I’s mostly living courtiers. Before becoming the king’s grand maître d’hôtel, Artus de Boisy had been appointed in 1506 by Louise to serve as her son’s preceptor.45 Artus’s full name was Artus Gouffier, seigneur de Boisy, and he was the son of Guillaume Gouffier, the young man assigned by Charles VII to protect Agnès during his absences. Artus was born in 1475 and his father did not die until 1495, leaving time to pass down stories of his youth.46 Also, Madame de Boisy’s grandmother, Marie d’Amboise, was the sister of Louise, first wife of Guillaume Gouffier. The Hangests, family of Madame de Boisy, were close allies of the Sorels, which suggests another path by which Agnès’s legend would have spread.47 When Louise looked to commission an album of portraits of “gentlemen and ladies” who “seem to still inhabit that sumptuous and nearly insouciant epoch that preceded the catastrophic Italian campaign,” she would have seen the sketch of Agnès, who was well known to Artus and Madame de Boisy.48 43  Rouard, François I chez Madame de Boisy, 72. 44  Zvereva, “‘Chose qui me donne,’” 186.

45  See Michon, Conseillers de François I, 229–39.

46  See Pere Anselme, Histoire genealogique, 5:608.

47  At least according to Peigné-Delacourt, who writes Regnaut Sorel was the executor of Jean II d’Hangest’s will. Unfortunately, he does not cite his source. Peigné-Delacourt, “Agnès Sorel,” 14. 48  Zvereva, “‘Chose qui me donne,’” 185–86.



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It is interesting to wonder what Louise would have heard of Agnès before coming across the original album and why the regent might have retained this royal mistress’s image. The story circulating beyond Agnès’s family in the late fifteenth century emphasized Charles VII’s emotional attachment to her. Chronicler Robert Gaguin, who served Louis XI, Charles VIII, and Louis XII, remarks that in “mon temps” it was constantly known (“fut constant renommee”) that Charles VII loved her very much.49 From Madame de Boisy Louise may have acquired the family lore and recognized that the type of mistress represented by Agnès posed no threat to her own position; on the contrary, such a mistress was an asset with her positive influence on the king. We might even hypothesize that Louise intended Agnès as a reproach to the king’s mistress, Françoise de Foix, whose portrait also appears in the album.50 Although the degree of Françoise’s influence over the king is not clear—there is no trace of such influence in the form of ambassadors’ soliciting her to act as an intermediary, for example—Louise may have regarded her with suspicion, as a potential rival. Certainly, Françoise’s family was prominent, her brother Odet de Foix, vicomte de Lautrec, serving as marshal of France and governor of Milan 1516–1522.51 Ambassadors had at least noticed Françoise. And at the Field of the Cloth of Gold festival of 1520, she was even conspicuously gifted a valuable crucifix along with the closest members of the royal family and intimate servants of the king: the queens exchanged gifts, the king and Louise gifted Wolsey, and Henry VIII gifted Bonnivet, the admiral of France and the Master of the Horse, along with Madame de Chateaubriand, to whom “he gave a crucifix worth about 2,000 crowns.”52 Although the album is the clearest sign of the transmission of Agnès’s image across the decades, she may also have been known to François I’s court through other sources. One of these may have been the king’s, and therefore Regent Louise’s, treasurer, Florimond Robertet, who owned É� tienne Chevalier’s former townhouse on the rue de la Verrerie from 1507 on.53 As we have seen, Denis Godefroy described the Melun diptych in 1660 and also inventoried the carved anagrams that decorated Chevalier’s house, reporting them to be commonly held for tokens of the treasurer’s love for Agnès. Whatever the truth of the real Chevalier’s intentions, Robertet surely could not have missed the carvings. Another sign of Agnès during these same years comes in the form of an anecdote about her tomb. In 1525 a new epitaph was engraved on Agnès’s tomb at Jumièges, as we learn from the Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Pierre de Jumièges, written by monk Jean Mabillon (1632–1707).54 The epitaph, which praises Agnès as an unaffected and mild dove, whiter than a swan, rosier than a flame, and mild in speech, calming 49  Gaguin, Les Croniques de France, 169v.

50  Rouard, François I chez Madame de Boisy, 21.

51  See Woodcock, “Living like a King,” and Garrigues, “Les clairs-obscurs de Françoise de Foix.” 52  Calendar of State Papers Venice, 3: June 26, 1520, no. 94. 53  Champion, La Dame de beauté, 146.

54  Mabillon, Histoire de l’abbaye royale, 2:191–97.

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quarrels, is a nearly exact duplicate of one that already decorated her tomb in Loches.55 Why this interest in Agnès in 1525, 75 years after her death? Mabillon confesses that he has no idea who or why, but someone who had visited the tombs in both places must have noticed that the one in Jumièges was short that particular epitaph and decided to honour the long-dead mistress of Charles VII by having it engraved there. Could it have been the king himself? Assuming that he had learned about Agnès from Artus de Boisy, François I may have been intrigued. He certainly had the opportunity to visit both tombs. In 1523 he rode from Rouen to Le Havre, a route that passes through Jumièges. At that point he might have realized that the tomb there lacked the epitaph of that in Loches, which he may have known from his many extended stays in the Loire Valley.56 The king is also known to have passed through Melun, his itinerary showing stops there in April 1515 and June 1519.57 Artus might at some point have made him aware of the tradition that the Virgin of the Melun diptych bore Agnès’s features. Agnès’s image soon appeared in literary works, two homages to her remaining from these same years. The prolific poet Roger de Collerye (1468–1536) composed a set of dialogues recounting a bit sarcastically the merits of ladies drawn from classical mytho­ logy, the Bible, and courtly romance. Agnès is the single historical figure who appears in the dialogue. Two figures, Pretty Talker (“Beau Parler”) and Gracious Welcome (“Recueil Gracieux”) discuss how certain females overcame their male antagonists: Pretty Talker: Who was the cause, plain and simple, Of Saturn, wise and human, Becoming the first king in the world?

Gracious Welcome: Lady Vesca.

Pretty Talker: Seeing the beauty of Saturn, Her second son, sharp, pure and clean, She deprived ugly Titan with eloquence, For cause and opportune reason.

Gracious Welcome: Jupiter, taciturn of love, Greatly loved the beautiful Danae. Pretty Talker: By long-term good counsel, By prudent nightly vigil, Judith did in Holofernes.

Gracious Welcome: Was it not the beautiful Agnès Who conquered Charles VII?

Pretty Talker: His desires for her were turned Into true love, pure and clean, Which are things of great value.58

55  Mabillon, Histoire de l’abbaye royale, 2:194–95. 56  In Marichal, Catalogue, 8:540.

57  He was in Melun in April 1515 and June 1519. Marichal, Catalogue, 8:414, 420. 58  Collerye, Œuvres, 127–28.



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The theme promoted by Agnès’s family is the one that Collerye draws on in his dialogue, that Agnès overcame the king, not through force, but through love. Her affair with the king was justified by her ability to convert his lust into something valuable to France. The second example is not a certain reference, but its imagery is highly suggestive. The peculiar description of the “Blason of the lovely breast,” composed by Clément Marot in 1535 during his exile at the court of Renée of Ferrara, seems to tie the poem to the Melun Virgin.59 The literary genre of blason, made popular by Marot, hyperbolically praises a woman, or, less often, a man, by exhaustively cataloguing her virtues, or by focusing on a single body part which it describes at length. It is true that portraits of women with one breast exposed became popular in the late fifteenth century.60 Still, it is difficult to imagine that the blason refers to anyone but the Melun Virgin, whose exposed left breast so perfectly matches Marot’s description: Hard breast, not even a breast, But a small ball of ivory, In the middle of which is placed A strawberry or cherry… Breast that never moves, Either coming or going, Running or dancing. Breast on the left, always distant from his companion…61

The blason, and this blason, in particular, comes with its own history, but nothing in this history adequately explains the very precise details that Marot has chosen. Why is the breast hard? That texture might suggest that Marot was looking at a statue rather than a painting or a real woman, but the detail of strawberry tip cannot be reconciled with marble. Moreover, the insistence on the breast’s immobility, its position on the left, and especially its distance from its companion also seem too apt and specific to be targeting any other representation with which Marot might have been familiar. Lance Donaldson-Evans, too, ties the blason to the diptych. But contrary to the bulk of scholars, he reads Marot’s poem as a paeon to “devoted love, a theme of the greatest importance in the work of Marot,” seeing the single breast as a clue that makes the link.62 Why one breast and not the other, he wonders? He proposes that the single uncovered breast did not arouse erotic connotations but was associated with fecundity, maternity, and food.63 Whatever other games Marot was playing, his reference to the Melun Virgin, if this is what it was, would have been appreciated as an aside by his “in-group.” After these references, nothing new seems to have been written about Agnès for nearly forty years, although she appears in reprints of older chronicles. It is perhaps significant that in the edition of Nicole Gilles’s chronicle published in 1551—but not in 59  See Donaldson-Evans, “Le Blason du beau tétin,” 645 and following. 60  Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes, 187–94.

61  Marot, “Blason du beaut tétin”; from https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Blason_du_Beau_Tétin. 62  Donaldson-Evans, “Le Blason du beau tétin,” 647.

63  Donaldson-Evans, “Le Blason du beau tétin,” 648, 649, 654.

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the earlier version published in 1520—Agnès is partially pardoned for having sinned against Queen Marie. The chronicle relates that the king’s counsel explained to the queen that it would be expedient for her to pretend not to notice her husband’s affection for Agnès. The king had been pensive and sad, and it was important to give him cheer. The queen acquiesced, although it weighed heavily on her.64 With the rise of the Duchess of É� tampes, who was followed immediately by Diane de Poitiers, the style of mistress that she represented was temporarily sidetracked.

Interregnum: The Duchesses of Étampes and Valentinois

The tenure of the Duchess of É� tampes, which lasted until the death of François I in 1547, was followed by the equally significant one of Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, mistress of the king’s successor, Henri II. Catherine de Médicis, arriving at the French royal court in 1533 as the bride of then Prince Henri, witnessed the rise of the Duchess of É� tampes and saw her depart with the death of her king, replaced by Diane, whom Catherine tolerated, in her own words, because she had no choice.65 With the fatal jousting accident of Henri II in 1559, Diane too left court. Catherine’s three sons became king in succession. Like Louise, Catherine betrayed no disapproval of her sons’ mistresses. None of these kings, however, had a powerful queen and certainly not a powerful mistress. Before picking Agnès’s story up again, it will be useful to explore the type of royal mistress represented by the Duchesses of É� tampes and Valentinois, whose style more closely resembled what we know of Antoinette’s than Agnès’s. As we have seen, the king appears to have met Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly on his return to France in 1526, and, soon afterwards, she was acknowledged as his favourite mistress.66 Her rise to political actor, however, did not begin until about 1538–1539, and she becomes a central figure in 1540–1541, when ambassadors to France, charged with keeping their lords up to date on François I’s attitude toward Henry VIII and Charles V, began to solicit her alongside other highly ranked contacts like the queen, the connétable Montmorency, the king’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre, the dauphin, and the dauphine.67 É� tampes’s credit only grew throughout the final years of the king’s life: in 1542 papal nuncio Dandino reports that the king was “completely in the thrall of Madame d’É� tampes...”68 64  Gilles, Annales et croniques de France, fol. 269r. Champion explains that the passage does not appear in the first printed version of the work in 1520, but is an addition appearing first in the 1551 edition. Dame de Beauté, 115n2. 65  She famously writes:“if I put on a pleasant face to Madame de Valentinois it was because of the king, and, still, I always made sure that he knew how I regretted it:for a woman who loves her husband never loves her husband’s prostitute.” Lettres, 8:181. 66  In August 1527, Henry VIII’s ambassador to France, Anthony Brown, describes Anne as the maiden favoured by the king, SP, 6:599.

67  The papal nuncio treats É� tampes as a diplomatic agent already in 1538. See ANG, 1:399 and following. Other ambassadors begin to recognize her a bit later. See LP, 15:70–82n223; 82–118n253. 68  ANG, 3:11, 220.



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By 1545, imperial ambassador St. Mauris complains to Charles V that Protestants at the French court were receiving great favour because Madame d’É� tampes “inclines to the Lutheran discipline.”69 In October 1546, É� tampes was still attempting to mediate an agreement between the English and the king, convinced that François I would break with the pope if Henry VIII would make the first move.70 Throughout her tenure, she performed her role as lady-in-waiting to Queen Eleanor of Austria with irreproachable deference.71 When Henri II ascended the throne, he dismissed the Duchess of É� tampes from court to install his own mistress, whom he immediately elevated to Duchess of Valentinois as a sign of her new status as favourite.72 Although less personally involved with ambassadors than her predecessor, Diane nonetheless promoted her foreign policy by managing the conflictual relationship between the king’s closest advisers, the peaceloving Montmorency and the more bellicose Guise brothers, whom contemporaries agree she preferred, at least during the first years of Henri II’s reign. 73 After the death of her king, the Duchess of É� tampes vanished from court memory, appearing only rarely in histories where her former importance was almost entirely ignored, and she never regained much interest relative to the more celebrated French royal mistresses. With the death of her own prince, Diane de Poitiers suffered a worse, if temporary, fate, entering into a dark period of defamation that lasted until the nineteenth century, during which she was excoriated for her greed, age, and illicit influence.74 Her servants complained of her avarice already during her lifetime, but the insults become scurrilous when the king was no longer there to protect her.75 Protestant historian Louis Régnier de la Planche writes that she “sucked the blood and marrow out of the people, ruined an infinite number of Houses through confiscation and other means; received piles of money from the king; sold offices and benefices…”76 A certain Villadon, protestant sympathizer, calls her a “public and common receptacle for immoral and unhinged men…”77 Her terrible reputation is also highlighted in the Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et desportemens de Catherine de Médicis of 1575, where Diane is treated as a prostitute procured by Queen Catherine for the king.78 69  LP, 21.2:188–203n406. 70  LP, 21.2:108–21n248.

71  We see her carrying the queen’s train in 1546, for example, as “lady of honour,” CSPS, 8:427–46n293.

72  As Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly and her husband had been elevated to Duchess and Duke of É� tampes. See Robert, Le Cabinet historique:12.2:96n10430; for Diane, see Catalogue des actes d’Henri II, 2:396n3755. 73  See, for example, Dandino, writing on March 31, 1547, ANG, 6:176. 74  Le Fur, Diane de Poitiers, 210–38.

75  See their complaints related to her administration of Chenonceau, Chevalier, Histoire de Chenonceau, 241–42. 76  La Planche, Histoire de l’estat, 14.

77  Letter reproduced in Louis de Bourbon, Mémoires de Condé, 1:621.

78  Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et desportemens de Catherine de Médicis. Pamphlet, aucune

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In other histories, she is cold and calculating, possessing the body of the king through sorcery, given that she had “nothing with which to hold the heart of such a prince.”79

Agnès’s Return

Catherine was certainly aware of Agnès Sorel. The queen was an avid collector of the albums of sketches that we have been discussing, and, as we have seen, Agnès featured in many of these.80 But, equally significant, during the reigns of Catherine’s sons Charles IX and Henri III, the royal historio­grapher gives a small but significant place to the narrative of Agnès as saviour of France. Although Catherine would not have been directly involved in the content of the history, she helped to create, or, at least, maintain, an environment at court and in her own household favourable to the cultivation of the historical memory of a beautiful and inspiring young mistress. Catherine embodied the value of honour and appreciated practical virtues like competence and tolerance, and the image of Agnès made her the very personification of these qualities. Agnès’s reappearance as a gentle beauty whose only purpose was to motivate the king’s valour suggests a courtly “collective unconscious” magically solving an insoluble problem, which I would state as follows: when all power is vested, presumably, if not in fact, in a king (as opposed to strong, stable institutions), a woman entirely devoted to the king, either his mother, or a non-royal woman who would have no prior dynastic loyalty, looks like the safest, most reliable adviser. The motif of Agnès was picked up on and embellished in a poem of 1573 by Pléiade member Jean-Antoine de Baï�f. The poet reprises the now-common theme, lauding Agnès for having motivated the besotted king to take up arms and drive the English from France. In the end, the king’s “virtue flamed up/from the same torch that had extinguished it.”81 Baï�f dedicates the poem to the Seigneur Sorel d’Ugny, member of the family in whose chateau hung the portrait of Agnès, as recorded by Peigné-Delacourt, 82 revealing that Agnès’s relatives continued to be interested in maintaining her reputation and in participating in the prestige that attached to her.83 Following on Baï�f ’s poem, the theme was further developed three years later by Bernard de Girard, Seigneur du Haillan, named historio­grapher of the king under Charles IX.84 True, the first time that Haillan treats Agnes, in De l’estat et succez des affaires de France of 1572, he has nothing positive to say about her, depicting her as distracting the king from his duties. He also contrasts her bad influence implicitly with that of Joan of Arc, the Maid who arrives to help save the kingdom, in the first known date, aucun lieu de publication, 20–21. 79  Bèze, Histoire Ecclesiastique,1:68. 80  Zvereva, Portraits dessinés. 81  Baï�f, Œuvres, 2:92–95.

82  As I note in ch. 4. Peigné-Delacourt, “Agnès Sorel,” 2n2. 83  Roy, La vie et les œuvres, 7–8; 424–25.

84  Fossier, “A propos du titre d’historio­graphe,” 378.



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association of these two young women. Chrono­logically speaking, the way Haillan sets up Agnès’s influence is impossible. She was born at least fifteen years after Joan. Still, the work is significant for conceiving of the two iconic figures as a related pair. The fire of the wars entirely burned all of France; the English were ravaging there, and the French were desperate, and yet King Charles did not move from Mehun-sur-Yèvre or Bourges, making love to a beautiful young woman named Agnès Sorel and having beautiful parterres and gardens built, apprehending neither his own ills nor those of the kingdom. But God, who was watching with pity, excited the valour of several courageous knights, who by their bravery and their virtue added their strength to the weakness of their king and saved him.85

Charles VII’s men were aided by the miraculous appearance of a “young woman of twenty-two, native of Vaucouleurs in Lorraine, named Jeanne, who, being led before the king, said that she had come to him, inspired by God, to promise him that she would chase the English from France.”86 But something changed Haillan’s perspective regarding Agnès. Did he talk to Baï�f ? To Queen Catherine? To one of Agnès’s descendants? We know that he was appointed official historio­grapher of the king on the recommendation of René de Villequier, son of Artus de Villequier and therefore grandson of Antoinette.87 For in the Histoire générale des roys de France, first published in 1576, Haillan supplements his earlier narrative to give Agnès a positive role, repeating and embellishing the legend of the young woman’s arousing the king’s sense of valour. Under the pen of Haillan, the vague image acquires a precise form that will appear throughout the centuries. The story begins with a self-indulgent, luxurious king unable to tear himself away from his mistress. But Agnès is not happy with this state of affairs and decides to act. She told him that when she had been a girl, an astro­loger had said that she would be loved by one of the most courageous and valourous kings in Christendom. When the king had done her the honour of loving her, she thought that he was the valourous and courageous king predicted to her by the said astro­loger, but, seeing him so weak and with so little concern for his affairs or for resisting the English and their king Henry who was taking so many cities right out from under his nose, she saw that she had been fooled and that the valourous and courageous king was in fact the king of England. Then she said to King Charles, “I’m going to find him – because the astro­loger meant him, not you, who has neither courage nor valour, since without resisting you let your kingdom be overcome.” This talk coming from the mouth of this woman, whom the king loved more than he should have, moved and goaded his heart so much that he began to cry and from that moment forward made a great effort, putting his nose to the grindstone and no longer hunting nor lingering in gardens as he had done before, so that by good fortune and the courage of his good men who served him faithfully he chased the English from France, except for Calais.88

85  Haillan, De l’estat et succez des affaires de France, 236–37. 86  Haillan, De l’estat et succez des affaires de France, 237.

87  As he explains himself in a pamphlet for Charles IX detailing his plans for a new history of France. See Bonnefon, “L’Historien Du Haillan,” 460, 480. 88  Haillan, 1627, Histoire générale, 1:1055–56.

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Gossipy court memoirist Brantôme followed Haillan’s passage nearly word for word in his own collection of stories about the ladies of the French court.89 Haillan’s anecdote exerted a lasting influence. Agnes as saviour appears in a collection of discourses on war and peace, gathered in manu­script français 4839 of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Described as a Collection of copies and translations concerning ancient, medi­eval, and sixteenth-century events, the manu­script is dated to the sixteenth century and features Agnès’s story among letters from popes urging peace, Charles Martel encouraging his men to battle, and St. Bernard comforting a repentant Louis VII who had accidentally burned women and children alive in war. This version of Agnès’s story tells of a king whose virtue would be reignited through the clouds of misery and who would reveal himself to be the good pilot and patron of his kingdom. Having indulged in pleasure, preferring the love of his beautiful Agnès to the good of his kingdom, he was ordered by Agnès to go out and fight the English. Cut to the quick by her reproach, he chased the English from France. However, other historio­graphers were to a large extent immune to the influence. François Belleforest, also one of Henri III’s official historio­graphers, follows Jean Chartier closely in his discussion of Agnès in his Grandes Annales, but he corrects his source, disagreeing with Charter’s assessment that Agnès had not been the king’s mistress: “That is just trying to sanctify immorality and elevate to the rank of virgin a woman who did not marry because she did not want to share her heart with a lesser man than the king.”90 Belleforest does, however, verify Agnès’s celebrity, sharing the information that Loches and Jumièges competed for the honour of being her final resting place. In his Cosmo­graphie, he insists that her body reposed at Loches, contrary to the claim of some that the tomb at Jumièges contained her body.91 Historio­grapher É� tienne Pasquier, too, failed to see the virtue in voluptuousness, giving the story of Agnès and the king a hostile cast in his Recherches de la France of 1596. For Pasquier, she is a symbol of lust and deserves blame for distracting the king. Charles VII, he writes, “in the midst of these afflictions gave himself over completely to voluptuousness, making love to a beautiful Agnès, forgetting the things necessary to his estate…”92 This Charles VII is not saved by Agnès. She makes four appearances in the work, each time seducing Charles VII from his warrior duties and then vanishing. A survey of historio­graphers of the following century shows a similar pattern: Agnès consistently appears in sections devoted to Charles VII in histories of France. However, her influence over Charles VII is generally regarded as a stain on his honour, a sign of his weakness.93 But Agnès’s story was not restricted to history, and her posi89  Brantôme, Œuvres complètes, 9:393–94. 90  Belleforest, Grandes annales, 2:1152 91  Belleforest, Cosmo­graphie, 1:32. 92  Pasquier, Les recherches, 544.

93  Some examples include:Vignier, Sommaire de l’histoire des François, 386; Serres, Inventaire général de l’Histoire de France, 2:39–40; Chappuys, Les chroniques et annales de France dés l’origine des François, 488–89; Aubert, Histoire ou recueil des gestes, 238; Dupleix, Histoire générale de France, 1090–91; Mézeray, Histoire de France depuis Faramond, 1:647, 665.



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tive image, prevalent in other genres, proved the more enduring. Gradually she took her place as the ideal royal mistress, or, more precisely, discourse on royal mistresses ignored the duchesses of É� tampes and Valentinois to focus on Agnès. In the following chapter, I trace her image through the reign of Henri IV, who embraced it as model of the ideal mistress, and, from there, I track her passage into the seventeenth and eighteenth-century courts of Louis XIV and XV, where with the flourishing of the new discourse of gallantry her celebrity increases.

Chapter Six

AGNÈS LA GALLANTE Henri IV, the

vert galant (lusty seducer), who ascended the throne in 1594, was well aware of the discourse surrounding Agnès Sorel.1 His secretary, Jules Gassot, describes the king comparing his passion for Gabrielle d’Estrees and, after Gabrielle’s death, other mistresses, to Charles VII’s for Agnès. The king “never got tired of such loves,” writes Gassot, “saying that Charles VII with his lady Agnès Sorel had conquered the kingdom.”2 By claiming that Gabrielle was the inspiration behind his chivalry, the king may also have hoped to enhance her chances of being accepted as his queen. Henri IV had emphasized his reassuring virility as one justification for succeeding the childless Henri III on the French throne, but he needed to produce a legitimate heir to make good on the claim.3 Gabrielle, like Agnès, bore the king three children, and Henri IV’s associating her with this earlier mistress seems strategic. The pairing of the two women will recur. In his false memoir of Gabrielle, Paul Lacroix has Henri IV’s mistress declare that she will aid her king by keeping his spirits up. “I will be your Agnès Sorel,” she cries, “and I will guard you from despair as long you have a sword in your hand and a hand to hold it.” Henri IV tears up, commending Gabrielle’s noble words and assuring her that he counts on her to inspire his martial ardor and his honour.4 We have noted that the first clear example of the identification of Agnès as the Melun Virgin dates from Henri IV’s reign. As we saw in Chapter Four, the king’s son, the dauphin who became Louis XIII, was sent to Melun to marvel at the diptych in 1608. In 1610 the king attempts to buy the diptych from the church for ten thousand livres.5 Based on his show of interest in this painting, François Avril posits that, during construction under his watch of a new portrait gallery of the kings and queens of France in the Louvre, Henri IV may have commissioned a copy of the Melun diptych to hang there.6 Avril also attributes Henri IV with being the force behind a new series of portraits of Agnès, which begin to proliferate around the end of the sixteenth century.7 Pos1  For the patriotic folk song that solidified the nickname, see Tiersot and Kindler, “Historic and National Songs,” 604–5. 2  Voir Gassot, Sommaire mémorial, 232.

3  Crawford, “The Politics of Promiscuity,” 225. 4  Lacroix, Mémoires, 4:266.

5  See Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet, 130. Avril cites pièce 663v of BNF français 8224, which is vol. 9 of Épitaphes de Paris et ses environs, collected in 1887. Pièce 663 describes the tomb of Chevalier and his wife. The verso records the presence of the diptych with Chevalier praying on one side and a portrait of “la Belle Agnès” on the other, over the door of the sacristy, adding that “it is said that Henri IV wanted to give 10,000 livres for it.” 6  Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet, 151. 7  Avril, ed., Jean Fouquet, 151.

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sibly at the king’s instigation, painters turned away from the Fouquet sketch and returned to the Melun diptych as a model, Avril explains. As evidence, he cites paintings that obviously copy the Melun Virgin, like those to which Charles Sorel refers, as we saw in Chapter Four: certain paintings of Agnès that depict her “with her bodice undone and one breast uncovered…”8 A portrait of Agnès is known to have graced the wall of the chamber Sévigné in the chateau of the exiled libertine Bussy-Rabutin (1618–1693), along with portraits of twenty-five women, including royal mistresses. An inscription above the painting, probably written by Bussy-Rabutin himself, notes that Agnès assured the deliverance of France from the English by reviving the courage of the king.9 “Another room, just before the Golden Tower, the Room of the Beautiful Ladies or the Sévigné Chamber,” writes É� mile Gérard-Gailly in 1909, bears witness to a disconcerting eclecticism: the “queens” of the left hand, Agnès Sorel, Diane de Poitiers, Gabrielle d’Estrées, la Belle Ferronnière, la Vallière, la Montespan, reside with Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Grignan and the Countess de Bussy, all portrayed in a triptych where it is clear once again that Mignard is an admirable artist and that Madame de Grignan, truly the “prettiest young woman in France,” might have shown herself less cold and impenetrable. We are not scandalized by the proximity…10

Agnès la gallante The querelle des femmes, writes Eliane Viennot, “developed as an echo of the concrete efforts of social actors to prevent or, conversely, allow women access to the same activities as men, to the same rights, powers, even riches, to the same recognition.”11 In this context, gallantry, the appreciation of women, their conversation, and their ideas, both in life and literature, softened some forms of female oppression by encouraging intellectual interaction between the sexes and what we would call the exercise of soft power. Indeed, the querelles de femmes and gallantry are tightly intertwined with discussions of female merit, a feature of salon life.12 Gallantry has a venerable history, already embraced as a defining French characteristic at the outset of Louis XIV’s reign.13 Not that it can be easily defined, typically handled as one of those concepts that everyone knows when they see it even though no one can actually define it. The etymo­logy of the term is well known. The Old French verb “galer,” to enjoy oneself, to have fun, had by 1555 given rise to “galanterie,” which meant an action characterized by teasing pleasantry or bravura. But a shift, or, at least, an expansion, of meaning can be perceived in the early seventeenth century. The adjec8  Sorel, La Solitude et l’amour philosophique, 325. 9  Sarcus, Notice historique, 52.

10  Gérard-Gailly, Un académicien, 107.

11  https://www.elianeviennot.fr/Querelle.html.

12  For an introduction to this vast topic see Lougee, Paradis des femmes, and Kelly “Early Feminist Theory and the ‘Querelle des Femmes.’” 13  Habib, Galanterie française, 17.

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tive “galant” becomes common with the added meaning of vivacious and fun-loving, coinciding with the first traces of what will become a movement of gallantry. Numerous works of literature bear the adjective in the titles from roughly the 1640s on, and the movement is firmly established by the 1660s. Used to describe relationships with women, the word is also ambivalent, meaning either charmingly teasing with a hint of the erotic or audacious and illicit. Noémi Hepp notes that gallantry, recognized from its inception as specifically French, has always been interwoven with myths of a lost golden age, and its sense has always been ambivalent, connoting at times a purely positive trait but, at others, a more negative quality resembling duplicity or trickiness.14 Claude Habib affirms that France was more progressive than other court societies regarding relations between the sexes from the seventeenth century onward, but she also points out that, chrono­logically speaking, the French court lagged behind its Italian counterparts until the reign of François I. During this reign, the French begin to emulate the Italians, absorbing their art, fashion, and ideals of comportment as laid out in Castiglione’s The Courtier.15 Still, Habib notes that the mixité, the intermingling of the sexes, of François I’s court was not entirely indebted to the Italians, recalling the role of Anne of Brittany in increasing the number of female courtiers and the troubadour tradition to which gallantry was joined.16 Progress was swift: by the second half of the seventeenth century, “the liberties the French women enjoyed stunned foreign visitors.”17 I would add that the Princesse de Clèves (1678), a work that itself demonstrates the greatest possible ambivalence toward illicit love and yet represents for many the epitome of gallant literature, immortalizes the concept gallantry in its first lines: “There was never in France so brilliant a display of magnificence and gallantry as during the last years of the reign of Henry II. This monarch was gallant, handsome, and amorous; although his love for Diane de Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, had lasted twenty years, its ardor had not diminished, as his conduct testified.”18 And, to return to the interconnection between the querelle des femmes and gallantry, Leanna Bridge Rezvani argues that the Princesse de Clèves should be seen as a gallant response to the querelle, writing that the “portrait of society that emerges from [Madame de Lafayette’s] depiction of the reign of Henri II challenges the idea of an omnipotent patriarchy where women were politically powerless. More importantly, it suggests that women clearly wielded more social and political influence than what was typically acknowledged by their male counterparts.”19 Agnès, too, might be regarded as a gallant response to the querelle. The interest in portraits of her that I have discussed was fuelled by the rise of gallantry, her soft 14  Hepp, “Galanterie,” 746.

15  Habib, Galanterie française, 228. 16  Habib, Galanterie française, 229. 17  Habib, Galanterie française, 230.

18  Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves, 3.

19  Rezvani, “Transcending the Rhetorical Impasse,” 190.

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involvement in politics and beauty representing the epitome of the concept, which allowed for female intervention as long as it was offered in ways that did not offend male sensibilities. A more congenial environment for Agnès’s already flourishing celebrity cannot be imagined. The Duchesses of É� tampes and Valentinois were perceived to have governed their kings too absolutely to be assimilated into the gallant tradition: the former was too assertive and the latter, despite her appearance in the Princesse de Clèves, was too religious, austere, and old to be much developed as a gallant heroine. With its porous boundary between morality and eroticism, the concept offered a perfect framework for enhancing the narratives about Agnès, showcasing her qualities: she was modest but also intelligent, an angel but also seductive, influential but only gently so. In some of the portraits modeled on the Melun Virgin, she gazes downward with a book in one hand, like her original gisant. In others, she gazes at the viewer. This ambivalent, or, perhaps, innocent, sexuality is precisely the quality that had been associated with her since the Melun diptych had initially evoked it, and her celebrity as a gallant would be firmly tied not just to her beauty, but to her amiability and kindness within a court where self-serving schemers were the rule. She intrigued, but she was fundamentally good. Of course, like gallantry itself, Agnès’s reign was still not regarded unanimously as a positive phenomenon by seventeenth-century writers. The behaviour of this royal mistress continued to be criticized as motivated by and inspiring lust. For example, the epic poem about Joan of Arc, La Pucelle, by Jean Chapelain (1595–1674), renews the Joan/Agnès pairing that we first saw in Haillan and further develops it to Agnès’s disadvantage. Agnès becomes the antithesis of the divinely endorsed Joan, serving as the work’s antagonist, along with France’s illegitimate regent, the Duke of Bedford. In contrast with Joan, “animated by the spirit of God,” Amaury, fictitious favourite of Charles VII, and Agnès represent “the different movements of the concupiscent appetite, which corrupt the innocence of the will by their inducements.”20 Still, the work did not exercise much influence because it never enjoyed great success. As Constant Venesoen explains, Chapelain composed his epic in the midst of a shift in taste: readers were turning against literature demonstrating a strong religious sentiment toward the long romantic novels that were becoming all the rage in salons.21 Despite six editions in the space of eighteen months, La Pucelle fatally damaged Chapelain’s reputation as a poet, although he retained his influence as a critic.22 But Agnès begins to come out well in other Joan/Agnès pairings, receiving a positive treatment from Charles Sorel in La solitude et l’amour philosophique de Cléomède, and this approach would prove to be the more durable. Sorel memorably presents Joan and Agnès as “two renowned women, one for valour, the other for beauty,” who 20  Chapelain, La Pucelle, preface, no pagination.

21  Venesoen, “La Pucelle de Chapelain,” 97–98. Nicolas Boileau drew the work into the quarrel between the ancients and moderns, severely lampooning it, 98–105. 22  Bourque, Jean Chapelain et la querelle de La Pucelle, assembles contemporary texts to demonstrate Chapelain’s damaged reputation.

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greatly served France, each in her own way.23 During the life of Charles VII, Sorel writes, Agnès challenged Charles VII’s courage in the way made popular by Brantôme and Haillan, whom Sorel cites. In the context of gallantry, arousing passion no longer requires any apo­logy. A few representative examples of Agnès as a gallant heroine will suffice to illustrate her development. She is featured in the “historical novellas” of the many-volumed Annales galantes by Marie-Catherine de Villedieu. This genre, which took its inspiration from real life but then quickly left any resemblance to reality behind, overlapped with the “gallant novella,” becoming popular in the 1660s. Madame de Villedieu favoured the genre, using it as a vehicle to discuss the psycho­logy and morality of love.24 As for Agnès, Madame de Villedieu writes that her interest in writing about this “fameuse” woman is not to discuss the history of Charles VII; a sufficient amount has already been written about the king, the usurpation of the English, and the prowess of Joan of Arc. She will focus instead on “the gallantries of the Belle Agnès.”25 The narrative that she recounts includes only a few traces of what might be considered “history,” introducing the king, Agnès, and a few characters who actually served Charles VII. But the story is an intricately complicated fiction, plunging the reader into the long, drawn-out rivalry between Agnès and the dauphin. Agnès does everything in her power to “vanquish” the dauphin’s bad will, but fails. The young man tries several times to destroy her. The story then turns to an elaborate plot involving the dauphin’s favourite, Chabannes. The dauphin convinces Chabannes to seduce Agnès in order to turn the king against her, but Chabannes gets caught in his own trap. Spies at court and disguises follow. The dauphin’s plot fails, but Agnès soon dies anyway. This story of Chabannes as Agnès’s lover caught on, repeated, for example, in the Galanteries des rois de France, first published in 1694.26 A different rivalry, however, one between cousins, is the focus of Agnès’s story in the best-selling history of royal favourites of 1697 by Huguenot émigrée to England Anne de La Roche-Guilhem (1644–1707). The collection features Agnès along with ten other women, some of them depicted as very unsavoury, who exerted influence over powerful men.27 Agnès’s portrayal is by far the most favourable. But as the king’s beloved and most amiable woman of the court, Agnès arouses the jealousy of none other than Antoinette de Maignelais, who begins to appear in such narratives as Agnès’s arch enemy. Her attempts to sabotage her cousin form much of the narrative. Like Madame de Villedieu, Madame La Roche-Guilhem borrows the names of historical figures and places, but the story that she tells is entirely fictitious. 23  Sorel, La Solitude et l’amour philosophique, 325.

24  On Madame de Villedieu’s literary theory and its influence see De Jean, Tender Geo­graphies, 129–40; Beasley, Salons, 152–56. 25  Villedieu, Annales, 336.

26  Sauval (or Claude Vanel; the catalogue of the BNF says that attribution is uncertain), Galanteries des rois de France, 1:16–36. 27  La Roche-Guilhem, Histoire des Favorites, 91–144.

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Another work of historical fiction, the Mémoires secrets de la cour de Charles VII (1700) by Catherine Bédancier, writing under the name of Madame Durand, offers a series of false memoirs centred primarily on amorous liaisons by Charles VII’s courtiers. Agnès plays a central role in the intrigue. One of the statements attributed to her in this work will be cited in later histories as if she had really uttered it, a passionate defence of her own innocence. Responding to Poton de Xaintrailles’s assertion that the queen found Agnès perfectly beautiful and prudent, so much so that she expected Agnès to offer only good counsel and service to the king, Agnès admits, “I will not hide anything from you, the king has tried to please me.” But because she is “a simple demoiselle,” she thinks that the king will not push too rapidly to conquer her; she is not impressed by the crown. She reveres and honours the king, which does not mean that she desires him; she has no fight with the queen in this area.28 In his Dialogues des morts of 1683, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) puts various historical figures in dialogue in Hell to foreground certain arguments about French society, placing Agnès in conversation with Roxelane, Suleiman the Magnificent’s wife. The dialogue is a paeon to gallantry, highlighting the Gallic style of commerce between the sexes. Agnès opens the dialogue by confessing that she does not understand Turkish gallantry. As far as she can see, the beautiful ladies of the seraglio have no choice as soon as their lover announces, “I want it.”29 They are never permitted to enjoy the pleasures of resistance or victory. Of course this is true, replies Roxelane. Turkish emperors are too jealous of their power to allow a woman to control them. In this way, she opens the opportunity for Agnès to promote her own relationship with Charles VII, which had been so beneficial for France. The choice of Agnès, along with women who had exercised genuine power (Marguerite of Austria, Anne of Brittany, Elizabeth I of England, Joan of Naples) is a tribute to a particular type of feminine power associated with gallantry. The gallant Agnès had powerful appeal. By the eighteenth century, her story, routinely recounted in histories of Charles VII, had been adjusted to smooth out any possible wrinkle that would detract from her goodness, although the details of her relationship with the king were clearly intended to titillate. A comparison between the place that Claude de Seyssel accords Agnès in 1508 in his history of France and Nicolas Baudot de Juilly’s vision of the same in 1756 shows the difference that the passage through gallantry had made for reception of this royal mistress and the different ways in which the passion that she evoked was understood. Describing the contrast between the prosperous kingdom over which Louis XII reigned and the desolate one of Charles VII, Seyssel explains that the latter, after the victories which brought him “immortal glory,” was not spared several “cases of ill fortune,” for in his old age he gave himself over to lust and too much carnal pleasure with the debauched women of ill repute who filled his household, and his lords and servants, following his example,

28  Durand, Mémoires secrets, 1:110. The statement reappears in a variety of works, including Delort, Essai critique, 30; Steenackers, Agnès Sorel et Charles VII, 314; and in the 1996 article of Clisson, “Antoinette de Maignelais,” 314. 29  Fontenelle, Dialogues des morts, 231 and following.

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wasted their time “in voluptuousness, dancing, mummeries, and passionate loves. And because of Agnès, who for a long time used him badly, he did many things unbecoming such a great and renowned king.”30 Baudot de Juilly’s Histoire de Charles VII tells an utterly different story. Agnès appears originally with Charles of Anjou and Pierre de Brézé in a “voluptuous garden where all the pleasures of the senses were fulfilled.” Still, because of her natural virtue, Agnès initially resists the enamoured king’s advances, which was difficult because the hearts over which a king cannot triumph are few. When she surrenders, she becomes a force for the good of France.31 She offers the king every delight, and he shares his crown with her, loving her with an unchanging intensity for twenty years. Baudot de Juilly concludes that her beauty must have been “superhuman,” because everyone forgave the king his attachment to her and especially because the beauty of the queen herself was not mediocre. In a poem dedicated to “voluptuousness” published in 1768 by the mysterious Chevalier de R***, Agnès serves as an example again, specifically cited as such. In addition to being cited in the poem itself, she is lauded in a footnote: of all women, Agnès Sorel made the most glorious use of the ascendance that love gives them over men. It is rare to see a mistress guide a monarch to glory. Perhaps this illustrious woman contributed as much to saving France as that marvelous Maid of Orleans.32

The effects of being absorbed into the gallant tradition are perhaps most clearly perceptible in the discourse pronounced by Thomas Riboud for the Society for Emulation at Bourg-en-Bresse, September 23, 1785. This laudatory and flowery speech, “Praise for Agnès Sorel, known as la Belle Agnès,” confirms, once again, Agnès’s celebrity. Her beauty alone gave her the power to transform Charles VII, and the idea of such a woman sends Riboud into raptures. “Agnès Sorel was loved by a sad and sensitive prince,” Riboud intones, “and she made of him a great king, and her counsel saved France.” His rhetoric then soars as he entreats Agnès to “[b]reak the chains of death, dear and respectable ghost; come, suffuse my soul with the celestial fire that beauty inspires, and perhaps I will be worthy to speak of you.”33

Agnès as the Ideal Royal Mistress

Beginning with the reign of Henri IV, who regarded his relationship with his own mistresses through the prism of Agnès’s legendary boosting of Charles VII’s morale, and culminating with the reign of Louis XV, Agnès becomes the model of the royal mistresses. She is explicitly and implicitly evoked in discussions of the royal favourite, serving as a barometer against which to measure other holders of the position and as an ideal to justify the tradition as a whole. 30  Seyssel, Les Louenges, 176–77.

31  Baudot de Juilly, Histoire de Charles VII, 2:218, 252. 32  Chevalier de R***, Poésies, 7.

33  Riboud, “É� loge d’Agnès Sorel,” 8–9.

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She is invoked from time to time as one who inspired too much luxury to the detriment of the kingdom. Bussy-Rabutin, despite the inscription over the portrait of Agnès hanging in his chateau, writes to his cousin Madame de Sévigné on February 23, 1678, to tell her that the king was on the battlefield, which was precisely where he belonged. He had not joined his mistress Madame de Montespan, who lay stricken with tertian fever.34 They inform me that Madame de Montespan suffered from two attacks of the tertian fever but that she is now well; she is not made for traveling, given her size. I notice, however, that the king loves her dearly and that he is right to do so, that he loves himself still more than he loves her, and he is not like Charles VII, who, rather than take the belle Agnès along with the army, stayed with her at Meun or at Bourges, while his kingdom was being attacked.35

Still, by the late seventeenth century, Agnès’s influence is almost unanimously acclaimed as positive. During these same decades, the identification of Agnès with the Melun Virgin seems to have become common knowledge, although, as we have noted, courtiers were aware of the identification earlier. As we have seen, historio­grapher Denis Godefroy visited the collegiate church of Notre Dame of Melun in around 1660 to research Chevalier for his history of Charles VII and commented on the diptych at some length. After describing the gisants of É� tienne and his wife, Catherine Budé, side by side in the choir of the church, Godefroy remarks on the painting: In the church, behind the choir, beside the sacristy, at a medium height on the wall, is displayed, as a curiosity, two medium-sized paintings on wood, folding into each other; one of them represents a Virgin Mary wearing a white veil on her head and a pearled crown with tall florets on top, her left breast uncovered, and her gaze lowered on a small child below, upright at her feet (some claim that the image is painted after the face of Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII).36

Agnès’s popularity continued into the reign of Louis XV, salonnière Madame de Tencin drawing on her example to describe one of Louis XV’s mistresses, Marie Anne de Mailly-Nesle, from 1743 on Duchess of Chateauroux (youngest of five sisters, at least three of whom became mistresses of Louis XV). Tencin determined that the duchess, also known as Madame de Tournelles, was someone who could be shaped and then deployed to conquer the sympathies of the nation for the king and his ministers.37 Agnès is also recalled in a memoir of Louis XV’s court, Les fastes de Louis XV, once again to discuss Madame de Tournelles. Louis XV’s young mistress was “this new Agnés Sorel” who made the king understand after the death of the Cardinal de Fleury that it was time to become master and at least appear to rule…”38 34  Bussy-Rabutin, Correspondance, 4:48–49. 35  Bussy-Rabutin, Correspondance, 4:48–49. 36  Godefroy, Charles VII, 885.

37  Goncourt and Goncourt, La duchesse de Châteauroux, 302–3. 38  Bouffonidor, Les Fastes, 1:238.

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The Abbé de Bernis (1715–1794), mentor to Madame de Pompadour, recounts the first meeting between Louis XV and his future mistress, then Madame d’É� tiolles, on whom the king liked to gaze while he was hunting in the forest of Sénart, near É� tiolles.39 Pompadour seems deliberately to echo the legend about Agnès and her astro­ loger passed down by Haillan and Brantôme when she claims to have been told by a fortune teller that she would be the king’s mistress one day. In his laudatory description of Pompadour, the Count of Espinchal (1748–1823), compares her to her illustrious predecessor, writing that the “portrait of Agnès Sorel that Voltaire created for us is perfectly suited to [Pompadour]…”40 In contrast, É� lisabeth Guénard (1751–1829), in her false memoirs of the Princess of Lamballe, first published in 1801, makes Agnès the ideal against which Pompadour is found to be too controlling: “If Madame de Pompadour had had the intelligence to stick to the single way she could make her influence felt, we might have placed her among those women who hid their irregular conduct behind their brilliant qualities; but she wanted to govern, and she possessed neither the sensibility nor the love of true glory that would make Agnès Sorel so dear to France.”41 Louis XV himself was protective of Agnès’s legacy. As we will see in the conclusion, in 1772, the canons of Notre Dame de Loches asked to move the tomb of Agnès Sorel from the choir of their church. The king refused the request, writing that the tomb was to be left where it was.42 I brought the introduction to this study to a close by noting that posthumous celebrities’ longevity is a function of the power of their symbolic meaning. Agnès’s own posthumous celebrity is based on a memory that crystallized after her death around a grain of truth, and its essential meaning has shifted very little over the centuries. Interlaced with love of king and country from the earliest days, her memory was more elaborately articulated over the centuries, but it was firmly established by the late seventeenth century when the type of passion that she inspired became attached to a certain aspect of national identity. Speaking of national identity before nation is problematic for all the reasons scholars have reiterated over the past several decades. However, it seems safe to say that the gallant tradition was imagined as particularly French by the late seventeenth century. Alain Viala cites numerous early sources that represent the association: Charles Sorel’s Hermogène, who proclaims that the word “gallant” comes from Gallus and Gallis because gallantry is particular to the French and to France; the Sorel as narrator, who asserts that no nation besides France observes most excellently the precepts of gallantry; Casanova, who too takes Gallus to be the ancestor of gallantry and makes that a matter of national pride; a Sicilian character in Molière, who invokes the Nation and notes that Monsieurs the French have a reserve of gallantry that spreads everywhere; Father René Rapin, who believes that the reason that French tragedy accords love such a central place is that the nation is natu39  Bernis, Mémoires, 1:110.

40  Espinchal, Journal d’émigration, 148.

41  Guenard, Mémoires historiques, 1:23–24. 42  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 92–95.

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rally gallant.43 We might also cite the popular royalist song “Vive Henri IV.” Although the song’s origins cannot be pinned down, whether the words were first sung in their present form in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, they claim the trait of being a “vert galant” (lusty seducer) for the French.44 Agnès’s image reached the culmination of refined gallantry in the eighteenth century, its result perhaps most palpable in Riboud’s “É� loge d’Agnès Sorel.” It has not been dislodged despite the best efforts of nineteenth-century historians, as we see in the following chapter.

43  Viala, La France galante, 356.

44  Tiersot and Kindler, “Historic and National Songs,” 604–5.

Chapter Seven

HISTORY, GALLANTRY, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY History, especially the

history of France, was already popular when it experienced an explosion of interest at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The much-loved genre then underwent a transformation, dividing over the following decades into two quite clearly demarcated versions, popular and scholarly, which came to be distinguished by distinct protocols, standards of proof, aims, and style. At the same time, history and literature, which had converged in the historical fictions of late seventeenth-century writers like Mesdames de Villedieu, La Roche-Guilhem, and Durand, as we saw in Chapter Six, came to be defined in opposition to each other.1 It is true that certain earlier historians had reflected critically on their materials, Dom Mabillon, for example, publishing in 1681 his De re diplomatica on how to authenticate documents.2 However, the professionalization of the field of history was different in quality and quantity, the process visible in the institutions established to support it: the É� cole des Chartes, founded in 1821 to train archivists, paleo­graphers, and librarians; the Société de l’histoire de France, created in 1833 to regenerate historical scholarship by editing and publishing a wide variety of medi­eval and early modern French texts; the É� cole pratique des hautes études, established in 1868 to fix history definitively as a science; and, more generally, from the 1870s, the newly invigorated university system. Professional historians in France committed themselves “to saying only how it actually was,” in Ranke’s immortal words. And yet, in reality, their scholarship was shaped to a large extent by their nationalism. The French history absorbed into school curricula and circulated among scholars and the educated reading public wove events recorded in archives with myths about the patrie that were stored in the cultural memory, myths about the origins of the nation, universalism, monarchy. In this way, scholarly history reflected and contributed to the patriotic discourses that sustained citizens who saw their government careen from one extreme to another, from imperial to monarchical to republican. In what follows I explore the story of Agnès among nineteenth-century historians, focusing on this intersection between scholarly history and nationalism. Agnès, as we have seen, was a perennial figure in chronicle and history from the fifteenth century onward, and she remained popular into the nineteenth century in a variety of genres. How were the much-embroidered narratives of this historical figure affected by the increasing professionalization of history during the nineteenth century? The answer is that the story of the gallant Agnès who saved France was not sig1  An abundant scholarship details the process. For a concise introduction see Breisach, Historio­ graphy, 238–47. 2  Head, “Documents, Archives, and Proof.”

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nificantly altered: the woman one encounters in late-twentieth and twenty-first century scholarly studies is essentially the one created during the seventeenth century. In fact, when professional historians of the nineteenth century applied their methods to the anecdotes in which Agnès featured as saviour of France, most declared them false: Agnès was not yet at court when Charles VII became a warrior king and therefore could not be the force behind his transformation. However, a small but vocal set of professionals defended the legend. A debate ensued, apparently over dates, both sides justifying their arguments with reference to primary sources. However, the real stakes were deeper and more emotionally charged, I propose here, inspired less by the strictures of historical protocol than by investments in Agnès’s meaning as cultural memory. Jan Assmann, whose work on cultural memory I cited in the introduction, sheds light on the situation, reminding us that cultural memory casts the past in symbols that illuminate “a changing present”; in the context of cultural memory, “the distinction between myth and history vanishes.”3 The debate on both sides seems to have been motivated primarily by warring notions of national identity, gallantry central to the one and irrelevant to the other.

Agnès and the Historians

Historians of the pre-É� cole des Chartes era treat Agnès as a uniquely worthy royal mistress. Even those skeptical of her political influence cling to the notion that her advice was invaluable to the king. Jean-François Dreux du Radier examines the legend of Agnès as saviour in Mémoires historiques des reines et régentes de France, composed between 1763 and 1776, finding no trace of the saviour legend in the contemporary chronicles. Nonetheless, he decides that “Agnès’s counsel must have made her still dearer to the king. Love inspired by beauty can be strong, but it is not always constant; that which is supported by esteem normally endures.”4 The Éphémérides politiques, littéraires et religieuses, a calendar of historically important events, neutralizes any moral qualms readers might have harbored to elevate Agnès above other favourites of kings of France: “What distinguishes Agnès Sorel to her advantage among other royal mistresses is that rather than debasing her lover as they did, she made hers illustrious, making use of the power that Charles VII’s love gave her over him only to inspire in him the courage appropriate to his situation and which he needed to reconquer France…[T]his love did not offend public morality.”5 When historians began to train as archivists, perceptions shifted. Professional historians tended to deny Agnès any serious influence on the ground that they found no evidence of any in the primary sources. And yet, the legend persisted. In a 1932 review of Champion’s still indispensable Dame de Beauté, Fernand Desonay alludes to the venerable long-term conflict between “romanceurs” and historians, writing: 3  Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory,” 113. 4  Dreux du Radier, Mémoires historiques, 3:188.

5  Noël and Planche, Ephémérides politiques, 104–5.



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Romanticism has been favourable to Agnès. Historians for over a century—Vallet de Viriville, Lalanne, Peigné-Delacourt, Dufresne de Beaucourt—have taken pains to establish the reality of the facts. But there are others: Delort, Capefigue, Stenakers [sic], and, at times, Vallet de Viriville. Who will save us from the “romanceurs”?6

Like Dreux du Radier, the historians to whom Desonay refers contest the saviour legend; unlike him, they reject speculation on whatever intimate influence Agnès may have exerted as beyond the scope of historical practice. This is left to the “romanceurs.” Except that this is not always true, Desonay points out, citing Auguste Vallet de Viriville (1815–1868) as both a historian and “romanceur.” Vallet de Viriville is indeed an interesting case, a professional historian, professor at the É� cole des chartes, where he also trained, who uncovered and published most of the contemporary documents associated with Agnès. But he must also be seen as a romanceur, arguing for Agnès’s centrality to the formation of the French nation in a series of important articles and in his bio­graphy of Charles VII.7 A long-term debate over the nature of Agnès’s influence commenced beginning in the 1850s, which saw a few historians aligning with the romanceurs against the professionals. As a point of entry to the debate an article of December 10, 1886, in the moderate Catholic periodical Le Correspondant offers an excellent example.8 A survey of the goings-on about Paris, the article devotes a few para­graphs to the annual public meeting of the Académie des inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, a learned society founded in 1663 as one of the five academies of the Institut de France and devoted to the humanities. Among other topics, the article notes, the members discussed the acclaimed bio­ graphy of Charles VII, which was being published volume by volume, by Fresne de Beaucourt, himself a Chartiste. Fresne de Beaucourt’s Charles VII represented a significant departure from the ineffectual king familiar to the public through the works of popular historians like Henri Martin.9 Moreover, Fresne de Beaucourt differed radically from Vallet de Viriville on the matter of Agnès. For Fresne de Beaucourt, the affair was nothing more than an interesting footnote. According to the article, president of the society Gaston Paris lauded the bio­graphy. In what was undoubtedly a swipe at Vallet de Viriville and his followers, Paris referenced “the vanity of a legend propagated by French gallantry” and praised Fresne de Beaucourt for returning to the Maid “the credit for having aroused the king from his baleful torpor too long usurped by Agnès Sorel.” This is the truth made clear by Fresne de Beaucout, Paris announced to 6  Desonay, “Pierre Champion,” 278. Fresne de Beacourt also gives a summary of the positions of historians regarding Agnès’s influence at the time that he was writing, the 1860s, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 206–10. We might also mention that already in 1848, Le Roux de Lincy, also a Chartiste, dismisses the saviour legend for lack of evidence, Les femmes célèbres, 434–41.

7  Vallet de Viriville elaborates this in several articles, many of which were also published separately as pamphlets. Beginning in 1850 he makes his principal arguments in, among other pieces, “Recherches historiques sur Agnès Sorel,” followed by “Etude morale et politique,” “Agnès Sorel, son introduction à la cour,” and Histoire de Charles VII. 8  Fournel, “Les Œuvres,” 899. It should be noted that although Vallet de Viriville had died in 1868, his influence remained. 9  For a discussion of early historians on Charles VII see Beaune, “L’historio­graphie de Charles VII.”

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general applause, a truth worthier and more beautiful than the fable. “France would prefer to owe its renaissance to Joan of Arc than Agnès Sorel, n’est-il pas vrai?” he demanded rhetorically. The article does not disclose whether Paris raised issues beyond the problem of how to interpret Agnès’s influence. Whatever the case, the emphasis on Agnès in the short notice suggests the currency of her legend for an educated French reading public of the 1880s and the interest in the historical scrutiny to which her legend was being subjected. As for Paris’s enthusiastic reaction to Fresne de Beaucourt’s demystification of Agnès’s influence, we should not be surprised. The struggle of the erudite medi­evalist Paris, another Chartiste who had also studied at the University of Bonn, to distance his own scientific methodo­logy from the impressionistic one of his medi­ evalist father Paulin Paris and his efforts to bolster the rigor of French scholarship are well known.10 Paris reveals his preferred way of handling historical love affairs in his preface to his recently deceased father’s study of François I’s private life: Gaston Paris is rigorous, Paulin Paris an undisciplined romantic. “I could not allow myself to finish [my father’s] work, in which taste and personal choice play too large a role,” Paris writes. Instead, he has limited himself to verifying that his father’s abundant citations of manu­scripts and printed works are accurate. “[Paulin Paris] could, under his own responsibility, allow himself to modify the old forms or prolixity of his sources here and there for the convenience or ease of the reader,” but Gaston Paris renounced such liberties: “all citations were collated and presented exactly as they appeared in the text from which they were taken.”11 For historians like Paris and Fresne de Beaucourt, Agnès’s saviour legend had to be proven with contemporary evidence. Their argument was that, historically speaking, Vallet de Viriville’s claim that Agnès was behind the king’s most valiant efforts, the Peace of Arras with the Burgundians in 1435, his appearance on the walls of Montereau in 1437, his suppression of the Praguerie in 1440, his restoration of Pontoise in 1441, rested on two crucial unproven points. The first was that the king underwent a transformation from a feeble young man into a worthy warrior around 1435. The second was that Agnès was present at court by 1435 to coax him along. We will not linger over the first point except to note that the view of Charles VII as a weak king was popular to varying degrees at different times. It enjoyed a certain currency in the early nineteenth century, with some historians like Henri Martin, as I noted above, convinced that Charles VII had remained ineffectual his entire life. As for the second point, Vallet de Viriville argues this despite admitting that Agnès does not appear in any historical record until the accounts covering the Duchess of Anjou’s household expenses for the period of January to July 1444. Fresne de Beaucourt, therefore, citing the lack of any earlier evidence of Agnès at court, insisted that she arrived at the royal court in around 1444, which means that her relationship with Charles VII could only have begun several years after he had 10  See Bähler, Gaston Paris et la philo­logie romane, for discussion of Paris’s development of his historical method. 11  Paris, Étude sur François premier, 1:iv–v.



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already shown his mettle as a warrior king. In other words, Agnès did not actually save France, because she was not there to rouse the king to valor. Paris’s reference to Joan of Arc alludes to Fresne de Beaucourt’s chrono­logy, suggesting that the Maid, who had arrived at Chinon in 1429, preceded Agnès in Charles VII’s life by many years and could therefore more reasonably be regarded as France’s saviour than Agnès. In characterizing Agnès’s legend as having been “propagated by French gallantry,” Paris pinpoints what had been at stake in the debate for Vallet de Viriville. For Vallet de Viriville, gallantry was the very essence of Frenchness. Vallet de Viriville made his argument for Agnès’s extraordinary influence in numerous articles.12 No document records Agnès’s year of birth, as we have seen. Nonetheless, the historian asserts without footnote or explanation, as if it were a proven fact, that Agnès was born in around 1409 or 1410.13 As for the date of the liaison, it is “a point that is equally important and delicate to establish.” No authentic document clarifies the matter in a direct and precise manner. The French chroniclers, either because they are ignorant or lack the authority to speak about it, retain an absolute and notable silence. Among modern historians, some date the liaison to 1426, others to 1444. The first hypothesis is based on nothing and must be rejected. The second seems equally inadmissible to me.14

Vallet de Viriville asserts that the liaison between Agnès and Charles VII must have begun in about 1435, observing that René of Anjou visited the king at different points before he sent Isabelle to Naples to rule on his behalf in 1435, which would have offered Agnès several opportunities to meet the king and be seduced by him. Further supporting his argument, he claims, are the birth dates of Agnès’s daughters, the first of which he gives as 1434, based on the research of Joseph Delort. He admits that Delort does not specify his sources.”15 Still, based on nothing except Delort’s assertion, he concludes that the dates are probable. Vallet de Viriville does not confine himself to dates, but fantasizes about the effect that Agnès had on the king when he encountered her in the early1430s: He finally saw appear, in the person of Agnès, a woman more beautiful and eloquent than the others. In her graceful and tender features he undoubtedly recognized his own destiny, which had seemed until that point so severe and dark. Then, lending an ear to this sweet revelation, he began to move, as if his chest were suddenly equipped with a new heart, along the path the Providence had prepared.16

Ludovic Lalanne, still another Chartiste, offers a riposte to Vallet de Viriville in the journal Athenaeum in November 1855.17 Lalanne grants Vallet de Viriville that Agnès theoretically may have exercised influence over Charles VII, “although nothing proves 12  See especially Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 43–49. 13  Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 45. 14  Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 48. 15  Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 49.

16  Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 255. 17  Lalanne, “Un mot,” 1020.

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it,” but disagrees that she could have exercised her influence as early as Vallet de Viriville claims, because she could not have been born as early as 1410 or arrived at court by 1435. To estimate her birthdate, Lalanne cites chronicler Thomas Basin, who claims that she died in the “flower of her youth” in 1450. A woman of forty, Lalanne asserts, could not be described in such a way. Moreover, Lalanne continues, Basin dates the beginning of the relationship to the time just after the truce with the English, which would be 1444. This means that the relationship lasted six years, given Agnès’s death in 1450, which comports with Du Clercq’s statement “she did not last long and died.”18 The chronicler would not have described a relationship of some fifteen years in that way. And, had she been around by 1435, surely she would have left some trace. Vallet de Viriville responds in the next issue of Athenaeum and continues the discussion in numerous other journals. To defend the early birth date, he cites an unedited document citing an unnamed “history buff ” who in 1778 (Vallet de Viriville admits that the date is a bit late, but makes no apo­logy for citing a source impossible for anyone else to hunt down and verify) had visited the abbey of Jumièges and learned from a register there that Agnès was forty when she died. This would give her a birth date of roughly 1410.19 Like Lalanne, Vallet de Viriville points to Du Clercq for evidence, but he chooses a different passage. Du Clercq, he notes, claimed that Charles VII had led a very holy life before making peace with the Duke of Burgundy, a reference to the Treaty of Arras of 1435. “But since making peace with the duke,” writes Vallet de Viriville, citing Du Clercq, the king had met a young woman called the “Belle Agnès.” Vallet de Viriville interprets the passage to mean that Charles VII took up with Agnès immediately after the Treaty of Arras.20 Fresne de Beaucourt lays out a thorough case for Agnès’s arrival at court in 1444, first in an article of 1866 and, later, in volumes three and four of the six-volume bio­ graphy of the king, the book to which Gaston Paris refers in the article cited above.21 He stresses that Agnès enters recorded history for the first time in Isabelle’s account, a document edited by Vallet de Viriville himself in an article of 1850. 22 The documents speak for themselves, Fresne de Beaucourt writes, urging historians to apply their prescribed method: We have to return directly to the sources and see what history, real history, teaches us about Agnès Sorel. Let’s leave aside the fantasies unworthy of being accepted as serious witnesses and turn to contemporary documents. Our job will be all the easier since the savant [Vallet de Viriville] who has long devoted himself to studying the problem— although his conclusions are different from our own—has set out precious bits of information.23

18  Du Clercq, “Mémoires,” 175.

19  Vallet de Viriville, “Agnes Sorel, son introduction a la cour,” 360. 20  Vallet de Viriville, “Agnes Sorel, son introduction a la cour,” 363. 21  Fresne de Beaucourt, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 204–24.

22  Fresne de Beaucourt, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 210. See also Fresne de Beaucourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:283–84. 23  Fresne de Beaucourt, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 210.



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Fresne de Beaucourt goes on to refute Vallet de Viriville’s dates, expressing incredulity like Lalanne that Agnès would have been described as young and beautiful by chroniclers had she been in her thirties. He insists that “more serious proof” is needed. He himself has searched but turned up nothing: “Before 1444, we are reduced to conjectures without foundation; after this date, we have positive data.”24 He does not deny her influence entirely. However, it is necessary to specify the nature of that influence. “We believe that it had to do only with court intrigue, with the domestic battles occasioned by the intractable character of the dauphin, with certain favours, certain rapid advancements, noted by contemporaries.”25

France’s Saviour: Nuancing Influence

We now know that Agnès was 26 or 27 when she died in 1450, which means that Fresne de Beaucourt is almost certainly correct about the date of Agnès’s arrival: she would have been about twelve in 1435, which seems too young to have exerted the sort of influence over the king that Vallet de Viriville wants to attribute to her. The debate about Agnès’s influence undoubtedly turns on historical verifiability. However, the historians’ dispute clearly exceeds their desire to discover the truth about Agnès’s dates, centring instead on what Agnès meant to France, that is, her significance as a cultural memory, which is entwined, in turn, with the issue of national identity. This becomes manifest when we consider the ways in which the two historians construct and value Agnès’s place at the royal court. Their constructions of her place there are closer than they believe, at least for the modern reader. The value they accord it, however, is different. Vallet de Viriville relates female power to gallantry and makes it an essential element of the development of the state, different from Fresne de Beaucourt, who relegates Agnès’s place to the intimate or domestic. For Vallet de Viriville Agnès and the king together created “a supreme union of two individual sympathies” that “became an essential cause of stability” and a “measure of the peace in the State (‘l’É� tat’).” The period of Agnès’s reign was one of the “calmest, most fecund and remarkable of the monarchy.”26 In contrast, the French monarchy as Fresne de Beaucourt imagines it held no place for Agnès as a stabilizing force. Agnès “exercised no political ascendant,” he argues. Any influence was “in the sense of intimate interaction…”27 Indeed, the late period at which she appeared at court, the nature of the events that took place during her short period of favour, the language of contemporaries, everything taken together proves it. It is therefore necessary to banish definitively from history, along with the fable of Haillan and Brantôme, the false tradition that honours her with the awaken-

24  Fresne de Beaucourt, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 222. 25  Fresne de Beaucourt, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 222. 26  Vallet De Viriville, “Etude Morale,” 264.

27  Fresne de Beaucourt, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 222.

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ing of Charles VII and attributes to her a share in the recovery of the French territory [from the English].28

And yet, Vallet de Viriville and Fresne de Beaucourt make essentially the same point: Agnès possessed a particular kind of power that worked within a system based on networks of unofficial influence. The latter deems Agnès politically insignificant for reasons that would likely lead modern scholars of medi­eval and early modern women to the opposite conclusion. Recent studies of mediating queens, female regents, and royal mistresses focus on the “ways that a range of women under the rule of a male sovereign interacted with power…in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas.” Power was exercised through a wide variety of forms: “letters, artwork, clothing, embroidery, or through their participation in gift-giving, fostering, patronage, diplomatic roles, and via social and communication networks.”29 Moreover, if Agnès’s clout is to be dismissed as “entirely intimate,” so too must be that of the royal mignons or favourites, where success depended on one’s ability to capitalize on the signs of the king’s favour. True, many of the king’s mignons were also military men, Charles VII’s close companions in the war against the English. But at court, they were the interface between the king and his people; as the pre-eminent gift giver, the king selected and cultivated his favourites by awarding them material goods and attention. An exclusive few, the king’s favourites acted as mediators between the public and the king. Among the favourites, the mistress enjoyed the most intimate access to and, therefore, potentially the greatest influence over the king of all. The contradictory characterization of the two historians arises from their conception of the relationship between the type of power that Agnès represents and the ways in which they conceive of national identity. The nationalism of Fresne de Beaucourt, who was himself a marquis, is of a piece with his forceful support of the monarchy against republicanism, with the way in which he imagines kingship. The defence that he raises on May 12, 1871, in the face of the defeat by the Germans and the establishment of the Paris Commune, reveals his fervent attachment to a self-sufficient, rational version of masculinity. In a pamphlet entitled “A tous les hommes de bonne foi, monarchie et république” he pleads for the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne, arguing that no other form of government but a monarchy is capable of maintaining order. The king, embodiment of the father principle, guarantees peace by keeping emotions in check and assuring objective justice: “The king of France is no ordinary leader; he is a magistrate, he is a father. The coronation imprints upon him a particular seal: his royalty is a sacred vocation. Superior to any law, he holds the law for inviolable, and he vows to observe it.”30 In contrast, the republic is ruled by the unruly emotions of the mob. Citing Guizot, Fresne de Beaucourt decries the chaos of democracy: “We must resist not only evil but the principle of evil, and the passions and ideas that give 28  Fresne de Beaucourt, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 224. 29  Broomhall, “In the Orbit,” 12.

30  Fresne de Beaucourt, “A Tous les hommes,” 10.



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birth to disorder.”31 There is no room in Fresne de Beaucourt’s France for a lover king, one who is motivated by illicit passion to recover his kingdom. Credit for any positive transformation the king may have undergone as he matured went strictly to the man himself.32 For Fresne de Beaucourt, someone planted Agnès in the orbit of the hard-headed realist Charles VII, hoping to lead him astray. Did “this prince, having reached the age of forty, betray the conjugal fidelity that he appears to have respected until that point and give in to the force of a violent passion?”33 No, Fresne de Beaucourt finds the affair more likely to have been the result of “some shameful intrigue, some shadowy conspiracy to slip a woman into the royal bed who could serve to advance ambitious designs.”34 Who engineered the scheme? According to Fresne de Beaucourt, the answer is Pierre de Brézé. Citing the mass of gifts that the king presented to Pierre in December 1444 and the deposition of Guillaume Benoist, Fresne de Beaucourt observes that “certain clues let us imagine that credit of Brézé and the favour of Agnès are not without a tight connection.”35 Vallet de Viriville died prematurely in 1868 and thus missed the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. His political leanings are elusive, because he scrupulously declines to comment on them (his obituary makes a point of mentioning that he was vitally caught up in the political turmoil but does not say on which side).36 In his history of public education in France, published a year after the revolution of 1848, he assures his readers of his political objectivity: I consider it my duty to make known here in a few words the goal that the author of this work has set for himself, and, for those who want to understand his intentions, the character that should be assigned to his work. Voluntarily removed from the active strife between parties, I have forced myself to maintain a perfect neutrality concerning the interests and especially the passions of the moment: given this dilemma, I have limited myself to the period before 1848.37

The approval he seeks, he continues, is that of “calm and sincere men, motivated by taste, the scientific spirit, who love and encourage with their favour all disinterested and impartial quests for the truth.” If it is impossible to discern his political leaning from these words, it is instructive to note that his father owned a tannery in Villepinte, a small town in the department of Seine-et-Oise, along with a store on the rue St.Denis in Paris in which he sold his wares.38 However successful his father’s business 31  Fresne de Beaucourt, “A Tous les hommes,” 23.

32  Fresne de Beaucourt, “Charles VII et Agnès Sorel,” 221. 33  Fresne de Beacourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:279–80. 34  Fresne de Beacourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:291. 35  Fresne de Beacourt, Histoire de Charles VII, 3:292. 36  Nicard, “Notice,” 10.

37  See his comments on the revolution of 1848 in Histoire de l’instruction publique, I. 38  Nicard, “Notice,” 4.

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may have been, the worlds within which Vallet de Viriville and the Marquis moved would have been utterly different. What is certain, however, is Vallet de Vireville’s appreciation of feminine influence.39 For Vallet de Viriville, the liaison with Agnès is the epitome of the gallant tradition, its most positive incarnation, and the reason for Charles VII’s successes: “Charles VII, as he changed with age, underwent the influence of natural law that guides our development,” he owns. And yet, improvement of the normal kind cannot explain his “amazing transformation.” This change, “by its sudden and radical character, seems to be the effect of a special cause and an exterior influence…”40 And that special cause was Agnès: “Her ascendance so to speak had no rival, no limit, no reserve: it extended to the greatest and smallest things.”41 Valet de Viriville’s Agnès and Charles VII participate in a gallant game that was part of a uniquely French tradition, one that changed the history of France for the better. Vallet de Viriville had earlier written on gallantry, tracing its history and showing its beneficial effects. In 1853, shortly before his widely circulated essays on Agnès and her career, he had published “De l’Amour et des sentiments chevaleresques, études historiques de moeurs” in which he argued that just the mention of the words “gallantry, cult of ladies” suffices to inspire a more or less vague notion of sentiments romantic and refined but nonetheless real; and this notion is tightly linked to our historical memories, to our national traditions. Such a belief, such an assumption is more than a simple patriotic prejudice: foreigners confirm that they too hold it.42

He explicitly states here what the article goes on to elucidate and what is also clear in many of his Agnès articles: gallantry is an important aspect of national identity, and it guarantees “moral preeminence.”43 Agnès is the reason for France’s recovery: “with Agnès [the king] discovered his honour and courage, and for this reason France owes her its salvation…”44

39  It is important to note his appreciation for women as intellectual beings. He affirms in his history of education that “a truth ever more accepted today is that the surest criterion for judging a society’s degree of civilization is to study the moral and intellectual condition that it attributes to women.” He regrets that the French have not prioritized female education:“From the humblest regions to the most highly elevated of this French society so celebrated for its gallantry and the influence of women, it appears that the universal doctrine of our ancestor regarding this problem has been limited to the program of Arnolphe in [Molière’s] ‘School for Ladies’:’To know how to worship God, love me, sew and spin!’” Histoire de l’instruction publique, 213. 40  Vallet de Viriville, Charles VII, 3:1–2.

41  Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 263. 42  Vallet de Viriville, “De l’Amour,” 191. 43  Vallet de Viriville, “De l’Amour,” 192.

44  Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 43.



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Agnès and the Tradition of the French Royal Mistress

Although kings throughout Europe have always had mistresses and, in some exceptional cases, powerful ones, the role is most closely associated with France. The existence of mistresses does not in itself create a tradition: traditions are produced by stories circulated in oral and written form, that is, discursively. The French royal mistress is a tradition in this sense. It is recognized as such, written about as a genealogy with a history, and populated with widely recognized figures: Agnès Sorel, of course, the Duchess of É� tampes, Diane de Poitiers, the Belle Corisande, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Henriette de Balzac d’Entragues, Louise de la Vallière, Madame de Montespan, Madame de Maintenon, Madame de Pompadour, Madame Du Barry. Already in the eighteenth century the royal mistress was recognized as a custom particular to France that contributed to the king’s grandeur, Frederick the Great expressing the perception when he includes her along with Versailles and the French army in his discussion of the ruinous proclivity of German princelings to emulate Louis XIV. He remarks in book ten of his Antimachiavel, first published in 1740, that “there is not a cadet of a cadet line who does not imagine himself as a sort of Louis XIV: he builds his Versailles, he has his mistresses, he leads his army…”45 A variety of social factors explain why the French were receptive to powerful mistresses including the attitudes toward women that we have been discussing and the inclinations of individual kings. Geo­graphy and dynastic stability are also factors: the French monarchy itself was longstanding. We find hints of the perception of the French royal mistress as a genuine tradition in the seventeenth century. The French king’s mistresses were celebrities, Louis XIV’s favourites followed in periodicals, novellas, and collections of stories, as we have seen. At least one collection of the gallantries specifically of the kings of France circulated. But most often tales of mistresses were grouped in collections containing stories of favourites from a variety of geo­graphical locations. Several collections to which I have referred serve as examples: Annales galantes by Marie-Catherine de Villedieu and the history of royal favourites by Anne de La Roche-Guilhem, as well as Dreux du Radier’s history of queens, regents, and concubines, which, although limited to France, includes women who served a variety of roles. However, during the nineteenth century, the French royal mistress begins to be written about as a phenomenon apart, assuming the rough genealogy with Agnès at its head that it retains today. Jean Nicolas Quatremère de Roissy’s 1825 Histoires d’Agnès Sorel et de Madame de Chateauroux ensconces these two favourites at the head of French tradition. Madame de Chateauroux, or Madame de Tournelles, was already recognized during her lifetime as a second Agnès Sorel, as we saw in Chapter Six. Quatremère de Roissy distinguishes them from other mistresses, all of whose behavior contravened morality. The title of mistress, even mistress of a king, evokes beauty and love, writes Quatremère de Roissy, but, at the same time, notions of seduction, ambition, and absolute control: 45  Frederick II, Anti-Machiavel, part 2, 6.

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No woman occupying the position of mistress can enjoy esteem or high consideration, however beautiful or powerful she may be. Envy and public hatred always dog the favourites of the king, because we attribute to them the faults of the royal lovers they fill with passion and master. Nonetheless, occasionally women who arrive at the highest level of favour by the charm of their faces and wit have been able to overcome through their great merits the irregularity of their situation and the outrage of their weakness.46

Agnès Sorel and Madame de Chateauroux were these exceptional women. The 1826 work of A.H. Chateauneuf ’s Favorites des rois de France: depuis Agnès Sorel, d’après les sources les plus authentiques brought an English point of view to bear on French royal mistresses, all the better to appreciate them. Chateauneuf discusses holders of the position in chrono­logical order, beginning with Agnès. In the preface to the second edition, the author reveals the disapproving English perspective on the tradition, recounting with delight the horror of an English friend, Milord G***, who goes on a tirade about the lax French attitude toward the kings’ favourites. The English kings had mistresses, proclaims Milord G***, but it was not the same thing! “Our sovereigns,” he snipes, “knew how to limit their prodigalities for their mistresses. Our parliament would not pay for them.” He has heard that royal mistresses have cost France ten billion pounds from Agnès to Du Barry. “The Parlement of Paris should have intervened…”47 He professes his astonishment that French historians seem so “calm in the middle of the intrigues that they recount.” What is the point of writing the Lives of Favorites except to teach a lesson? The subject seems frivolous at first glance, he admits, but it could be very useful if used as a counterexample. Chateauneuf defends Agnès against the diatribe, giving her a place of honour among the others. “You will permit that a Frenchman sees some difference between the loveable Agnès Sorel, who by a trait of character awakened the besotted soul of a king happily losing his kingdom, and the belle Ferronière…”48 Amours et galanteries des rois de France, by politician and author Edme-Théodore Bourg, enjoyed an astonishing popularity, with fourteen editions between 1830 and 1833, but it took a dimmer view of the tradition of royal mistress. Bourg writes if it is possible to assign the fundamental cause to an event as complicated as the Revolution of 1789, one of those that we could designate would be the unimaginable power exercised since François I by the courtesans of our kings. The Nation, numbed by its old prejudices and its old obedience, had suffered and funded the prostitutes of kings and the rich: she demanded an accounting.49

Chapter two purports to be a history of marriage, in which context the royal mistress represented an outrage. The French king eventually began to acknowledge his mis46  Quatremère de Roissy, Histoires, 8–9. The comparison between Agnès and Chateauroux became a commonplace. See Capefigue, Louis XV, 117, and Madame la Marquise de Pompadour, 32, and Bungener, The Priest and the Huguenot, 2:122; Grillon des Chapelles, Esquisses biblio­ graphiques, 3:85. 47  Chateauneuf, Favorites, xviii. 48  Chateauneuf, Favorites, xv.

49  Bourg, Amours et galanteries, 1:14.



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tresses publicly. At first this caused a great scandal, but the people of the court became more corrupt and disorder slid into the popular mores.50 The work tracks mistresses from Childeric on. When we arrive at Charles VII, his first favourite is not Agnès but Gérarde de Cassinelle, who was in reality associated with the dauphin Louis, prematurely deceased heir of Charles VI. Bourg claims to be interested in eliminating pure fantasy from the record, but, in fact, he includes fictitious stories, claiming that just as Isabelle is about to depart for Sicily, Agnès pretends to be sick and unable to travel in order to remain with the king. Still, he also discusses the relative value of different sources: In general, old writers, those who made collections of frivolous anecdotes about the kings and princes, neglected to cite their source, and I cannot say if the author of the Intrigues galantes de la cour de France, a work printed in Co­logne in 1698, imagined the intimacy of Agnès with Chabannes; it is as difficult to believe what this author writes about Chabannes as it is to believe what Dreux du Radier writes about [É� tienne] Chevalier.51

This does not stop him from citing Haillan and passing along the story of Agnès as saviour. The king was taken up with voluptuous pleasure in Loches and Chinon: However, the people began to show their contempt, accusing Agnès of being responsible for the unworthy laziness of the prince. The favourite felt the wrong that this was causing, and, attempting to arouse the king to glory, she accomplished what the queen had not been able to do.52

The will to truth was present. But despite his interest in verifying anecdotes, Bourg was no historian, untrained in evaluating sources. Vallet de Viriville turns his attention to these same questions, and, as we have seen, unearths many of the documents related to Agnès that today form the basis of scholarship on her. And yet, he offers no analysis beyond his intuition, expanding on the saviour legend without reinterpreting it or questioning the old anecdotes. His vision of Agnès and her influence will become a standard for interpreting her role. In addition, his treatment of Agnès vis-à-vis other royal mistresses is important for showing how the narrative with which we are familiar was cemented. For Vallet de Viriville, the honest and adoring Agnès cannot be compared to her successors. Later maî�tresses-en-titre, he writes, formed a sort of “bizarre and internal conspiracy” with their “obligatory entourage of cabals and intrigues.”53 Stranger to what we might call politics and enjoying nonetheless an immense, even absolute, influence over the king’s mind, she never highjacked government affairs in the disruptive way that would characterize the more or less hidden power of favorites-en-titre, and revealed her noble and generous influence only through good works. The period of six years [the second stage of her influence] was marked by the organization of a regular army; the re-establishment of order, which had been disturbed for almost one hundred years in the areas of justice, taxes, and public administration; the period ended with the

50  Bourg, Amours et galanteries, 1:26.

51  Bourg, Amours et galanteries des rois de France, 1:232–33. 52  Bourg, Amours et galanteries des rois de France, 1:223–24. 53  Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 263.

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recovery of Normandy; this period of six years is one of the most beautiful, greatest, and most memorable in the history of the monarchy. Nowhere, as far as we can see, did this unheard of elevation, this irresistible credit of Agnès, arouse scandal and indignation…54

He distances Agnès from the favourites who followed, claiming that she worked in an entirely different way. Nonetheless, I believe that we misunderstand this influence completely if, to make sense of it, we assimilate it to the famous reigns from later in the history of the French monarchy. Later, the favourites of the kings of France represented a second power within the State. Hidden power, impudent altogether and shameful; disquiet, agitated, invisible, a double fund of official politics. The influence of the maî�tresses-en-titre, with its obligatory parade of cabales and intrigues, formed a sort of strange internal conspiracy. In the conjugal home of the king, it was the struggle between the left and the right hand: this adultery of the “ruelle” was reborn in the political area, where the unfaithful spouse became the perjured king who betrayed in turn his ministers.55

He claims to base his assumptions on primary sources, writing that “the more closely we read the documents of this period, the more we realize that Agnès, until her last day, held Charles VII under the charm of a sort of cult and adoration.” 56 However, he cites nothing, leaving the modern reader to wonder what in the many documents that he provides in his articles led him to his conclusion? It seems doubtful that Agnès ever exercised influence to the degree of her most powerful successors. And yet, if she wielded political power, surely it was precisely through the same mechanisms that Vallet de Viriville disparages.

Agnès and Contemporary Debate

Beyond the interest for specialists in women of late medi­eval Europe, Agnès’s afterlife is part of the broader history that informs recent intense debates in France over the veil and the #metoo movement. At stake in these debates is how to remember the venerable French tradition of gallantry. A number of public figures have lately characterized critiques of the tradition as assaults on French identity. Despite his light tone, historian Alain Viala is perfectly serious when he underlines the significance of the issue in his Modern Humanities Research Association centenary lecture of November 2018: France is today under pressure, from a large and thorny bundle of serious issues, and of a very varied nature. Among these, and greater than Monsieur Macron’s lack of popularity or Monsieur Melenchon’s aggressiveness, greater even than Brexit (hard or in name only), there is—right at the heart of the mass of problems—the “Galanterie française.” For more than a year now, every month, even every week there is a new episode of the “Querelle de la galanterie française:” the Quarrel of French Gallantry.57

54  Vallet de Viriville, “De l’Amour,” 379–80.

55  Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 263. 56  Vallet de Viriville, “É� tude morale et politique”, 263.

57  Viala, “La galanterie française.” See also Viala, “La galanterie est un ensemble vaste, mouvant, contradictoire.”



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The quarrel has been in full swing for several years, as even a cursory reading of news magazines and on-line publications reveals. Some denounce gallantry as a mask for sexism.58 But others offer fulsome support. In an article published in 2016, Bérénice Levet defends the tradition, regarding the 650-some cases of sexual assault against women in Co­logne on New Year’s Eve 2015 from the perspective of a lack of gallantry. Gallantry protects women from such outrages. European civilization, she writes, is a civilization where life is good for women. The exactions of New Year repel us, revolt us, in and of themselves, but we need to reject them all the more forcefully because they are a crime against our mores, customs cut from the cloth of equality and liberty, against our mingling of the sexes. Men have been “polished” by women, they have learned to control the desire that the opposite sex inspires in them, to approach women indirectly. They do not demand that the object of their desire cover herself from head to toe to prevent them from surrendering immediately to temptation, they have learned the rules of gallantry.59

For some French feminists, gallantry affords women a particular type of power along with a relationship based on happy complementarity, as opposed to equality between the sexes. Mona Ozouf refers to this relationship as the “French singularity”; Philippe Raynaud speaks of the power it affords as a “particular form of equality”; for Irène Théry, it is “feminism à la française.” 60 In L’Identité malheureuse, Alain Finkielkraut uses the “French concept of interaction [“commerce”]” between the sexes to explain the logic that regards wearing a headscarf as an affront: French social life is premised on direct interaction between men and women, faces uncovered. “France is the only western country to sense the veil as a problem, and it is alone in forbidding it in schools,” he concedes. But the importance that the French place on this unique style of gendered interaction along with the long history of this type of interaction means that the veil, which overdetermines sexual desire as illicit, is incompatible with a defining characteristic of French social life.61 Or, as Claude Habib writes, the interdiction [against the veil] becomes understandable when we return to the backstory of the gallant tradition, which presupposes that women be visible, and, more precisely, happily visible, taking pleasure in being visible…Wearing a veil is a sign of chastity, which means the interruption of gallant play and even the definitive impossibility of it. A

58  See, for example, Aragon, “La galanterie ‘à la française’ est-elle une forme déguisée de sexisme?”; Sinard, “La galanterie depuis le XVIIe siècle.” 59  Levet, “É� vénements de Co­logne,” 48.

60  Ozouf uses the expression to refer specifically to the French relationship between the sexes in Les Mots. The particularity of the French relationship between the sexes is the product of an alliance between the memory of the “happy interaction between the sexes” (“commerce heureux entre les sexes”) initiated by the aristocratic world, on the one hand, and the reality of extreme democracy, on the other. In French society, she explains, equality between the sexes is taken for granted. However, this does not exclude the prizing of differences, which can be experienced without anxiety and employed with happiness, by playing with the resources of seduction and the ambiguity of love relationships (395). Raynaud, “Les femmes et la civilité,” 182; Chemin, “Le ‘féminisme à la française,’selon la socio­logue Irène Théry.” 61  Finkielkraut, L’Identité malheureuse, 51.

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veiled woman tacitly affirms that all men are a danger…The veil interrupts the circulation of coquetry…62

Similarly, the anti-#metoo manifesto signed by one hundred prominent French women, celebrities, and intellectuals alike, and published in Le Monde in January 2018, made its argument against the #metoo movement in terms of gallantry. The manifesto evokes its loyalty to the long tradition in its first lines: although rape is undoubtedly a crime, coming on to a woman is not, nor is “gallantry a macho attack.” Women can be both the equal of men at work and their sexual object in private, the manifesto affirms. It then denounces, among other things, the refusal on the part of the #metoo movement to validate a woman’s choice to enact her sexual difference: “A woman can, in the same day, lead a professional team and enjoy being a man’s sexual object, without being a ‘whore’ or a vile accomplice of the patriarchy.” Agnès is the prototype of this variety of female power, that advocated by the gallant tradition and defended by the anti-#metoo manifesto. A flurry of docu-fictions featuring Agnès as a gallant heroine has appeared since 2006 inspired by the discovery that she died of mercury poisoning, news that ushered in a new kind of celebrity for Agnès. I consider these films in the following chapter. Still, because they combine details of state-of-the-art forensic evidence with the myths about the ideal royal mistress, portraying Agnès as the very emblem of power based on sexual difference and complementarity, I bring this chapter to a close with a few words about one of the most recent of these docu-fictions, setting it into the context of the modern gallantry debate. An episode devoted to Agnès on the French popular historical television program “Secrets de l’Histoire,” first aired in 2014 and replayed in January 2021, frames Agnès’s story in the discourse made familiar by the recent gallantry debate. She was an “incredibly modern woman,” free, both sexually and intellectually, beautiful, ambitious, and generous. As for her significance to France, she transformed the king, exhorting him like Jeanne d’Arc to fight the English and playing a decisive role in his victory. As one of the episode guests affirms, “She still holds a unique place in the history of France.” Another stresses the role of Agnès in the construction of national identity, explaining that “modern France is born at this time with women like Agnès Sorel who add the basis of everything that we believe ourselves to be, in the form of a taste for refinement and luxury, but also courage.” The guests, who include not only popular historians but also at least one renowned scholar, make some odd claims: Agnès appeared at court in gold armor encrusted with jewels; Agnès, fearing the ascendance of her cousin Antoinette over Charles, was horrified to learn that she was about to have a fourth child because it might ruin her figure. But much of the episode is dedicated to recycling the saviour narrative, presenting it as if the information were historically verified, with the guests offering loud, enthusiastic endorsements of the affair as both wildly erotic and beneficial to France. It should be noted that the guests are not young and therefore perhaps not 62  Habib, Galanterie française, 412–13.



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representative of the French public; moreover, “Secrets de l’Histoire” itself has been much criticized for its emphasis on royalty and the peculiar version of history it presents.63 Nonetheless, the sheer delight with which the guests recount again and again Charles VII’s seduction of the strategically resistant young woman (“she was not just any servant but a woman who knew how to impress”) bears witness to the durability of the myths—of Agnès and gallantry—and the intensity of feeling they still arouse, shedding light on why the quarrel that Viala describes remains so lively. The figure of Agnès that emerged between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries offers a privileged perspective from which to consider the long history of recent debates over gallantry and reflect on why many in France continue to value the particular style of status and power that she represents as an integral and, for some, defining aspect of French identity.

63  See, for example, the online critique of Blaise Magnin, “‘Secrets d’histoire,’le magazine royaliste de France 2?” “But to endlessly dissect customs and usages, the states of mind and the libido of the kings and queens, mostly to swoon over their good taste, their grandeur, their courage or their lucidity, denotes a conception of history and the social world that is very partial, to say the least, and so depoliticized that it becomes…very political!” Magnin, “‘Secrets d’histoire,’ le magazine royaliste de France 2?” Acrimed, July 21, 2014.

Conclusion

AGNÈS SOREL, MODERN CELEBRITY At first glance,

tediously detailed forensic evidence related to a murder case would seem unlikely to excite a popular audience. Not so, writes television critic Jack Seale: “If you slow a true-crime documentary right down so you’re lingering obsessively on every detail of the case, it’s not boring; it’s fascinating, because the significance of each small development is highlighted.”1 True-crime murder has entranced audiences for centuries now. But this new variation, with its emphasis on laboratory analysis of trace evidence—clues often barely perceptible to the naked eye like hairs, skin fragments, fibres—has in recent decades developed a mass following, growing into a wildly popular genre in print, on television, and, now, in podcast series. When the news broke in 2005 that Dr. Philippe Charlier and his team had undertaken a project to exhume and examine the remains of Agnès Sorel, a ready-made public welcomed the story. Six months of testing confirmed or revealed several important facts: Agnès’s age at the time of death, the number of her pregnancies, and the impossibility that her last baby survived more than a few hours. Feeding the inevitable fascination for murdered beautiful young women, the findings also revealed that Agnès had died of an overdose of mercury so enormous as to exclude the possibility that her doctor could have administered it by accident. The findings have since been published in a variety of genres, written, electronic, and audiovisual, and incorporated into new scholarly work. Moreover, they have inspired a series of documentaries, docu-fictions, and semi-fictionalized murder mysteries based on Agnès’s life and death. Although the suspicious circumstances of her sudden demise have attracted attention since shortly after the event, details of the lab tests proving that she died by poison brought an attention so avid that it seems appropriate to claim that Agnès has reached a new stage in her post-mortem celebrity. In what follows I lay out the findings of Charlier and his team to integrate them into the narrative about Agnès. But I begin by examining what we know of the chain of custody associated with her remains, because whether they are actually hers is a question of the utmost importance. Before her tomb was moved in 1777, her remains were inspected, placed in an urn, and replaced in the tomb. When the tomb was destroyed during the French Revolution, the urn was stored for several years before being returned to the restored structure. Do the remains examined by Charlier belong to Agnès?

Agnès’s Remains and the Chain of Custody

Legend holds that the canons of the collegiate church of St. Ours of Loches petitioned Louis XI to move Agnès’s tomb. Positioned in the very centre of the choir, the structure left only three feet free on either side, forcing the three priests to skirt it clumsily 1  Cited by Mullan, “How We Got Hooked on Grisly True Crime.”

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while they were saying mass and often catching and ripping their garments on its various protuberances. It also made their passage back and forth from the sanctuary to the choir unwieldy.2 Louis XI famously rejected the request, or, more accurately, he is said to have told the canons that they could move the tomb as long as they repaid all the money Agnès had left them.3 The canons tried again to have the tomb moved under Louis XV. They had just spent a significant amount to decorate the church, and they wished to transfer Agnès’s tomb from the choir to a lateral chapel, where it would be equally visible but out of their way. The request, presented at Versailles on Christmas 1772, bears the response that the king scribbled in the margin after informing himself about Agnès: “Nothing. The tomb to be left where it is.”4 The canons reappeared with the same request in 1777 under Louis XVI, perhaps encouraged by the new king’s apparent lack of interest in mistresses. This time the king did “not disapprove at all of the transfer,” wrote the king’s secretary of state, Amelot, to the Archbishop of Tours, but he demanded that it be carried out with “as little disturbance and as much decency as possible” and that the remains be placed in a spot as good as the other.5 In a letter of the following day, the Archbishop of Tours told the canons to make the transfer behind closed doors and engage a notary to create a report on what was found inside the casket.6 This notary report represents the first step in verifying that the remains examined by Charlier belonged to Agnès. According to the report, the burial vault was pierced to access the three embedded (and rotting) coffins. Within the innermost coffin was found “the lower jaw, the two maxillary bones of the lower jaw with the teeth well preserved, the hair absolutely healthy like that of a recent cadaver, and the rest of the body in ashes…The said bones, hair and ashes were carefully gathered and placed in an urn, a clay pot covered with brick, and transferred in a procession to the tomb.”7 A complaint was filed that during the transfer, a long and tiresome process, a young man had entered, and in full sight of the priests, stirred Agnès’s ashes with his foot and made off with most of her hair and part of her jaw.8 However, the complaint was indignantly disputed by crown prosecutor Potier de la Berthellière: in fact, the hair had been cut off by the attending doctor for conservation while the other remains had been placed in an urn and set in the mausoleum. Moreover, in response to the 2  For a map showing the location of the tomb see Blieck, “Le tombeau d’Agnès Sorel,” 28.

3  Gaguin, Les Croniques de France, 188v. For the information on Agnès’s exhumations here and following see the documents edited by Champion, Dame de Beauté, in his pièces justificatives, here 197–98; Blieck, “Le tombeau d’Agnès Sorel,” 27–33; the entry for Loches by Dufour, Dictionnaire historique, 185–91; and Bosseboeuf, “Le tombeau d’Agnès Sorel,” 119–27. 4  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 92; Bosseboeuf, “Le tombeau d’Agnès Sorel,” 124. 5  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 199, citing Archives d’Indre-et-Loire, G. 20s.

6  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 199, citing BNF, Collection Joly de Fleury 478, fol. 278.

7  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 200, citing Archives d’Indre-et-Loire, G. 295. Presumably they also found the rest of the skull, because its absence is not remarked upon; also, as we will see, it is mentioned in later reports; see Champion, Dame de Beauté, 204. 8  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 200, citing BNF, Collection Joly de Fleury 478, fol. 271.



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complaint, the hair had been recalled by the dean of the chapter, and the doctor had immediately handed it over in its entirety. Agnès then reposed peacefully until March 1793, when a group of revolutionaries came across her tomb on their way to the Vendée and, believing that it contained a saint, vandalized it with their sabers. Loches administrators recovered the scattered marble pieces and put them in storage, according to a report of 1796 by president of the Loches municipal assembly Jacques-Pierre Gaboré; as for the urn with its bones, the report explains that following the destruction of the tomb it was buried in the church cemetery.9 According to a local tradition, representative for Seine-Inférieure Pierre Pomponne Amédée Pocholle opened the urn and helped himself to some hair and teeth in 1795.10 Pierre Champion disputes this, however, based on a letter from Gaboré defending Pocholle. 11 In 1801 Prefect of Indre-et-Loire General FrançoisRené-Jean de Pommereul decided to have the tomb restored, sending for the urn to be deposited at the Sous-préfecture until it could be housed in the refurbished tomb. In a document of 1805 ordering the work, Pommereul justifies the expensive restoration, calling Agnès the “only mistress of our kings who deserved the recognition of the patrie, requiring as the price of her favours the expulsion of the English from France.” 12 Sculptor Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet received the commission to repair the shattered gisant, and in 1809 Agnès’s urn was placed in the newly restored tomb, itself now located in the royal lodgings in Loches, in the tower where she and the king were reputed to have trysted. There she remained until 2005 when she was transferred back to the church, at which time the General Council of Indre-et-Loire commissioned an examination of her remains with the triple objective of guaranteeing that they did indeed belong to Agnès Sorel, and, if so, determining her state of health and cause of death.13 The chain of custody is indeed tenuous. But, as I explain in the following section, the remains tested by Charlier and his team yielded results compatible with what was already known of Agnès—besides the date of bones and age, the teeth reveal the correct number of pregnancies, and the hair fits descriptions of Agnès’s. It is also important to keep in mind that disturbances to the remains involved not the addition but removal of certain pieces, to be exact, hair and teeth. It seems unlikely that someone would have removed Agnès’s remains and replaced them with the skull, bone pieces, and putrefied tissues belonging to a different fifteenth-century woman who shared all of Agnès’s major characteristics, including three pregnancies and death at the age of twenty-four to twenty-seven. Such a thing is theoretically possible, but why would someone carry out such a scheme? In any case, there are no contemporary accusations of such a substitution. 9  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 135–36. 10  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 95. 11  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 95

12  Champion, Dame de Beauté, 205. 13  Charlier, “Vie et mort,” 1734.

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Forensic Details

For those interested in detailed forensic reports, information on the remains and tests run on them are readily available. To bring this study of Agnès to a close, however, only a few points about the examinations directly related to the questions raised throughout are necessary to review. On scanning and then opening the urn, the team discovered putrefied material and small pieces of bone deposited in four levels corresponding to the movements of the shovel that had transferred Agnès from her casket to the urn. Clinging to the skull with its partially attached broken jaw were bits of eyebrow, skin, and fibre. Head hair and hairs from the pubic region and armpits were also discovered in the urn. In addition, Charlier describes assorted mummified body parts. Although all the teeth had been extracted from the jaw, the team discovered seven detached teeth in the urn. The lack of wear on the teeth along with the absence of vertebral arthritis suggested an age of twenty to thirty; a closer examination of the teeth yielded an average from twentythree years and nine months to twenty-seven years and nine months.14 The rings of dental cement on the teeth confirmed three pregnancies, the fourth pregnancy being too recent to have caused a new ring.15 The bones were dated with carbon-14 to verify their date.16 The most striking discovery, of course, was that the Dame de Beauté died of a massive overdose of mercury. A test on some of the different types of hairs found inside the urn showed an enormous level of mercury concentrated within them.17 Mercury on the outside of the hair would have indicated that the metal had been absorbed from an exterior source, say, the urn, but such a concentration inside the hair could only have come from ingestion. Roundworm eggs were discovered in the putrefied matter, along with male fern pollen, a common cure for worms. That mercury was a common cure for worms suggests one reason that Agnès might have been prescribed mercury. But the normal dose was the size of the head of a pin, usually taken in a crumb of bread. Agnès would have needed to swallow something like a teaspoon, ten to one hundred thousand times the normal dose, to account for the level of mercury in the hairs.18 As Charlier points out, a doctor can always make a mistake: he might double the dose, for example. But to give a patient 10,000–100,000 times the dose is unthinkable, a “monstrous error.”19 The team also eliminated the possibility of long exposure in the form of cosmetics containing mercury as a cause of death. The extremely high level of mercury in her hairs, Charlier writes, “is not compatible with a long survival, and the poisoning 14  Charlier, When Science Sheds Light, 102. Charlier details the examination in “Les dents,” 1512–513. 15  Charlier, When Science Sheds Light, 103. 16  Charlier, “Vie et mort,” 1735.

17  Charlier, “L’empoisonnement de la Dame de Beauté,” 108, for the types of hair tested. 18  Communication with Professor Charlier of November 22, 2014.

19  See the docu-fiction, Label Histoire no. 11, “Le décolleté d’Agnès Sorel est-il vraiment un poussé au crime?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ1OxA9pL_g. Charlier makes the assessment at 13.37.



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would have been acute, preceding death by 48 to 72 hours.”20 How could the mercury dosage have been so grossly miscalculated, especially given that Agnès was probably attended by Robert Poitevin, the king’s own doctor and a highly esteemed and trusted member of the royal coterie?21 Was she deliberately poisoned? The dauphin remains a prime suspect among modern followers, and a jealous Antoinette de Maignelais has also been proposed, as we will see. Regarding a potential killer, I would draw attention to one of Charlier’s findings as particularly significant for theories about a murder. As the “pluridisciplinary study” that brought twenty-two passionate scientists together for a period of six months approached its conclusion, Charlier writes that “one of the most troubling discoveries was probably several bones from a foetus of seven months.” 22 This can only be the child that Agnès did not bring to term. It is not clear whether the baby was stillborn before the fatal dose or died with its dying mother of the poison, but, as Charlier explains, in the fifteenth century, a baby so premature would not have been viable. The theory that the doctor Robert Poitevin poisoned Agnès either working singly or at the instigation of the dauphin has recently been proposed, the scientific team noting their suspicion of him: He cared for Agnès and was one of the three executors of her will. Because of his profession, he frequented the “Simples,” the apothecary gardens where medicinal plants were found. He had the power to transform a drug into poison.23

In other publications, Charlier refuses to speculate on the murderer, leaving that to historians. Still, he observes that Poitevin would have been the best-placed to carry out the deed.24 But was Poitevin even present at Agnès’s deathbed? There is no direct evidence, even though Agnès names him in her will as an executor, along with Jacques Cœur and É� tienne Chevalier. Still, he must have been present. Jacques Cœur was accused (although not convicted) in 1451 of poisoning Agnès, and one of the extracts from the trial collected by Cœur’s children to exonerate him records that Poitevin testified at the trial. This means that Poitevin was with Agnès when she died: why else would his testimony have been sought? Poitevin’s testimony was crucial to proving the innocence of Cœur, according to his children, in their document summarizing the main points of the trial. The trial papers fill six enormous books, they write, so they have extracted the most salient points,25 one of which is Poitevin’s testimony, that is, that Agnès could not have been poisoned because she had given birth to a live child who lived six months. Poison would have 20  Charlier, “Qui a tué,” 259.

21  On Poitevin see Vallet de Viriville, “Notes bio­graphiques sur Robert Poitevin,” 488–99, and Robert Favreau, “Robert Poitevin,” 141–51. 22  Charlier, “Vie et mort,” 1737.

23  Charlier, “L’empoisonnement de la Dame de Beauté,” 109. 24  Charlier, “Qui a tué,” 262.

25  Clément, Jacques Cœur et Charles VII, 2:333, pièces justificatives.

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killed the child as well as its mother; hence, Agnès could not have died of poison.26 The Cœur family naturally would have wanted to prove that the baby had lived in order to clear Jacques. But what they write about Poitevin’s testimony must be true: it could have been easily verified. Whether or not it is true that the baby was born living (the baby could have been born before administration of the poison), Poitevin is clearly lying when he claims that the child lived for six months, as the bones of the seven-month foetus buried with Agnès demonstrate. Why would Poitevin make a claim under oath that he knew to be false? He seems on the surface an unlikely assassin. And yet, if outwardly he appears to have led an exemplary life, he may have felt that the king was compromised by his mistress and undertaken to kill her when she was ill and pregnant, because his act would have gone undetected. Moreover, in addition to serving as the king’s primary doctor, he also served the dauphin in the same capacity after the latter’s succession (he was the “premier phisicien des Roys Charles et Louys”).27 Perhaps he colluded with the dauphin. Although lacking detailed knowledge of how Poitevin thought of Agnès—he may have been appalled at the king’s devotion—we know that he lied in claiming that Agnès’s baby had lived and that he later served the dauphin. Modern historians have tended to dismiss the possibility that Agnès was murdered out of hand, guided perhaps by modern skepticism about conspiracy theories. And yet, several members of different factions associated with Charles VII had been assassinated over the years, and other royal mistresses had been murdered. A priori the case looks too much like a murder simply to dismiss the possibility. A female political adviser and mistress to the king, a woman with powerful enemies, suddenly dies in the prime of life of a massive overdose of a drug used therapeutically only in miniscule doses. Were a public figure to die today from ingesting 100,000 times the normal dose of, say, morphine, the case would be treated as a potential assassination. It is hard to imagine on what ground we should dismiss the possibility of murder in Agnès’s case. Still, given the current state of knowledge we can only speculate who might have done it. A series of recent true-crime novels and docu-fictions, documentaries that include re-enactments of key scenes, invite the public to do just this. To mention only a few, Mireille Lesage’s Agnès Sorel posits an affair between Pierre and Agnès and makes Antoinette Agnès’s killer. In René Maury’s Agnès Sorel assassinée, Jacques Cœur murders Agnès who is pregnant with his child, fearing the king’s wrath.28 Turning to film, in addition to the episode of “Secrets de l’Histoire” devoted to Agnès that I discuss in Chapter Six, numerous works sensationalizing the narrative to greater or lesser degrees have appeared since shortly after the news of Agnès’s probable murder first broke. In Dominique Adt’s prize-winning “L’affaire Agnès Sorel” of 26  Clément, Jacques Cœur et Charles VII, 2:334–35, pièces justificatives.

27  See Vallet de Viriville, “Notes bio­graphiques sur Robert Poitevin,” 496. It must also be noted that Chevalier worked for Louis XI, as did many of Charles VII’s former officers. 28  In addition, see Lemaire, Qui doncques a tué Agnès Sorel?; Gersal, L’Énigme du masque de fer; and “Poisoning Agnès Sorel,” adapted by Eleanor Herman from her 2018 book, The Royal Art of Poison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul.



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2006, Charlier introduces paleopatho­logy, the new pluridisciplinary field he helped to found, which uses medicine for anthropo­logical and archaeo­logical goals. The focus of the film is scientific, with the principal doctors and scientists involved in the investigation explaining their findings and leading the audience inside the various laboratories where they carried out the work. Supplementing the scientific reports, a set of experts discusses Agnès’s career, asserting the unsupported claims common in popular history: one historian, describing the negative public impression of Agnès, refers to a fictitious entry into Paris, the king riding into the city on horseback. Riding along beside him in a magnificent carriage, who do we see? The mistress of the king! As for Agnès’s death, Charlier affirms that it was not likely to have been an accident. The experts then return to consider the suspects. Any one of the captains affected when Agnès was put in charge of a military stronghold might have been sufficiently disgruntled to seek the ultimate revenge. The dauphin is a possibility, too, but not a likely one. Certainly he eliminated his enemies, but the nobility tended to kill each other with noble arms, not poison. Antoinette? A rival but probably not an assassin. Poitevin had the means but… Both “Charles VII, Jeanne d’Arc, Agnès Sorel,” directed by Dominique Mougenot, Thierry Bruant, and Catherine Mignot in 2011 for the series “Les Rois de France,” and Label Histoire no. 11’s, “Le décolleté d’Agnès Sorel est-il vraiment un poussé au crime?”29 also combine documentary material featuring Charlier and his team with re-enactments of Agnès at court. Once again, the meticulously laid out forensic science is interwoven with popular historical versions of the romance: we are told, as if it were a fact, that the politically savvy Yolande introduced Agnès to Charles; that Agnès became a second queen; that the captains were irate at finding themselves distanced from the king by a little “péronnelle” (tootsie). Agnès, then, is back in the public eye. Even if we do not count the numerous Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr pages, advertisements, Instagrams, and magazine articles, it is clear that her legend continues to occupy a significant space in the modern imaginary, fascinating international publics. If we do count them, this royal mistress is astoundingly popular. In a 2018 post dedicated to responsible history, Rachel Moss notes that a thread about Agnès Sorel had been retweeted 53,000 times in three days. The problem, Moss continues, is that the thread is deceptive, introducing Agnès as a woman who had her gowns tailored to expose her “favourite boob.”30 Moss is certainly correct that the thread is deceptive. No historian believes that Agnès exposed her breast as a fashion statement. Beyond circulating false stories about historical figures, Moss protests that many of “these Sexy History threads” “flatten lived human 29  “L’affaire Agnès Sorel” must be rented, but “Charles VII, Jeanne d’Arc, Agnès Sorel” and “Le décolleté d’Agnès Sorel est-il vraiment un poussé au crime?” can be viewed free on YouTube:https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ1OxA9pL_g; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irxdmjBYbEQ

30  https://rachelemoss.com/2018/05/11/unsexy-history-writing-with-respect/?fbclid= IwAR3afNRm_ghiLERROdZMa4u6bF1TY-JzRAqkDrEIkVxr0xTd1VH2j4S1JAk. The interest generated by a tweet on Agnès’s breast is perhaps predictable in a society where Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction” during the American Superbowl halftime show created a moral panic among a good percentage of the population. The wardrobe malfunction even has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_show_controversy.

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experience of the past into entertaining anecdotes” and “ascribe modern motivations and desires to people (usually women) of the past, turning historical subjects into modern women in costume.” It is impossible to disagree with Moss. And yet, it is also impossible not to acknowledge that a celebrity like Agnès functions as a “symbolically powerful parable.” The mystique of her persona is too intense—it has always been too intense—to be distinguished entirely from the historical person that she was. What I would like to suggest, however, is that even as such legends flourish, historians should continue to carefully investigate the women of the past, providing critical accounts of their lives and the anecdotes associated with them that can serve as parallels, if not challenges, to the legends. A parable is not true. But it is not unimportant, because it relates a meaningful story about the culture that produces it. We can both acknowledge the parable that Agnès represents for what it is and appreciate her as a once-living woman, a figure of historical significance, who, excluded from representation in the symbolic systems of status of Charles VII’s court, nevertheless became a celebrity who continues to fascinate today.

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INDEX

Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. See Pius II Anjou. See Charles of Anjou, Isabelle (duchess of Lorraine and Anjou), Marie of Anjou, and René

Basin, Thomas, 12, 20, 21, 22, 62, 116 Beauvallet, Pierre-Nicolas, 65, 70, 131 Blieck, Gilles, 65 Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de, 10, 40, 87, 98, 105, 109 Brézé, Pierre de, 37, 39, 107 ally of Agnès, 13, 19, 30, 31, 43, 55, 56, 117, 119 involvement in Mariette plot, 54n116 object of plotted coup, 51 valued by Charles VII, 46, 55n120 Burgundy. See Isabelle of Portugal and Philip Cayot-Délandre, François Marie, 1 Chabannes, Antoine de, 26, 51–52, 56, 105, 123 Charles VII, 1, 17, 32, 35, 43–46, 60, 68, 105, 107 and the mignons, 56–58 begins affair with Agnès, 35–37, 114–16 excessive libido, 21 love for Agnès, 2, 21–23, 42, 91, 98 personality, 38–40 relationship with queen, 41–42 reputation, 38, 113 Charles of Anjou, Count of Maine, 25, 41, 45, 57, 107 coup to make favourite of Charles VII, 39 involved in plots, 43, 46, 51–52, 53 dismissed from royal court, 42, 50 Charlier, Philippe, 6, 32, 129–33, 135 Chartier, Alain, 79, 80n62 Chartier, Jean, 13, 20–26, 32, 36, 47, 60–62. 65, 98 Chastellain, Georges, 13n25, 20–21, 23–25, 32–33, 39, 57, 59n148, 79 Chateaubriand, François René de, 1

Chateaubriand, Francoise de Foix, Countess of, 84, 87, 91 Chateauroux, Marie Anne de Mailly-Nesle, Duchess of, 109, 121–22 Chevalier, Étienne, 2, 13, 57, 101n5, 108, 123, 134n27 commissions Melun diptych, 6–68, 72, 74–75 executor of Agnès’s will, 61, 73, 133 house in Paris, 55–56, 91 Cœur, Jacques, 13, 30, 55–57 executor of Agnès’s will, 61, 133 fall, 13, 133–134 Diane de Poitiers. See Valentinois Du Barry, Jeanne Bécu, madame, 10–11, 14, 66, 121, 122 Étampes, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, Duchess of, 2, 10, 17, 33, 99, 121 fall, 95 gallant tradition, 104 power relative to Agnès, 5, 42, 80, 81, 86, 94 Protestantism, 95 rise to power, 87

Fouquet, Jean, 5, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 102 François I, King of France, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 57, 80, 81, 83–92, 94–95, 103, 114, 122 Fresne de Beaucourt, Gaston Louis Emmanuel du, 30, 31, 50, 55, 57, 60, 113–20 Gaignières, François Roger de, 65, 70, 71, 78 Gisants, 62, 65, 70, 71, 78, 104, 108, 131

Henri II, King of France, 1, 94, 95, 98, 103 Henri IV, King of France, 5, 9, 99, 101, 107, 110

154

Index

Isabelle, Duchess of Lorraine and Anjou, 9, 22, 27–28, 35, 36, 37, 115, 116, 123 Isabelle of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy, 18, 23 Joan of Arc, 11, 36, 41 execution of, 36 paired with Agnès, 96–97, 104–5, 114–15 Jouvencel, 3, 31, 76 Jumièges, 22, 26, 29, 60, 61n162, 65, 72, 91–92, 98, 116

Lalain, Jacques de, 19 Lalanne, Ludovic, 113, 115–17 La Marche, Olivier de, 20–24, 39, 46, 56–57 Loches, 2, 28, 29, 37, 54, 60, 62, 65, 70, 72, 92, 98, 109, 123, 129, 131 Louis, dauphin of France. See Louis XI Louis XI, King of France, 13, 18, 24, 29–30, 31, 36n1, 45–46, 53, 91, 105, 117 and Agnès’s tomb, 129–130 flight from royal court to Dauphiné, 53–54 marriage to Marguerite of Scotland, 47, 49 relationship with father, 37–39, 47, 50, 51, 54, 61 rumoured to have poisoned Agnès, 25–26, 79, 133–35 rivalry with Pierre de Brézé, 43–44, 51–52, 54, 58, 59 Louise of Savoy, 5, 84, 86–87, 89–91, 94 Maignelais, Antoinette de, 13–15, 28n60, 57, 76, 78, 79, 94, 97, 105, 126, 133, 134–35 Marguerite of Scotland, dauphine of France, 36, 45 death of, 18, 30, 47, 50, 51 persecuted by Jamet de Tillay, 48–50, 58 relationship with dauphin, 44, 48, 49 Marie of Anjou, Queen of France, 18, 19, 28, 35, 36 attitude toward Agnès, 23, 80, 94 Charles VII’s attitude toward, 41–42 Mariette, Guillaume, 31, 53–55, 59 Melun diptych, 2, 5, 29, 33, 55, 66–74, 76, 78, 91–92, 93, 101–2, 104, 108

Paris, Gaston, 113–14, 116 Philip, Duke of Burgundy, 18, 40, 42, 44 Pius II, Pope (Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini), 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 30 Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de, 2n6, 10–11, 14, 66, 81, 109, 121 Praguerie, The, 27, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 46, 57, 114 Pringy, Jeanne-Michelle de, 11 René, Duke of Anjou, 19, 22, 27, 35–37, 41–42, 44, 48, 116 conflicts with Charles VII, 45–46 dismissed from royal court, 42, 50 involved in plots, 43, 46, 51–52

Sorel, Agnès, as post-mortem celebrity at royal court, 86–94, 96–99 as viewed by historians, 111–17 beauty of, 2, 21, 62, 79, 81, 82, 96, 104, 107, 112 children, 6, 31, 101 death of, 60–62 debate over birth date, 22, 115–16 Grand estate, 2, 21–23, 29 in court politics, 53–59 in gallant literature, 104–7 inspires the king to glory, 2, 3, 5, 6, 76, 96, 98, 112–17, 123, 126 Melun diptych, 2, 5, 29, 33, 55, 66–74, 76, 78, 91–92, 93, 101–2, 104, 108 memory curated by family 76–80 portrait in album of Louise of Savoy, 5, 68, 87–91, 96 portrait in the chateau of Bussy-Rabutin, 102 reputation, 1, 62, 66 rumoured to have been poisoned by the dauphin, 25–26, 79, 133–35 in docu-fiction, 126–27, 134–35 Sorel, Charles, 72, 88, 102, 104, 109 Steenackers, François-Frédéric, 1, 106n28 Tillay, Jamet de, 18–19, 42 favourite of king, 30, 43 persecution of dauphine, 47–51, 58 Tournelles, Madame de. See Chateauroux



Valentinois, Diane de Poitiers, duchess of, 1, 2n6, 5, 66, 84n18, 94, 99, 103, 121 black legend, 95 gallant tradition, 104 portrait in the chateau of Bussy-Rabutin, 102 power relative to Agnès, 5, 42, 80, 81, 94 Vallet de Viriville, Auguste, 14, 27, 29, 60–61, 113–24 Villequier, André de, 13, 14, 57, 76, 78 Antoinette de Maignelais, dame de. See Maignelais René de, 97 Yolande of Anjou, 35, 39, 41, 43, 135 relationship with Charles VII, 40, 42

Index

155