Four councillors sought to mitigate the sentence of the Duke of Nemours; Louis XI dismissed them forthwith. In the royal missive cited by Champagnac, the sovereign did not merely contest a judgment: he suspected those who hesitated to punish of conspiring against his very person. The fate of Jacques d’Armagnac turned upon this profound mistrust. Captured at Carlat prior to his removal to Paris, the duke was immured within the Bastille. The chronicle depicts him enclosed in an iron cage, where the king reportedly commanded that he be interrogated, put to the question, and read his sentence.
The chronicle assigns no certain beginning of an indictment to this affair. It cites Voltaire, who concedes that the exact crime imputed to Nemours remains unknown. Certain historians, according to this passage, ascribed to him the design of seizing the king and slaying the Dauphin. Voltaire deemed such a plot implausible: the duke, having taken refuge far from the court, would have had to capture a sovereign master of his realm, and subsequently eliminate the son whilst sparing the father.
What the chapter asserts with greater clarity is the hostility of Louis XI toward the House of Armagnac and the duke’s transfer to Paris. The cage did not serve merely as a holding cell prior to an audience: the king allegedly demanded that the prisoner be questioned therein, subjected to torture within its bars, and there hear his judgment pronounced. The judicial apparatus thus bore down upon the man in the very confines where he was stripped of all liberty.
The selection of the judges likewise belongs to the chronicler’s account. Louis XI dispatched several magistrates to the Bastille, Philippe de Commines among them. Champagnac recalls Commines’s defection from the service of the House of Burgundy to that of the King of France, rendering a severe judgment upon him. The councillor who had passed from Burgundy into the royal retinue now found himself among those sent by the monarch to try his enemy. The commission repaired directly to the captive; the prisoner did not leave his cell to appear before them.
Another detail recorded by Champagnac illuminates the sovereign control exerted over the proceedings: the king reportedly altered the composition of the tribunal and the venue of the sittings on several occasions. Following the verdict, four councillors of the Parlement, whom the narrative describes as inclined toward leniency, were broken from their offices. The chronicler thus portrays the affair as a sequence of decrees wherein the status of the magistrates themselves could be remade at will, whilst the capital outcome remained firmly in the grasp of an authority that brooked no correction to its sovereign resolve.
Following the pronouncement of the decree, the duke was shriven in a chamber hung with black. Champagnac associates this solemn display with the funeral rites reserved for condemned princes, describing as an act of grace the permission granted to inter Nemours in the habit of a Cordelier friar. Yet the black hangings and the monastic vestment altered nothing of the scene’s grim reality: the prisoner kept in a cage, interrogated and tortured within that same cage, advanced toward his death amidst a rigorously orchestrated ceremonial.
The father’s demise did not terminate the misfortunes of his line within the chronicle. Champagnac records the confinement of his sons until the death of Louis XI, tracing their sufferings to a petition presented to the Estates-General following the monarch’s passing in 1483. He also transmits the dreadful image of the children stationed beneath their father’s scaffold. This scene belongs to the retrospective narrative he constructed; it must not be confused with eyewitness testimony collected firsthand. It would, nonetheless, enjoy an enduring literary posterity.
Casimir Delavigne seized upon it in his tragedy Louis XI. He lends voice to the young Nemours, whom Commines urges to renounce his resentment. The youth replies with the memory of the father he heard pacing, praying, and whispering the names of his sons. Here the theater provides an outlet for filial grief; it yields no fresh proof regarding the trial itself. The captivity had transformed into a dramatic scene designed to render forgiveness impossible.
The royal letter cited by the chronicler following the dismissal of the four councillors constitutes another element of this portrait. Therein, Louis XI complained that subjects of the Crown had sought to make “so cheap an account” of his royal person by diminishing the penalty incurred for lèse-majesté. He construed their moderation as proof that men still lingered who were ready to conspire against him. He announced the necessity of purging the court and enforcing an ordinance prohibiting any alleviation of penalties in such causes. The letter, as quoted by Champagnac, thus transformed a judicial disagreement over sentencing into a suspicion of treasonous conspiracy.
This document does not suffice to reconstruct the judicial dossier; it demonstrates, however, the rhetoric by which the sovereign vindicated his intervention. In his eyes, to mitigate the sentence was tantamount to placing his own life in jeopardy. The four councillors said to have favored a lesser punishment were stripped of their offices, and the chronicle links their fate to the royal determination to banish all indulgence from trials of high treason. The question of Nemours’s guilt, left unresolved at the opening of the account, is thus overshadowed by another dilemma: what discretion remained to the magistrates when the king treated clemency as a peril to his crown?
The duke was executed in 1477. The ruin of his house is equally legible in the fate of its possessions. The Bibliothèque nationale de France notes that a portion of the Armagnac family’s library was seized by Pierre II of Bourbon following this execution. These illuminated manuscripts were incorporated into a princely collection assembled through commissions, inheritances, gifts, and the spoils of war. What the chronicle terms the division of the spoils thus reached into private libraries: volumes passed into alien hands whilst their former masters forfeited their freedom or their lives.
At Moulins, the dukes and duchesses of Bourbon had, since the fourteenth century, amassed an opulent collection. The BnF preserves today a substantial portion of the Moulins volumes that subsequently entered the royal collections. This history of material goods does not recount the duke’s interrogations, but it renders visible that which the sentence set in motion: behind the prisoner stood a dynasty, ancestral inheritances, and estates awaiting partition.
Judges could be supplanted, councillors dismissed, and children kept in chains. In the missive preserved by Champagnac, Louis XI sought above all that none might lessen the penalty for lèse-majesté. Nemours obtained only the favor of being buried in a friar’s cowl. Royal clemency halted at the shroud of the dead; those who had sought to admit it into the judgment lost their offices for their pains.