There remained to the condemned man but a single choice, inscribed by his judges: to be hanged, or to marry the maiden he had seduced. Yet he had taken holy orders. The second path was closed to him, leaving only the first open. In the tale related by Champagnac, the decree did not truly proffer two avenues of escape; rather, it set forth an alternative whereof one term was forbidden by law, and then waited for the prisoner to mount the scaffold.
Renée Corbeau dwelt in Angers. The chronicle names her the Belle Angevine by reason of her beauty, describing the throngs that gathered whenever she was known to pass through a church or along a public walk. Men offered her their fortunes and their hands, yet none, it seems, had touched her heart. This young woman appears at first enclosed by glances, yet utterly set apart from them: to be admired conferred no power over the choice of the man she was to marry.
In 1594, according to Champagnac, a gentleman from Séez arrived to study at the University of Angers. He, too, drew all eyes. He was called the handsome Norman, and the town burned to compare the two figures of whom so much was already spoken. The chronicle affirms that they were smitten at their very first encounter. They met in secret, despite the close watch of Renée’s parents. The student’s name has not come down to us. His face was renowned throughout the city, yet his identity remains a blank in the chronicler’s pages.
Their clandestine commerce endured until her parents surprised the young man in Renée’s chamber, whither he was wont to repair by night. According to Champagnac, he thereupon confessed that he regarded her as his wedded wife and consented without constraint to marry her. A contract was drawn up and signed with all haste. The promise assumed written form in the presence of the family, yet the marriage had not yet obtained the consent of the gentleman’s own kin. He returned to his native province to secure it.
His family refused. The chronicle does not resolve the motive: whether the inconstancy of youth, deference to parents who looked upon the match as a misalliance, or mere despair. The handsome Norman entered the ecclesiastical state and received holy orders. For Renée, the civil covenant no longer sufficed to shield her. Her father deemed that she had been abducted and dishonoured; he brought the matter before the criminal lieutenant of Angers and caused the seducer to be pursued. The legal vocabulary of ravishment transformed their private history into a criminal indictment.
The young man appealed to the Parlement of Paris. That high court confirmed the proceedings and returned, Champagnac reports, an arrêt sentencing him to be hanged unless he chose rather to marry Renée. The sentence appeared to leave him at liberty to redeem his pledge, but his religious vows had raised an impediment which the judges knew to be insuperable without a dispensation. The chronicler thus portrays a decree that sealed in advance the door of wedlock. The condemned man himself, we are told, sought not to excuse his fault, and prepared himself for death.
The chapel of the Palais-de-Justice became his final station. There the young man found a confessor; upon the square outside, the instrument of death was raised and the executioner stood waiting. The chronicle furnishes neither his name, nor the particulars of his examinations, nor any voice raised further in his defence. It places the Belle Angevine amidst the crowd, learning that her lover was about to be put to death. What she did thereupon is recounted as an irruption: she thrust her way through the archers and burst into the chamber where the magistrates sat.
Champagnac puts into her mouth an elaborate and lengthy oration. Renée recalled to the magistrates that they had deemed her rather unfortunate than guilty, yet warned them that the death of her lover would condemn her likewise to infamy. She reproached them with the fact that the remedy chosen to repair her honour would leave her alone with her shame. She demanded to suffer the selfsame punishment if the young man could not be pardoned. Then she pointed to another issue: the papal legate, hourly expected, might grant a dispensation permitting him to wed her. The young woman did not plead that the covenant be annulled; she demanded the means to render its fulfilment possible.
The speech, in Champagnac’s version, stayed the execution of the sentence. The magistrates ordered that the penalty be deferred so that the young man might apply to the ecclesiastical authority. This reprieve did not set him at liberty: it merely suspended the fatal hour. Renée had passed from the domestic chamber to the bar of justice, and her voice had altered the calendar without yet altering the decree.
The legate reached Paris. Champagnac identifies him as the prelate who would later reign as Leo XI; after conferring with the prelates and doctors of divinity of his retinue, he judged the condemned man unworthy of grace and refused the dispensations requisite for the marriage. Another door was shut fast. The grace solicited from the Church had failed, despite the intercession of great lords mentioned in the tale. Renée and the young man remained under the imminent peril of the sentence pronounced against him.
There remained only the recourse of a petition to the King. Henry IV then occupied the throne, according to the chronicle. Champagnac depicts him as a prince indulgent toward those faults to which love may prompt a man. The King received their plea and entreated the legate. This time, the papal authority yielded to royal solicitation and granted the dispensations. The possibility of marriage, denied a few lines earlier, at last became a reality.
This second supplication subtracted nothing from the original decree: it sought only a means to execute it without sending the young man to the scaffold. The impediment remained religious, and the two paths offered by the court remained unequal. If marriage were impossible, the gallows were presented by the text as an absolute certainty; if a dispensation were granted, the contract might yet be honoured. The chronicle thus narrows the fate of the lovers down to a single open decision, resting with an authority capable of permitting what the condemned man could not choose of his own accord.
The nuptials were solemnised. Renée followed her husband into Normandy, and, according to the chronicle, the pair lived there in exemplary concord. A story that began beneath the gaze of an entire city closes upon a retired existence, summed up in a single sentence of conjugal bliss. The text tells us neither how long the ordeal lasted, nor what became of the family, nor the true name of the young man. Its conclusion rests upon a religious authorisation obtained through the intervention of the sovereign, not upon a judicial decree revoking the sentence.
Champagnac concludes by observing that the memory of the Belle Angevine has almost faded away, even in Anjou, and that only faint traces remain amidst the dust of the court registry of Angers. Yet he reproduces not a single instrument from those archives. The narrative does not allow us to verify the details he ascribes to the contract, the decree, the stay of execution, or the dispensations. It offers an account handed down by a nineteenth-century chronicler, whose dialogues and dramatic scenes belong to his own art of narration. What must be retained together, without confounding the realms of record and romance, is the existence of this version and the resolution it presents: a threatening sentence, a suit before the legate, and grace at last secured through the King’s intercession.
At the centre of it all there remains a young woman whom justice claimed to protect even as it prepared the death of the man she loved. She parted the ranks of the archers, stood before the judges, and transformed her misfortune into a precise demand: that they grant the time and the dispensation required to make marriage possible. Renée’s eloquence may well belong to the craft of the chronicler who transmitted it; yet in this narrative, it was that eloquence which altered the outcome. The gallows stood waiting upon the square. The reprieve, and after it the supplication to the King, supplanted the hour of execution with the chronicle of a wedding.