He had been clad in the livery of the house where, perhaps, he first drew breath. At seven years of age, the child served as a page to the Count and Countess de Saint-Géran. They brought him up with singular affection, provided him with a careful education, and watched him grow beside them. To the world, he was the nephew of their majordomo. The Countess, who had once asked for her newborn child only to be denied it, loved this boy without yet having the power to bestow her name upon him.
The affair had begun long before his birth, in the matrimonial arrangements of two houses. The Marshal de Saint-Géran, widower of Anne de Tournon, had wed the widow of the Count de Longaunay. He had a son, Claude de La Guiche; she had a daughter, Suzanne. On the 17th of February 1619, the two children were wed. Suzanne was thirteen years old, Claude eighteen. The young husband thereupon departed for Italy. An alliance devised to consolidate two great fortunes was destined to wait long for its heir.
Upon the Marshal’s death, in 1632, Claude succeeded him in the governorship of the Bourbonnais. The years slipped by without progeny. The couple sought counsel of physicians, undertook pious pilgrimages, and continued to hope. Then, toward the end of 1640, Suzanne perceived the first signs of pregnancy. In the château of Saint-Géran, this expectation at last assumed tangible form: wet nurses were engaged; the Countess’s mother took up residence at her side.
On the 16th of August 1641, the pangs of labor overtook Suzanne during Mass, in the castle chapel. She was borne to her chamber. Her sister-in-law, the Marchioness de Bouillé, observed that too many persons crowded about the sufferer in the oppressive heat. The Count, Suzanne’s mother, and the rest of the company withdrew. The Countess’s chambermaids were likewise sent away. From that moment, in the judicial narrative recorded by Champagnac, the Marchioness, the two Quinet women, and the midwife formed the closed circle of the confinement.
Toward evening, the midwife prescribed a draught to bring rest to Suzanne. The lady sank into a deep slumber. Upon waking, she asked for her child. Her condition was such that she was persuaded she had been delivered; she was told that no birth had occurred. She insisted. The midwife thereupon promised that her delivery would take place during the day.
The morrow passed without any infant appearing. To the mother’s questions, the midwife now attributed the delay to the influence of the moon and advised physical exertion. The Countess was driven in a coach over rugged roads and across plowed fields. This ordeal yielded not the child she demanded. Another explanation soon replaced the earlier ones: certain women, it was said, believed themselves pregnant when they were not. Suzanne was urged to consign to the realm of mere illusion the months of waiting, the preparations, and all she had felt upon awakening.
The household resumed its course around this void. The parents were wealthy, surrounded by kin, attentively served; yet they had been unable to have a child shown to them or to obtain any clear account of its disappearance. For Suzanne, the bedchamber where so many had foretold a birth had become the place of an unyielding denial. Her grief endured for years, according to the chronicle.
It was into this very house that Beaulieu, the majordomo, introduced a young boy. He presented him as his nephew and godson, sought permission to rear him in the mansion, and obtained it. The child was approximately two and a half years old when he thus returned to the Saint-Géran household. The Countess took him into her affection and took him with her to Moulins. The Count shared this attachment. Both still believed him to be kin to their servant.
Beaulieu died in 1648. Champagnac describes a death clouded with suspicion, recording that the man had wished to beg his master and mistress’s forgiveness for a grievous wrong. Fearing to hasten his end, they did not go to receive his confession. The record thus preserves no complete deathbed avowal from the majordomo. Yet his death left beside the couple the boy he had placed there, while rumors began to spread concerning the birth of 1641.
Vague at first, these reports led the parents to investigate the events of that night. The midwife was arrested. Her denials and contradictions brought new facts to light. The inquiry threatened to implicate the Marchioness de Bouillé; the Count, wishing to shield his sister, diverted the prosecution in that direction, the chronicle relates. To acknowledge his son and to accuse his own flesh and blood became two courses exceedingly difficult to separate.
The pleadings, as summarized by Champagnac, reconstructed an organized abduction. The Marchioness, presumptive heir to her brother, was alleged to have seen in the pregnancy the ruin of her expectations. The Marquis de Saint-Maixant was said to have joined with her, aided by Beaulieu, the midwife, and the Quinets. A wound upon the infant’s cranium was presented as the vestige of an attempt to slay him at birth. The chronicle also offers an explanation for his survival: Saint-Maixant, it was conjectured, wished to retain a hold over the Marchioness. This latter motive remains mere conjecture, even in an affair so heavily freighted with accusations.
The path taken by the little boy grew clearer. Entrusted to Beaulieu and put out to nurse, he had been conveyed to Paris to the house of Marie Pigoreau, the majordomo’s sister-in-law. Baptized Bernard, he was subsequently placed at Torcy, in Brie. Pigoreau was alleged to have bestowed upon him the identity of one of her own deceased children before changing quarters. When Beaulieu brought him back to the Saint-Gérans, this fabricated past provided a substitute parentage sufficiently plausible to secure his admittance.
The Count and Countess formally acknowledged their son, styling him the Count de La Palice. But to bestow the name beneath their own roof was not enough to maintain it before the magistrates. The midwife was condemned to death at Moulins; she appealed the sentence and died in prison before the cause reached its conclusion. The Marchioness de Bouillé likewise died. Saint-Maixant died in the Conciergerie, where he was held on other charges. Several actors in the original drama had passed away, yet the succession aroused fresh resistance.
The Lady de Ventadour and the Countess du Lude challenged the young man’s status. According to the narrative, they encouraged Marie Pigoreau to declare herself his true mother. She who had reared him under another’s identity now came forward to claim that identity as her own. Suzanne found herself compelled to defend, against the assertion of a second motherhood, the child whose very birth had once been denied her.
Behind the two women lay substantial, material interests. If the boy belonged to the Saint-Gérans, his presence overturned the expectations of their collateral heirs. If Pigoreau prevailed, the youth reverted to being merely a child taken in out of charity, whom the Countess’s affection could never make an heir. Everything that had once seemed domestic and unremarkable—a wet nurse, a baptism, a name given to an infant—now weighed heavily in the balance of the estate.
Pigoreau fled during the course of the proceedings. On the 5th of June 1666, the Parlement rendered its final decree: the young man was declared the legitimate son of the Count and Countess de Saint-Géran. Pigoreau was condemned to be hanged in effigy. Of this sentence, the chronicle records no actual execution.
Suzanne was by then a widow. She had endured the locked chamber, the denial, the return of a little boy under an assumed name, and the fierce opposition of kin whose fortunes were placed in jeopardy. Nearly five-and-twenty years had been required for the birth of the 16th of August 1641 to receive definitive recognition. The former page was no longer required to serve in his parents’ house beneath the livery of a stranger: he was at last permitted to bear their name before the world.