the engraved name of D'Albret, and the name
of the royal regiment which he commanded. He had doubtless been buried
where he fell in the park.

This proprietor was the father of the late Baron de Courval, formerly an
officer in the French army, who, during the Second Empire, married Miss
Ray of New York.

The De Courvals became possessors of Pinon through the murder of the
Marquis d'Albret. The way in which this came about curiously illustrates
the course of justice and injustice under the _ancien regime_. This
differed more in form than in fact from the course of justice and
injustice in our own time. Claude, Comte de Lameth, the jealous husband
of 'la belle Picarde,' was a great personage, not only Comte de Lameth
but Vicomte de Laon, d'Anizy, de Marchy, and de Croix, and seigneur of
Bayencourt, Pinon, Bouchavannes, Clacy, Laniscourt, Quincy, '_et autres
lieux_.' But the Marquis d'Albret was a greater personage still, and
the widow of the marquis, who refused to believe the story of his affair
with 'la belle Picarde,' was a _dame d'atours_ of the queen, Marie
Therese. So also was the cousin-german of the marquis, and these two
dames made such a clamour about the murder that the king, Louis XIV.,
and of course with the king the whole court, so waged war against the
Comte de Lameth that his whole family found it wise to seek safety in
flight, and fearing the confiscation of all his property, the Comte
(whose wife had previously gone into an Ursuline convent) sold the
estate and Chateau of Pinon, with other estates, to his friend Pierre
Dubois de Courval, president of the parliament of Paris.[8]

[8] The venom of this old history recurs in the Revolution,
poisoning the minds of three Lameths, concerning whom Mr. Carlyle
indulges in much quite unnecessary and grotesque emotion.

In 1730 Dubois de Courval pulled down the ancient Chateau de Pinon, and,
on the designs of Mansard, built the present stately and imposing
edifice. Le Notre laid out for him also the extensive park, and, when he
died, in 1764, he left Coucy-la-Ville and Fresnes to his elder son, and
to his younger, with the title of Vicomte de Courval, the chateau and
estates of Pinon.

It was the widow of this younger son, Aime-Louis Dubois de Courval, who,
as I have already said, saved what could be saved of the Chateau of
Anizy in 1793 by buying it from the enterprising M. Orry de
Sainte-Marie.

Her husband, a man of worth and of note in the