promise to intercede in her favor, they declined to prosecute
her or her husband. Fribourg also took the side of the lovers, and sent
a letter in their behalf to the king of France. But the Countess de la
Varax had already secured the support of both emperor and king, who,
thinking the matter of high political importance, sent pressing letters
by their ambassadors to Berne and Fribourg and, later, to the Diet of
the Confederation, commanding that de Beaufort should give up his bride.
Informed of these royal and imperial commands, the Sire de Beaufort
declared he would die rather than give up his wife or emerge from his
Gruyere asylum, and prayed the seigneurs of Berne to write to the king
in his favor. Before the grave assemblage of the Confederation of the
Diet at Baden, Count Michel magnificently declared that as for him he
would protect the refugees at all costs, and left the matter to the
justice of the delegates. The Diet as stoutly declining to dissolve a
legalized marriage, defied the summons of the king and the emperor and
ordered the pursuit of the lovers to cease. The two counts of Gruyere
and of Beaufort were so gratified by this support that when the emperor
prepared to invade Switzerland they offered to join the Confederate army
in the defence of their country. With the passing of this threat of
invasion Count Michel lost his last opportunity of military distinction.
The remainder of his reign was one long struggle with the net of
financial embarrassment which now encompassed him. The youthful
impression of magnificence gained at the French court, the vanity of his
extraordinary beauty, the favor of the dazzling Francois I, the actual
independence of his imperial principality exalted his imagination to a
pitch of pretension utterly beyond his capacity of either leadership or
organization. He was fertile in imagination, persistent and
indefatigable, but he had unfortunately inherited no trace of the
firmness or judgment displayed by the long line of his ancestors, while
from the intriguing de Vergy strain, he derived a treacherous and feeble
duplicity, which lost him the confidence of the sovereigns he served and
the cities with which he was allied. Although maintaining an apparent
friendship with Berne and Fribourg, whose monetary assistance he
constantly demanded, he succeeded by a complicated system of loans and
partial payments of interest in possessing himself of a long line of
chateaux-forts extending f