of De Lameth, and towards the end of the
seventeenth century the Chateau de Pinon witnessed one of the most
romantic and abominable murders recorded in the annals of French
gallantry.

As Pinon is still, after all the chances and changes of seven hundred
years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a
curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair
compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat
gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather Italian than French.

Charles Marquis d'Albret, the last of that illustrious race, Prince de
Mortagne and Comte de Massant, was the nephew of the Marechal d'Albret,
and he came therefore, on the mother's side, of the royal blood of Henry
of Navarre.

He loved, not wisely but too well, Henriette de Roucy, Comtesse de
Lameth, called 'la belle Picarde,' whose husband was seigneur of the
Chateau de Pinon. In August 1678, the Marquis d'Albret was at the
Chateau de Coucy with the army of Flanders, then commanded by the
Marshal-Duke of Schomberg, who afterwards fell fighting for King William
III. in Ireland at the battle of the Boyne.

The Comte de Lameth, who had in some way discovered the relations which
existed between his wife, 'la belle Picarde,' and the Marquis d'Albret,
shut the comtesse into a room at Pinon, and compelled her, by threats
and violence, to write a letter to the marquis giving him a rendezvous
at Pinon. On the day mentioned in her letter the Comte de Lameth ordered
six horses to be put to his coach, and (having previously put his wife
under watch and ward) drove off with an escort to Laon. News of this was
carried at once to Coucy. The Marquis set forth with a single attendant
on horseback to Chavignon, where at the hostelry of La Croix Blanche, he
was met, as from the letter of his lady-love he expected to be, by a
servant from the Chateau de Pinon.

Armed only with pistols in his holsters, he mounted after dark and rode
on from Chavignon to Pinon. There, as he entered the park-gates, just
after midnight, three men, one of them Jocquet, the valet de chambre of
the Comte de Lameth, sallied out upon him from under an archway, and,
feigning to take him for a robber, opened fire upon him. He killed one
of his assailants, and then himself fell.

About fifty years ago, the then proprietor of Pinon was building a lodge
for one of his keepers when the workmen came upon a gold ring in digging
for the foundation. It bore