The Hindu : International : A bimbo bumped off

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Sunday, Apr 03, 2005

International

International

A bimbo bumped off

PARIS, APRIL 2. Suspicions of foul play that have intrigued France for almost 600 years were finally confirmed yesterday when a leading pathologist said he could prove that the mistress of King Charles VII was murdered — but not by whom.

Agnes Sorel, described by one medievalist as France's first official bimbo, died suddenly in February 1450 at the age of 28, while on her way to Rouen to give moral and extramarital support to her man, who was busy kicking the English out of Normandy.

Officially, she died of dysentery while six months pregnant with what would have been the fourth child she had borne the King.

Unofficially, she was murdered — a theory that a Lille paleopathologist, Philippe Charlier, says is now scientifically substantiated.

Mr. Charlier told Le Point magazine yesterday that after nearly a year of painstaking tests, he could confirm that she had been poisoned — at least partly resolving France's most enduring medieval mystery.

"It's not up to me to say who killed her," he said. "But someone did."

Sorel, the daughter of a soldier, was raised as a young gentlewoman in Picardy, and in her early teens was appointed Maid of Honour in the household of Rene I of Naples, Charles's brother-in-law.

Introduced at Court at the age of 20, her pale beauty, intelligence and wit made a marked impression on the King who, although 20 years her senior, was apparently something of an innocent.

Contemporary chroniclers such as Thomas Basin blame her for turning Charles from a reticent ruler into a sex-mad monarch.

In 1444, Sorel became the first woman ever to be officially presented as the mistress of a French King.

In that year, a besotted Charles gave her large quantities of jewellery, including what is believed to be the first cut diamond, and several handsome estates, among them the aptly named Beaute-sur-Marne.

Her extravagances were legendary: she invented the off-the-shoulder gown and spent fortunes on monumental fur-lined robes with trains of up to eight metres long, becoming the best client of the court's principal merchant and financier, Jacques Coeur.

She exercised, by all accounts, a remarkable influence over Charles, steering many of his political choices and almost certainly urging him to retake Normandy from the English once and for all.

She also gave birth to three illegitimate daughters — Marie de Valois, Charlotte and Jeanne de France — all of whom the King legitimised.

A particle accelerator revealed lethal quantities of what Le Point called "a metal used abundantly by alchemists of the time" — whose precise identity the pathologist has promised to reveal today.

Beautiful Agnes was, it seems, definitely bumped off. But it may take many more years to work out by whom.

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