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 régime_. 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 Thérèse. 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 Château 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 Château de Pinon, and, on the designs of Mansard, built the present stately and imposing edifice. Le Nôtre 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 château and estates of Pinon.
It was the widow of this younger son, Aimé-Louis Dubois de Courval, who, as I have already said, saved what could be saved of the Château of Anizy in 1793 by buying it from the enterprising M. Orry de Sainte-Marie.
