The Countess Claude, although supported by such friends as the maréchal of Burgundy, the duke of Savoy, the king of France, and the emperor of Germany, had been reduced to sad straits. From her retreat at the château of Aubonne, without heat, without food, she had appealed to the guard which Berne and Fribourg had established at Gruyère for a little of her home butter and cheese to keep her from actual starvation. The council at Geneva provided for her necessities by requiring the restoration of the amount of her dot, and to her and her daughter possession of the châteaux of Aubonne and Molière for their lives, with a purchasable reversion in favor of Count Jean. But when, dying early, Hélène, in defiance of this provision, left these properties to her husband and his family, there were more quarrels about their possession, and again the European powers were invoked by Guillaume de Vergy, who procured from Louis XII of France a protest as unheeded as the mandate of the emperor, against their diversion to Count Jean. But the maréchal at last succeeded in his long considered plan of amicably uniting the rival claims, for in a family council it was finally agreed that his daughter Marguerite should marry Count Jean's son and successor, and that the purchase money of the two châteaux, supplied by Count Jean, should constitute her dowry. So was concluded a quarrel of more than sixty years, begun and ended by a marriage.
The estates so manfully won by Count Jean were not destined to bring him unmixed satisfaction. The men of Gessenay demanded pay for their support in the form of costly enfranchisements from contributions or taxes; the revenues of Gruyère had already been decreased by the long legal processes of the succession, the maintenance of the army of defence, and the payment of Countess Claude's dot and her daughter's pension, as well as by the heavy purchase money of the châteaux of Aubonne and Molière. While still preserving its appearance of luxury the court of Gruyère was now supplied and maintained by loans from Berne and Fribourg, while Count Jean, who had prevailed against so powerful an array of foes, was like his predecessors, despoiled by the bishop of Lausanne, who demanded the cession of his rights over a rich part of his possessions. Thus the reign which had begun by an astonishing display of courage and firmness was so embarrassed by the expenditure incident to its establishment, that it ran thereafter a very inglorious course unmarked by the happy prosperity of former years. When Maximilian I prepared to proceed to Italy to be crowned emperor of the Romans, the Bernois consented to enroll Count Jean's son, his son-in-law, the seigneur of Châtelard, and Claude de Vergy, under the Gruyère banner in the army of confederates which was to swell the imperial forces. But with the refusal of Venice to permit the passage of Maximilian this dream of worldly experience and adventure was necessarily abandoned. Except for the service of the Count's illegitimate son Jean, who fought with a force of Gruyèriens in the battle of Novara, when the Swiss preserved Milan to its dukes against the invading army of Louis XII, no military honor accrued to Gruyère during his reign.