Chapter Four - Communicative Memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
Summary
THE FIRST ATTEMPT to preserve Agnès's image for posterity after her premature death comes in the form of the gisants on her two tombs commissioned by the king. Agnès's heart was laid to rest in the abbey church at Jumièges, in accordance with her dying wishes. Jean Chartier explains that the young woman had given the abbey a large donation for this purpose. Although this tomb was damaged by Huguenots and destroyed during the Revolution, descriptions of it passed down in numerous documents reveal it to have been a black marble bed, rising three feet above the floor, on which a kneeling white marble Agnès offered her heart to the Virgin. At the base of the tomb, which stood in the middle of the chapel of the Virgin, lay another marble heart. Four separate epitaphs, two in French, two in Latin, praised her.
As for Agnès's body, it returned to the collegiate church of St. Ours of Loches. Her tomb there subsists, although it too was heavily damaged during the Revolution and restored by Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet. Comparison of the Beauvallet's restoration with a sketch of the original from the collections of François Roger de Gaignières (1642–1715) (Figure 3) shows certain differences. Gilles Blieck, conservator of Historical Monuments within the regional direction of the Cultural Affairs of the Centre-Val de Loire (DRAC), enumerates the changes. Whereas Beauvallet's Agnès sports the crown of a duchess, the original wore a simple band around her head. The other repairs involved “the nose, one ear, the hands (joined without a book), a large portion of the body, the wings and hands of the angels, the head of the lamb on the right, the muzzle of that on the left, and the horns of both.” According to another of Gaignières's drawings, a now-lost bronze epitaph resembling those of Jumièges decorated the tomb at Loches, displaying Agnès, once again with a band around her head, kneeling with St. Agnès before the Virgin. The epitaphs on both tombs stressed Agnès's charity toward the Church and the poor. They also praised her administration of La Roquecezière, Vernon, and Issoudun, describing her as “gentle in her words, soothing quarrels and scandals,” and, in a clear reference to the assumption of the Virgin, as ascending into heaven where she would take her place on a throne surrounded by saints.
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- Information
- Agnès Sorel and the French MonarchyHistory, Gallantry, and National Identity, pp. 64 - 80Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022