A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Surville, Marguerite Eleonore Clotilde de
SURVILLE, MARGUERITE ELEONORE CLOTILDE DE,
Of the noble family of Vallon Chalys, was the wife of Berenget de Surville, and lived in those disastrous times which immediately succeeded the battle of Agincourt. She was born in 1405, and educated in the court of the Count de Foix, where she gave an early proof of literary and poetical talent, by translating, when eleven years old, one of Petrarch's Canzoni, with a harmony of style wonderful, not only for her age, but for the time in which she lived. At the age of sixteen, she married the Chevalier de Surville, then, like herself, in the bloom of youth, and to whom she was passionately attached. In those days no man of high standing, who had a feeling for the misery of his country, or a hearth and home to defend, could avoid taking an active part in the scenes of barbarous strife around him; and De Surville, shortly after his marriage, followed his heroic sovereign, Charles the Seventh, to the field. During his absence, his wife addressed to him the most beautiful effusions of conjugal tenderness to be fband in tin compass of poetry.
Her husband, Count de Surville, closed his brief career at the siege of Orleans, where he fought under the banner of Joan of Arc. He was a gallant and a loyal knight; so were hundreds of others who then strewed the desolated fields of France; and De Surville had fallen undistinguished amid the general havoc of all that was noble and brave, if the love and genius of his wife had not immortalized him.
Clotilde, after her loss, resided in the château of her husband, in the Lyonnois, devoting herself to literature and the education of her son; and it is very remarkable, considering the times in which she lived, that she neither married again nor entered a religious house. The fame of her poetical talents, which she continued to cultivate in her retirement, rendered her at length an object of celebrity and interest. The Duke of Orleans happened one day to repeat some of her verses to Margaret of Scotland, the first wife of Louis the Eleventh, and that accomplished patroness of poetry and poets wrote her an invitation to attend her at court, which Clotilde modestly declined. The queen then sent her, as a token of her admiration and friendship, a wreath of laurel, surmounted with a bouquet of daisies, (Marguerites, in allusion to the name of both,) the leaves of which were wrought in silver and the flowers in gold, with this inscription: "Marguèrite d'Ecosse a Marguèrite d'Helicon." We are told that Alain Chartier, envious, perhaps, of these distinctions, wrote a satirical quatrain, in which he accused Clotilde of being deficient in l'air de cour; and that she replied to him, and defended herself, in a very spirited rondeau. Nothing more is known of the life of this interesting woman, but that she had the misfortune to survive her son as well as her husband; and dying at the advanced age of ninety, in 1495: she was buried with them in the same tomb.