There was one excessively blasphemous superstition to which Chateaubriand paid credence in his book—and it was certainly to this that the secretary of the abbey was referring. It was a story that had been going around for nearly two centuries about the severed head of the Duchesse de Montbazon. She was the lover of the young Rancé and “one of the most beautiful beings ever to be seen.”⁷⁶⁶ “When dancing, she outshone all the rest,” Tallemant assures us, though she wasn’t to his taste, since she had “breasts twice the desirable size; and they were fine white and firm, but it was so difficult to hide them.”⁷⁶⁷ In describing her, Cardinal de Retz wrote that he had “never seen anyone who, in vice, had conserved so little respect for virtue.”⁷⁶⁸ She arrived at Court at a very young age, with all the frenzy of gallantry and money, which often came together—and then “greed cooled her pleasures without interrupting them.”⁷⁶⁹ She said that by the age of thirty she would no longer be good for anything and then they’d have to throw her in the river. She was thirty-five at the time of Princess Marie’s wedding, and still her beauty dominated all others. Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé was fourteen years younger, and already an abbé, when he fell in love with her. He had long curly hair, wore an emerald at each wrist, a diamond on his finger, his sword at his side, two pistols on his saddle, with a violet doublet of finest cloth. In a pamphlet “on the true reasons for the conversion of the Abbé de La Trappe,” written by Daniel de Larroque to defame Rancé, published in 1685, it was suggested that the turning point in his life dated from the sudden death of Madame de Montbazon: “I have already told you how the Abbé de La Trappe was an amorous man and had various tender relationships.⁷⁷⁰ The last of these was with a duchess famous for her beauty, who, having narrowly avoided death while crossing a river, encountered it a few months later. The Abbé, who from time to time went out into the countryside, was there at the very moment when this sudden death occurred. His servants, who were not unaware of his passion, were eager to conceal this sad event from him, which he discovered on his return … He went straight up to the duchess’s apartment, where he was permitted to enter at any hour, and instead of the sweetness he expected to enjoy, the first object he saw was a coffin. He realized it was that of his lover on seeing her bloodstained head, which had accidentally fallen from beneath the cloth with which it had been most negligently covered, the head having been severed from the rest of the body in order to save on length and thus to avoid having to make a new coffin longer than the one they had used.” Others suggest that Madame de Montbazon’s head was then seized by Rancé and that it remained with him through the stages of his conversion and his cloistered existence, always beside him in his cell. Years later, it was claimed that the head of Madame de Montbazon was displayed at La Trappe in the room of Rancé’s successors. The skull that appears in portraits of Rancé, among papers, folios, and the crucifix, the skull that encapsulates the silence of the Trappist rule, is—it is said—not an image of death but the treasured fetish of the woman who “had so often bowed over the womb of life.”⁷⁷¹