Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/116

102 her husband to death, if she did not give up the place. She had large possessions, and offered all willingly to ransom him; but said she would not buy even his life by an act of perfidy, at which he would blush. They put him likewise to the most cruel tortures, that he might command his wife to open the gates to them; but he braved their menaces; and, being obliged to raise the siege, they were atrocious enough to strangle him.

On receiving this news, Madame de Barri was struck with grief and horror; but feeling that a Christian must not give way to vengeance, she opposed the wishes of the garrison to make reprisals on some gentlemen who were their prisoners; and, in the hour of anguish, exerted herself to save their lives.

To do honour to her virtue, Henry IV. commanded her still to enjoy the government of Leucates, which she held for twenty-seven years. F. C. repute at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. servant to one Thomas Knob, of Aldington, in Kent, 1325, about which time she was troubled with hysterical fits, which threw her body into terrible convulsions, the contortions of which she preserved after her cure; and it was no difficult matter, in an age of  credulity.