Clotilde de Surville

Clotilde was “a precocious genius, and composed verses at the age of twelve.” [3] In 1421 she married Berenger de Surville, "who quitted her early to fight under the command of the Dauphin, afterwards Charles VII.

The history given in the introduction of the discovery of the manuscript was evidently a fable, and the poems were set down by most authorities as forgeries, especially as they contained many anachronisms and were written in accordance with modern laws of prosody.

The manuscript had been in the possession of Jean François Marie, marquis de Surville, an Émigré who returned to France in 1798 to raise an insurrection in Provence, and had paid the penalty with his life.

This correspondence makes it clear that Vanderbourg was innocent of forgery and believed that the poems were of 15th century date, and that the anachronisms of matter and form were due to retouching by Surville.

But the researches of Mace interested local antiquarians, and documentary evidence was produced that the wife of Berenger de Surville was Marguerite Chalis, not Clotilde, and that the marriage dated only from 1428.