ABSTRACT

Georgette, the daughter of Jacques de Montenay and Isabelle d’Estouteville, was born around 1540. She was originally thought to be from Lyons (see Zezula and Clements). Trusting the most respectable sources available to them, most scholars believed that she was born in Toulouse or in Languedoc,1 and that after the early death of her parents,2 she grew up at the court of Jeanne d’Albret, becoming later one of her ladies in waiting. Newly found documents revealed in 1990 that her family, of solid and ancient nobility, was in fact from Normandy, and that it is only after her marriage that she moved to Languedoc (see E. and J.-P. Labrousse). Very little information has been found about her youth, but while we cannot doubt her own statement that her parents and six of their servants died when she was quite young, whether this tragedy resulted from the devastating epidemics of the time or from a cataO strophic accident that spared the five Montenay children is not known.