In the third of the thirty-seven penitential orisons Fébus composed ‘when the Lord was angry with [him]’, the pathos of personal anguish can be clearly heard through the protective layers of rhetoric and quasi-liturgical Latin, a pathos laced with mystery as the Count begs God's mercy not only for himself, but also for an unnamed, equally guilty other. The supplication is repeated five times: ‘Lord, may it please Thee that we two (nos duo) not be among the damned’; ‘Lord, look as us two Thy servants (nos duo servos tuos)’; ‘Lord, save me and him (salva me et illum)’; ‘Sweet Virgin Mary […] pray for me and for him (ora pro me et illo)’; ‘God Our Father […] have mercy on me and on him (mei et illius miserere).’ Intimates of Fébus – those who had been by his side in the summer of 1380 – may well have known who was that ‘other’. None could or would tell the tale, but it is almost impossible not to identify the unnamed one as young Gaston, bound together with his father in their mutual, mortal sin: the attempted parricide, the murder of a son.

A troubled marriage

Although many links are missing from the chain of events leading to that double crime, the sequence can almost certainly be said to begin with the dismissal of Fébus' wife, Agnès de Navarre, only a few months after she had given birth to their only child, the boy whom tradition decreed must be named Gaston, as the legitimate heir born in and for Béarn.