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In this case it was William I., Duc de Belleme, who decided to raise a great fortress on this rock that he had every reason to believe would prove an impregnable stronghold, but although only built in 1011, it was taken by Duke William thirty-seven years later, being one of the first brilliant feats by which William the Norman showed his strength outside his own Duchy.
This son had married Mademoiselle Belleme, daughter of the first president of the court of Bourges, and with her the political glories of a family which gave three ministers to the moderate monarch. The Bellemes, advocates in the time of Louis XV, elevated the Jacobin origins of the Martins. The second Count Martin was a member of all the Assemblies until his death in 1881.
Invited by the inhabitants of Domfront to protect them against Robert of Belleme, he had made that place a starting-point from which he had recovered a considerable part of his earlier possessions. Now William sent ships to bring him by sea to Eu, probably wishing to use his military skill against their common enemy.
At the two semicircles, whereby the dinner-table was prolonged, were M. Montessuy, robust, with blue eyes and ruddy complexion; a young cousin, Madame Belleme de Saint-Nom, embarrassed by her long, thin arms; the painter Duviquet; M. Daniel Salomon; then Paul Vence and Garain the deputy; Belleme de Saint-Nom; an unknown senator; and Dechartre, who was dining at the house for the first time.
But we have one point to settle with witnesses nearer home. In the war between William Rufus and Duke Robert, the Duke, with his ally King Philip of France, took a castle in which Roger the Poitevin, son of Earl Roger of Shrewsbury and brother of Robert of Bellême, commanded for William at the head of 700 knights.
She was therefore sister to the heir of her mother's estates and crimes, to that Robert of Bellême who is charged with a crime from which the worst Merwing would have shrunk, that of pulling out the eyes of his little godson, seemingly only for the fun of the thing. But Emma and her sisters are described as being much better than any of their brothers, even those who were not so bad as Robert.
Robert of Belleme had lost too much in England to rest satisfied with the position into which he had been forced. He was of too stormy a disposition himself to settle down to a quiet life on his Norman lands.
In this same year, following out what seems to have been the deliberate purpose of Henry to crush the great Norman houses, another of the most powerful barons of England was sent over to Normandy, to furnish in the end a strong reinforcement to Robert of Belleme, a man of the same stamp as himself, namely William of Mortain, Earl of Cornwall, the king's own cousin.
He had further imprisoned the Bishop of Le Mans, Gervase of the house of Belleme, though the King of the French had at his request granted to the Count of Anjou for life royal rights over the bishopric of Le Mans. The bishops of Le Mans, who thus, unlike the bishops of Normandy, held their temporalities of the distant king and not of the local count, held a very independent position.
Though the great Norman barons stood aloof from him Robert of Belleme and his two brothers Roger and Arnulf, William of Warenne, Walter Giffard, and Ivo of Grantmesnil, with others Henry was stronger in England than Robert.
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