history. He was, however, too poor to send assistance, and France
inordinately wanted Brittany. Anne's position, therefore, grew month
by month more desperate, until, after the town of Nantes had fallen,
ultimate defeat became inevitable. Brittany, unaided, was a pigmy
standing up to a colossus. What facts the little duchess's childish
mind grew to understand during the two years she ruled in Brittany are
hard to imagine. Every night her people put her to bed knowing that
the enemy crept, hour by hour, nearer to her person. Every morning
fresh perplexities of state were tumbled into her strained, embittered
understanding. She learnt by heart the cheerless vicissitudes of life
before she knew its kindling compensations. And by nature Anne was
proud, obstinate, prematurely intelligent. This little thing was no
dazed creature propped up as a mere figure-head of state by powerful
officials. No one knew better than Anne the value of her own position.
If she cried when the lugubriousness of her household grew more
patent, she cried, not from terror, but from the bitter knowledge of
utter powerlessness. The mere thought of being conquered roused a
tempest in the fiery spirit of the child-duchess.
She was fourteen when a compromise saved her. Charles VIII., to settle
matters more securely than could be done by any temporary conquest,
proposed to marry his past antagonist. When the proposal was first
laid before her, Anne naturally refused with a sickened fury and
vehemence. No extremity should drive her to think submissively of the
man whose ambition had been the bane of her short existence. She
argued, moreover, that she was already the wife of King Maximilian of
Germany. But Brittany was in sore distress, and once more all those
with power to persuade urged her to consider this proposal as a
godsend to her country. She would not listen; every nerve in her body
revolted against this man, whose very proposal carried a threat behind
it. Finally a priest was called upon to help the troubled counsellor,
and the poor girl, whose happiness throughout had been the one thing
nobody considered, was informed that the Holy Church demanded this
sacrifice for the welfare of her people. She gave in then; there
remained no alternative open to her. An interview took place, when the
enemies of yesterday fumbled with reluctant courtesies. Three days
later they were betrothed, the Duke of Orleans being among the
witnesses of the ceremony.
Anne at this time was, it is said, a pretty, fresh-looking girl, with
an admirable carriage, for all that one leg was slightly shorter than
the other. Charles VIII., on the other hand, could hardly have been
uglier. His head was too big for his body, his eyes were prominent and
expressionless, his lips flabby. There was nothing in his lethargic
appearance to disarm Anne's sullen misery, and during their first
poignant meeting one can feel with certainty that she did nothing to
render easier the polite apologies stammered out by the uneasy lover.
But Charles's manner was gentleness and simplicity itself. Even
Commines, who considered him futile and childish, says of it, "No man
was ever more gentle and kindly in speech. Truly I think he never in
his life said a thing to hurt any one; small of body and ill-made, but
so good, a better creature it would be impossible to find."
The marriage once accomplished, Anne and her husband started upon a
triumphal journey through Brittany. The marriage had been a brutal
necessity, and, for all her determination, the girl of fourteen was in
it only the tool of the men and women who called themselves her
subjects. But once married, Charles showed the utmost tactfulness. In
the "History of the Dukes of Brittany" we read, "The king, having
against his will, as it were, become her husband, omitted nothing
that could assuage the unhappiness their marriage had caused her,
behaving so well that in the end she was quite satisfied with her new
life, and felt for this prince the greatest love and tenderness." But
to have hated Charles would seem to have been impossible. All writers
are unanimous as to the sweetness of his character in personal
intercourse.
A good deal is known about Anne's equipment for her first journey as a
married woman. Her travelling dress was of black velvet trimmed with
zebeline, and her gown for best occasions of gold material lined with
ermine. Among the furniture also were two beds--a serviceable one,
draped with black, white, and velvet cloth; and another hung with gold
brocade and bordered with a heavy fringing of black.
During the journey Anne received innumerable wedding presents, and at
the gates and squares of every town plays were acted for the two young
people. Most of these were mystery plays, but a certain number of
farces were introduced for variety. What these comic plays were like
can be gathered from the _Farce du Cuvier_, famous a little later. It
deals with a hen-pecked husband, whose wife had provided a written
list of his household duties in order to jog his harried memory.
One day, while washing the linen, his wife fell into the copper. The
conversation between them is the dramatic moment of the play. I quote
it as given in Mr. Van Laun's interesting "History of French
Literature."
_Wife_ (_in the copper_). Good husband, save my life. I am
already quite fainting; give me your hand a while.
_Jacquemet._ It is not in my list....
_Wife._ Alas! oh, who will hear me? Death will come and take me
away.
_Jac._ (_reading his list_). "To bake, to attend to the oven, to
wash, to sift, to cook."
_Wife._ My blood is already quite changed. I am on the point of
death.
_Jac._ (_continuing to read_). "To rub, to mend, to keep bright
the kitchen utensils ..."
_Wife._ Come quickly to my assistance.
_Jac._ "To come, to go, to bustle, to run ..."
_Wife._ Never shall I pass this day.
_Jac._ "To bake the bread, to heat the oven ..."
_Wife._ Ah, your hand; I am approaching my last moment.
_Jac._ "To bring the corn to the mill ..."
_Wife._ You are worse than a mastiff.
_Jac._ "To make the bed early in the morning ..."
_Wife._ Oh, you think this is a joke.
_Jac._ "And then to put the pot on the fire ..."
_Wife._ Oh, where is my mother, Jacquette?
_Jac._ "And to keep the kitchen clean...."
_Wife._ Go and fetch the priest.
_Jac._ My paper is ended, but I tell you, without more ado, that
it is not on my list.
In the end, having wrung from her a promise of docility, he helped her
out. The farce concluded with the joyful murmur, "For the future,
then, I shall be master, for my wife allows it."
But the great day of Anne's youth was the day of her coronation in
France. No toy lay so dear to her heart as a crown, and no one could
have felt more unspeakably proud and great when, before an immense
crowd of nobles and people, her crowning took place at the church of
St. Denis. She wore a gown of pure white satin, and hung her
hair--which was long and beautiful--in two great plaits over her
shoulders. St. Gelais de Montluc said of her at this time, "It did one
good to look at her, for she was young, pretty, and so full of charm
that it was a pleasure to watch her."
Afterwards followed the unavoidable reaction, when the ordinary
routine of existence had to be confronted. Anne's position, once the
glamorous days of public functions were over, revealed innumerable
drawbacks. She was a little girl in a strange country, surrounded by
persons unwilling to surrender either power or precedence. Anne of
Beaujeu, the former Regent--harsh, efficient, domineering--was the
first power with whom Anne suffered combat. Small questions of
precedence kindled the tempers of both. The elder Anne loved power as
much as the younger, and was a woman few people cared to defy. But the
juvenile bride had been modelled a little bit after the same pattern;
she also possessed indomitable qualities, and had no intention of
being a queen for nothing. The Regent--her surprise must have been
overwhelming--found herself worsted. Sensible as well as proud, she
retired before any pronounced unseemliness had occurred, and left the
two young people to manage the kingdom for themselves.
But the period of domesticity between Charles and Anne did not
continue long. There was a little love-making, a little house
decorating, and then came the momentous first invasion of Italy.
Commines, a shrewd and plain-spoken observer, says a good deal about
this Italian campaign, which he accompanied. Both he and the Italian
historian Guicciardini refer with pronounced contempt to Charles's
mismanagement of it, while Commines goes so far as to state
practically that nothing but the grace of God kept the army from
annihilation.
While Charles was away time passed wearily for Anne. Previously to
her husband's departure, when barely fifteen years old, she had given
birth to her first baby, the needful son and heir. But to make the
days more empty and interminable, the child was taken from her at the
beginning of hostilities. For safety's sake he remained at the castle
of Amboise, strongly guarded by a hundred of the Scottish guard. So
carefully was he protected, in fact, that when one of his godfathers,
François de Paule, came to see him, he was only allowed to bring one
other priest with him--a man born in France, and one who had never
been to Naples. Unfortunately, no guards could save a life so feeble
as this child's of a child-mother. Almost immediately after Charles
had come back from Italy the little creature fell ill and died with
tragic suddenness.
Before this, and after her husband's safe arrival, Anne is said to
have been unprecedently light-hearted. To exist for months, as she had
been doing, waiting hour after hour for the daily courier's arrival,
was to become drained at last of every feeling except a tortured
expectancy. Charles's death would not only have made her a widow, it
would have taken her cherished crown away from her also. To hold both
safe again relaxed even Anne's cherished decorum of manner. But the
death of the Dauphin struck the newly arisen gaiety abruptly out of
her. She grieved passionately, bewildered that God should do this
inexplicable and bitter thing to her. How fiercely she rebelled is
shown by the following incident. Her friend of childish days, Louis,
Duke of Orleans, was now once more heir to the throne. In a court of
mourning he struck Anne as unduly blithe and cheerful, and instantly
her sore heart revolted and hated him. Commines, who mentions the
circumstance, says that "for a long time afterwards they did not
speak." As a matter of fact, Anne insisted upon his removal from the
court circle. Louis retired to his own home at Blois, where he fell
back upon the hobbies of his father, the childlike poet Louis of
Bourbon, whose poems he collected while he waited for his old friend's
nerves to tranquillize.
Charles meanwhile gladdened his spirit with architectural interests.
He had come back deeply influenced by the beauty of Italian methods,
and having brought with him a crowd of Italian artists and craftsmen.
How the tumultuous Anne struck him after the subtlety of Italian
womenfolk is not mentioned. The women of the Italian Renaissance were
an education in themselves. Charles had been cajoled by Beatrice, had
been knelt to by Isabella of Aragon, had been flattered delicately and
unceasingly. His path to Rome had been strewn with gracious ladies,
all more consummate, more complex, more highly wrought, as it were,
than his own house-bound countrywomen. Anne, besides, could never have
been a person of irresistible daily whimsicalities. Fortunately,
Charles possessed strong domestic instincts, and in justice to Anne it
should be mentioned that she did not show the same indifference to
personal graces usually associated with women of her practical
temperament. She had a few dainty vanities--was particular about baths
and washing in basins all of gold; and had shoals of little scented
sachets placed between her linen and in the clothes she wore, violets
being her favourite perfume.
[Illustration: FROM THE _CALENDRIER_
IN ANNE'S "BOOK OF HOURS"]
In the April after the Italian campaign the two were at Amboise
Castle, Charles, it is said, having grown from an irresponsible youth
into a ruler actuated by definite tenderness for his people. And then
a tragic thing happened. On the Saturday before Easter some of the
household were playing tennis in the courtyard. Anne and Charles went
to watch them play, but in passing through a corridor known as the
_Galerie Hacquelebac_--about to be pulled down--Charles hit his
head against the low frame of a doorway. The accident seemed trivial,
and for some time he watched the players as if unaffected by it; but
suddenly, in the middle of a phrase, he dropped mysteriously to the
ground. Placed upon a mattress, he lingered until the evening, and
died at eleven o'clock at night. He was then twenty-eight, and Anne,
struck brusquely from placid trivialities to the supreme incident of
existence, was twenty-four.
Louis of Orleans had become King of France. Anne, huddled in a
darkened room at Amboise, cried for hours without ceasing. She sat
forlornly on the floor, and knew the uselessness of wordy
consolations. Charles had been good to her; the future would have been
full of pleasant habits. Now he was dead, and there remained nobody
whose interests and hers were identical. Many would be brazenly glad
that she was cast down. She who yesterday had been Queen of France,
was now nobody--a widow--whose crown, that salient, exalting
possession, belonged to the wife of Louis. True, she was still Duchess
of Brittany, but she had suffered sufficient baneful experience to
know that they would soon try and wrench that honour from her also.
No efforts could appease her grief. A contemporary nobleman, writing
to his wife four days after Charles's death, remarked, "The queen
still continues the same mourning, and they cannot pacify her." How
could they, when all that she craved had been subtracted from her
life? For days she crouched upon the floor of a black-draped room,
desolately rebellious against the stupid harshness of life. Hour after
hour she moaned, and cried, and wrung her hands. Nevertheless, for all
her stricken gestures, her brain worked well enough. She began to
write letters the day after Charles's death, and as soon as she had at
last been induced to eat, she signed an order to re-establish the
Chancellorship of Brittany. Courage and intelligence continued intact
for all the abasement of her attitude. She wept, but as she wept she
thought out practical behaviour for the future.
At the same time, there is no doubt that she was genuinely disturbed
and disconsolate. When, after some days, they brought her the usual
charming white of royal widows, her pitiable and comfortless thoughts
mutinied instinctively against its serenity and calm. She would not
wear it: black was the only hue that could meet the blackness of her
life--white revolted her as an equal offence and mockery. With a
dogged insistence upon the hurt that tortured her, she set an
undesirable fashion, and through a tumultuous intolerance of pain did
away with an old prettiness of custom.
Three days after her widowhood her old friend the new king called to
express condolence. Anne still repined in her darkened chamber. The
only light that fell upon her came from two great candles. She had not
risen when a bishop came to offer consolation, but she probably did so
now, and made a grudging obeisance to the man who had suddenly climbed
above her.
Louis XII.'s manners, to every woman save his wife, were notoriously
deferential. Anne, moreover, was still very youthful, and in the
semi-darkness her great mass of shining hair could not but have looked
soft, and young, and movingly incongruous with her sorrow. They spoke
of the dead man's funeral. Anne expressed the wish that nothing that
could do honour to his memory should be omitted. Louis answered
instantly that all her wishes were sacred, and did, in fact, pay all
the funeral expenses out of his private purse. Then she stated her
desire to wear black as mourning, and once more Louis acquiesced with
a visible desire to spare her feelings to the utmost of his capacity.
In the soft, uncertain candlelight a new emotional quality may well
have appertained to the girl so harshly and abruptly widowed.
Surrounded by darkness, her desolate youthfulness, and her pitiful
desire to obscure her youth in still more blackness, might easily have
stirred an old admirer to a renewal of tenderness.
Anne continued to moan a good deal for several days, but it is
questionable whether the hidden excursions of her mind were so
storm-beaten after this visit as before it. The majority of women have
an intuitive knowledge of the emotions felt by men when in their
company, and Anne possessed great powers of discernment. She could
perfectly understand that Louis XII. wished desperately to retain
Brittany. By the terms of her marriage settlement it now indisputably
belonged to her once more. She also knew, with an acute sense of the
potentialities flung open by the fact, that the idea of having his own
marriage annulled had become an invincible necessity of his nature.
The wayward brutality of her conduct to him after the death of the
Dauphin might have chilled original kindliness of feeling; but he had
thought her charming previously, and the desire for Brittany would
naturally facilitate the effort to find her charming henceforward.
There is no doubt that Louis's visit, at least in some degree,
alleviated depression; for a little later, with the impetuosity that
kept Anne from being a totally dull woman, she said, in answer to some
remark of one of her ladies, that sooner than stoop to a lower than
her husband she would be a widow all her days, adding, in the same
breath, that she believed she could still one day be the reigning
Queen of France if she should wish it. A quaint writer of that time
described Anne accurately, but kindly, when he said, "The greatness of
heart of the queen-duchess was beyond all belief, and could yield in
nothing that belonged to her, neither suffer that she should not have
entire control of it."
But her statement was literally correct. While she lived in the strict
retirement of mourning, writing lucid, emphatic letters to Brittany,
the new king flung himself into the business of repudiating Louis
XI.'s daughter. It is an episode that considerably smirches the
propriety of Anne--afterwards a great upholder of propriety--for
several further visits took place between the black-robed widow and
the new king, and that they did not meet merely to extol the merits of
the dead husband soon became apparent. Charles died in April, and in
August two acts, dated on the same day, were passed. In the one Anne
consented to marry Louis so soon as his present marriage should be
annulled in Rome, and in the second Louis agreed to give back to the
duchess the two towns of Nantes and Fougeres, if by death or other
impediment he should prove unable to marry her within a year.
The divorce was not a difficult one to obtain. Alexander needed French
assistance for the aggrandisement of Cæsar Borgia, and sent him
personally with the Bull to Louis. Then a tribunal, formed of a
cardinal, two bishops, and other minor dignitaries, sat upon the case
and called upon the queen to appear in person. Both she and the
council knew that the inquiry was a degrading and unmerciful farce.
Nevertheless, for form's sake, endless questions were put to the woman
who was at one and the same time both so ugly and so beautiful. They
questioned her concerning her father, Louis XI., pressing to obtain
involuntary exposures. Jeanne's sensitive and finely poised reserve
could not be splintered by insistence. "I am not aware of it," or "I
do not think so," were all that her lips yielded. She rendered even
distress a little lovely by the silence in which she sheltered it. In
reality, Louis's memory must have been essentially painful. For, like
her husband, he had unremittingly hated her. As a child her tutor was
even in the habit of hiding her in his robe for safety if by chance
Louis met them in a corridor.
From family discords the court passed to the question of her marriage.
Bluntly, they informed the martyred woman that she was a deformity. "I
know I am not as pretty or as well made as most women," was the
answer, that seemed to carry a lifetime's tears below its
plaintiveness. They insisted further that she was not fit for
marriage. Then a little anguished humanness seems to have fluttered
for a moment through her patient spirit. "I do not think that is so. I
think I am as fit to be married as the wife of my groom George, who is
quite deformed, and yet has given him beautiful children." But all the
while both she and those who questioned her knew with perfect clarity
that neither questions nor answers could affect the ultimate issue.
They were but a mean and vulgar form gone through to blind the
judgment of the people. Louis XII. denied that their union had ever
passed beyond the marriage service. Once more Jeanne fell back upon
grave words conveying nothing. "I want," she answered, "no other
judges than the king himself. If he swears on oath that the facts
brought against me are true, I consent to condemnation."
That gave all they needed, and the marriage was declared null and
void. For the last time Jeanne and Louis went through the discomfort
of an interview, and for once, and once only, Jeanne's consummate
self-immolation drew tears from her husband. Then she passed out of
his existence, and became, what she had always desired to be, a nun.
In one of the sermons preached on the anniversary of her death, it was
said of her, "She was so plain that she was repudiated by her husband;
she was so beautiful that she became the bride of Jesus Christ."
Anne and Louis were then delivered from all impediments, and in the
year after Charles's death were married at the Nantes Cathedral. The
marriage settlement drawn up was entirely advantageous to Anne.
Undoubtedly Louis loved her. In his time many kinds of women had
engrossed him, for he was a man who, as one writer puts it kindly,
"did not disdain the pastime of ladies." But after many love affairs,
and much knowledge of women's subtleties, he finally surrendered to
the charms of a woman possessed of no subtleties of any sort.
[Illustration: ANNE KNEELING
FROM THE "BOOK OF HOURS"]
The attraction is difficult to account for. Possibly Anne held him
through his domestic leanings, and through her own indomitable force
of character. The monotonies of guilty love episodes may have given a
restful grace to placid respectability; Louis knew by heart every
cankering perversity inherent to the women who are not virtuous, and
probably, therefore, set additional store by one possessing at least a
steadfast and limpid purity. How much virtue in a woman, when she was
not Jeanne, appealed to him is clear from a remark made some years
later. It had reference to Anne's aggressiveness. Some one complained
of it to Louis. His answer offered no consolation, but expressed a
definite attitude of mind. He remarked merely, "One must forgive much
to a virtuous woman."