III.
No one has told us of Queen Jehanne’s sorrow—better so. No stranger ever shares a full heart’s loss. Broken, but submissive and self-sustained, her consort’s fortitude in distress had come to her as well; she failed not at the moment of her trial. With her own hands she led the last offices of reverent duty to the dead. Shrouded in a simple white linen shift, but covered with the crimson and ermine mantle of state, they laid their deceased Sovereign upon the canopied bed of Estate, moved to the centre of the great hall. The Queen herself had closed his eyes, and now she arranged his hands. In them she placed a costly ruby cross he had given her at her marriage; at his feet she laid the “Livre des Heures,” which was also his nuptial gift; and then she placed around his neck the Sovereign’s jewel,—there was no heir to wear it, alas!—and last of all she knelt and sprinkled holy water on his corpse.
Every door and window was set wide ajar that, night or day, all might see and pray and bless. Dusk fell on that long, long day, but the crowd of loving servants and subjects still surged along reverently to pay their last respects; and so night fell and passed, not in the peaceful hush of slumber, but with smothered tread of painful feet and the smothered sob of woe.
All Aix was hung in black, and on July 14 the streets were lined by weeping citizens as the funeral cortège of “le bon Roy” passed to the Cathedral of St. Sauveur. The burial casket, after the requiem and Court ceremonies, was placed, not in a tomb direct, but in a chapelle ardente, and watches of religious mounted guard and prayed. Soon the wish of their venerated Sovereign was made public property, and then, amid fresh lamentations lest Aix should lose his remains, appeals were made to Queen Jehanne. She was deeply affected, but remained quiet and resigned. She could not reverse her husband’s will, but she could allow his body to remain awhile where it was. With this the authorities had to be content, and forthwith, to strengthen their hold upon that sacred casket, steps were taken to erect a splendid monument and tomb. An embassy was sent off at once to Rome to ask for a “Bull” whereby the late Sovereign’s directions as to the place of sepulture might be laid aside. Aix was not so much jealous of Angers as she was devoted to her King.
In accordance with the marital customs of the time, King René had a mistress—perhaps more than one, but one at least whose name has been preserved by chroniclers, Marie de la Chapelle, a respectable middle-class woman of Provence. Whether “de la Chapelle” was a sobriquet or not is not clear; probably it was so, and given her later on in life after the artist King had painted her wearing a chapelle, or black velvet hood, in a diptych, wherein he faces her, which he kept secretly in his own studio. It is said that she did not really love René, but liked to rule him and to direct the royal household. She was exigeant, too, for the legitimatizing of the three children she bore the King, whom René had always duly acknowledged as his. These were Jean, “le Bâtard d’Angers,” created, after the premature death of Prince Louis, Marquis de Pont-à-Mousson and Seigneur of St. Cannot; Blanche; and Madeleine. Jean married Isabelle, daughter of Raymond de Glandevez, Ambassador to the Pope, pro-Governor of Genoa, and Grand Master of France. Blanche d’Anjou married Bertrand de Beauvau, Seigneur de Precigny, Master of the Court of Angers and Seneschal of Anjou. He was in 1462 appointed President of Provence. His father was Seigneur de Rochette. René gave his daughter the estate of Mirabeau in Poitou, which he purchased in 1488. In the Comptes du Roy René is the record of a gift to Blanche of a gold mirror worth 20 écus d’or, under date January 12, 1488, and the same year, on March 18, she received a large table diamond from her father, which unfortunately she lost when playing in a farce before the Court on the following Jour de l’An. The precious bauble was found by a monk, Alfonso de la Rocque, Prior of the monastery of Les Anges d’Aix, and restored on payment of a tun of red wine. The discovery was only made known, it appears, through the confessional; the good friar had qualms about not making known his find. This Blanche d’Anjou was educated at Beaucaire by Demoiselle Collette, a worker in furs, who received many costly gifts from King René. It has been sought to prove that Marie de la Chapelle was this Demoiselle Collette. Among the King’s gift were homely objects, too. His Comptes, under April 4, 1447, record “three cannes of fine holland cloth; two ditto fine muslin, and five black silk velvet for a head-dress.” Another gift to Blanche d’Anjou, on May 16, 1447, was hair for a rigotter, a coiffure postiche for which the King paid 7 florins to Marguerite, wife of Jehan Augier, at Beaucaire. Again Blanche was the recipient of her father’s generosity, for on June 7 the same year he gave her a cincture of wrought silver which cost 11 florins.
Before Blanche married the Seigneur de Precigny he had buried three wives, and he himself was buried with them at Angers in October, 1474. She died prematurely in giving birth to a child, April 11, 1470, no more than twenty-one years of age. Madeleine, René’s second illegitimate daughter, married Louis Jehan, Seigneur de Belleneve, Chamberlain to Charles VIII. of France when Dauphin. He gave him for his marriage 15,000 florins, that he might “espouse worthily ma cousine,” as he calls her. Louis XII. gave her on her widowhood a sum of 12,000 florins.
On the death of King René, his eldest daughter, Yolande, Countess of Vaudémont, claimed and assumed the title of Queen of Sicily, Jerusalem, Naples, and Aragon, but took no steps to enforce her claim upon that vulture monarch, Louis XI., who at once seized upon the lands of his uncle, and styled himself Duke of Anjou and Count of Provence. Countess Yolande was her father’s child, tender and retiring. She craved the charms of the quiet life, and consequently, at the convocation of the Estates of Anjou and Provence, she renounced her title, and made it over to her son René. He had already taken up the gauntlet of his grandfather, and given proof of the sterling qualities of his ancestry. The duchy of Lorraine and that of Bar were his through his mother also, and as Duke of Lorraine René II. is known to historians. Countess Yolande died at Nancy February 21, 1483. René II. was the Prince whom his father, Ferri de Vaudémont, insisted should make a pilgrimage from Vezelay,—famous in the history of Thomas à Becket,—the capital of Le Morvan, to Jerusalem with one foot booted, the other bare, and, as he went, to distribute to every poor person he met 12 livres by way of satisfaction for small sums he himself had borrowed and had not paid back—surely a wide stretch of fatherly authority and the law of substitution!
The widowed Queen lost little time in settling her affairs in Provence, for she was minded to go to Anjou with her precious dead; indeed, René had expressed a wish to that effect. She carefully surveyed the names of all the people René loved and of those who loved him most nearly too. To each and all some token was sent or given; she spared few things for herself. Churches, institutions, schools, guilds, and all public bodies, received mementoes of the dead monarch. To Jehanne came many pangs at parting. She had learned to love the gentle Provençals, and they had not failed to return her regard most warmly. At last her preparations were completed, and she spent a day and night in the cathedral by the casket of her dear dead, and then sorrowfully she took her journey to distant Anjou, home to her kith and kin.
RENÉ D’ANJOU
(Circa 1470)
Painted by himself on wood. Aix Library
To face page 348
King René in his will speaks thus of his beloved Queen: “Because Jehanne has loved me, so I do and shall love her as my dearest wife till death. Her virtues and her goodness to me I cannot forget, nor her loving services which she has rendered me for so long a time. I will that she shall have unrestricted liberty of action to settle, when I am dead, where she will.… I give to her the county of Beaufort; the castle and estate of Mirabeau; the town of Aubagne; the castles of San Remy, Pertuis, and Les Baux, with my bastides in and about Aix and at Marseilles, with all their furniture and appurtenances.” King René also specially bequeathed to Jehanne his most valuable jewels: collars of diamonds; “le grand et le petit bulay,” rubies, with sprays of gold and gems;[A] his diamonds “à la cesse,” uncut and strung (?); his plates and caskets of gold; his great bowls of gold; his great trays of silver; and his precious goblet and ewer of gold encrusted with jewels; and many other splendid precious objects.
[A] “Le grand bulay” was a famous ruby, richly mounted, which he had bought for 18,000 florins (= £7,000).
With respect to the body of King René, it has been chronicled that the Queen before leaving Aix made secret arrangements for its translation to Angers. She feared a hostile demonstration if open measures were taken. She took into her confidence a priest belonging to the cathedral chapter, and they together worked out a plan which was put into operation after Queen Jehanne had arrived at Angers. She sent two of her most trusty attendants, Jehan de Pastis and Jacquemain de Mahiers, with an imposing suite, conveying a letter to the Archbishop of Aix asking for the heart of René. The priestly confidant was at the service of the envoys, and they very cleverly contrived to secrete the casket with the King’s body in a royal chariot which the Queen had commanded to be laden with certain dresses and properties she had left behind, and in particular the pall she had worked with her own hand, and which was still covering the dead King’s coffin. The precious burden was driven to a secluded backwater of the Rhone, and there embarked upon a great royal barge; and so King René’s body passed through France once more, as he had so often done in life. The disembarkment of the royal corpse was effected at Ponts-de-Cé, across the Loire, a few miles out of Angers, and thence the second obsequies were conducted with splendid ceremonies and amid universal tokens of joy and sorrow of his Angevine subjects. The heart was with the body, but the entrails were left at Aix in the cathedral.
This was the last public appearance of Queen Jehanne. She retired to her Castle of Beaufort, and there she spent the residue of her life, eighteen long and solitary years—years never idle, never self-indulgent, years loyal to the fond memory of her spouse, years yearning for reunion. The day Jehanne entered her new home was St. Luke’s festival, 1481, the second summer of the year, when the last grapes hang ripened upon the vines, and the year’s vintage is gathered in. Perhaps the simile from Nature enforced itself upon the widowed Queen’s sympathetic mind. Her harvest was now that of the quiet eye; its growth had been when eye met eye—hers and René’s; now was approaching the winter of her life, when her work was to be finished and her rest full-garnered.
Jehanne chose as the companions of her widowhood three trusty servitors—René de Breslay, her Seneschal; Thibault de Cossé, her Master of the Household; and Bernard de Praneas, her Confessor. She spent her time in prayer and charity. She established hostels for poor people, for pilgrims and the sick; schools for children left orphans, and for those cast upon the world by miserable parents. Besides these pious works, the good Queen preserved her interest in such arts and crafts as she and René had encouraged in Provence. She studied once more books and sciences he had loved, she painted miniatures, composed madrigals and hymns, and sang and played as she had done for him, and her pen became that of the ready writer. She translated Guillaume de Guillerville’s tragedy, “The Pilgrimage of Human Life”; “The Soul separated from the Body,” a poem by Jehan Galoppez, a priest of Angers and her Private Secretary; and a moralization upon “The Certainty of Paradise.” All her works were, however, in prose, which, she said “conservez le sens et les images, mais déliverez moi du martelage et des grimaces de ce baragouin!”[A]
[A] “Preserve the sense and the shape, but protect me from forced metaphor and gibberish!”
Perhaps the action which most endeared the memory of the good Queen to the hearts and minds of the people about her was the extraordinary pains she took to alleviate taxation and to readjust tribute. When René took over the estate in 1471, he made vast reductions in the imposts on land and stock and crop. These were confirmed by Queen Jehanne ten years later, and further reductions were conceded. Her plea to herself was: “Now René is no more, I have no other rôle to play but to do as he would have wished me.” The Forest of Beaufort, where René and she had followed the chase in princely fashion, now no longer echoed the blast of hunting-horns and the cracks of hunting-whips, but with the gentle notes of the Angelus, and when the curfews rang out in neighbouring village and homestead, they carried with them the refrain, “Priez pour la bonne Jehanne.”
These soft nocturnes and sweet visions of ancient days still linger in Anjou. The memory of the Queen of Sicily, Jehanne, is cherished, and almost a proverb it has become, that all good things done in that rich province are due to the watchful spirit of the Queen. In this connection a very weird narrative may be told. In 1469 Guillaume de Harancourt, Bishop of Verdun, invented a cage of wood and iron for refractory criminals. One such was sent to Angers, which after Jehanne’s death became known as the “cage of the Queen of Sicily.” It was said that Jehanne had been put therein wearing wooden sabots. The why and wherefore of her incarceration was perfectly uncertain, but the sabots are to-day in Angers Museum; the cage has disappeared. Another version has it that King René had among his wild creatures at Reculée and elsewhere a very ferocious eagle which he could not tame, and so the bird was sent to Angers and placed in the Bishop’s wood and iron cage, and dubbed “La Reine”—“The Queen”! This bird of prey deserved the name; its appetite was prodigious. In Les Comptes, among other entries referring to “her Majesty,” is—“June 3, 1474, ‘La Reine’ has a whole sheep day by day.” This is quaint indeed, but characteristic of stories and storytellers!
Queen Jehanne died at the Castle of Beaufort, December 19, 1498,—as the chroniclers tell us,—“in the odour of sanctity and with all the consolations of Holy Church.”
The Queen’s will—a most lengthy document—contains many affecting and many quaint bequests. She first of all commends herself conventionally to the Almighty, and then goes on to indicate her desire to be laid not far from “Marie of blessed memory”—her consort’s grandmother, Marie de Blois-Châtillon—“before the altar where is laid my lord and consort,” and she warns all and sundry against laying any other bodies there. Her heart she bequeaths to the Chapel of St. Bernardin, within the Church of the Cordeliers at Angers, to be placed beside that of René. She directs that her body shall be covered with a pall of black silk, and that at her funeral six poor religious should attend habited in black, and each bearing a flaming torch. Her heart and René’s should repose upon a pall of cloth of gold embroidered in crimson, and bearing their joined shields of arms. Lights shall always burn in front of the tomb and the cardial reliquary. She instructs her brother and nephew, Seigneurs de la Roche and de Montafiland, to hand over to the Chapter of St. Maurice in Angers 200 livres tournois (circa £120) to pay for her burial cortège, and for Mass, absolutions, vespers, and bells. Particularly she notes her preference for flags of bougran—stuff (?)—over silken banners.
The day after her interment the Queen directs that with reverent ritual a crown shall be placed over her head like that she placed over René’s, upon their monument. Certain saintly relics which he and she had been the means of rescuing from sacrilege, and had deposited in the Church of St. Tugal de Laval, shall be displayed gratuitously to “such dames comtesses as may wish to become mothers.” Her “Breviary,” “Psalter,” “Hours,” and other books of devotion, she bequeaths to the Church of St. Tugal de Laval, for the use of daughters of her father’s house at their marriage or when residing in Laval. Two gold rings she particularly desires to be placed upon the relics of St. Nicholas d’Angers, within his reliquary: “one, my wedding-ring, which my very redoubtable lord and consort,—whom God absolve,—placed upon my finger at our nuptials, with a small heart of diamonds and enamelled with deep red roses.” The other ring had a large diamond mounted on a fleur-de-lis, and the band bore the enamelled arms of Anjou. Queen Jehanne did not forget her friends and attendants; for example, among very many legacies, she left 200 livres tournois each to three ladies: Jacqueline de Puy du Jour, Catherine Beaufilz, and “ma petite” Gindine de la Jaille, to provide them with trousseaux upon marriage.
The body of the Queen was reverently shrouded in a plain linen chemise, such as that with which she herself had assisted to cover King René’s corpse, and over it was placed his robe of state. Hers was the last lying in state of a Queen of Sicily, and every mark of homage and respect was rendered her remains by high and low. Peasants and citizens conspired together to show their grateful sense of her virtues and her benefactions, and the country road from Beaufort to Angers was lined with sympathetic crowds of mourners. Her passing was in the night time,—so consonant with her love of seclusion and simplicity,—and the whole country-side was ablaze with torches and bonfires. The Queen’s burial was at St. Maurice’s Cathedral, in the tomb of her consort; whilst her heart,—“so full of love and so tenderly beloved,”—in a golden casket exactly like that of the King, was placed next his in the Chapel of St. Bernardin. Upon a memorial tablet was inscribed the epitaph: “Here lies the Heart of the very high and puissant Princess, Jehanne de Laval, second wife of King René, and daughter of Guy, Count de Laval.”
The monument to King René, which she at last came to share in blessed memory, had his effigy reclining, and at his feet a sculptured lion, symbol of courage; at Jehanne’s feet were carved two hounds, emblematic of fidelity. The Chapel of St. Bernardin thus became the royal mausoleum of the last Anjou dynasty—René, with his father and mother, his two wives, his eldest son, and his two daughters, in holy company; and so they remained for 300 years, until that cataclysmatic year 1793, when every holy stone was tumbled down and every reverent memorial defaced. The memorial chapel was for centuries a thing of beauty. King René himself painted the glass windows and designed the tomb. Soon after his marriage with Jehanne de Laval he employed Francesco Laurana and Pietro da Milano to decorate the chapel.
Soon after the death of King René, Sieur Guillaume de Remerville,—his Treasurer at Aix,—voiced the universal sorrow and permanent regret of all the royal servants of his lord in a beautiful funeral ode, which he dedicated to “Queen Jehanne, his worshipful mistress”:
“Pleurez, petits et grands! Pleurez!
Car perdu avez le bon Sire.
Jamais ne le recouverierez—
Sa mort sera grief martyir.”
“Weep little, weep great, weep all!
For we have lost our good Lord.
Ne’er more his form to recall—
Hearts broken by his mord.”
Such was the refrain. The same loving dirge of woe was re-echoed through Anjou and Provence when Jehanne passed royally to her burial.
KING RENÉ’S SIGNATURE.