The only existent memorials to King Louis II. and Queen Yolande are to be seen in a stained-glass window in the Cathedral of St. Julien at Le Mans, the capital of Maine, one of the richest and most beautiful specimens of fifteenth-century glass in Europe. The royal couple are upon their knees, attired in conventional costumes, and bare-headed. Their youngest son, Charles of Anjou and Maine, is buried near that splendid window, an interesting and curious circumstance in the happenings of Providence. He died in 1474. All Anjou and Provence bewailed their Queen, her virtues, her benevolence, her piety, her loyalty.
Yolande’s claim to the title with which she has been honoured, “a good mother and a great Queen,” needs no vindication. She was, in short, the most noble woman in all France during the first half of the fifteenth century.
CHAPTER IV
ISABELLE DE LORRAINE—“THE PRIDE OF LORRAINE”
I.
Child-marriage was a distinguishing mark of the Renaissance, but its fashion in the Sovereign States of France was very much more commendable than its prototype in Italy. In the Italian republics it became a holocaust of immature maidens, condemned to untimely death through the perverted passions of worn-out men of middle age. In France the girl brides were mated with boy husbands, but cohabitation was regulated by the watch and will of guardians. In both countries, doubtless, the marriage contract was essentially a commercial undertaking, but in France it marked the attainment of political and dynastic aims. Sovereign families rarely allied their offspring out of the ruling class. At the same time the danger of conjugal union between individuals nearly related was immeasurably increased. Indeed, such relationships were those most zealously cultivated by ambitious and exclusive rulers. The marriage of René d’Anjou and Isabelle de Lorraine was a striking and typical instance of this precocious marital custom.
ISABELLE DE LORRAINE