[A] “He knew music, and how to modulate his voice to the notes of a lute, striking it with his fingers.”
At Bracon was the Duke of Burgundy’s splendid library, to which René was freely admitted. There he studied painstakingly classical works in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.
Cut off as he was entirely from intercourse with his family, friends, and subjects, at times he gave way to melancholy, and regarded himself as unjustly treated by Providence. He craved to behold his children, and this longing was assuaged by the chivalrous consideration of the Duke of Burgundy, who permitted the little Princes Jean and Louis to visit their unhappy father in his prison.
II.
The years 1434 and 1435 were full of tragic happenings for René and Isabelle. Death claimed three important personages near of kin. All Lorraine mourned the saintly Duchess Margaret. She died in her devoted daughter’s arms during the feast of Pentecost, and they buried her beside her consort, Charles II., in the ducal tomb at St. George-by-the-Gate. Her quiet influence had been all for good, both upon her children’s account and upon the morals of the Court and nation. She could, as we have seen, act the heroine as well as the devotee. Isabelle missed her mother’s goodly counsels more than she could express in words. René’s greatest loss was undoubtedly his brother, Louis III., King of Sicily-Anjou and Naples. This bereavement wholly changed the position and prospects of the Bar-Lorraine ducal family; for Louis dying without surviving issue, all his honours, titles, and dominions, were inherited by his next brother, René.
This event, and what it meant for René, were the climax of his career. The proclamation of the new King was a tragedy and a travesty combined. The pathos of his position was emphatic. The news stunned him—powerless and wellnigh nerveless, hopeless and wellnigh demented. He had not regained his equanimity, when the mockery of his fate was borne still more cruelly upon him in the intelligence that reached him on February 2, 1435, in the Tour de Bar, of the demise of Queen Giovanna II., whose will named him her successor as King of Naples.
Louis died of fever at Cosenza, the capital of Calabria, on November 15, 1434, lamented by his enemies as well as by his friends. His devoted mother was not with him. She was broken-hearted at the news which reached her at Angers. Alas that so gallant a soldier-King should be cut off so suddenly and so prematurely in the first bloom of his manhood! Cast down with grief unspeakable and mute, his girl-wife—still a bride—Marguerite, consoled his last hours. No child had come to bless their union, and the palpitating passion of the honeymoon was naturally cooling. The stress, too, of martial movements separated all too soon and too frequently the bridal couple. Still, Queen Marguerite ministered tenderly to her sick spouse, and her love burst forth in undiminished fervency as she realized that death would so cruelly part them. Very nobly and unselfishly, Louis in his will,—very strangely, made exactly to the day a year before,—required all honour to be paid to his widow, for his sake as well as for her own, and left her the bulk of his private property—alas! greatly diminished by the expenses of his military campaigns. Moreover, he expressly directed that she should be free to go where she would,—if not to Anjou, then to her home again in Savoy,—and he besought her, “for the love she bore him, not to pine away in sadness, but to choose some good man and marry him, for the relief of nature and for the love of God.”
Marguerite buried Louis with the burial of a King, and built a monument to his memory in the cathedral, and she directed that the sword of Lancelot, the British knight whom Louis had unhorsed at tilt and slain, should be suspended over the royal burying-place. Then she speeded back to her father’s Court, not adventuring herself at Naples, where Queen Giovanna lay a-dying. Good and true wife that she was, she kept her sorrow silently and unaffectedly for twelve long years, and then she married another Louis—Louis IV., Duke of Bavaria. Short was again this second union, for after another two years’ widowhood she married, for a third time, Ulric VII., Count of Würtemberg, in 1452. At Stuttgart, after so many tragic changes, Queen-Duchess-Countess Marguerite settled down, and lived seventeen years in peace and happiness, drawing her last breath upon the very day of November, the 15th, which had witnessed the marriage vows of Louis III. and herself just thirty-six years before.
Duchess Isabelle de Lorraine, now Queen of Sicily-Anjou and Naples, with her accustomed promptitude, despatched a messenger to the King in prison, announcing her instant departure for Naples. She sapiently understood that her presence in Italy was essential if the crown of Naples was to rest securely upon her husband’s head. She would receive the allegiance of the Neapolitans in his name, and administer the government as his Lieutenant-General. On November 28 she left Nancy with her second son, Louis, Marquis of Pont-à-Mousson, and travelled post-haste into Provence. Again her presence kindled the most enthusiastic expressions of commiseration for the lot of the King and Count, and of devotion to his person and to herself. Men and money poured in upon her. She welcomed all, and accepted gratefully everybody’s contribution.
From Marseilles the Queen and her following sailed to Genoa, where the Doge and the nobles gave her a right royal reception, and volunteered help and amity. Thence to Milan the intrepid traveller took her way, where she gained over the Duke, and he made René’s cause his own. In Rome, Pope Eugenius IV. blessed her and her son, and conjured all the Italian States to lend their aid. Her arrival at Naples was so entirely unexpected by the Alfonsists that they were not only checkmated in their attempt on King René’s inheritance, but were thrown into a panic, from which they were unable to rally.