There are roses at Christmas as well as at midsummer, and although the pale single blossoms of the winter festival have not the fragrance of the floral queens of the month of May, they are roses all the same. All roses, though, have thorns, or their petals are crinkled and their leaves torn. In the Temple Gardens, as the story goes, once on a time two rival warriors met, and plucked, one a white, and one a red, rose from the bushes. They stuck them in their caps, and so carried them to battle, fierce and long—the deadly Wars of the Roses. The story of the rose heroine of those troubled scenes, the intrepid Queen Margaret, we have learnt; now we must read the narrative of another Queen of Roses, La Demoiselle Jehanne de Laval, and of her nigh fifty-years-old bridegroom, le bon Roy René, a Christmas rose.
“May and December” we call such nuptials. But never mind. The monarch and the maid went very well together, and for them literally came true, “Roses, roses, all the way.” He the great red standard rose of Provence, she the nestling, creeping, sweet wild-rose of Laval, mingled their renown and charm for the pleasure of all ages.
JEHANNE DE LAVAL
From a Painting by King René, finished by Nicholas de Froment (1475-76) at Aix Cathedral
To face page 306
Jehanne, or Jeanne, de Laval, “a very beautiful woman and superbly dressed”—this is a succinct and alluring description of one of the most fascinating beauties, as lovely in mind as in body, be it said, who ever took her gracious path across the pages of sentimental biography. Born at the Castle of Auray,—of which now not a stone is standing,—in Brittany, overlooking the tempestuous Atlantic and the Druid fable-land of Carnac-Locmariaker, on November 10, 1433, Jehanne was the fifth child of Guy XIII., Count of Laval, and his wife, Isabelle de Bretagne, whose father was Jean VI., Duke of Brittany, and mother Princess Joanna of France, sister of Charles VII. The House of Laval was very famous in the annals of mediæval France, and linked by auspicious marriages to all the Sovereign Princes of the land. The first Count was a Baron of Charlemagne—a “Guy,” the unalterable prenominate of all the line. Their castle was founded by that King of romance and chivalry, King Arthur, and each succeeding occupant made good his claim to the gilded spurs of knighthood either on a stricken field or in a crusade to Palestine; they were war-lords all. Laval was their principal stronghold, midway between Rennes and Le Mans, where the machicolated donjon of the Seigneurs of La Trémouille, upon its isolated rock, dominates the smiling country-side.
The full title of the lordly Guys was Counts of Laval, Vitré, Gaure, and Montfort—all in Brittany. Count Guy XIII. had ten children by his consort Isabelle: Guy, who succeeded him as Guy XIV.; Pierre, Duke and Archbishop of Reims; Yolande, sponsored by Queen Yolande of Sicily-Anjou, and twice married, last to Charles of Anjou, King René’s brother; Françoise, who only survived her birth fourteen days; Jehanne, or Jeanne; Anne, died in infancy; Artuse, who died unmarried at Marseilles in 1467; Hélène, wife of Jehan de Malestroit, son of the Bishop of Nantes by his mistress, Isabel Kaër; and Louise, who married Edward, Count of Penthièvre. Guy XIII., inconsolable for the loss of the mother of his children, sought comfort in another matrimonial venture, and for his second wife took Françoise, daughter of Jacques de Dinan, Seigneur of Châteaubriant and Grand Butler at the Court of King Charles VI. She bore him three children,—Pierre, François, and Jacques,—so Jehanne was a member of a large and, we may presume, a happy family. Little Jehanne was baptized in the Audience Hall of the Castle of Auray by Amaury de la Motte, Bishop of Vannes.
There is rarely very much to record of the early years of any girl’s life, and Jehanne de Laval was no exception. A maiden was only made conspicuous by an early betrothal, and for that her parents worked assiduously. Jehanne was an exception to the rule of precocious marriages, for no one appears to have claimed her hand and heart until she was past her majority, and suitors probably regarded her as a negligible quantity. Jehanne, however, was not wanting in her entrée upon the world of men and manners, and we make her acquaintance when not more than fourteen years of age, as she comes forward curvetting upon a blanche haquenée at a royal tournament.