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.