After the birth of Claude a still keener edge was given to disquietude. Almost immediately arose the question of a marriage between the girl and Francis. For years, with all the passionate fierceness of her nature, Anne fought to ward off this triumph for her adversary and to marry the child to a different husband. In 1501 a temporary victory expanded her heart. The baby became promised to the Duke of Luxembourg, afterwards Charles V., son of the Archduke Philip of Austria. This engagement continued for several years. Then Louis realized that the probability of his having a son had grown very small, and that under these conditions the Austrian marriage would be in the last degree impolitic. For some reason not stated, he and Anne stumbled at this period into a serious breach of tenderness. His attitude to the question of Claude’s marriage may have roused her to a despairing fury. To surrender the little plain girl she delighted in, to the son of the woman she abominated, was a hard thing to do—too hard for a heart already contracted with useless yearnings. Louis met her strenuous obstinacy with an implacable conclusiveness. The pulse of the nation beat, he knew, for the young D’Angoulême, who was “all French;” and his own opinion could be summed up in one sentence—that “he preferred to marry his mice to rats of his own barn.”
A chill, destroying discord rose between the married lovers, who had once known such warmth in each other’s presence. Louis, stung out of placidity, even commenced to snub the proud and suffering woman struggling against his wishes. During one of the recurring discussions upon the same subject, he informed her that “at the creation of the world horns were given to the doe as well as to the stag, but the doe venturing to use these defences against her mate, they were taken from her.” If he had whipped Anne, the sense of stinging humiliation could hardly, one imagines, have been sharper. For no woman bore herself with a more unyielding dignity before witnesses, and the remark was not made beyond the reach of auditors.
In 1505, Anne, fretted, sore of heart, beaten and discouraged, went to Brittany. The actual reason of her going is not given, but having gone she stayed there, and more, wrote no longer daily letters to “her loving and beloved.” Outwardly she was happy—held magnificent receptions, and went interesting journeys from one town to another. Clearly it was rest of heart to be away. Home had become a place of piercing bitterness, of rending and exhausting antagonisms. On a vital question she and Louis pulled different ways. Here in Brittany friction and sorrow lulled a little. Her nerves took rest, and her heart forgot at intervals.
ST. HELENA
FROM ANNE’S “BOOK OF HOURS”
That she flinched from return as from a renewal of intolerable provocation is unmistakable. In the September of 1505 she was at Rennes; and while she was there, Louis’s friend, the Cardinal D’Amboise—upon whose death Pope Julius II. “thanked God he was now Pope alone”—wrote with a hint of distraction concerning the gravity of her prolonged absence from France. He said, “The king sent for me this afternoon, madame. I have never seen him so put out, as also I understand from Gaspar, to whom he spoke in my presence.” The letter concluded with an urgent appeal that she should return and “so satisfy the king and also stop strangers from gossiping.”
Four days afterwards he wrote again: “Although wonderfully pleased at the assurance you send me of making all possible haste to return to court, I am deeply distressed that you do not mention any date. I do not know what to answer the king, who is in the greatest perplexity.... I wish to God I was with you.... I can only say that I grieve with all my heart that you and the king no longer speak frankly to one another.” Still she lingered, like a person bathing weary limbs in warm and soothing waters. Amboise, seeing the oncoming of permanent alienation, wrote again, “For God’s sake don’t fall, you and the king, into these moods of mutual distrust, for if it lasts neither confidence nor love can hold out, not to speak of the harm that can come of it, and the contempt of the whole Christian world.”
In the end Anne drew upon her tired courage and came back. Once together again, moreover, she and Louis must have yielded to gentler feelings, for two children were born afterwards. But from this time to the end Anne never again felt the glow of life really stream upon her—a chill loneliness sapped capacity for pleasure. Once Louis exchanged the lover for the husband, they possessed no mental companionableness to fall back upon. They saw few things with the same emotion, and for successful marriage this is the primal necessity. Anne was intuitively religious, and Louis had been excommunicated—without visible disturbance—for his exploits in the second Italian campaign. To increase a marked sense of the difference between their views, Brittany had been excluded from the excommunication.
Everything for Anne had grown a little out of gear—a little hurtful and antagonistic. Claude was lame and not pretty—Louise’s handsome son and daughter were adored by everybody.