Three days after the death of Charles, Louis XII. came to see her. He promised to give a splendid funeral to the late King, which he did. Anne ordered her mourning to be black instead of the white usually worn by Queens of France, and sent to the prelates, nobles, and bourgeois of Bretagne to come and escort her to Paris, where, according to custom, she was to pass the first months of widowhood; the hôtel d’Estampes, one of the group forming the hôtel St. Paul, having been prepared for her.
On May 15th she left Amboise with her great Breton train, paid a state visit to the King, and establishing herself in her hôtel turned her attention to the government of Bretagne, demanding from the Mâitre de la Monnaie at Nantes the gold and silver coinage with the effigies of her father and herself, appointing her brother and other Breton nobles governors of the towns, from which the French troops were now withdrawn,[301] writing constantly to her relations, friends, and officers, and occasionally seeing Louis XII., who did everything he could to please her.
LOUIS XII.
For although he could not have been in love with her, as some historians assert, before she was ten years old, it is certain that he was now most anxious to marry her, not only as Duchesse de Bretagne but as the woman he admired and loved.[302] He was thirty-four, handsome, and extremely attractive, and Anne, besides being ambitious and reluctant to lose the French crown, seems to have returned his affection. A French writer remarks that her love for Charles had arisen from duty, and therefore was not likely to be very lasting,[303] which may well have been the case. But it was evident that no such marriage could take place until Louis had obtained a divorce from his present wife, Jeanne de France, for which purpose he began negotiations with the Pope, the friendship between Anne and himself meanwhile increasing as may be seen by the following letter:—
“Monsieur mon bon frère,—Je aye receu par le Sr de la Pomeraye, voz lectres & aveques sa charge entendu la singulere benevoleme & amytié que me portés, dont je suys très consolée & vous en remercie de tout mon cueur, vous priant de tousjours ainsi continuer comme c’est la ferme confiance de celle que est & à jamays serra.
“Vostre bonne seure, cosine & allyée,
“Anne.”[304]
In June they met at Estampes and agreed to marry each other as soon as Louis could get his divorce. Anne went back to Paris, and later in the summer she went to Laval to stay with the Queen-dowager of Sicily, after which she returned to Bretagne, where she was received with great state and universal joy. Delighted to be once more in possession of her own duchy she resolved now that she had recovered the reins of government never again to let them slip out of her hands. Under her supervision a history of Bretagne was written by a learned priest, her almoner, from the papers and records in different monasteries.
She ruled Bretagne as a sovereign princess with much wisdom and capacity, and being generous and charitable she made various excellent laws for the good of the people. Her own household she arranged on a magnificent scale, and appointed a guard of a hundred Breton gentlemen who escorted her wherever she went.
While she was at Nantes her old governess, Madame de Laval, died, to her great sorrow.