Thou dost to both a cruel wrong:
Should dread in mutual love be known?
Why let my heart lament so long,
And fail to claim what is thine own?”[[157]]
What is unique in history, this Beatrice of Savoy had four daughters and three granddaughters who were all queens or empresses. As Dante says:
“Four daughters were there born
To Raymond Berenger; and every one
Became a queen, and this for him did Romeo.”
It was this Romeo de Villeneuve, the able minister of Count Raymond, whom Dante finds worthy of a place in his Paradise, who is said to have first foreseen the grandeur of united France, and who negotiated the grand alliances of his master’s daughters. One married St. Louis of France; another, Henry III. of England; a third, Richard of Cornwall, afterwards Emperor of Germany; and the fourth, Charles of Anjou, King of Naples and Sicily. As for the granddaughters, Beatrice of Sicily became Empress of Constantinople; Margaret of England, Queen of Scotland; and Isabella of France, Queen of Navarre.
Beatrice of Savoy was first buried at Echelles, where a magnificent tomb was erected, on which she lay, surrounded by the statues of her children and grandchildren with their consorts—twenty-six in number, all of white marble; but the tomb was destroyed at the Revolution, and her remains afterwards transported to Hautecombe, or at least what was saved of them, and placed in a new tomb.