Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/20

Rh Louis XII. These events made the little boy at Romorantin heir-presumptive to the throne of France.

But Louis was anxious to leave a nearer heir. He divorced his faithful, ugly wife, the crippled daughter of Louis XI., and espoused Anne of Brittany, the beautiful Queen Dowager, whom he had desired to marry in his early youth. Anne and Louisa were implacable at heart. The stern little Breton Queen was as obstinate as the Countess, but far more sedate: determined, ambitious, and secret. She had a great contempt for Louisa's violent aspirations; a very rigid Catholic, she looked with misliking on the free speech and wide reading of the young Countess of Angoulême. But King Louis was resolved to be friends with his handsome cousin and her children. It was, indeed, to Louisa's Castle of Romorantin that Anne repaired to await her first confinement. With what strenuous prayer and hope, and with what humiliating fear, that event was awaited, only those can understand who have sounded the deep, inexorable rivalry between these two women. On the 13th of October 1499 the child was born. It was a daughter, the Princess Claude of France. "Elle fut née en ma maison," writes Louisa in her diary. From that moment she determined the little girl should marry her boy Francis, and not some powerful foreign prince, who might forcibly break the Salic law. Naturally Anne was of a contrary opinion.

The Queen was young, was of Louise's own age, three-and-twenty. A son might be born to her to mock all Louisa's hopes and dreams. From this intense expectation neither one nor the other of these women was ever free. But the years went on, and no male child was given to Anne; then, one crucial morning, a