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.
Moreover, she had been coerced and disregarded; for all her excessive stateliness men knew her as a humiliated and beaten woman. Before Louis left for the third Italian campaign, the betrothal of Claude to Francis had been ratified. Deputies from the different departments had visited Louis at Plessis-les-Tours. They called him “Father of his people;” then upon bent knees begged that he would “give madame your only daughter to Monsieur François here present, who is a thorough Frenchman.” Both Louis and the kneeling deputies shed tears, but though a sentimental emotion fluttered them in passing, the scene was essentially an organized drama, gone through in order to cut the last possible ground of resistance from under Anne’s feet. Two days later Francis, aged eleven, and Claude, aged six, were formally promised to one another.
There is one more outstanding incident in Anne’s life—her bitter warfare with the great Marechale de Gie. It has been called the inexcusable stain upon her reputation. The story certainly leaves her nakedly crude, fiercely elemental, but at least upon this occasion a glaring provocation roused her to fury. Louis fell ill. He had enjoyed his youth too coarsely, and paid heavily in after years for the absence of more delicate cravings. Anne nursed him with an affection made quick through terror. “She never left his room all day, and did everything she was able herself.” But Louis failed to get better. Each day he drew nearer the purlieus of finality; his doctors perceived no possibility even of return. Then Anne, sitting wearily by the bedside of the sick man, did undoubtedly think of practical matters. She remembered Louise and their mutual hatred. Historians express disgust at what followed, but in reality there is nothing to be deeply disgusted about. The brain in times of tense, overwrought excitement is assailed by many discordant and trumpery remembrances. Anne, alert and nervous both, gazed at the sinking patient, and recalled the valuable furniture, jewellery, and plate, whose possession might be contested later. Had she been a woman of momentous feeling, the knowledge could equally have flashed through her kindled intelligence, but would have left it bitterly indifferent. Anne was not strung with overwhelming affections, and her predominating common sense saw that after this man’s death she had still a future to organize. Without relaxing one personal nursing labour, she gave rapid orders to the household, until all the articles stated as hers in the marriage contract were despatched by ship to Brittany.
Gie had long ago placed his interests upon the side of the power to follow. Being informed of the queen’s arrangements, he stopped her vessels, definitely refusing to allow them to leave the country.
There was a certain reckless temerity in the action; but Louis, it was understood, could not live more than a few hours, and the new king would know how to reward such strenuous adroitness in his interests. But in this matter Gie was unlucky.
Louis suddenly—and apparently unreasonably—abandoned the notion of dying. From extreme collapse he rapidly recovered, and immediately afterwards banished Gie from court. There are slight variations in the story—in one account Anne was labouring to remove Claude to Brittany as well—but the above is the account given by the greatest number.
For a short time Gie remained thankfully at his magnificent place in the country, clutching at the fact that his punishment went very comfortably with his instincts. But Anne’s heart was too primitive for trivial retaliations. Mezerai did not say for nothing, “She was terrible to those who offended her.” Presently Gie received a summons to answer to the charges of lèse-majesté and peculation, was arrested, and after being treated with a shameless brutality, received a verdict of guilty, with a loss of all honours and five years’ banishment from court. The ugliest part of a story—in which from the beginning everybody behaved with a rather ignoble sagacity—is the report that Anne openly stated that she did not desire the Marechale’s death, since death gave relief from suffering, and she chafed for him to live and feel all the misery of being low when he had been high; in other words, that she craved a long and cankering duration to his discomfiture.
After the birth of another daughter—the child Renée, subsequently to be Duchess of Ferrara—Anne’s last fragment of happiness died in her. Jean Marot, father of the famous Clement Marot, referred to her in some verses with a singular realism and comprehension. He wrote—
She was, in truth, tired to death of the involved labour of life. Thoughts of the complacent, unprincipled, mendacious Louise de Savoie, whose son was heir to the throne of France, fermented in her blood, and kept her heart from beating contentedly. From the time of Renée’s birth she surrendered to an uncontested weakliness. Though she became enceinte again shortly afterwards, hope scarcely fluttered, and her physical condition bore witness to a mind past any salutary optimism. She had already given birth to three sons, not one of whom had lived, and throughout the household it was recognized that she lacked good fortune in motherhood.
In 1512, some one wrote: “The queen is in great pain, and her baby is expected at the end of this month or the beginning of next. But there is not the fuss and excitement here that was made over the others.”
The child came, but the triumphant Louise records the event in her diary with cynical cheerfulness: “... His birth will not hinder the exaltation of my Cæsar, for the infant was born dead.”
Anne, worn and heartbroken in her second best bed—always used for accouchements—becomes at last entirely touching. She was by this time ultimately and irremediably beaten. The child had been a son, but was dead. “She took pleasure in nothing afterwards,” said D’Argentre, while she continued so ill that most of the time she had to stay in bed. Louis, back from renewed disasters in Italy, found her there on his return. Shortly afterwards—on the 9th of February, 1514—she died.
Louis grieved considerably. The flaring heat of latter quarrels had burnt up much original tenderness, but De Seyssel’s statement that Louis “loved her so that in her he had placed all his pleasure and delight,” was an approximate interpretation of their position until vital antagonisms sharpened the tongues of both.
Anne was given a sumptuous funeral. The arrangements for it, could she have known them, would have caused her exquisite pleasure. For six days she lay in her own room, prayed for unceasingly. Then she was placed upon a Lit de Parade, and covered with a pall of gold cloth bordered with ermine, the fur represented by the coat-of-arms of Brittany. She lay underneath this, with white gloves upon her hands, and a crown upon her head; her dress was of purple velvet, and on each side were cushions holding the Sceptre and the Hand of Justice.
After the funeral Louis sent her heart in a golden case to be entombed in Brittany. On the casket was written—
But as a matter of fact, the one great drawback to Anne was that she had not heart enough. Her presence inspired neither tenderness nor laughter, her society neither encouraged nor comforted. And the consequence was that nobody could have been missed less. On the whole she had been a good woman; except in times of tumultuous temper, she had endeavoured to live conscientiously and reasonably. Only she possessed no deep-dwelling sympathies; consequently when she died she was dead immediately. It is the people who kindle perpetually at the needs of others who live for years in the hearts of those they have penetrated.