The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King Read Online Free PDF

Burgundy, which was seen as a state in its own right. Years later, the young Louise de Savoie was sent to Burgundy to live at Anne’s two great houses, Chantelles and Moulins. It was the custom for young girls of noble birth to be brought up in the household of an important and learned lady, and it was in Anne’s household that Louise joined a privileged group, all scions of noble houses, to be educated in the principles and traditions of life at a royal court.
    When Louise was not quite eleven and a half, 2 Anne arranged her marriage to the twenty-nine-year-old Charles d’Orléans, comte d’Angoulême and a Prince of the Blood. Louise was somewhat younger than the brides of most family marriages arranged by Anne de Beaujeu, but she never liked Louise and wished to have her out of the house. Time was to prove her instinct right.
    When Louise arrived at her husband’s crumbling castle in Cognac, the child bride found two mistresses already in residence. It seems her husband was an avid reader of Boccaccio and shared the libidinous traits of this author’s heroes. Intelligent and resourceful, Louise appointed one of his mistresses as her lady-in-waiting and the other as her maid. At fifteen, Louise gave birth to her first child, a daughter, Marguerite, said by poets to have been born of a pearl and known in history as the remarkable “Marguerite of the Marguerites,” the “Pearl among Pearls,” and future queen of Navarre. 3 François, her “Caesar,” was born two years later, in September 1494. In that same summer, the mistresses of her energetic husband each presented him with a daughter. For the next seven, happily bucolic years, the family lived together, until the sudden death of Charles. Louise, a beauty of eighteen, comforted the mistresses, and her husband’s young chamberlain comforted the widowed châtelaine. As Louise’s father had by then become the ruler of Savoy, she became entitled to use his name.
    A series of unexpected events followed, bringing Louise de Savoie’s little Caesar closer to the throne. The king of France, Charles VIII, died suddenly at the age of twenty-eight from a blow receivedwhen he passed under a low stone doorway. 4 The king’s heir was his brother-in-law and cousin, Louis d’Orléans, who, at age fourteen, had been forced to marry Charles VIII’s crippled sister Jeanne. Unlike the attractive Anne de Beaujeu, this daughter of Louis XI was said to have the soul of a saint and the body of a monster. 5 The new king claimed that his marriage had never been consummated, and immediately after his coronation, Louis XII had this union annulled. 6 He married instead the pious widow of Charles VIII, Anne de Bretagne, sovereign duchess of Brittany. Anne de Beaujeu approved her brother-in-law’s marriage on condition he cancel her father’s contract by which her territories would revert to the crown in lieu of a male heir. Little did the new king realize that with this one stroke of the pen he was creating an independent and immensely powerful Bourbon state.
    As Louis XII was often away with his armies and his wife was the proud ruler of Brittany, he appointed his terrifying sister-in-law Anne de Beaujeu to act as regent during his absences. As long as Louis XII had no heirs, François d’Angoulême, Louise’s little Caesar, was the heir presumptive. When François was six, the king created the duchy of Valois for him. Louise’s ambition for her son was growing apace. However, Anne de Bretagne, again queen of France, was charming, and, worse for Louise, she had proven her fertility by giving birth to three sons and a daughter. Although childhood illnesses had killed them all, Anne de Bretagne was young and would surely bear more children.

    L IKE their mother, Marguerite and François d’Angoulême had a magical upbringing within the circle of Anne de Beaujeu. Marguerite was the best student among the children and grew to become one of the sixteenth century’s most learned