of the said duchy, if he were to die before her with-out children born of their marriage.  My Lady Anne could not, in case of widowhood, contract a second marriage save with the future king, if it were his pleasure and were possible, or with other near and presumptive future successor to the throne, who should be bound to make to the king regnant, on account of the said duchy, the same acknowledgments that the predecessors of the said Lady Anne had made.”  On the 7th of February, 1492, Anne was crowned at St. Denis; and next day, the 8th of February, she made her entry in state into Paris, amidst the joyful and earnest acclamations of the public.  A sensible and a legitimate joy:  for the reunion of Brittany to France was the consolidation of the peace which, in this same century, on the 17th of September, 1453, had put an end to the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, and was the greatest act that remained to be accomplished to insure the definitive victory and the territorial constitution of French nationality.

[Illustration:  Meeting between Charles VIII, and Anne of Brittany——­282]

Charles VIII. was pleased with and proud of himself.  He had achieved a brilliant and a difficult marriage.  In Europe, and within his own household, he had made a display of power and independence.  In order to espouse Anne of Brittany, he had sent back Marguerite of Austria to her father.  He had gone in person and withdrawn from prison his cousin Louis of Orleans, whom his sister, Anne de Beaujeu, had put there; and so far from having got embroiled with her, he saw all the royal family reconciled around him.  This was no little success for a young prince of twenty-one.  He thereupon devoted himself with ardor and confidence to his desire of winning back the kingdom of Naples, which Alphonso I., King of Arragon, had wrested from the house of France, and of thereby re-opening for himself in the East, and against Islamry, that career of Christian glory which had made a saint of his ancestor, Louis IX.  Mediocre men are not safe from the great dreams which have more than once seduced and ruined the greatest men.  The very mediocre son of Louis XI., on renouncing his father’s prudent and by no means chivalrous policy, had no chance of becoming a great warrior and a saint; but not the less did he take the initiative as to those wars in Italy which were to be so costly to his successors and to France.  By two treaties concluded in 1493 [one at Barcelona on the 19th of January and the other at Senlis on the 23d of May], he gave up Roussillon and Cerdagne to Ferdinand the Catholic, King of Arragon, and Franche-Comte, Artois, and Charolais to the house of Austria, and, after having at such a lamentable price purchased freedom of movement, he went and took up his quarters at Lyons to prepare for his Neapolitan venture.