“A l’avans! zou! en festo arrouinas lou Tresor!”

    Go ahead! that’s right, ruin the treasury with your feasts!

and to his objections to so many flattering courtiers, the Queen replies:—­

    “Voules que moun palais devengue un mounastie?”

    Do you want my palace to become a monastery?

Joanna replies nobly and eloquently to the threats of her husband to assume mastery over her by violent means, and, in spite of the anachronism (the poet makes her use and seemingly invent the term Renascence), her defence of the arts and science of her time is forceful and enthusiastic, and carries the reader along.  That this sort of eloquence is dramatic, appears, however, rather doubtful.

The next scene interests us more directly in the characters before us.  The Prince, left alone with his confidant, Fra Rupert, gives expression to his passionate love for the Queen, and pours forth the bitterness of his soul to see it unrequited.  The fierce Hungarian monk denounces, rather justly, it appears to us, the license and levity of the Italian court, and incites Andrea to an appeal to the Pope, “a potentate that has no army, whose dominion extends from pole to pole, who binds and unbinds at his will, upholds, makes, or unmakes thrones as an almighty master.”

But Andrea fears the Queen would never pardon him.

    “E se noun ai en plen lou meu si caresso,
    L’emperi universal! m’es un gourg d’amaresso!”

    And if I have not fully the honey of her caresses
    The empire of the world is to me a gulf of bitterness.

Finally the monk and La Catanaise stand alone before us.  This woman is the Queen’s nurse, who loves her with a fierce sort of passion, and it is she who commits the crime that causes the play to be called a tragedy.  This final scene brings out a flood of the most violent vituperation from this veritable virago, some of it exceedingly low in tone.  The friar leaves with the threat to have a red-hot nail run through her hellish tongue, and La Catanaise, standing alone, gives vent to her fury in threats of murder.

The next act reveals the Hall of Honor in the Castel-Nuovo at Naples.  Andrea in anger proclaims himself king, and in the presence of the Queen and the Italian courtiers gives away one after another all the offices and honors of the realm to his Hungarian followers.  A conflict with drawn swords is about to ensue, when the Queen rushes between the would-be combatants, reminding them of the decree of the Pope; but Andrea in fury accuses the Queen of conduct worthy a shameless adventuress, and cites the reports that liken her to Semiramis in her orgies.  The Prince of Taranto throws down his glove to the enraged Andrea, who replies by a threat to bring him to the executioner.  The Prince of Taranto answers that the executioner may be the supreme law for a king,

    “Mai per un qu’a l’ounour dins lou pies e dins l’amo,
    Uno escorno, cousin, se purgo eme la lamo.”