“Be calm, mother:  the best of all talismans is your prayer to God for me:  it is the tender thought of you that will keep me for ever in the path of duty and justice; your maternal love will watch over me from afar, and cover me like the wings of a guardian angel.”

Elizabeth sobbed as she embraced her son, and when she left him she felt her heart was breaking.  At last she made up her mind to go, and was escorted by the whole court, who had never changed towards her for a moment in their chivalrous and respectful devotion.  The poor mother, pale, trembling, and faint, leaned heavily upon Andre’s arm, lest she should fall.  On the ship that was to take her for ever from her son, she cast her arms for the last time about his neck, and there hung a long time, speechless, tearless, and motionless; when the signal for departure was given, her women took her in their arms half swooning.  Andre stood on the shore with the feeling of death at his heart:  his eyes were fixed upon the sail that carried ever farther from him the only being he loved in the world.  Suddenly he fancied he beheld something white moving a long way off:  his mother had recovered her senses by a great effort, and had dragged herself up to the bridge to give a last signal of farewell:  the unhappy lady knew too well that she would never see her son again.

At almost the same moment that Andre’s mother left the kingdom, the former queen of Naples, Robert’s widow, Dona Sancha, breathed her last sigh.  She was buried in the convent of Santa Maria delta Croce, under the name of Clara, which she had assumed on taking her vows as a nun, as her epitaph tells us, as follows: 

“Here lies, an example of great humility, the body of the sainted sister Clara, of illustrious memory, otherwise Sancha, Queen of Sicily and Jerusalem, widow of the most serene Robert, King of Jerusalem and Sicily, who, after the death of the king her husband, when she had completed a year of widowhood, exchanged goods temporary for goods eternal.  Adopting for the love of God a voluntary poverty, and distributing her goods to the poor, she took upon her the rule of obedience in this celebrated convent of Santa Croce, the work of her own hands, in the year 1344, on the gist of January of the twelfth indiction, where, living a life of holiness under the rule of the blessed Francis, father of the poor, she ended her days religiously in the year of our Lord 1345, on the 28th of July of the thirteenth indiction.  On the day following she was buried in this tomb.”

The death of Dona Sancha served to hasten on the catastrophe which was to stain the throne of Naples with blood:  one might almost fancy that God wished to spare this angel of love and resignation the sight of so terrible a spectacle, that she offered herself as a propitiatory sacrifice to redeem the crimes of her family.

CHAPTER IV

Eight days after the funeral of the old queen, Bertrand of Artois came to Joan, distraught, dishevelled, in a state of agitation and confusion impossible to describe.