, Louis XI., sums up for us in this epigram
his estimate of the daughter whom he loved and trusted more than any
other person of his own blood. This daughter, Anne de France, was but a
young woman when her father died, but the tortuous policy and the
sagacious aims of Louis XI. had become familiar to her as a mere girl,
and she lived to continue and in some sort to carry to successful
terminations the principal schemes cherished by her father.

Almost from her very birth, Louis had used her in his intrigues,
proposing her marriage now with this prince, now with that, according as
the needs of the moment suggested. When the chief of his enemies,
Charles le Temeraire, lost his first wife, Louis proposed that he marry
the princess Anne, at that time a child of two years, and offered as her
dowry Champagne, if Charles would agree that Normandy should revert to
the Crown without question. Yet, a year later, 1466, when Louis had
obtained possession of Normandy and had no further immediate need of
Charles, he offered Anne to the son of the Duke of Calabria. Neither
bargain was meant to be kept; but Charles, partly out of anger at the
king's bad faith, married Margaret of York. Seven years later, when
Louis had made up his mind to conciliate the house of Bourbon, Anne was
betrothed to Pierre de Bourbon, Sire de Beaujeu; and as no new alliance
presented itself as desirable, Anne de France became Anne de Beaujeu.

Anne was enough like her father in the hardness and crafty resoluteness
of her character to win his confidence. We see her intrusted with the
care of one of the most important of those noble wards whom Louis loved
to bring to his court and keep under tutelage, Marguerite, the little
daughter of Maximilian and Marie de Bourgogne. When the fear of
assassination had driven the king to immure himself in
Plessis-lez-Tours, and to hedge himself about with such fantastic and
intricate defences that none but his favored lowborn servants could
enter with ease and hope of return, he would sometimes admit this
favored daughter. And when, in the imminence of death, he determined
that the silly dauphin, jealously guarded at Amboise, should learn
something and should know that the power of the sceptre was soon to pass
to him, it was Anne de Beaujeu again on whom he relied. He enjoined the
dauphin Charles to keep about him the faithful servants who had made
France; especially did he recommend "Master Oliver," without whom, he
said, "