ercise her
authority in Brittany, but she made the weight of her will felt in the
affairs of the whole kingdom, pursued with ungenerous vindictiveness
those who thwarted or opposed her, was jealous of her husband, of Madame
de Bourbon, and of Louise de Savoie, mother of the young prince who one
day was to be King Francois I. For her second husband, a man infinitely
more worthy of respect than Charles, she appeared to have little
tenderness. He was always considerate and good humored, admiring her and
loving her even when she was domineering and almost insolent in her
attitude toward him and toward his favorites. Her prudence and her
regard for the decencies of life, too apt to be forgotten in the
dissolute life now fostered by increased luxury and culture, were the
only traits of Queen Anne that could be considered admirable. Her
patronage of art, and of letters to a certain extent, her liberality to
her favorite Bretons, had endeared her to a small circle; but neither
France, which she hated, nor the best counsellors of the king, whom she
thwarted and discomfited by her absolute ascendency over the king, had
any cause to regret the early death of the queen, in 1514. It was
fitting that, according to her wish, her heart should be buried in
Brittany, while the body rested in Saint-Denis; for that heart had been
unwaveringly Breton. To Louis she was _ma Bretonne_; and Breton she was
in the most marked traits of her character; a woman of more than usual
intellect and ability, with appreciation for art and literature, with a
high sense of domestic virtue, and yet always hard, cold, shrewd, and
narrow-minded.

The contrast between the two Annes who fill so large a place in the
closing years of the fifteenth century is as complete as it is striking.
Both were so placed by the accident of birth and fortune as to have much
power, for good or for ill, in the destiny of France. But while Anne de
Bretagne showed herself merely a woman, ruled by personal motives,
jealous of power in small things and blind to or unconscious of the
far-reaching results that might spring from the exercise of that power,
Anne de Beaujeu had the broad mind, the far-seeing and calculating
intellect of the statesman. Her intellect, indeed, was essentially
masculine: "Madame de Beaujeu," says a contemporary historian, "would
have been worthy to wear the crown, by her prudence and by her courage,
if nature had not excluded her from the sex in whom the right