The Duc d’Orléans, now Louis XII., was still at Blois, and much distressed at the melancholy state of the Queen. He sent the Cardinal Briçonnet and the Bishop of Condon, who had been friends of hers and of Charles VIII., to see her.[300] They found her lying on the floor sobbing and crying in a corner of the room. She did not get up when they came in, but the Bishop, a man of holy life and intellectual power, succeeded in comforting her so far that she listened to his words of consolation, rose, became calmer, and was persuaded to take some food.
Then she began to think about her beloved Bretagne, now her own again, and directly she had finished that first repast she signed a decree reestablishing the _chancellerie_ which had been suppressed.
Her nearest remaining relation was her brother the Baron d’Avaugour, but she was very fond of her cousin, Jeanne de Laval, Queen-dowager of Sicily, to whom she wrote, telling her of the death of the King; and also of the Prince of Orange, Jean de Châlons, for whom she sent at once and whom she made governor of Bretagne.
Three days after the death of Charles, Louis XII. came to see her. He promised to give a splendid funeral to the late King, which he did. Anne ordered her mourning to be black instead of the white usually worn by Queens of France, and sent to the prelates, nobles, and _bourgeois_ of Bretagne to come and escort her to Paris, where, according to custom, she was to pass the first months of widowhood; the hôtel d’Estampes, one of the group forming the hôtel St. Paul, having been prepared for her.
On May 15th she left Amboise with her great Breton train, paid a state visit to the King, and establishing herself in her hôtel turned her attention to the government of Bretagne, demanding from the _Mâitre de la Monnaie_ at Nantes the gold and silver coinage with the effigies of her father and herself, appointing her brother and other Breton nobles governors of the towns, from which the French troops were now withdrawn,[301] writing constantly to her relations, friends, and officers, and occasionally seeing Louis XII., who did everything he could to please her.
For although he could not have been in love with her, as some historians assert, before she was ten years old, it is certain that he was now most anxious to marry her, not only as Duchesse de Bretagne but as the woman he admired and loved.[302] He was thirty-four, handsome, and extremely attractive, and Anne, besides being ambitious and reluctant to lose the French crown, seems to have returned his affection. A French writer remarks that her love for Charles had arisen from duty, and therefore was not likely to be very lasting,[303] which may well have been the case. But it was evident that no such marriage could take place until Louis had obtained a divorce from his present wife, Jeanne de France, for which purpose he began negotiations with the Pope, the friendship between Anne and himself meanwhile increasing as may be seen by the following letter:--