Two castles in the heart of Maine thus acknowledged William for their lord. Three years passed away without further advance from either side; Geoffrey’s energies were frittered away in minor disputes which brought him neither gain nor honour. The old quarrel about Nantes woke up once more and was once more settled in 1057 under circumstances very discreditable to the count of Anjou. Duke Alan of Britanny died in 1040, leaving as his heir a boy three months old. The child was at once snatched from the care of his mother--Bertha of Blois--by his uncle Odo, who set himself up as duke of Britanny in his stead.[481] The duchy split up into factions, and for sixteen years all was confusion, aggravated, there can be little doubt, by the meddlesomeness of Geoffrey of Anjou, who seems to have taken the opportunity thus offered him for picking a quarrel with count Hoel of Nantes.[482] In 1056 or 1057, however, a party among the Breton nobles succeeded in freeing the young Conan, by whom Odo was shortly afterwards made prisoner in his turn.[483] On this Geoffrey, it seems, following the traditional policy of the Angevin house in Britanny, made alliance with his late enemy the count of Nantes; and Hoel, on some occasion which is not explained, actually ventured to intrust his capital to Geoffrey’s keeping, whereupon Geoffrey at once laid a plot for taking possession of it altogether. His treachery however met the reward which it deserved; he held Nantes for barely forty days, and then lost it for ever.[484] Troubles were springing up too in another quarter. Geoffrey’s marriage with the widowed countess of Poitou had failed to bring him the advantages for which he doubtless hoped when he carried it through in defiance of public opinion and his father’s will. He had been unable to keep any hold over his stepsons. Guy-Geoffrey fought and bargained with the rival claimant of Gascony till he had made himself sole master of the county: Peter-William, though he bears the surname of “the Bold,” seems to have kept his land in peace, for his reign is a blank in which the only break is caused by his quarrels with Anjou. The first of these, in 1053, came as we have seen to no practical consequence, and two years later William is found by Geoffrey’s side at Ambrières. But the tie between them was broken; Geoffrey and Agnes were no longer husband and wife,[485] and Geoffrey was married to Grecia of Montreuil. There are sufficient indications of Geoffrey’s private character to warrant the assumption that the blame of this divorce rested chiefly upon his shoulders,[486] and it may be that Peter-William acted as the avenger of his mother’s wrongs. The quarrel, whatever may have been its grounds, broke out afresh in the spring or early summer of 1058, when the duke of Aquitaine blockaded Geoffrey himself within the walls of Saumur. But before the end of August a sudden sickness drove William of Aquitaine home to Poitiers to