The first notice we find of the life of Marie d’Anjou, however, does not refer to her union with Charles VII., but her betrothal, when only five years old, to Jehan de Beaux, Prince of Taranto, her kinsman. He was the son of the Prince of Taranto who accompanied King Louis II., Marie’s father, on his romantic journey to Perpignan, in 1399, to welcome Princess Yolanda d’Arragona. Descended in direct line from Charles, first Duke of Anjou, younger brother of St. Louis IX., his grandfather was Philippe, second son of Charles III. and Marguerite of France. Through the last-named Princess a sad stain besmirched the shield of the silver lilies. Jehanne and Blanche de Luxembourg, daughters of Otto IV., Count of Burgundy, married respectively King Philippe the “Tall” and King Charles the “Fair” of France. Charged with witchcraft, they were imprisoned for life in the Château de Dourdan, where they were tonsured, scourged, and tortured--although they were the most beautiful and most highly cultured women of their day--together with their sister-in-law Marguerite, but she returned to her husband in 1314. Their terrible experiences were made traditional in the family, and, naturally, did not conduce to success in courtship. No doubt the idea which fixed itself in the minds of Louis II. and Yolande with respect to this betrothal was the strengthening of the claims of Anjou, of the younger line, upon the crown of Naples, by the alliance of the two branches of the house. Why this arrangement was set aside, or when, it is hard to say. Some chroniclers aver that the young Prince was drowned at sea off Taranto; others, that he had different views; and, more likely than all, others attribute the renunciation to the action of Queen Yolande, who, directly she had obtained charge of the person of the young Dauphin Charles, determined a more brilliant match politically, if a less attractive one psychologically. Possibly Queen Yolande hardly realized, at the date of that auspicious marriage, how its consummation would affect herself. High-toned as she was, and assertive of Anjou’s prestige, she could not know that Queen Isabeau’s absolute declension from rectitude would, by force of contrast alone, throw her own worthy aims into emphatic prominence. That marriage was the opening of the portals of imperial interest to the personal guidance of the strongest mind and will in France. She became actually the power on the throne, not behind it. Her hand directed the issues of life and death between the rival Powers--France and England. Yolande became at once the ruler of France and the dictator of her foreign policy. What has history to say about all this? Nothing, or next to nothing. Historians,--the most narrow-minded and most easily biassed of writers,--have not cared to trace and teach the ethics of the personality of this ruler of men and States.