Giovanna very unwillingly transferred her affections to an older suitor,--the champion, if we may so write, of the heavy weights,--Jacques de Bourbon, Comte de la Marche, of the Royal House of France, and their nuptials were celebrated in the Cathedral of Naples on August 10, 1415. He very soon discovered that, strong man as he was, he had a wily woman to contend with. He began to assert his marital rights, and required Giovanna to accord him equal honours with herself; at the same time he utterly failed in the reformation of the conduct of his wife. She served herself upon him as she willed, but she mostly willed to serve him not at all, and to transfer her favours, as before their marriage, indiscriminately to whilom paramours. Like a lion wounded in his den, Roy Jacques,--for so he called himself,--struck out at his supplanters, and, with his past-master knowledge of the rapier and its uses, he pricked to death not one but many lovers of the Queen. The Neapolitans were man for man with Giovanna, and indignant with her consort. Strange to say, perhaps, for us who read the story of the time, evil royal communications had wholly corrupted the morals and the manners of all classes in the realm. Incited by toadies and sycophants, Giovanna at last took the upper hand against her spouse, and on September 13, 1416,--little more than a year after their marriage,--she ordered his imprisonment in the Castella dell’ Ovo, a fortress of such strength that Froissart said: “None but the devil can take it!” Thence, however, he escaped, but with a price upon his head,--fixed by his inconstant mistress,--and took up his residence at Besançon, with the white cord of St. Francis d’Assisi round his loins. There he died, having renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil, a wiser and a disillusioned man, in 1436. Giovanna, released from the bonds of matrimony, greatly to her relief, gave herself unreservedly into the arms of every man dare-devil enough to risk the consequences. Of these, perhaps the first whose name and maldoings chroniclers have preserved was Pandolfo Alopo, a base-born athlete, a very handsome fellow, and a seductive guitarist to boot. He responded to his royal mistress’s amours, and she appointed him Seneschal of the kingdom, with authority to use her signet-ring. Very soon, mentally and morally undisciplined as he was, he exceeded the length of Giovanna’s tether, by exciting her jealousy with respect to her Maids of Honour. Short was his shrift. Seized, bound, and tortured with nameless indignity and cruelty, his mutilated body was cast into the sea off the fair island of Nisida, where the vicious vixen held orgies equal in atrocity and bestiality to those of Tiberius in Capri.