At Reculée father and daughter once more embraced each other. Alas, what a sorrowful meeting that was, and how mixed their feelings! Margaret’s filial duty conquered the reproaches she had prepared, and René’s tears and silence spoke more loudly than words of regret could do. Providence had been cruel to them both. René loved Reculée for its peace and solitude, and there Margaret should repose awhile and recover mind and body. No prettier resort was there in all Anjou than the Maison de Reculée--“Reculée” René named it, a place of “recoil” from the buffetings of fate. He had purchased the estate, in 1465, from one Colin, an Angers butcher, for 300 _écus d’or_, and had greatly enjoyed laying out the estate and erecting a bijou residence. His paintings and his sculptures, his books, his music scores, his miniatures, and all his artistic hobbies, he lavished there for himself and fair Queen Jehanne. They often dropped down the Maine in a pleasure barge, and landed in the sedges, full of warblers and wild life. Reculée was but a league or two from Angers. Hard by the _manoir_ was the sheltered and picturesque hermitage of La Baumette,--a shrine of St. Baume, patroness of Provence,--and hither René and Margaret resorted daily for prayer and meditation. Margaret’s home-coming was sad enough, but her demeanour was rather that of defiance than of patience. Her pride had been laid low by her sufferings and ill-treatment, but not slain; and when she heard of the treachery and chicanery of the King of France in entering Angers in force, and proclaiming himself Sovereign of Anjou, her scorn knew no bounds, and she chided her father for his pusillanimity, and reproached him for his _dilettante_ life. His sedentary pleasures and his artistic tastes bored her cruelly; she despised his peaceful handiwork, and craved his strong arm once more in the fight. If England was lost to her, Anjou and Provence should not be; this was her grim determination, and she roused herself for action and foray. Like a lioness at bay, she fought out to a finish strenuously her troubled life, away from stricken fields and gruesome dungeons. René felt his daughter’s strictures more acutely than he said; indeed, they fell like blows of sharp poniards upon his wounded heart. The deaths of all his near relatives, sons and daughters, and his son-in-law, Ferri de Vaudémont, saddening as they were, were as nothing to the vituperations of Margaret--now almost a frenzied recluse. King René sank at last, wearied, heart-broken, yet trustful in his God, into his mortal resting-place, and Queen Margaret retired to the Castle of Dampière, near Saumur, the modest _manoir_ of a devoted servant of her father’s house,--the Sieur François de la Vignolles, of Moraens,--to end her dire days of woe.