Troubadours and “Courts of Love” were complements of warlike deeds on stricken field or in tilting-joust. The Provençal seigneurs and their ladies lived in lonely castles, with nothing on earth to do. Provence was the cradle of the troubadours. Every troubadour had to choose the lady of his passion; she might return it or not, as she chose. It was Guillaume de Poitou, a very famous troubadour, who gave the maxim: “If you propose a game of love, I am not too foolish to refuse, but I shall choose the side that is the best.” All this appealed to King René, and his bent fell in distinctly with that of the famous troubadours of the past. His poetic and sentimental nature found reflective expression in the old “_Magali_,” of the popular melodies of Provence: “O Magali ma tant amado, Mete la tête au fenestroun, Esecuto un pan aguesto subado De Tambourine, de Viouloun Esplein estello paramount, L’Auro os tournado Mailes estello paliran Quand te verraut.” This was the spirit of the life to which King René introduced his young and beauteous consort--a romantic existence which appealed forcibly to the sweet instincts of the royal bride. Her response was the joy of René’s heart; if denied the fruit of sexual love, he and she were productive of the issue of kindred souls. They lived for one another in an elysium of bliss, chaste and unalloyed, with no qualms of conscience and no aftermath of reproach. René’s love of Jehanne became a passion; her freshness and animation and the evenness of her disposition were to him like so many springs of invigorating water, whence, quaffing, he ever rose to new activities. She became the inspirer of his poetry, the spur in his official duties, and the pivot of his benevolence. He was never tired of extolling her virtues in prose and verse, nor of painting her in miniature and in large. It was said that he always carried about with him wherever he went her portrait, which he himself painted upon a small oval piece of walnut wood let into a locket frame of chiselled gold and enamel. More than this, his most treasured trophy of the “Lists”--the lance with which he unseated Charles VII. at the nuptial tournament for Queen Marguerite d’Anjou--contained an orifice wherein he inserted another likeness of “_la bonne Jehanne_.” In the inventory of his garderobe at Angers Castle we read: “_Item, Ung bois de lance creux, ou il y a dedans un rollet de parchemin, auquel c’est dedans la portraicture de la Royne de Sicile._”[A] [A] “Item, A hollow lance pole wherein there is a roll of parchment upon which is a portrait of the Queen of Sicily.”