Besides these family cares, Queen Jehanne devoted much of her time to feminine industries. In the convents, in the workshops, in the fields, were poor girls and women needing assistance and encouragement. The example of “good Queen Yolande” was ever before her eyes, and she strove to make herself not only mistress of their hearts, but of their occupations. Spinning, weaving, embroidering, and generally all needlework, found her an accomplished executant. She, too, could use her brush and palette, in miniature and in large, and her chisel and mallet both in wood and stone, and she was a very excellent artificer in gold and silver work. Her benefactions were on the most liberal and most catholic scale; no good cause was overlooked, and when she came to make her will, paragraph after paragraph was taken up by bequests to charitable institutions and to cherished needy individuals. If less devout than her sister-in-law, Queen Marie, and less religiously exercised, Queen Jehanne was a model daughter of the Church, and none recognized this more completely than His Holiness the Pope, who bestowed upon her the precious decoration of the Golden Rose, “for virtue as a spouse and benevolence as a Queen.” Approaching her jubilee,--an anxious period for many women,--the good Queen fell away in health, and appeared to be sickening for her end. Poison was hinted at, but in all probability she suffered, not from poison designedly administered, but from the poison of the atmosphere, laden time out of mind, in those low-lying lands near the mouths of the Rhine, with the seeds of disease--the dreaded plague and black-death. Happily, Jehanne was able, through her robust constitution and abstemious way of life, to throw off the evil effects of her malady; but no sooner had she regained her accustomed vigour than a crushing sorrow came to her--the mortal illness of her cherished spouse, King René. His was a green old age, with his venerable but erect figure and his winning if somewhat melancholy expression. His blue eyes and gracious aspect drew forth confidence all round, and his gentle voice and genial manners excited true affection. Dressed almost with monkish severity in a great long coat of black silk or velvet, with a heavy collar and revers of brown squirrel fur, and wearing a girdle with a crucifix and beads, his long white hair was capped by a simple velvet _berretta_, and he displayed neither jewels nor decorations, only his Sovereign’s badge and chain of gold. He was a typical father of his people.