This was the last public appearance of Queen Jehanne. She retired to her Castle of Beaufort, and there she spent the residue of her life, eighteen long and solitary years--years never idle, never self-indulgent, years loyal to the fond memory of her spouse, years yearning for reunion. The day Jehanne entered her new home was St. Luke’s festival, 1481, the second summer of the year, when the last grapes hang ripened upon the vines, and the year’s vintage is gathered in. Perhaps the simile from Nature enforced itself upon the widowed Queen’s sympathetic mind. Her harvest was now that of the quiet eye; its growth had been when eye met eye--hers and René’s; now was approaching the winter of her life, when her work was to be finished and her rest full-garnered. Jehanne chose as the companions of her widowhood three trusty servitors--René de Breslay, her Seneschal; Thibault de Cossé, her Master of the Household; and Bernard de Praneas, her Confessor. She spent her time in prayer and charity. She established hostels for poor people, for pilgrims and the sick; schools for children left orphans, and for those cast upon the world by miserable parents. Besides these pious works, the good Queen preserved her interest in such arts and crafts as she and René had encouraged in Provence. She studied once more books and sciences he had loved, she painted miniatures, composed madrigals and hymns, and sang and played as she had done for him, and her pen became that of the ready writer. She translated Guillaume de Guillerville’s tragedy, “The Pilgrimage of Human Life”; “The Soul separated from the Body,” a poem by Jehan Galoppez, a priest of Angers and her Private Secretary; and a moralization upon “The Certainty of Paradise.” All her works were, however, in prose, which, she said “_conservez le sens et les images, mais déliverez moi du martelage et des grimaces de ce baragouin!_”[A] [A] “Preserve the sense and the shape, but protect me from forced metaphor and gibberish!” Perhaps the action which most endeared the memory of the good Queen to the hearts and minds of the people about her was the extraordinary pains she took to alleviate taxation and to readjust tribute. When René took over the estate in 1471, he made vast reductions in the imposts on land and stock and crop. These were confirmed by Queen Jehanne ten years later, and further reductions were conceded. Her plea to herself was: “Now René is no more, I have no other rôle to play but to do as he would have wished me.” The Forest of Beaufort, where René and she had followed the chase in princely fashion, now no longer echoed the blast of hunting-horns and the cracks of hunting-whips, but with the gentle notes of the _Angelus_, and when the curfews rang out in neighbouring village and homestead, they carried with them the refrain, “_Priez pour la bonne Jehanne_.”