After bidding adieu to her dearly loved son,--perhaps her favourite child, and most like herself in temperament and character,--Queen Yolande, with the young King, was fully occupied in receiving addresses of condolence and assurances of loyalty both at Angers and at Aix, to which they made a progress in full state. She assumed the personal direction of affairs, appointing tactfully as assessors the most prominent men of all classes in both domains. In a very distinct sense she was a democratic Sovereign, and under her régime the Estates were allowed a good deal of independent action in matters, at least, of local policy. Thus, by maintaining the dignity of the crown of Sicily-Anjou-Provence and encouraging popular government, Queen Yolande initiated the first free constitution in the history of all France. The stability of the throne and the welfare of its subjects having been secured, the Queen turned her attention to the matrimonial prospect of her eldest son. Some years before King Louis’s death, Jean “sans Peur,” Duke of Burgundy,--in days when the Courts of Angers and Dijon saw eye to eye, and the States were not rivals in the direction of the general policy of the French Sovereigns,--had confided his little daughter Catherine to the charge of the eminent Queen of Sicily-Anjou, to be brought up with her own girls, the Princesses Marie and Yolande. Then the idea of the betrothal of Louis d’Anjou and Catherine de Bourgogne was accepted as a very excellent mutual arrangement; indeed, the Duke had named his intention of dowering the Princess with 50,000 _livres tournois_ (= _circa_ £30,000), besides placing the castle at the disposal of the young couple upon the consummation of the marriage. There had arisen coolness and suspicion between the Sovereigns of France and the Duke of Burgundy, whose connection with the assassination of the Duke of Orléans, in 1407, had never been cleared up. The Duke, moreover, had seen good,--in view of his professed claims to the crown of France,--to make terms with the King of England which would, under certain circumstances, gain territorial aggrandizement for Burgundy, and ultimately the reversion to his family of the royal title. This _rapprochement_ with the hated invader of Northern France,--the foe at the gates of Anjou,--lead summarily to the renunciation by the Angevine Sovereigns of all matrimonial affinities between the Houses of Anjou and Burgundy. Little Princess Catherine was sent home to Dijon, and the Duke scouted the Anjou alliance, and made terms with Lorraine, a step which in another decade told disastrously against the son of Queen Yolande.