The ducal gardens at Bar-le-Duc were famous. The Cardinal sent to Italy for skilled gardeners, who reproduced something of the terrestrial glories of that favoured land. Tuscan sculptors and Venetian decorative painters followed in the wake of the gardeners, who not only designed architectural terraces with marble statues and garden-pavilions with painted ceilings, but also designed and minted medals and plaques of the Cardinal, Prince René, and other members of the family. Naturally, the young Hereditary Duke revelled in these graceful settings for the floral games and festive pastimes which made the Barrois Court, even in the absence of a reigning Duchess, the rendezvous of poets, gallants, and beauties. Here, too, the Prince’s natural love for music had full play; he became a poet and a troubadour “in little,” if not in “great.” In a very real kind of way René’s training in the arts of war and in the arts of peace was the very same which made a Lorenzo de’ Medici at Florence and a Francesco Sforza at Milan. Amid all these occupations, the Prince had few opportunities for visiting his birthplace, Angers, and his devoted mother there. Travelling was very insecure, and the Cardinal disparaged any expedition beyond the bounds of the duchy. Only one such visit is recorded, and that in 1422, when René took his absent brother’s place to give away his favourite sister Marie to Charles VII. of France, and then Queen Yolande once more embraced her son. On the other hand, the Prince was permitted by his uncle to vigorously assist King Charles against Louis de Châlons, Prince of Orange, who was devastating Dauphiné. In another direction the young warrior gained laurels also. Named protector of the city of Verdun, he destroyed the rebel castle of Renancourt and the fortresses of La Ferté, and hastened to the assistance of his kinsman, the Count of Ligny, at Baumont en Argonne. Guillaume de Flavy and Jehan de Mattaincourt surrendered, and René cleared the country of disaffected marauders and adventurers. Charles V.’s speech at the siege of Metz one hundred years later might very well have fitted the youthful conqueror in Barrois: “Fortune is a woman: she favours only the young.”