The marriage of Prince Charles d’Anjou was delayed many years, and his experience of the vicissitudes of Cupid’s thraldom was almost identical with that of King Louis III., his elder brother. Affianced in 1431, at the same time as his sister Yolande, to a daughter of Guy, Count of Laval, his brother René’s bosom friend, and one of Jeanne d’Arc’s _preux cavaliers_, another Yolande, he broke off the match because the infant Princess,--she but three years old,--was “so plain and weak.” “Besides, I will not wait twelve years for her.” He was himself just seventeen. The baby-fiancée’s mother was a Bretagne princess, Isabelle, a daughter of Queen Yolande’s great ally, Duke Jehan VI. The young Prince had in his mind another amour, perhaps hardly in his heart; but he had seen and admired, when assisting at the _sacre_ of King Charles VII., his brother-in-law, at Reims, a Princess of Champagne, and, much against his mother’s wish, he bespoke her for his own. They were betrothed at the ancient castle of Coucy, near Soissons, in 1435. This match, too, came to nothing, for the fair fiancée, Catherine, perished in the flames of her boudoir curtains, set on fire by accident, and left her young Prince of twenty-one free to step along the uncertain path of courtship once more. Such were some of the ups and downs of the Queen of Sicily-Anjou and of her family. The death of Charles II., Duke of Lorraine, on January 25, 1431, saw the reunion,--after a century or more apart,--of Bar and Lorraine under one Sovereign. Duke René and his Duchess Isabelle had resided more or less quietly for ten years at the Castle of Bar-le-Duc, and there the greater part of their family was born. Now they prepared to move to Nancy, but their way, which Duke Charles had, as he thought, secured, was barred, and René was called out to fight for his throne. Antoine, Comte de Vaudémont, Duke Charles’s eldest nephew, thrust the provisions of the Salic Law in the new Duke’s face, and drew his sword to enforce his action. Varied were the fortunes of the civil war, but at the Battle of Bulgneville Duke René was taken prisoner by Philippe, Duke of Burgundy, who supported his kinsman Vaudémont, and was kept in captivity for nearly three years. In vain Queen Yolande tried every expedient to set her son free. His captors required his absolute renunciation of the duchy of Lorraine, and would accept no compromise. Then came another crushing blow. Louis III., King of Sicily, Naples, and Jerusalem, Duke of Anjou, and Count of Provence, died of fever at Cosenza, the capital of Calabria, on November 15, 1434, lamented alike by friend and foe. Queen Giovanna had in 1424 created him Duke of Calabria, but many attributed his death, indeed, to poison administered by order of the Queen. Never was there a more gentle nor a braver Prince--“_l’escarboucle de gentilesse_,” he was styled in the annals of chivalry. His devoted mother, of course, was not with him; she was broken-hearted at Marseilles.