René, only twelve years old, the following year accompanied Charles II. of Lorraine to the siege of Toul,--for many years a turbulent element in his dominions,--where there was a hot dispute concerning certain laws and customs oppositive to the claims of the crown of Lorraine. Toul was captured, and mulcted in an annual tribute of a thousand livres. Directly the proclamation of Isabelle of Lorraine with René as the sharer of her throne was made, Antoine de Vaudémont, Duke Charles’s eldest nephew, entered a protest and claimed the succession. He based his action upon the three conditions--(1) The Salic Law ruled the succession of Lorraine; (2) the male line had not been broken since the creation of the duchy; and (3) the realm had never gone out of the family. Charles scouted all these positions, affirmed his own sovereign right to name his successor, and refused to alter the terms of the proclamation so far as regarded the succession of his daughter and Duke René. All the church-bells in Barrois and Lorraine were again set jingling joyously when, in the ducal castle of Toul, on the morning of January 17, 1437, a young mother,--very young indeed, barely seventeen,--brought forth her first-born--a beauteous boy, the image, as the midwives said, of the boy-father, not yet nineteen. Church-bells, too, rang merrily all over Anjou and Provence when the glad tidings reached their borders that a male heir was born to the honours of Sicily-Anjou-Provence. Perhaps René and Isabelle were too young to realize what it all meant for France at large, but Queen Yolande understood well enough its tenor, and with her congratulations she greeted her first son’s grandchild with the title of “Prince of Gerona,” linking him ostentatiously with her hereditary rights in Aragon. Duke Charles, too, and Duchess Margaret were the happiest of grandparents, and baby Jean was created Comte de Nancy as future Duke. Charles’s death was somewhat sudden and quite unexpected. Strong man that he was, King Death seemed to be a power not immediately to be feared. René was not at Nancy when the death-knell sounded, but news swiftly reached him, and he returned at once to the capital. Duchess Margaret,--despite her lamentations and her natural dislike to public appearance,--attired herself in full Court dress, the crown she rarely wore upon her head, and all the officials of the Court, the Government, and city, in her retinue, and hastened to the gate to welcome the new Duke of Lorraine. Before her carriage rode a number of lords and knights, who dismounted on the approach of René, and, saluting him deferentially, greeted him as “_Vous estoit le nostre duc!_” The cry was taken up by all the gallant company, whilst René, having dismounted at the portal of St. George, took the sacred missal offered by the Dean into his hands, and swore then and there to respect and safeguard the ancient liberties of the State and city.