The years 1434 and 1435 were full of tragic happenings for René and Isabelle. Death claimed three important personages near of kin. All Lorraine mourned the saintly Duchess Margaret. She died in her devoted daughter’s arms during the feast of Pentecost, and they buried her beside her consort, Charles II., in the ducal tomb at St. George-by-the-Gate. Her quiet influence had been all for good, both upon her children’s account and upon the morals of the Court and nation. She could, as we have seen, act the heroine as well as the devotee. Isabelle missed her mother’s goodly counsels more than she could express in words. René’s greatest loss was undoubtedly his brother, Louis III., King of Sicily-Anjou and Naples. This bereavement wholly changed the position and prospects of the Bar-Lorraine ducal family; for Louis dying without surviving issue, all his honours, titles, and dominions, were inherited by his next brother, René. This event, and what it meant for René, were the climax of his career. The proclamation of the new King was a tragedy and a travesty combined. The pathos of his position was emphatic. The news stunned him--powerless and wellnigh nerveless, hopeless and wellnigh demented. He had not regained his equanimity, when the mockery of his fate was borne still more cruelly upon him in the intelligence that reached him on February 2, 1435, in the Tour de Bar, of the demise of Queen Giovanna II., whose will named him her successor as King of Naples. Louis died of fever at Cosenza, the capital of Calabria, on November 15, 1434, lamented by his enemies as well as by his friends. His devoted mother was not with him. She was broken-hearted at the news which reached her at Angers. Alas that so gallant a soldier-King should be cut off so suddenly and so prematurely in the first bloom of his manhood! Cast down with grief unspeakable and mute, his girl-wife--still a bride--Marguerite, consoled his last hours. No child had come to bless their union, and the palpitating passion of the honeymoon was naturally cooling. The stress, too, of martial movements separated all too soon and too frequently the bridal couple. Still, Queen Marguerite ministered tenderly to her sick spouse, and her love burst forth in undiminished fervency as she realized that death would so cruelly part them. Very nobly and unselfishly, Louis in his will,--very strangely, made exactly to the day a year before,--required all honour to be paid to his widow, for his sake as well as for her own, and left her the bulk of his private property--alas! greatly diminished by the expenses of his military campaigns. Moreover, he expressly directed that she should be free to go where she would,--if not to Anjou, then to her home again in Savoy,--and he besought her, “for the love she bore him, not to pine away in sadness, but to choose some good man and marry him, for the relief of nature and for the love of God.”