really that of the saint, and whether it works miracles; whether it has cured anybody, and whom; and how it is to be worn. I beg you to inform me of all this as quickly as you can, or to write about it in detail to the general of Normandy; also whether you have out yonder any particular cure which has the virtues of the said ring. If you can find one, send it to the said general, I beg you, for the sake of all the pleasure you can give me. Now farewell, cousin and friend.’ In the last years of Louis XI. the male line of the house of Anjou became extinct. We have seen how the king obtained from the last of the house, who could no longer escape from his powerful arm, the cession of their French provinces and their Italian claims: of the former he took immediate possession, the latter remained in abeyance waiting for eventualities which did not fail to come, to the ruin of Italy, whose old sins were expiated centuries later. René, a king of shadows if ever there was one, saw his son Jean and his grandson Nicolas both die before he himself was laid to rest at Angers on July 10, 1480. His nephew Charles, Count of Maine, to whom his French possessions passed with the consent of Louis XI., followed him to the grave within seventeen months; and the sole heiress was now René’s daughter Yolande, widow of Ferry, Count of Lorraine-Vaudemont. She too died in the beginning of 1483, a few months before the king. Her marriage with her cousin had been intended to reconcile the claims of the Vaudemont branch to the Duchy of Lorraine with those of primogeniture in the female line on behalf of which René, as the husband of the heiress Isabelle, had fought unsuccessfully with Antoine de Vaudemont, father of Ferry. Yolande’s son, René II., now succeeded to the dukedom of Lorraine, as well as to the French fiefs of the Vaudemonts. It was he who defeated Charles the Bold at Nancy, and was led by the Venetians into the war with King Ferrante in Italy, where years after, in the war against the Spaniards, his son revived the old family claims to the Neapolitan crown—those claims which were to be practically made good once more in the middle of the seventeenth century by a scion of the French branch of the old house.