[Sidenote: Feelings with which she signed it.] It cost Margaret no effort to sign this paper. With the death of her husband and her son all hope had been extinguished in her bosom, and life now possessed nothing that she desired. She signed this fatal document, renouncing not only all claims to be henceforth considered a queen, but all pretension that she had ever been one, with a passive indifference and unconcern which showed that her spirit was broken, and that the fires of pride and ambition which had burned so fiercely in her breast were now, at last, extinguished forever. [Sidenote: Ungenerousness of Louis.] When the paper was signed Margaret was dismissed and left at liberty to go her own way to her native province of Anjou, where it was her intention to spend the remainder of her days. Her plan was to pass by the way of Paris, in order to see once more her cousin, King Louis, who had treated her with so much consideration and honor when she was on her way to England with a fair prospect of finding her husband upon the throne. But the case was different now, Louis thought, and instead of receiving kindly her intimation that she was intending to visit Paris on her way home, he sent her word that she had better not come, and advised her instead to make the best of her way to her father in Anjou. [Sidenote: An escort offered.] He, however, as if to soften this incivility, sent an escort to accompany her in her journey home, but Margaret was so stung by her cousin's heartless abandonment of her in her distress that she resolved to accept no favor at his hands; so she refused the escort, and set out with her few personal companions alone. [Sidenote: Danger.] [Sidenote: English people in Normandy.] This little blazing up of the old flames of pride and resentment in her heart came near, however, to costing Margaret her life, for she had not gone far on her journey before an emergency occurred in which an escort would have been of great service to her. It seems that when the English were driven out of Normandy, many families and some whole villages remained of people who were too poor to return. These people were now in a very low and miserable condition. They mourned continually the hard necessity by which they had been left without friends or protection in a foreign land; and they understood, too, that the first beginning of the abandonment of their possessions in France by the English was the cession of certain provinces by the government of Henry VI. at the time of that monarch's marriage with Margaret of Anjou, and that all the subsequent misfortunes of their countrymen in France, by which, in the end, the whole country had been lost, had their origin in these transactions. [Sidenote: Margaret at the inn.] [Sidenote: Riot at the inn.]