However, his marriage with Joan had been duly solemnized some months before the death of old King Robert in order that the latter’s fondest wish might be accomplished betimes; but, to the rage and disappointment of Andrew, as soon as the King was dead, Joan alone had been proclaimed as his successor by her cousin, Charles Duke of Durazzo and Albania, who had presented her as their sole, legitimate sovereign, to the populace assembled below the windows of the Castel Nuovo in a room of which King Robert’s dead body, the breath but scarcely gone out of it, lay still warm upon the bed on which he had died. Moreover not only Charles of Durazzo, but others, including principally Robert of Cabano and another cousin of the Queen, Louis of Taranto, had absolutely refused to do homage to Andrew of Hungary; to Joan alone had they bent the knee and sworn fealty. Only one person of all those present had protested energetically against the exclusion of Prince Andrew from the immediate proclamation of sovereignty; this was a certain Father Robert, a monk, the tutor of Andrew, whom he had accompanied from Hungary to Naples and whom he never deserted as long as the prince lived. This Father Robert earned the especial dislike of Petrarch, to whom the monk’s austere and masterful personality was as gall on the tongue, to judge from the poet’s description of him. As has been told, then, by the time that King Robert passed away, leaving his kingdom to Joan and to Andrew her consort, these two had been man and wife for long months; during which period Joan had loved, not her husband, but the handsome, swaggering Saracen, Robert of Cabano. But by now, when she was become Queen of Naples by the death of her grandfather, Joan had grown weary of the insolence of Robert’s dominion over her, and was minded to throw off the yoke of it. Also, her affections—which, be it said in justice to her, had formerly been consistently offered to her husband and as consistently rejected by him—had turned towards one of the very few completely disinterested and unselfish persons at the Court. This was Bertrand of Artois, whose father, Charles of Artois, had been appointed by King Robert’s will one of the regents of the kingdom until Andrew and Joan should have attained their twenty-fifth year.