The good King René of Sicily, having lost his wife Isabel, Duchesse de Lorraine, suffered such great grief that never did he truly rejoice again; and when his intimate friends and favourites urged him to consolation he led them to his cabinet and showed them, painted by his own hand (for he was an excellent painter), a Turkish bow with its string unstrung, beneath which was written: _Arco per lentare piaga non sana_--“The bow although unstrung heals not the wound.” Then he said to them: “My friends, with this picture I answer all your reasons: by unstringing a bow or breaking its string, the harm thus done by the arrow may quickly be mended, but, the life of my dear spouse being by death extinct and broken, the wound of the loyal love--the which, her living, filled my heart--cannot be cured.” And in various places in Angers we see these Turkish bows with broken strings and beneath them the same words, _Arco per lentare piaga non sana_; even at the Franciscan church, in the chapel of Saint-Bernardin which he caused to be decorated. This device he took after the death of his wife; for in her lifetime he bore another. Our queen, around her device which I have told of, placed many trophies: broken mirrors and fans, crushed plumes, and pearls, jewels scattered to earth, and chains in pieces; the whole in sign of quitting worldly pomp, her husband being dead, for whom her mourning never was remitted. And, without the grace of God and the fortitude with which he had endowed her, she would surely have succumbed to such great sadness and distress. Besides, she saw that her young children and France had need of her, as we have since seen by experience; for, like a Semiramis, or second Athalie, she foiled, saved, guarded, and preserved her said young children from many enterprises planned against them in their early years; and this with so much industry and prudence that everybody thought her wonderful. She, being regent of the kingdom after the death of her son King François during the minority of our king by the ordering of the Estates of Orléans, imposed her will upon the King of Navarre, who, as premier prince of the blood, wished to be regent in her place and govern all things; but she gained so well and so dexterously the said Estates that if the said King of Navarre had not gone elsewhere she would have caused him to be attainted of the crime of lèse-majesté. And possibly she would still have done so for the actions which, it was said, he made the Prince de Condé do about those Estates, but for Mme. de Montpensier, who governed her much. So the said king was forced to content himself to be under her. Now there is one of the shrewd and subtle deeds she did in her beginning.