ruler whom we know he will fatally entangle. With Marie in Burgundy, as with the passionate and unhappy Marguerite of Anjou in England, we are inclined to forgive the ruler who could not rule, or who resorted to infamous means in her struggles to rule, when we remember that both were women brought face to face with tremendous problems and made the sport of crafty, cruel, unscrupulous foes and faithless friends. CHAPTER XV ANNE DE BEAUJEU: THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KINGDOM _C'est la moins folle femme du monde, car, de femme sage il n'y en a point_ (she is the least foolish woman in the world; there are no wise ones). The cynical old king, Louis XI., sums up for us in this epigram his estimate of the daughter whom he loved and trusted more than any other person of his own blood. This daughter, Anne de France, was but a young woman when her father died, but the tortuous policy and the sagacious aims of Louis XI. had become familiar to her as a mere girl, and she lived to continue and in some sort to carry to successful terminations the principal schemes cherished by her father. Almost from her very birth, Louis had used her in his intrigues, proposing her marriage now with this prince, now with that, according as the needs of the moment suggested. When the chief of his enemies, Charles le Téméraire, lost his first wife, Louis proposed that he marry the princess Anne, at that time a child of two years, and offered as her dowry Champagne, if Charles would agree that Normandy should revert to the Crown without question. Yet, a year later, 1466, when Louis had obtained possession of Normandy and had no further immediate need of Charles, he offered Anne to the son of the Duke of Calabria. Neither bargain was meant to be kept; but Charles, partly out of anger at the king's bad faith, married Margaret of York. Seven years later, when Louis had made up his mind to conciliate the house of Bourbon, Anne was betrothed to Pierre de Bourbon, Sire de Beaujeu; and as no new alliance presented itself as desirable, Anne de France became Anne de Beaujeu.