The influence of Anne de Beaujeu was already showing signs of a decline; and it therefore behooved her to work while it was yet day, for the time was fast coming when her boy king would no longer submit to sisterly tyranny. Charles was in his twentieth year when, in the spring of 1491, he made his first independent move, with a prospect of still more dangerous manifestations of independence. One evening he left Plessis, as if to go hunting, and rode toward Bourges. He had secretly given orders that Louis d'Orléans should be released, and went to meet and be reconciled with this dangerous adversary of his sister. Louis, who had been sobered by his confinement, was overjoyed at his release, and met the king with every manifestation of loyal devotion and respect. Fortunately, Louis cherished no feelings of resentment against the house of Beaujeu, and willingly acceded to the formal reconciliation proposed by the king, signing, with Pierre de Bourbon, a treaty of amity and fraternal love, in which all past wrongs and differences were to be forgotten. Louis was faithful to the spirit of this agreement, and France had no longer to fear his factious activity. And when Dunois, always ready to plot, always ready to undo his own plots, also agreed to a reconciliation, the personal power of Anne in the royal council may have been weakened, but the ultimate triumph of the principles for which she had contended was assured. Though no longer dominant in all things, she could yet shape the policy of the kingdom and contrive the ruin of Maximilian's ambitious schemes. To unite France and Brittany had been the dream of the French kings, but again and again had the dream proved a delusion. Louis XI, always awake to every possible chance of advantage, had bought the claims of the heiress of the ancient line of Charles de Blois and Jeanne de Penthièvre; but no opportunity of profiting by these claims had been vouchsafed his greedy soul. Now the coveted province seemed more hopelessly alienated than ever. For Anne de Bretagne was married to Maximilian, and the young King of France was solemnly betrothed to the daughter of Maximilian, Marguerite, who had actually been reared at the French court on purpose to fit her for the post of queen, and who had already received, by courtesy, the titles and honors of her station, though her youth still precluded the consummation of the marriage. How to rob Maximilian of his bride and dispose of his daughter was a problem that might well have seemed hopeless of solution. But Madame de Beaujeu was not hopeless, nor was she over-scrupulous.