Joan during the siege endured all the worst fatigues of war that any soldier has to bear.She saw her faithful friends fall around her wasted by hunger or decimated by sickness.When all food was exhausted,dead and decomposed bodies were thrown into the castle that they might pollute the air she breathed.Otho with his troops was kept at Aversa;Louis of Anjou,the brother of the King of France whom she had named as her successor when she disinherited her nephew,never appeared to help her,and the Provenqal ships from Clement VIIwere not due to arrive until all hope must be over.Joan asked for a truce of five days,promising that,if Otho had not come to relieve her in that time,she would surrender the fortress.
On the fifth day Otho's army appeared on the side of Piedigrotta.
The fight was sharp on both sides,and Joan from the top of a tower could follow with her eyes the cloud of dust raised by her husband's horse in the thickest of the battle.The victory was long uncertain:
at length the prince made so bold an onset upon the royal standard,in his,eagerness to meet his enemy hand to hand,that he plunged into the very middle of the army,and found himself pressed on every side.Covered with blood and sweat,his sword broken in his hand,he was forced to surrender.An hour later Charles was writing to his uncle,the King of Hungary,that Joan had fallen into his power,and he only awaited His Majesty's orders to decide her fate.
It was a fine May morning:the queen was under guard in the castle of Aversa:Otho had obtained his liberty on condition of his quitting Naples,and Louis of Anjou had at last got together an army of 50,000men and was marching in hot haste to the conquest of the kingdom.
None of this news had reached the ears of Joan,who for some days had lived in complete isolation.The spring lavished all her glory on these enchanted plains,which have earned the name of the blessed and happy country,campagna felite.The orange trees were covered with sweet white blossoms,the cherries laden with ruby fruit,the olives with young emerald leaves,the pomegranate feathery with red bells;the wild mulberry,the evergreen laurel,all the strong budding vegetation,needing no help from man to flourish in this spot privileged by Nature,made one great garden,here and there interrupted by little hidden runlets.It was a forgotten Eden in this corner of the world.Joan at her window was breathing in the perfumes of spring,and her eyes misty with tears rested on a bed of flowery verdure a light breeze,keen and balmy,blew upon her burning brow and offered a grateful coolness to her damp and fevered cheeks.
Distant melodious voices,refrains of well-known songs,were all that disturbed the silence of the poor little room,the solitary nest where a life was passing away in tears and repentance,a life the most brilliant and eventful of a century of splendour and unrest.
The queen was slowly reviewing in her mind all her life since she ceased to be a child--fifty years of disillusionment and suffering.
She thought first of her happy,peaceful childhood,her grandfather's blind affection,the pure joys of her days of innocence,the exciting games with her little sister and tall cousins.Then she shuddered at the earliest thought of marriage,the constraint,the loss of liberty,the bitter regrets;she remembered with horror the deceitful words murmured in her ear,designed to sow the seeds of corruption and vice that were to poison her whole life.Then came the burning memories of her first love,the treachery and desertion of Robert of Cabane,the moments of madness passed like a dream in the arms of Bertrand of Artois--the whole drama up to its tragic denouement showed as in letters of fire on the dark background of her sombre thoughts.Then arose cries of anguish in her soul,even as on that terrible fatal night she heard the voice of Andre asking mercy from his murderers.A long deadly silence followed his awful struggle,and the queen saw before her eyes the carts of infamy and the torture of her accomplices.All the rest of this vision was persecution,flight,exile,remorse,punishments from God and curses from the world.Around her was a frightful solitude:husbands,lovers,kindred,friends,all were dead;all she had loved or hated in the world were now no more;her joy,pain,desire,and hope had vanished for ever.The poor queen,unable to free herself from these visions of woe,violently tore herself away from the awful reverie,and kneeling at a prie-dieu,prayed with fervour.She was still beautiful,in spite of her extreme pallor;the noble lines of her face kept their pure oval;the fire of repentance in her great black eyes lit them up with superhuman brilliance,and the hope of pardon played in a heavenly smile upon her lips.
Suddenly the door of the room where Joan was so earnestly praying opened with a dull sound:two Hungarian barons in armour entered and signed to the queen to follow them.Joan arose silently and obeyed;but a cry of pain went up from her heart when she recognised the place where both Andre and Charles of Durazzo had died a violent death.But she collected her forces,and asked calmly why she was brought hither.For all answer,one of the men showed her a cord of silk and gold.
"May the will of a just God be done!"cried Joan,and fell upon her knees.Some minutes later she had ceased to suffer.
This was the third corpse that was thrown over the balcony at Aversa.
End
