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publicly retract her objection to the marriage.
    The wedding, to be held in Arles, was planned for the following December. The bride, accompanied by a splendid retinue, left Zaragoza in the fall of 1400 and began the long journey to Provence. King Martin, with more pressing business to attend to, declined to leave Aragon for the ceremony, and delegated one of his cousins as his surrogate.
    Yolande of Aragon’s reputation for handsomeness preceded her. The Monk of Saint-Denis, writing of her at the time of her marriage in the monastery’s official chronicle, rhapsodized, “This princess captivated all eyes with her exceptional beauty, the charms of her face and the dignity that emanated from her whole person. In a word, she was a genuine treasure of graces. The wise said that Nature had enjoyed creating her and bestowed on her every possible perfection; she lacked only immortality. I will not attempt to describe her beauty; suffice to say that she was beyond compare.” She was “one of the most beautiful creatures that one could see,” agreed the chronicler Jean Juvenal des Ursins, who knew her.
    Anxious to set eyes on so admirable a paragon of feminine charm (or more likely suspicious that the accolades were a little too effusive to be true), the prospective bridegroom found himself too impatient to wait at Arles for Yolande to appear as protocol demanded. Instead, Louis II raced to Montpellier, which was along the wedding party’s route. There he disguised himself and hid among the crowd that had massed to view the royal procession in all its magnificence. The princess of Aragon and her entourage passed through as planned; Louis was able to get a good long look at his intended without being observed himself; and, finding (no doubt to his intense relief) that she passed muster, galloped back to Provence with a light heart in plenty of time for the official reception.
    Yolande of Aragon arrived in Arles on December 1, 1400. She made a grand entrance into the city, a canopy of gold cloth embroidered with her coat of arms and those of her future husband held over her head by foursyndics. She was received by her husband-to-be and future mother-in-law “with all expressions of honor and joy,” and was married the next day by a cardinal in front of an audience that included many high-ranking members of the Church and the Provençal aristocracy. Afterward, the newlyweds repaired to their castle to receive the homage of the local baronage, and the following days were given over to feasting and merrymaking, to mark the momentous and glorious nature of the occasion.
    Marie of Blois had succeeded in corralling the daughter-in-law of her choice. Little did she know that in doing so, she had also saved France.
    F OR A MARRIAGE that had begun with the wife’s repeated refusal of the husband, Yolande of Aragon and Louis II got along very well together. They would be married for seventeen years and there was never a hint of scandal or infidelity about either one of them. They seem actually to have loved each other.

    Portrait of Louis I of Anjou and his wife, Marie of Blois, Yolande of Aragon’s formidable mother-in-law.
    Of course, the readiness with which Yolande and Louis II fell into a harmonious conjugal relation might easily be traced, at least in the beginning, to their opulent, carefree, and highly agreeable lifestyle. The revenue from the rents and taxes on Louis’s holdings in Anjou, Maine, and Provence were substantial, and this income, in combination with Yolande’s impressive dowry, vaulted the young couple into the realm of the extremely wealthy. They owned more castles than they knew what to do with, and these were so conveniently placed that every year they could spend the hottest months of the summer in Anjou in the north and then migrate south for the cold of winter to warm and sunny Provence. Louis II’s castle in Angers, the capital city of Anjou, was one of the largest and most important fortresses in