Yolande moves away, bending to pick up the dropped garment. She tosses it carelessly across the chair. “Isabeau never cared for him. She treated all her children like chess pieces, each to be played at a different time and discarded if they were useless. She only ever loved herself. A shameful woman. To her, being a mother is not so different from being a queen. When one sits at a great height, it is easy to enjoy many favors. One can live one’s whole life never knowing what it means to give, to sacrifice. And she still does not know.

“From an early age,” Yolande continues, “I took an interest in Charles. I saw how he was neglected. No one cared for him; no one minded if he was in a room or if he was missing. I once asked him, when he was a boy only so high—he was very small as a child: How long has it been since your mother took you in her arms and kissed you? Since she called you her special darling and said she wanted to gobble you up like a dish of stewed apples with spoonfuls of white sugar? We were on a barge traveling to the south of the kingdom. It was the first time he saw such green and beautiful country. He said, without taking his eyes off the land, which he did not know at the time would one day be his, ‘It has been three months since my mother held me.’ And my heart, it broke for him. I folded my arms over his thin body. I told him, From this moment on, Charles, you have two mothers: your natural mother and me, Yolande. You have my children to be as close or closer to you than your own siblings. And after that day, he always called me his ‘good mother’ and became like another brother to my second son, René. They would read poetry together and draw. I took what he made, what he wrote, and I made a point of showing his work to all the drawing masters and the famous poets who would visit the court. The attention frightened him at first. This was to be expected. But later he learned to laugh. And he learned to be at ease with his true friends. Who knew then he would become King of France? Two of his elder brothers were not infants when they died; they were already men. But illness took them, God rest their souls, and then it was my own sweet son who became Dauphin.”