do during the period of her madness. On his travels with the Grande chapelle he met many of the other Franco-Flemish composers who were working at the same time (for instance, Josquin, Isaac and Robert de Févin) and these meetings may also have proved decisive in the development of his style. Retirement and death Between 1508 and 1514, the court stayed at Mechelen and Brussels, rarely traveling. These are hypothesized to be the most productive years for La Rue as a composer, since he would have had the most free time, and spared the rigors of travel across Europe. Shortly after Charles V came of age in 1515, the court resumed its travels; La Rue retired shortly after a huge tour of all the cities in the northern portions of Charles' empire. Likely he left his job during one of the chapel's visits to Kortrijk, in May or June 1516. He remained there until his death a little more than two years later. While his epitaph alludes to the possibility that he may have worked at the courts in France and Hungary at some time, no other corroborating evidence has been found; however there remain biographical gaps in the 1470s and 1480s: for example, the location of "St Ode" is not yet known. La Rue was relatively wealthy when he died, especially for a singer who was not an aristocrat, and details of his will and the subsequent events surrounding its disposition survive in detail. Not only did his executors find chests of money in his lodgings, but he had considerable income from his prebends, which he distributed to many places, including relatives, charities, choirs, institutions; and he arranged for requiem masses to be sung every day for the month after his death, and a further 300 masses to be sung afterwards, in several different cathedrals. He asked to be buried on the left side of the altar in the church in Kortrijk, although the exact location can no longer be found, and the epitaph only survives in several partially contradictory copies. His epitaph indicates he was a thrifty, virtuous person, not "given to the crimes of Venus" (as, for example, composer Nicolas Gombert, who was sent to the galleys for molesting a choirboy, Ghiselin Danckerts, who was fired from the Sistine Chapel choir for being excessively "given to women", or Gilles Joye, who wrote a mass based on the