Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (5 page)

At a tournament, the knights traditionally lower their lances in front of the object of their admiration so that she can tie her favor—her silken scarf—to the tip, and her knight then sallies forth into the combat wearing her colors. It was naturally expected in the grand tradition of courtly love that the new queen would be judged “
la belle parmi les belles
”—the beauty among the beauties. It was Henri’s first tournament and he was cast in the role of the hero, Amadis. But instead of lowering his lance before the auburn-haired Eléanore of Portugal, or even his father’s buxom and vivacious blond mistress, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly (who believed she deserved the honor, and privately expected it), Henri, perhaps wishing to publicly acknowledge the woman who had shown him kindness on the saddest day of his life, halted before the thirty-year-old Diane de Poitiers, Grande Sénéchale of Normandy. He dipped his lance and, in a reedy voice not yet matured by adolescence, boldly offered his protection as her gallant knight if she would favor him with her green and white colors that day.

The crowd didn’t know whether to be shocked or charmed. Anne d’Heilly was steamed and made a dramatic exit from the wooden stands, drawing even more attention to her rejection. From then on she regarded Diane de Poitiers as her enemy and spared no opportunity to attack her beautiful rival. A couple of years later, long before their romance began, the fourteen-year-old Henri energetically defended Diane from Anne d’Heilly’s slanderous allegations that “the Wrinkled One,” as the royal mistress called Diane (who was only
nine years her senior), maintained her youthful looks by practicing witchcraft—a serious charge in the sixteenth century.

By the time Henri became a bridegroom in 1533, the tall and slender comtesse de Brézé had already been widowed for two years. Diane had added the widow’s symbol, an upended torch, to her coat of arms, with the motto
Qui me alit me extingit
—“He who inflames me has the power to extinguish me.” It was a family symbol, but the semierotic phrase would prove prophetic.

Black and white were the official colors of mourning in France, and the Sénéchale, as Diane was also known, decided that they flattered her pale complexion and strawberry blond hair so well that she retained them. Black and white became her signature, and from then on she wore nothing else and decorated her rooms at court as well as her great gift from Henri (upon his accession to the throne), the Château d’Anet, exclusively in those two hues. Diana was not only the Roman goddess of the hunt; she was the goddess of the moon, and black and white also represented the dark and light sides of the celestial sphere.

From the outset, Henri made no secret of his attraction and devotion to Diane de Poitiers, and Catherine de Medici endeavored to compete with her kinswoman for his affection. But the new bride was soon compelled to acknowledge that this elegant older woman in the prime of her beauty had utterly bewitched her husband.

In 1537, while Henri was on a military campaign in Piedmont, he impregnated a commoner named Filippa Duci, which was all it took to convince him that the fertility issues he and Catherine had been suffering in the four years since their wedding were his wife’s fault. Filippa bore a daughter, and Henri named her Diane, after the Sénéchale, to whom he gave the child to be raised alongside her own two girls. Because of the infant’s name, and the fact that the comtesse de Brézé was parenting her, rumors abounded that little Diane de France was really the bastard daughter of Diane de Poitiers and Henri. By now he had moved up a notch in the line of succession and was the dauphin, owing to the death in August 1536 of his older brother.

Although it is possible that Diane and Henri consummated their romance as early as the end of 1536 or the start of 1537, it’s more
likely that the liaison didn’t blossom into a full-blown sexual relationship until 1538, after Henri returned from the front. The eighteen-year-old had come back more confident and mature of mind and body (not to mention a dad). An erotic poem that Diane, then thirty-seven, wrote soon after Henri’s return to France refers to her having submitted, “quivering and trembling…[to] a boy, fresh, ready, young,” so she may indeed have kept him waiting and wanting until then.

Henri and Diane’s is one of the greatest romances in royal history. Until she slept with Henri, the Sénéchale’s sexual experience had been limited to a successful seventeen-year marriage with a man forty years her senior, a man she’d wed at fifteen, when he was old enough to have been her grandfather. With Henri she was experiencing passion for the first time in her life, but enjoying relations with a man young enough to be her son.

One clue that their affair became carnal in 1538 is that Henri began to dress only in Diane’s colors—black and white. He also adopted the crescent moon as his emblem, and created a monogrammed device with their initials as entwined as their limbs must have been every night. Emblazoned beneath the moon, Henri’s motto became an erotic double entendre:
Cum plena est, emula solis
—“When full, she equals the sun.” Portraits of Diane, including nudes depicting her as Diana, goddess of the hunt, were hung everywhere. Desperately in unrequited love with her husband, the unhappy Catherine de Medici had no choice but to accept the ubiquitous HD insignias and the new decor with dignified silence, tamping down her bitterness and humiliation. There was nothing she could say, because until she gave Henri a child, she could be sent home to Florence at any time, repudiated for barrenness.

A plot to put aside Catherine had already been set in motion by François I’s scheming blond mistress, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly. Anne wished to topple her rival courtesan, Diane de Poitiers, by finding Henri a new bride—one he would actually desire. But Catherine had an unlikely ally: her second cousin Diane. It was in Diane’s interest as well that her lover retain his homely little wife; otherwise she, too, ran the risk of being cast aside. So she became the couple’s sex therapist.

Meanwhile, Catherine availed herself of every known remedy in
an effort to become fertile: wearing a girdle under her gowns that was made by a witch (soaked in she-donkey’s milk and bearing charms such as the middle finger of a fetus); sporting an amulet about her neck containing the ashes of a giant frog; ingesting myrrh pills and mare’s urine; and slathering herself with poultices of cow’s dung and ground stag antlers. But as things transpired, part of their conception problem may have been Henri’s. Referred to in several diplomatic dispatches, he suffered from a mild deformity of the penis, a downward curvature known as chordee or hypospadias. Evidently, Catherine’s real medical issue was an inverted uterus, and some scholars have hypothesized that had Henri’s penis been straight, she would have had far less trouble conceiving.

Henri was an adventurous lover with Diane but never attempted anything too exotic with his wife. Diane advised Catherine to jettison all the quack remedies, and instead (in concordance with the royal physicians), she suggested a number of sexual positions to the royal couple that would facilitate successful intercourse, including making love
à levrette
—which we might call doggie style, a
levrette
being a greyhound.

Not only did the gossip regarding Henri and Catherine’s embarrassing sex life spread through the French court, but foreign ambassadors provided the intelligence to their employers. It humiliated Catherine all the more that the whole world seemed to know that Henri’s mistress “at night urges [him] to that couch to which no desire draws him.”

By reminding Henri of Catherine’s many fine qualities of character as well as encouraging him to become more acrobatic in his spouse’s boudoir, Diane was able to thwart Anne d’Heilly’s scheme to supplant the dauphine, thereby maintaining her
own
place in Henri’s affections and bed. Diane would get Henri all hot and bothered and then send him upstairs to his wife’s bedchamber to perform his conjugal duty.

Catherine reveled in each visit, but for Henri it was purely an obligation. He could not even bear to look his Medici bride in the face while they made love, and when he finished he would return to his mistress’s slender arms. It was a body slam to Catherine’s ego. What
did Diane de Poitiers have that she didn’t? Catherine’s curiosity got the better of her when she hired an Italian carpenter to drill a pair of holes in her floor so she could spy on Henri and his paramour. What she saw sickened her: “a beautiful, fair woman, fresh and half undressed, was caressing her lover in a hundred ways, who was doing the same to her.” They were all over Diane’s furniture, and on the floor, made more comfortable and sensuous by her velvet rug puddled about them. Brokenhearted, Catherine admitted to her friend the duchesse de Montpensier that Henri had “never used her so well.”

In any event, Diane’s advice proved fruitful and Catherine bore children. To Catherine’s displeasure, Henri thanked his lover for her successful sex counseling by giving her a role in the raising of his children. Diane’s cousin Jean d’Humières was awarded the governorship of the nursery, and Diane appropriated Catherine’s private nicknames for the royal children. To the future queen, even in her maternal triumph, nothing remained entirely hers; her husband’s mistress was not only in
his
bedroom, but in their children’s sphere as well. At least she was qualified. Diane, who had successfully raised two daughters of her own, in addition to Henri’s illegitimate Diane de France, would eventually be placed in charge of the education of Henri and Catherine’s offspring, which she managed until 1551.

On March 31, 1547, Henri became king of France upon the death of his father. After a lavish procession in which he passed beneath a trio of triumphal arches, one of which bore the motto he and Diane devised as their own,
Donec totum impleat orbem
—“Until it fills the whole world”—Henri was crowned at Reims on July 26. His black velvet doublet and coronation robes were embroidered not with the traditional lilies of France but with Diane’s insignias in countless seed pearls: her quivers, bows and arrows, her entwined crescent moons, and their initials—an H and double D. From then on, these would become Henri’s kingly symbols, a public acknowledgment of his liaison with his moon goddess, openly, if not defiantly, bringing their romance into the sunlight. Not only the king’s garments and his horses’ caparisons, but each royal property would eventually become emblazoned and embellished everywhere one looked with their combined ciphers and insignias.

As queens of France were merely consorts and were not crowned beside their husbands, the very pregnant and opulently gowned Catherine was no more than an honored spectator at Henri’s coronation. But she was outshone by the even more resplendently attired Diane de Poitiers, whose fair hair was adorned with a diamond crescent that to the eye of every beholder looked like a crown. The new queen did not even spend her husband’s coronation night celebrating privately with him. According to the Italian ambassador, after the banquet, the king “went to find the Sénéchale.”

As soon as the crown was on his head, Henri showered Diane, whom he called “madame,” or
ma dame
(“my lady,” in the high-flown chivalric sense), with jewels, real estate, and revenues, many of which his father had previously given to
his
maîtresse en titre
, Anne d’Heilly. Among Diane’s new perquisites was a percentage of income from a tax imposed on every church bell in France. This unusual love token prompted the poet Rabelais to bawdily quip that the monarch had hung the bells of his kingdom about the neck of his mare.

Rabelais realized that Diane was Henri’s paramour in the fullest sense, but there were some at court who still didn’t believe it, unwilling to wrap their brains around the idea that such a young, virile man had any sexual desire for a woman twenty or so years his senior. Ambassador Lorenzo Contarini, in his dispatches to the Vatican in 1547 (after the pair had been lovers for nearly ten years), wrote that the French king displayed a “real tenderness” toward Diane de Poiters, “but it is not thought that there is anything lascivious about it, but that this affection is like that between a mother and son.” It’s a testament to the lovers’ discretion that they managed to fool at least some of the people some of the time.

However, not every ambassador was so taken in, and the paramours weren’t always so tactful. At the outset of Henri’s reign he created an intimate circle of loyal nobles, which excluded his queen, but included his official mistress. The imperial ambassador Jean de Saint-Mauris, whose boss was the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, Charles V (the same monarch who had held Henri a prisoner when he was a boy), was exceptionally disparaging of both the king and his mistress. Saint-Mauris wrote of this relationship:

“After dinner [his midday meal] he visits [Diane] and when he has reported to her details of all the matters he has discussed in the morning meetings, he sits on her lap and plays the guitar to her, frequently asking [his Grand Master of the Household, the duc de Montmorency] whether she had not preserved her beauty, occasionally caressing her breasts and looking at her face, like a man dominated by his infatuation…. The king has many good qualities, and I would hope much more of him if he were not so foolish as to allow himself to be led as he is…none may dare to remonstrate with the king in case he offends [Diane], fearing that the king will tell her, since he loves her so much…. He continues to yield himself more and more to her yoke and has become entirely her subject and slave.”

Evidently Diane’s signature perfume, a lightly peppered scent, acted as an aphrodisiac for Henri. Privacy was scarce during this era, and in the presence of trusted attendants and advisers (and the occasional ambassador), the lovers felt comfortable getting blatantly physical. Signor Alvarotti, the Venetian ambassador, wrote in 1549 that on one occasion when Diane and Henri began to indulge in some heavy foreplay, the king caressed her with such abandon that the bed collapsed and Diane cried, “Sire, do not jump on my bed so violently or you will break it.”