The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (43 page)

3
. Love letters and poems were a popular literary form of the time. The ability to compose a good poem was akin to having good manners or being well dressed; it was required of young courtiers of either sex. By the rules of Courtly Love, a gallant knight always destroyed any love letters he received.

4
. Mail was carried by relays of mounted couriers for the king, the royal family and their staff, and also for foreign dignitaries. As the mail horses were under Brusquet’s command, this enabled the king to know everyone’s itineraries. Brusquet developed the idea of renting out his horses to carry mail for specific clients, French as well as foreign.

5
. Made of wood and covered in painted oilcloth.

6
. The Fountain of the Innocents was built by Pierre Lescot and Jean Goujon. It was originally an open loggia with three sides, the fourth backing onto one of the church buildings on the corner of the rue Saint-Denis and the rue-aux-Fers. Since 1786, it has stood on the site of the former Church of the Innocents, in the middle of the Place des Innocents in Les Halles, the old quarter of Paris.

7
. As Latin inscriptions were used on triumphal archways, a “C” represented the numeral 100, so a “K” was used instead for the queen’s name.

8
. It was the danger of a treaty between Henri II and the Protestant princes opposed to him that prompted Charles V to agree to the Treaty of Passau, resulting in the 1555 Settlement of Augsburg. This treaty gave rulers the right to determine the religious denomination of their subjects. A Catholic ruler had Catholic subjects, a Lutheran ruler had Lutheran subjects, and should they not agree, emigration was the alternative offered. It also led to savage repression by some rulers.

9
. “Silvius” was the code name for Diane used by the imperial ambassadors. There are three possible explanations for this. First, Jacques Silvius was a famous gynecologist whose works were translated from Latin into French by Guillaume Chrétien. He dedicated the part of his book referring to women’s nature to Diane for her help with the royal conceptions. It was rare that medical books were translated from Latin into the vernacular and therefore available to everyone. Apart from midwives, women were excluded from all medical knowledge. According to the sixteenth-century writer Christine de Pisan, women were allowed to know the “secrets of nature” but not to “name them,” nor were they allowed to know of anything considered “indecent” or embarrassing. Guillaume Chrétien’s translation of Jacques Silvius made it possible for women to learn about the most intimate, feminine details of their bodies.

The second possibility is that Diane’s avid interest in medicine was well known, and that she was seen as a natural instructor who wanted to help other women. Diane was intelligent, capable, and overwhelmingly practical, in sharp contrast to the frivolous court. A third is that
silvius
, the Latin for a wood or forest, refers to Diana as the goddess of the moon, the forests, the chase, and childbearing.

10
. Jean Orieux,
Bussy-Rabutin: Le Libertin galant homme
.

11
. This room is situated between the chapel and the west wing of the château. It can still be visited today.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Anet

A
s energetic in war games and sport as he was in his indulgence of the senses, Henri took his lead from his en-thralling mistress. Diane had indeed enchanted the young king—the courtiers could find no other explanation for his devotion to her—and she was an expert at her art. Besides Diane, the king’s two great passions were war and the chase, and horses were an integral part of each, an interest Henri and Diane shared.

In summer they would rise at dawn, and in winter an hour later when the sun had warmed the air a little. Both looked splendid on horseback and often chose their mounts to compliment the color of their costumes. At Anet, Diane kept one of the best stables and packs of hounds in France, and as she knew the countryside around her home so well she was able to provide the most exciting day’s hunting, with picnics prepared in romantic rendezvous.

In the evening, her guests would be entertained with magnificent banquets in rooms designed to set off her special beauty. Only princes and grandees knew such luxury and comfort. The rooms were furnished with deep, soft seating; and chairs were covered in black velvet,
edged with silver brocades, fringes, and appliquéd with three interlaced crescents of silver satin. There was little organized seating and young ladies would sit on squares of tapestry on the floor. Chests and early wardrobes held clothes that would be folded and laid flat.

Diane often visited the horses in the three royal studs—Amiens, Saint-Léger, and Oiron in Poitou—and a number of her letters are dated from these places. The animals there were bred for Henri by Claude Gouffier, seigneur de Boisy,
grand écuyer
, or Master of the Horse of France, whose stable was so beautiful that the king’s stud groom told Henri he had nothing to equal it. At Oiron, the greatest of the three studs, Diane had a gallery constructed for portraits of her favorite mounts, and the monogram “HD” can still be seen today on the walls.

Henri was a consummate equestrian, who treated his horses as if they were his pets. They had the best of everything and their trappings were extremely ornate. His harnesses were gilt leather, while the saddles were stuffed in the Mantuan or Turkish fashion, very comfortable for horse and rider. For state occasions, his horses always wore tall plumes on their headbands. Among his favorites were Quadrant, whom he trained to kneel before him; the renowned sire Gonzague, who came from the famous Mantuan stud of Federigo Gonzaga; the high-stepping Mireau, trained by Carnavalet, the greatest trainer in France; the oddly named warhorse, Le Bay de la Paix, whom Henri rode at Amiens; and the gentle, highly bred Hobère, perhaps the most beautiful of them all. Henri was so devoted to his horses that their names and feats became as famous as those of his courtiers. Henri was known as the best horseman in the kingdom, and it was said that none of his squires could show off a horse’s ability or its flaws as well as the king.

Henri turned Oiron into a cavalry school for one hundred and fifty of his pages, scions of the grandest families of France. The two famous riding masters, Carnavalet and Sipire, took charge of these young gentlemen and turned them into a crack regiment. War was considered a sporting, moral occupation and a safety valve to tame wild young spirits.

Henri II was naturally affectionate and loved animals. In addition to horses, he had quite a collection of dogs—hunting hounds and
greyhounds, spaniels, and little white Maltese lapdogs which he fed himself. Mary, Queen of Scots, who came to France in 1548, became so attached to the Malteses that she owned as many as twenty-five, and years later took some of them back with her to Scotland. According to Brantôme, Henri kept a small zoo to include the many exotic animals given to the royal family.

The king’s court was orderly, and, it was alleged, even more “gallant” than that of his father. Henri II was a man of discipline and habit. He rose early, heard Mass, then spent three hours at his desk, sat in council or held audiences. He ate moderately, and in winter when there were no military campaigns, rode or hunted on horseback with hounds to keep fit. In the afternoons he would attend to more deskwork and hold councils—invariably with Montmorency or Diane. The evening meal was always held in public with full ceremony, after which he might attend one of the queen’s receptions. He never stayed late and spent much time alone with Diane.

Other sporting pastimes at court included
jeu de paume
, or tennis—Diane installed a court at Anet as early as 1548. According to the imperial ambassador Saint-Mauris, Henri always played tennis entirely dressed in white, “with white shoes also, and with a fine straw hat upon his head. He wore his doublet for playing. When one sees him thus at his game one would scarcely realize it is the king who is playing, for even his errors are openly discussed, and more than once I have heard him taken to task.”
¹
The king always played in the most dangerous and difficult second or third positions, and excelled in both. If he won, he gave the prize to his team; when he lost, he paid for everyone. It was the same with billiards and pall-mall. Skating was another of the king’s favorite sports, and when the ice was thick enough to hold him, he would skate on the pond at Fontainebleau. If it snowed, he staged snowball fights with his gentlemen. Having lost his childhood, Henri was always searching to recover it.

Many sports, like jousting, were of a violent nature and during peacetimes they acted as a substitute for war. According to Tavannes,
Henri could “break” as many as sixty lances a day, galloping on German chargers at his opponents. After energetic exercise, the king’s companions had their limbs massaged with almond oil to help them sleep, whereas Henri would attend a ball and dance all night—another thing he did superbly.

At this time Ambassador Matteo Dandolo described the king to his superiors in Venice:

Although young gentlemen were trained for the noble and honorable pursuit of war, the king worked hard with “
Madame
” to remain at peace with his neighbors. Henri was in love, and he would rather spend time with his beloved, reading or sharing their enjoyment of music, art, and philosophy, than at war. Wherever he was, Henri would summon
his Italian lute player, Alberto de Ripa, to send him into a reverie with his gentle art. He would listen to the melodies of Palestrina, or the verses of the great French poet Pierre de Ronsard, set to music for four voices. (Ronsard was actually tone-deaf, but he loved music.)

Henri so wanted the world to know and remember the strength of his love for Diane that every stone façade built during his reign was carved with their combined initials and he summoned all the great artists of the day to immortalize his duchesse de Valentinois. In the early days of his reign, Henri commissioned a portrait of himself from the great enameler Léonard Limousin, painted as he wanted posterity to remember him: the mighty king astride his powerful horse, turning to look at Diane, seated almost naked behind him, his arm caressing her neck, his eyes gazing into hers. In another portrait of Diane, Limousin depicted her as Venus, again half clothed, this time protecting a winged cherub.
³
At Anet there is a bas-relief of Diane, again naked, with Juno’s sacred peacock at her feet. The court painters and sculptors were able to portray the ladies of the court naked with impunity because they were meant to represent famous characters in classical mythology. No one was in the least shocked. Not only those with beautiful bodies were painted; even Catherine appears naked on horseback next to a clothed Henri in another enamel by Limousin. The classical tradition had taken over and the French gloried in the naked body.

Once the antique and the classic became Diane’s passion, she set out to develop a French school, although this did not prevent her from patronizing Italian painters such as Primaticcio. The court painter François Clouet was commissioned for the portrait of
Diane de Poitiers at Her Bath
, in which she appears superbly naked, aristocratic and almost sculptural, and without a hint of shame. The Roman practice of bathing had become fashionable during the Renaissance, especially as a setting for conversation. Diane was proud of her perfect body and saw no reason that it should not be admired. It was this oddly formal painting which began the tradition in France for ladies and courtesans to be painted at their bath.

Diane often posed as the goddess Diana; for another Clouet portrait,
she appears in a natural setting by a woodland spring, bathing with her nymphs. Wearing a doublet of black and white stripes, Henri is depicted as Prince Actaeon, who has been separated from his companions while out hunting, and, catching sight of the goddess, falls in love. The startled Diana is defenseless in her nakedness. For an instant, captured in this painting, the huntress becomes the hunted. In the conclusion of the myth, to punish this insolent voyeur, Diana splashes Actaeon with water and transforms him into a stag to be chased by his own hounds, which tear out his heart. The message of this painting was not lost on Diane’s enemies. When her boundaries are violated, Diana is a cold and vengeful goddess. This allegory was one of the many by which Diane created a deliberate confusion between the goddess and the king’s mistress, fusing the reality with the legend in her quest for eternal life as her namesake. There is also a
Metamorphosis of Actaeon
at Anet, which is accompanied by the inscription “
No Lice a Ogniun Veder Diana Ignuda
”—“No one has the right to see Diana naked.”

Diane commissioned French artists, particularly the French pupils of Primaticcio (who painted her twice), and many of their allegorical portraits cast her as the central character. When the great hunting painting for Chenonceau was completed, all the court saw Diane portrayed as the divine
chasseresse
, the huntress Diana, a goddess radiant in her naked beauty. Diane was fifty. We see her shoulders, her long limbs and firm torso, her high, powerful forehead, her well-modeled chin, and delicate tapering fingers. Her hair is still titian gold and her skin extraordinarily white—whiter even than the cavorting cherubs around her. The color of her eyes is ambiguous: contemporary records and paintings disagree whether they were blue or green. If, as seems likely, this portrait was true to life, then Diane de Poitiers was as worthy of her handsome and virile thirty-two-year-old king as he was of this stunning older beauty.