The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (46 page)

When the king was at Anet, the courtiers vied with one another in their sense of fashion. There was quite a change in the clothes worn at this time. The handkerchief had come into common use; for the first time, ladies wore camisoles as undergarments. White under-linen, often embroidered and edged in lace, absorbed perspiration and dirt, and acted as a protective layer between the rich outer fabrics and the
body. Clothing also indicated the differences between the classes. Only ladies wore under-linen. The same applied to sleeping, which until that time had been mostly in the nude. To wear a nightdress became a mark of chastity (and most comforting in winter).

Court dress stipulated long bodices for women, pointed at the front below the waist; large, rigid skirts; high ruffs—as high as possible at the back in order to frame the face—and large hats with Austrian feathers. Men wore jerkins, breeches slashed with silk, with tight-fitting hose, short pelerine coats, and hats decorated with a feather. In general, gentlemen wore dark colors; and short, pointed beards were fashionable, in imitation of the king’s. Henri was very interested in fashion and, as so often happens, created a new look of his own by chance. Due to an accident as a child, he had an ugly scar on his neck. To hide it, he took to wearing tight, high-ruffed collars, and this attractive fashion was adopted by his courtiers. The king felt there should be a distinction between the princely families and their suites, so he ordained that only high-ranking families could wear crimson. Young ladies were permitted to wear crimson petticoats and muffs. This rule was intended to underline the difference in social status but also to lower the cost of some of the expensive pigments by decreasing the demand.

The mid-sixteenth century was also the time when French gourmet food emerged. French cuisine began to achieve such a reputation that foreign princes sent to France for chefs and pastry cooks. The expression “
faire bon chère
” litters the correspondence of the time and was used to signify the quality of the guests’ welcome and comfort as much as the excellence of the fare.

Cookbooks had been available since the advent of printing and the cult of cuisine was developing. Already some members of the court were known for their appreciation and knowledge of good food, among them Henri’s friend Jacques de Saint-André, who wrote of the splendor of the food to be had at Anet and Chenonceau.

At her own table, Diane preferred to drink
vin clairet
or rosé. Her wines came from her vineyards at Chenonceau or from Beaune. Although dairy products were considered more suited for the use of the common people, Diane believed in healthy food and served butter and
cheese from Normandy at her table. Traditionally, there were three courses for dinner or supper—boiled food, followed by the roasts, and then fruit—a departure from earlier in the century, when dishes were brought in one after the other with no heed for order. Fish, including whale and dolphin, came from Rouen and was often cooked in white wine. It was used especially on Fridays and on “days of obligation” (religious fast days). According to Erasmus, during Lent, the kitchen was busier than ever as the chefs were hard put to render delectable the meager rations permitted.

Diane’s table was always laden with an abundance of food. Pork was butchered into ribs or chops, or was sometimes served as hams or sausages made from the trotters or the ears. Beef, lamb (the tongue was a delicacy), and poultry were in abundant supply. Vegetables—especially cabbage, spinach, leeks, and turnips—were cooked in lots of water (probably boiled tasteless) and often pureed to digest more easily. Cooked together with the meat, the vegetables ended up as a sort of stew, which was easy to eat with a spoon. There were still no forks. All this fare was accompanied by a variety of sauces, hashed meat, and pastries. Wine was drunk warm (blood temperature), but slowly the fashion for chilling white wine came from Italy. White wine was then drunk at cellar temperature or snow and ice added. The Italian sculptor Bernard Palissy designed a clay drinking fountain for keeping wine chilled in the summer months.

Presentation of food also became important—the look of it as well as the aroma and the taste. Even the table linen was impregnated with the scent of lavender, flowers, and herbs, and exquisite dinner services were used. Flowers covered the tables and cloth. Napkins were made of damask, toothpicks of gold and silver, and there were small silver dishes filled with sugared almonds. The napkins were scented and often tucked into necklines to save clothes from falling food and messy fingers. Each place was laid with a goblet, a knife, a spoon, and sometimes a smaller spoon like a teaspoon. The only utensil resembling a fork was a two-pronged spike used by servants for holding down the meat during carving. Elegant guests ate with just two fingers—their hands regularly washed in bowls brought to individuals at the table.

The art of conversation dates from this time, led by intelligent ladies
blessed with polite manners. Not all had the fabled charm of Marguerite de Navarre, but the phrase “
tenir compagnie à la française
”—“to entertain in the French manner” came into usage at this time. According to du Bellay, the French court was the only school where one could learn the art of conversation. Catherine de’ Medici was considered very cultivated and Mary, Queen of Scots, could hold charming conversations in Latin. No wonder that during the mid-sixteenth century, the French court was reputed to be the most civilized in Europe.

A
NET was as close to Paradise as Diane could make it, and wherever he found himself, Henri wanted to return to its enchantment. For the king, Anet and Chenonceau were the settings of the chivalrous romances that had influenced those lonely years in Spain. The king so loved the peace of this beautiful château on the Eure that he hurried back there after any absence. Philibert de l’Orme wrote, “The King was more anxious to know what I had done there [Anet] than at his own houses. This was all he cared about.” Henri was at Anet so often that he made it a virtual seat of government, holding audiences on a dais of black velvet surrounded by seven pillars topped with white plumes. Hundreds of his documents and royal edicts state that they were “Given at Anet.”

Diane always tried to help the queen maintain her dignity, and at Anet she created a series of separate state rooms for her. Whenever Catherine accompanied the court for a sojourn there, she could stay in royal apartments decorated with her own crowned cipher just as if she were in residence at any of the king’s châteaux. One can only imagine the queen’s discomfort within this house, but both Diane and Catherine took great pains to avoid embarrassing the king, and the world assumed all was harmony between the two women. Catherine’s château of Montceau-en-Brie was also a magnificent country property, and a huge amount of money was spent on making it luxurious; but Anet was considered a modern work of art and the talk of the foreign courts. Even if the creation of Anet cost the king a fortune, he knew it was also a symbol glorifying the art and culture of his reign.

For more than one hundred years Anet would remain untouched. Then, in the 1680’s, the duc de Vendôme, who inherited the house, redecorated it in the taste of Versailles. The
Diana
tapestries, dedicated to the goddess, were removed at this time. Four were brought back later—
Diana Saving Iphigenia, Diana Slaying Orion, The Death of Meleager
, and
Jupiter Turning the Peasants into Frogs
—and one can imagine the immense pleasure the châtelaine must have gained from gazing at them.
⁹
There is one remarkable example of this set in the Metropolitan Museum in New York called
The Drowning of Britomaris
. Scholars generally agree that the figure of Diana in the tapestry is as true a portrait of Diane de Poitiers as exists.

_____________________

1
. Saint-Mauris. R. J. Knecht in
Francis I
cites A. Castan,
La Mort de François Ier
, “Memoires de la Société d’emulations du Doubs,” Fifth series, iii, 1878;
Calendar of State Papers, Spanish
, 12 volumes, edited by G. Bergenroth, P. de Gayangos, and M. A. S. Hume (London, 1863–1895).

2
. François had often challenged his sons to a joust.

3
. The Limousin enamels described here are now in the Louvre.

4
. Since Diane took the title of “duchesse d’Etampes” in 1552, it is possible that paintings of the two women became confused by biographers.

5
. At the château d’Anet there is a small pestle and mortar marked with Diane’s emblem used for crushing powders or delicious-smelling plants and herbs; ambergris is a waxy, grayish substance formed in the intestine of sperm whales and found floating in the sea or washed ashore. It is added to perfumes to slow down the rate of evaporation.

6
. Goujon’s origins are obscure. The majority of his work was commissioned by Anne de Montmorency.

7
. From Jules Michelet (1798–1874),
Bête royale
. Although considered one of France’s greatest “national” historians—his
History of France
was published in seventeen volumes in 1833–1867—Michelet’s work was influenced by his family’s traditional leanings toward the Huguenots. His books are anticlerical and republican. He was also the first to use the term
renaissance
meaning “rebirth.”

8
. Since poison—the easiest way of getting rid of someone—could be added to parchment, clothes, gloves, even a bouquet of flowers, princes took the precaution of having someone else read their letters to them. The fear of poison during this century reached endemic proportions.

9
. These tapestries can be seen at Anet today.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A Delicate Domestic Balance

I
n 1548, the year of Mary Stuart’s arrival in France, Henri sent forces to help the Scots against the English. In return for this assistance, and at the urging of the Guises, the king of France asked for the hand of their niece, Mary, Queen of Scots, for the dauphin. The family of Guise was triumphant and deeply in the debt of the duchesse de Valentinois for this enormous boost to their family’s elevation. The six-year-old Mary arrived in France on August 13, 1548. Her mother, the dowager-queen of Scotland, Marie de Guise, had lost her husband, James V, prematurely, and this continued bond with her homeland was her dearest wish. Rightly, she judged that it would be safer to keep Mary far away from the intrigues of the Scottish and the English courts, and she stipulated that Mary should be put in the care of Diane de Poitiers. The duchesse de Valentinois was only too willing to have charge of the eventual successor to Catherine as queen of France. Almost immediately, Mary’s great-aunt Antoinette and her Guise uncles extended their influence and remonstrated with Mary’s mother that “her train was not handsome and as little appropriate as could be.”

Mary Stuart’s first stop in France was at Carrières on the Seine, a
little downstream from the Palace of Saint-Germain. The royal children were there while Saint-Germain was being renovated to receive the little Queen of Scots. The king had issued strict instructions that no workers coming from an area that had the plague were to be employed. At the time of Mary’s arrival, there were four royal children in the nursery: the dauphin François, born in January 1544; Elisabeth, born in 1545; Claude, born in 1547; and Louis, born in 1549. Mary was one year older than the dauphin. Subsequently, six more children would be born: Charles in 1550, Henri in 1551, Marguerite in 1552, and Hercule in 1554. Twin girls appeared in 1556, but did not live long.

In his letters to Scotland, Henri II assured Mary’s family that she was being treated as a sovereign queen. “She shall be received, treated, and honored in all our towns and other places through which she may pass [on her way from the coast to Saint-Germain] as if she were our dearly loved consort the queen in person, having power and right to grant pardons and to set prisoners free.”

Among the many
enfants d’honneur
in the royal nursery when Mary Stuart arrived were her Guise cousins—Henri, son of the duc de Guise; and another Henri, son of the duc d’Aumale—whose fathers were away campaigning. Not long after the little queen was installed in her rooms, the royal children’s governor, Jean d’Humières, received letters from the king and Madame de Valentinois concerning her care. Diane’s letters are to the point, friendly but not really warm. It was not her way.

Mary’s grandmother, the duchesse Antoinette de Guise, wrote to tell the king how well the little dauphin and Mary were getting on—as if they had known each other a long time. Both children were aware that they were engaged, and they danced together at the marriage of the duc d’Aumale soon after Mary’s arrival. Diane wrote a number of letters to the children’s governor to encourage him to promote the friendship between Mary and the dauphin and also between Mary and Elisabeth, saying the two girls were to share a room to aid their companionship. Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, wrote with advice and admonitions; it seems Mary did not wash her hair often enough and her mother insisted she should do this every month as her hair was always oily.

Although Diane could overrule him, Anne de Montmorency (Grand Master of the Household) was officially responsible for the royal nursery. As the caring father of eleven children of his own, he often selected the doctors for his royal charges. Among his many instructions to Humières was to ensure that the dauphin should not go out in cold weather and must always carry a pocket handkerchief for his nose (which was always running). The dauphin also had permanent colitis and the Grand Master recommended cures. Mary Stuart was the only really healthy child in the nursery, and she was deeply distressed when the dauphin fell seriously ill in the autumn after her arrival. It was said that the Children of France were tainted by the “Italian disease.” Although syphilis was not hereditary, and Catherine was healthy enough, all her children except the youngest, Margot, were born undersized and sallow-faced. Later in life they would be tormented by ill health.

The enchanting little queen and her Scottish entourage were allocated rooms especially prepared in a wing of the Palace of Saint-Germain. Mary brought her own household with her and was indeed treated much more lavishly than the other royal children, owning three brass chests for her jewels and having sixteen dresses made in one year.

Catherine grew to dislike Mary. It has been suggested the reason was that Mary’s aunt, the pretty princess Louise de Guise, had been put forward by her father the duke to replace Catherine when she was still childless. Catherine’s education of Mary has been unjustly blamed for the Scottish queen’s alleged “wickedness”; but in fact, Catherine avoided Mary as much as possible and had no part in her education. Mary wrote to her mother in Scotland that she was not in the good graces of the queen, who was the daughter of merchants. Unfortunately, little Mary repeated this comment within Catherine’s hearing. The queen never forgot the slight, and the Scottish queen would regret the remark later in her life. Meanwhile, Catherine wrote to Marie de Guise in Scotland: “You are wonderfully fortunate in having such a daughter, and I am more fortunate still because God has so disposed matters as to grant her to me, for I think having her with me will be the strength of my old age.”

Unlike the dauphin, Mary Stuart was a keen student, and she was
urged to encourage him. She wrote to François: “
Ama igitur literas, princeps illustrissime
”—“Love learning, most illustrious prince.” The Venetian ambassador Giovanni Capello reported that the dauphin “does not care much for letters, at which the king is displeased. Very good teachers have been provided for him … yet their success is small.” Young François was more interested in soldiering.

Although the dauphin was named after his grandfather, he could not have resembled him less. This François was physically weak and subject to every sort of childhood illness and disease, which left him looking pale and waxy, with none of the physical prowess of his father or grandfather. Henri did all he could to make the child’s life happy. There is a letter written by the king to his governor when François was four years old saying he no longer wants to be dressed as a girl “and I agree with him. He should have breeches as he asks for them.”

Giovanni Capello described the dauphin around this time to the pope, his godfather: “Their Majesties have three girls and three boys. The first son is his most serene dauphin whose name is that of his grandfather François I and is the godson of Your Serenity. This month he will finish his eleventh year and for his age he is not well advanced. He is aware that he is a prince, but he speaks little and is perhaps a little bilious. For his traits, he has more of the
physiognomies
of his mother than his father.”

The dauphin’s dull eyes protruded from a bloated head, and he had his mother’s receding chin. His bulbous nose dripped constantly in tandem with his open mouth, through which the unfortunate boy had to breathe owing to problems with his adenoids. Sometimes his ears ran as well. Charles, seven years his junior, had a narrow, ratlike little face, and a sly expression. Henri, younger still, appeared normal, but the baby, Hercule,
¹
had far too large a head and ugly features. The eldest girl, Elisabeth, one year younger than the dauphin, was slight and pretty, with the large dark eyes of her mother and her receding chin. Claude, two years younger than Elisabeth, was as misshapen as her namesake grandmother; and the youngest girl, Marguerite, or Margot, was rumored to be barren from birth.

“The dauphin is not without ability,” continues the Venetian ambassador Capello,

According to Brantôme, the cardinal de Lorraine supervised the children’s Bible studies, and he sat and read with the dauphin himself. Like many of the Guise family, Mary was taught music, the cittern (a flat, pear-shaped instrument similar to a guitar), harp, and harpsichord, and loved to sing. All the royal children were taught to dance, and they learned languages—Italian, Spanish (French for Mary), and Latin. The girls were also taught needlework. Mary’s Latin schoolwork shows her writing to her uncle, the cardinal de Lorraine: “Many people in these days, my uncle, fall into errors in the Holy Scriptures, because they do not read them with a pure and clean heart.” This would indicate that she was being trained in the Catholic religion. Mary’s moral and religious instruction was given her by Antoinette de Guise, her grandmother, renowned for her piety, charity, and monastic links. She was also an excellent wife and mother and ran her houses beautifully.

At this time, the queen asked Nostradamus, the better known of her two soothsayers, to cast the children’s horoscopes. These were far from accurate. Prince Louis was supposed to live long and prosper, whereas in fact he died at less than two years old. Nostradamus said Charles IX would be a great and valiant ruler, whose glory would equal that of Charlemagne, but the exact opposite came to pass.

Two years after Mary’s arrival, the children’s governor, Jean d’Humières, died, and his wife, the mother of seven sons and eleven daughters,
was retained to take care of the matrons and maids of honor. Diane wrote to her that she trusted Madame d’Humières’ judgment over that of the doctors, “especially in view of the many children you have had.” Henri II also assured Madame d’Humières that he found her services excellent and he wanted “no other person ever to look after the children.” In all, thirty-seven children of noble families were brought up with the Children of France.

In 1550, Marie de Guise returned to France to visit her daughter Mary and her son, the duc de Longueville, whom she had left in France as a baby. This visit by the queen mother was intended to ensure the continuance of the Franco-Scottish alliance; but Marie de Guise only really succeeded in annoying everyone at the French court by persistently asking for money and support. The following year, 1551, she returned to Scotland in great distress with her French son. Four years later, Marie de Guise took over the regency from Mary’s cousin, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, who had been given the title duc de Châtellerault by François I.

By 1553, the dauphin had his own separate household under d’Humières’ successor, Jacques I, seigneur d’Urfé,
²
but the queen decided to keep Elisabeth and Claude by her and not give them a separate establishment. This was possibly to prevent Diane from appointing her own favorites to care for the girls. A year later, in 1554 when Mary was twelve, she was, in fact, given charge of her own household and entertained her uncle the cardinal de Lorraine as her first guest.

Strangely enough, the children seemed to cling to their father rather than their mother, and thought nothing odd about spending so
much time with Diane at Anet. Little Mary Stuart was warmhearted and sincere. That warm heart ruled her head, and her love and support were instinctive rather than strategic. In this age of cynicism, Mary Stuart was somewhat unusual in her deep sincerity, especially toward her Catholicism, which could only lead to eventual disaster. Mary gave her love to “
Madame
,” and Diane returned her affection, taught her to ride, and gave her a falcon, remembering her own childhood passions for both. Mary wrote to her mother:

The king, who was generally bored by women, delighted in children and, like all the court, fell under the spell of the little Scottish queen. He called her his
reinette
, treated her like one of his own, and became very attached to her. By the age of eleven, Mary had learned so much from Diane that she could entertain the king as well as any woman of twenty-five. Henri wrote that she was the most perfect child he had ever seen, and openly preferred her to his own children, insisting that she take precedence over them at court. Indeed, he had written to Humières when Mary first arrived: “I have to inform you that it is my desire that she should take the precedence of my daughters. For not only is the marriage between her and the dauphin settled and concluded, but she is a crowned queen, and as such it is my wish that she should be honored and served.”