Seductress (16 page)

Once within this cloistered sanctuary, few could resist the enchantment of its resident life force. In a backyard “Philosophers Pavilion” lived three myrmidons—Abbé Morellet, Abbé de La Roche, and the young Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis—who provided Minette with “unremitting adulation.” Turgot renewed his marriage proposals, and though they practically lived in each other’s houses, she refused him because she enjoyed her independence too much.

Franklin’s passion for her should have surprised no one. Almost a male counterpart of Minette, he was high-spirited, whimsical, and amorous, and he preferred older to younger women. A heartthrob even at seventy, Franklin, like Helvétius before him, caused an erotic firestorm among the young Parisian lovelies who created coiffures in his honor and beat down his bedroom door.

Yet after seven weeks in France he was so besotted with the sixty-one-year-old Minette that he told friends that he intended to “capture her and keep her with him for life.” Nearly every day he trudged over to Auteuil, where she relieved him of the American puritanical corsetry he detested so much; she made sure he kicked back and “was always feted.” Minette shrieked with approval at his defenses of atheism and joined him in rowdy drinking songs and “gay nonsense.” He gorged on her thick whipped cream and played the harmonica for her circle of acolytes.

Minette herself fell very much in love with Franklin but repeatedly refused to marry him, citing her devotion to her salon and personal freedom. He composed a last-ditch plea on his own printing press, “To Our Lady of Auteuil: A Descent into Hell,” a witty jeu d’esprit in which he imagined their ex-spouses married in the afterlife. “Let us
avenge ourselves
!” Franklin implored. To no avail.

She and Franklin, though, remained ardent lovers. They exchanged mash notes and regular visits, kissed in public, and praised each other abroad; he said if he were summoned to paradise, he’d pray to remain on earth for another of her embraces. When he was at last summoned back to America from his diplomatic tour, he wrote sadly, “It seems to me that things are badly arranged in this world when I see that two beings, so made to be happy together are obliged to separate.”

After Franklin left, other equally illustrious men took his place: noted author and orator Sébastien Chamfort and Comte Destutt de Tracy, a philosopher and revolutionary activist. As the nation hurtled toward revolution, Auteuil became a “horrifying nest of ideologues,” harboring the masterminds of the future republic. Thanks to them and her husband’s populist sympathies, Minette was spared the ravages of the Terror.

By eighteenth-century standards Minette lived to an astonishing age of eighty-one. Like Roald Dahl’s Grandma Georgina, she seemed to age backward, awakening with the birds, throwing open her windows to smell the flowers, and romping with the caretakers’ children. As “light and lively” as a twenty-year-old, she still drew admirers. Even Napoleon paid a call. She died of a chest cold in 1800, her longtime companion and backyard “philosopher” Cabanis beside her. At her deathbed he sobbed, “My dear mother!” To which she replied, “Yes, I am. I always will be.”

Cabanis, like others, instinctively invested her with mythic dimensions. Both Franklin and Fontenelle equated her with the moon goddess, sacred archetype of the senior siren and divine regenerator. Fontenelle likened her to a moon that rose for him, and Franklin, to an old moon whose castoff fragments created her “star” children.

Abigail Adams, with thirty-something pique, set Minette down for a “very bad” woman, and she was. She broke the patriarchal old lady mold and came out blazing with life, noise, and razzmatazz sex appeal. She belonged to the wrong club, a sorority of uppity, obstreperous love queens, life spirits beyond good and evil. Franklin’s drinking song, which he dedicated to her, acknowledged as much: “Fair Venus calls, her voice obey!”

 

As Cabanis’s tribute to Minette acknowledges, maternal allure often figures into the elder siren’s attraction. In her later incarnation, the Mother of All Being reached her apogee. Men at a preconscious level know it; for them the older woman is always “mother,” a source of terrifying dependencies, authority, and incest taboos. Also, of course, a source of tremendous appeal. The cagey Silver Foxes handled this high-intensity aphrodisiac with finesse, artfully mixing nurturer and sex queen so as to neutralize oedipal anxieties and maximize the maternal hit. Through the adroit deployment of the
magner mater,
two French “old dames” captured younger kings who adored them to the end and made them de facto queens of France.

In 1543 the first of these “old dames” lay with her royal lover on a turkey carpet at Fontainebleau. They gamboled in “wanton” abandon, she throwing off her shift, he covering her “beautiful” body in hot caresses. She was the forty-four-year-old Diane de Poitiers, and she was being watched. From the ceiling above, a tear-streaked young woman peered through a peephole: Catherine de’ Medici, wife of the prince on the carpet.

For nine years she’d tried unsuccessfully to lure her husband to bed, a failure neither she nor her minions could fathom. Catherine epitomized Renaissance feminine desirability; she was nubile, plump, docile, and sweet and wore the costliest, sexiest clothes at court. What black magic explained the appeal of this ancient strumpet? Advisers knew how to handle it—sulfuric acid to the jade’s face. But Catherine preferred to “wait and hate.” With a middle-aged rival it was just a matter of time.

Wrong. It would be another fifteen years before Diane de Poitiers was displaced, a decade and a half in which she became the queenpin of France. And her appeal for Henri was no mystery. Throughout his traumatic youth she’d been his protectress and shoulder to cry on. When Henri came back from a four-year captivity in Spain, the twelve-year-old dedicated his first feats to Diane and wore her colors. She initiated him sexually at seventeen and ruined him for other women. He neglected his wife, and when he became king in 1547, he invested her with power, riches, and influence beyond those of any
maîtresse en titre
in French history.

Diane had been bred for this. Born in a turreted castle on the banks of the Rhône, she was raised for no ordinary destiny. Her father’s favorite (like so many female achievers), she eschewed traditional feminine employments for riding and hunting, and acquired a masculine taste for “magnificence.” Instead of being browbeaten out of it through the usual training, she spent her adolescence at a finishing school for women of majesty. Her teacher was one of Europe’s boldest iconoclasts, the “ardent feminist” Anne de Beaujeu. She’d governed her own kingdom for eight years and taught her demoiselles to rule. They learned classical literature, medical lore, grace, civility, the art of conversation, and the importance of “great doing.” There men addressed ladies on bended knee.

When Diane turned fifteen, Anne, a firm believer in the advantages of widowhood, provided her with a rich husband forty years her senior. While married to Louis de Brézé, an indulgent Burgundian baron, Diane bore two daughters and served as a matron of honor to the French queen.

At Fontainebleau she won her spurs in seduction. François I had just imported Renaissance culture to France and imposed Castiglione’s charm school precepts on the court. Women had to fascinate: dress rakishly in extravagant gowns trimmed with guipure lace, swing their hips when they walked, half close their eyes, and know “how to dance,” talk, and “be festive.”

Eldersirens catch on early; Diane soon made her mark. She sang a profane De Profundis to great applause and stole the balls with her graceful gaillards. Her conversational gifts, burnished by Anne de Beaujeu, rapidly drew the king’s attention. He summoned her to his private Pavilion St. Louis for long parleys and probably more. His jealous mistress hired poets to savage Diane, rumors ran rife of an affair, and the king inscribed her portrait with a sentimental tribute, “Good to look at, pleasant to be with.”

Although sycophants called her “the beauty of beauties,” Diane looked more like one of Cranach the Elder’s burgher women—a long face with thin lips, narrow, lashless eyes, and a Nixon nose. But she made herself “pleasant” through an outré technique, washing daily in cold water and cleaning her teeth with a rag soaked in vinegar. She also had that rarity of rarities in the sixteenth century, a clear complexion unscarred by smallpox.

When her husband died after their fifteenth anniversary, Diane assumed the role for which she had been groomed, chatelaine of their Burgundian estate at Anet. Rich, commanding, and at the crest of her charms, she had the whole older woman power package. That, with her accumulated maternal charms, made the seventeen-year-old Henri fall completely under her spell.

From the start of their affair he submitted to her guidance. Although a prize jouster with an action figure physique, Henri was morose, withdrawn, and socially challenged. Under Diane’s tutelage, he came out of his shell and became a suave operator. He read Machiavelli at her insistence and grew affable and vivacious. A visitor recalled a lively evening in his company soon after. Henri played the guitar with Diane in his lap, stopped to fondle her breasts, and turned to the company and asked if they’d ever seen a more beautiful woman.

By her forties Diane looked at least twenty years younger. In a time when most women her age tottered toothless to the grave, she boasted a slim, lithe figure that she accentuated with tight gold riding costumes and décolleté black and white gowns. But she’d never pass for a debutante. A midlife portrait shows her with marionette lines, eye pouches, and a wattle. Even Henri admitted it wasn’t her “beauty . . . as much as [her self] that pleas[ed] him.”

The self that pleased him so much was more than a nurture mom, though she was that too. She was the mother goddess in all her totality and swank. Diane, crackling with sex appeal, combined divine élan and a heady mélange of opposites—Renaissance prince and courtesan, abbess and bawd, lady charity and hardball powerfrau. She thought herself the ne plus ultra and signed her name, celebrity style, Diane. Shrewdly identifying with the divine regenerator of youth, she took Diana (ancestress of Hecate, the senior moon deity) as her patron deity and hired artists to immortalize her as the eternally nubile goddess of the hunt.

Caught in this mythic undertow, Henri thought her semidivine. When he took the throne in 1547, he went public with his passion. He insisted on Diane’s presence beside him at the coronation and, failing in that, redesigned the royal robes with their paired initials, “DDH,” on the embroidery. He made her duchess of Valentois, gave her the crown jewels, and, in the first years of his reign, funneled a quarter of the national revenues into her account. He taxed the churches to pay for a renovation of her estate at Anet, prompting Rabelais to crack that “the king had hung all the bells in the kingdom around the neck of his new mare.” He wore Diane’s black and white colors with her coat of arms and a new motto on his justaucorps: “My devotion shall be known throughout the world.”

He didn’t need to spell it out. She “ruleth the roost,” groaned the English envoy. The palace matriarch, Diane replaced ministers with her satellites and joined the king’s private council, an unprecedented event in French history. Yet Henri II was no royal wuss. He initiated administrative reforms and successfully pursued his father’s war against the Holy Roman Empire. Still, he never made a decision without first consulting Diane, a maven of statecraft. As his chief adviser she instigated peace treaties, forged alliances, handled his correspondence, and persuaded him to sleep with Catherine to ensure heirs.

The “Dissimulation Queen,” however, was not moved to gratitude. The moment Diane came down with a menopausal malady, Catherine de’ Medici opened fire. She invited Henri to an erotic ballet and instructed one of the comeliest dancers to seduce him. The dancer succeeded and bore a child, but the plot failed. Henri wearied quickly of his pretty piece and returned to Diane with redoubled ardor.

When Diane recovered, he said he couldn’t “live without her” and gave her Chenonceaux, the romantic château that spans the Cher River. Faithful to her credo “You must dazzle,” she imported celebrity artisans, artists, and gardeners from all over Europe and transformed the château into “the most prized jewel of the sixteenth century.” Through wise acquisitions (fifteen more properties plus three houses in Paris), tight bookkeeping, wholesale taxation, and a fleet of lawyers, she built up one of the largest estates in France.

She may also have paid Henri back in kind. According to rumor, he surprised her one day in her boudoir and discovered a “very handsome, intelligent, and ambitious courtier” under the bed.

After Henri died of a lance wound in a tourney, Catherine de’ Medici, who’d waited and hated thirty years, sharpened the long knives. She seized Chenonceaux, repossessed the crown jewels, and went for blood. But the provident Diane had crisis-proofed herself with powerful allies and retired in peace to Anet, where she administered her estate and dispensed charity, building a hospital for the village and refuge for homeless women.

Brantôme, who saw her before she died at sixty-six, said she was as seductive as ever, full of “grace,” majesty, and gallantry. Her “winter,” he claimed, “was more glorious than the spring and summer of any other.” Yeats’s poetic tribute to ageless charm, “When You Are Old,” was based on Ronsard’s “When You Are Old, at Evening,” written for Diane.

At her death she left instructions for a spectacular memorial mass, an invitation-only service with a hundred white-robed paupers filing in, singing paternosters. The eternal grandstander, she designed her mortuary chapel with an ornate sarcophagus in the center, a sculpture of her youthful self in prayer attended by a statue of love writing the history of her life on marble tablets.

Her history was written instead with poison pens. Her elder enticements, not surprisingly, disquieted everyone; the sexual allure, power, money, “plentitude of being,” and, most of all, maternal sway over Henri. Textbooks portrayed her as a man-eating ogress who despoiled France with her greed; folktales, as a witch—the standard rap for spellbinding sirens.