The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (23 page)

Bronzino’s portrait shows us Catherine at fourteen. Sadly, she had inherited none of her lovely mother’s features. Catherine’s is undoubtedly an intelligent face, serious and secretive, with hard eyebrows, bulging eyes, a large nose, a thin upper lip, and a thick and protruding lower lip. At fourteen, she was also far too thin for the taste of the day. In a word, she was no beauty. But Suriano adds that she was “lively, shows an affable character and has distinguished manners.…” Her lack of beauty did not exclude charm, as Giorgio Vasari noted in his section on Sebastiano del Piombo in
Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
. “Her charm cannot be painted or I would have preserved its memory with my brushes.” Strangely, Catherine is described by several eyewitnesses as being both dark and fair. In fact, she had dark hair—we know she sometimes added blond hair extensions, which showed from beneath her headdress. When she arrived in France she was still not fully grown, which explains why some described her as short and others say she was of medium height. Despite these discrepancies, not one witness claimed that she was pretty.

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1
. A gift from her late husband, the king of Portugal.

2
.
Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII
. Arranged and collated by J. S. Brewar and others. London: 1862–1932.

3
. Until her husband died, green and white were Diane’s personal colors.

CHAPTER NINE

The Widow

A
s her husband grew weaker, Diane shut herself away from the world and nursed him devotedly. Neither her efforts nor the skills of the doctors she called to Anet could prevent the death of Louis de Brézé on July 23, 1531 at the age of seventy-two. He was the last to carry the title of Grand Sénéchal of Normandy.
¹
The king ordered that the funeral should be appropriate for a natural grandson of King Charles VII, the most senior of his courtiers, and a loyal servant of the crown through four reigns. On August 18, Louis de Brézé was laid to rest in his family tomb in the cathedral at Rouen, with the great pomp and formality appropriate to his high station. Funerals of members of the royal family and the court had a solemnity and procedure that made them almost an art form of the time.

The Grand Sénéchal’s red, black, and yellow standard was carried aloft, followed by the company of the King’s Own One Hundred Gentlemen, led by Saint-Vallier, Diane’s father. Then followed the procession
of Louis de Brézé’s decorations and orders carried by stewards on cushions. A wax effigy of the deceased, opulently dressed in full regalia, was placed on the coffin. Diane commissioned a young sculptor, Jean Goujon, to make a monumental tomb within the cathedral that took almost ten years to complete. She asked Goujon to include her in the sculpture in the guise of the goddess Diana. On the sepulchre she had inscribed in gold letters:

Diane de Poitiers had genuinely loved and revered her husband and mourned Brézé sincerely. It may seem strange that a beautiful, intelligent young woman like Diane could have been a faithful and loving wife to an old man like Louis de Brézé. But theirs had been a marriage of minds, of mutual interest, respect, and admiration. After seventeen years of friendship and companionship, Diane keenly felt the loss of Brézé’s wisdom and experience, as well as the protection that he was able to give her. For the rest of her life, Diane wore only black, with touches of white. With her very white skin and reddish-golden hair, black and white suited her admirably and made her stand out in contrast to the brilliant kaleidoscope of colors worn at the time.

Diane added to her coat of arms the symbol of a widow, a torch turned upside down with the motto “
Qui me alit me extingit
”—“He who inflames me has the power to extinguish me,” which was also the symbol of the Valentinois branch of her family. From the moment of Brézé’s death, Diane was determined to be seen by her contemporaries and posterity as a widow in perpetual mourning for her husband. Indeed, she would make her widowhood her career. For the rest of her life, in everything she created and built as well as in her person, Diane remained officially the honorable widow.

One might ask why Diane chose to stay in eternal mourning. Was it just to keep her position as the widow of the most senior courtier in
France after the Princes of the Blood? At thirty-one, Diane de Poitiers was a woman who was sure of herself, and she knew the king held her in sufficient esteem to allow her to cope with her new situation. She had observed the court for half her life and knew where she stood. Widowhood gave her unusual freedom for a woman at this time. If a wellborn woman had sons and, better yet, was a widow, she could rise as high as any nobleman. According to Brantôme, widows at court “want friends and lovers, but no husband, out of love for the freedom that is so sweet. To be out from under the domination of a husband seems to them paradise, and no wonder. They have the use of their own money, the management of the estate … Everything passes through their hands. Instead of being servants as before, they are in command; they can pursue their pleasures and enjoy companions who will do as they wish. They remain widows in order to keep their grandeur, dignity and possessions, titles and good treatment.” Diane de Poitiers was to avail herself of every advantage of her new position.

T
HE autumn of 1531 brought with it famine and the plague. The king shut himself up in Fontainebleau, leaving in mid-September to go on a pilgrimage to Nôtre-Dame-de-Liesse to pray for the ease of his mother’s suffering. Louise had so many causes for complaint that her death was only a question of time. Since the Treaty of Cambrai, she had not taken any further part in the government of the realm. Her guilt over the consequences of the Battle of Pavia, her efforts to repair the harm she had done to France, and her many duties during her regency all had worn her out. She had worked so hard that she ruined her already fragile health. In her last years, Louise de Savoie developed an abhorrence of death and a morbid fascination with illness and its cures. Brantôme writes of both Louise’s and her daughter’s horror and fear of death. The regent could not bear preachers to speak of death in their sermons and complained that when they had nothing else to say, “ignorant persons fall to talking of death.” Both Louise and Marguerite experimented with medical ointments and lotions. Marguerite
wrote to François: “… after dinner … instead of doing her usual good works, she sends for all those who have any malady, whether in the legs, arms or breasts, and with her own hands she dresses them, in order to try out an ointment, which is somewhat singular.” A few days after Marguerite wrote this letter to her brother at Chantilly, where he was visiting Montmorency, Louise left Fontainebleau with her daughter for a change of air and to avoid the plague in the area. She stopped at Grèz-sur-Loing, a little village in the Gâtinais, where she died on September 23, without seeing her beloved son for whose glory she had struggled all her life.

When François heard that his mother had stopped at Grèz because she was feeling ill, he raced to be with her, but he could not reach her before she died. Louise de Savoie was fifty-five. Her son was inconsolable with grief, and fainted on seeing the corpse.

As
dame d’honneur
to Madame Louise, the Grande Sénéchale of Normandy, Diane de Poitiers, returned to the court to take part in the funeral ceremonies. Louise’s effigy had been placed on top of the coffin, dressed in her court robes, wearing her crown and holding her scepter. All the houses in the streets of the funeral procession were draped in black. On October 17, the convoy escorting the coffin, accompanied by torchbearers, wound its mournful way to the Cathedral of Nôtre-Dame in Paris. The cortège was led by three cardinals, thirteen archbishops, and the Princes of the Blood. They were followed by Louise de Savoie’s empty litter, encircled by her
dames d’honneur
, and behind them members of the court and the
Parlement
. Two days later, after the celebration of three High Masses, the convoy left in pouring rain for the interment at Saint-Denis in the vault of France’s monarchs. There Louise de Savoie would remain for 250 years, until 1789, when revolutionaries dragged her remains out of the tomb and threw them into a communal ditch along with those of all the other kings and queens of France.

With the death of Louise de Savoie, the tragic sequence of events that had almost ruined France came to an end. Anne de Beaujeu, the Constable de Bourbon, and now Louise, were all gone. Diane de Poitiers had lost her husband. The Grande Sénéchale of Normandy
had reached a time in her life when she must take stock and plan her future. Diane’s only future lay at court. But, as a very rich widow without sons, she was particularly vulnerable to those who wished to exploit her possessions and her daughters’ inheritance. If she were to survive, she would need to find a second husband or a powerful protector to guide her through the minefield of intrigue at Fontainebleau.

A
FTER the funeral ceremonies for her husband and for the regent, Diane de Poitiers returned to Anet. During this time of retreat from the court, she began to care for her looks in earnest, since at thirty-one she was approaching what was then regarded as middle age. To maintain her famous complexion, Diane used only rainwater for washing her face, and she avoided cosmetics which, at the time, were most damaging to the skin. Blessed with energy and abounding good health all her life, she had never ceased to train and exercise her mind and her body. Now she concentrated on preserving that perfect face.

If the secret of Diane de Poitiers’ beauty lay in her daily routine, she deserved her astonishing youthfulness and robust health. Summer and winter in all weathers, she would rise at dawn and bathe her whole body in ice-cold rain or well water. She breakfasted with a cup of homemade bouillon (later this was to be described as a magic potion—even by Brantôme) before leaving at first light for a brisk three-hour ride through the woods and countryside around Anet. On her return she would rest, and around ten or eleven, she would eat a simple meal. Only then did Diane de Poitiers begin her public duties as the widow of the Grand Sénéchal, attending to the affairs of her vast inheritance and greeting the growing number of her callers. She would dine at six in the evening and retire to bed early.

Diane de Poitiers epitomized the image of her era’s beauty: tall, slender though not frail, she had a long neck, and strong arms and legs from riding. She had beautiful hands with long fingers, and her alabaster skin was shown to advantage by a décolleté of black velvet or satin. Around 1530, well-built rather than thin women were considered beautiful in their sensuality. Ladies were careful to keep the sun off
their skin
²
while maintaining a healthy outdoor appearance, a flattering décolleté, and a small waist. A lady would only expose her throat, neck, hands, and décolleté, so these were the areas studied and cherished. Her throat should be white and soft, and it was quite usual for her lover to caress her neck in public. Unlike the breasts, the throat was not considered an intimate part of the body. A lady would know how to move her hands elegantly in conversation, play with her gloves, or take part in card games, tric-trac, or check. Her smile would be remarked upon and a lady’s beauty depended much on the whiteness (and retention) of her teeth.
³

Brantôme wrote how well Diane’s black and white mourning became her, and how her clothes were always designed to show her figure to the best advantage. He added that “her style expressed more worldliness than mourning and, above all, set off her beautiful neck.” Her clothes were always made of pure silk. Two waves of reddish-golden hair showed from a snood of black silk mesh encrusted with pearls. Often she would hang ropes of large pearls from each shoulder, swinging them across the front of a wide black velvet bodice with a deep décolleté. Her sleeves were tight at the shoulders and on the upper arms, and burst into delicate full white muslin above the elbow, to be caught at the wrist. Around her narrow waist she wore a chain of precious stones, which joined and then hung down the front of her dress. If the whole effect was calculated, it was done in order to please. Wearing mourning placed her on a pedestal above her rivals, a rare creature rendered more desirable by her isolation. Her signature black and white became the fashion for aristocratic widows thereafter.
⁴