The Rivals
Diane de Poitiers was the moon goddess on Earth.
Born a few days after the calendar rolled over to 1500, she lit up the French Renaissance and has cast a long, lovely shadow ever since. She was clear-eyed and clever, able to turn a sticky situation to her own long-term advantage; a designer of palaces, a shrewd businesswoman, an ageless lover and adviser to a king nineteen years her junior. In short, she was a study in contrasts who dressed solely in black and white—a genuine icon in a world that did not apply that word lightly.
Was she a witch? Maybe. Do we hold that against her? Certainly not! We adore our shrewd and soignée déesse.
Diane easily outshone her second
cousin Catherine de’ Medici. Catherine was considered an Italian merchant-class upstart, a homely little girl whose family bought royal cachet by marrying her off to Henri II. She would become queen of France and, later, its regent; mother of queen and kings, a schemer and poisoner with an army of spies, a personage so feared that it felt like a kind of love. And her husband just happened to be in love with Diane.
Was Catherine a witch? Almost certainly. Do we hold that against her? Not really. But we wouldn’t trust her as far as we could throw her, even if she stood atop the last medieval tower at Chenonceau and begged to be tossed into the River Cher. Which she would never do—she loved power too much.
And revenge.
These larger-than-life personages were the greatest rivals of the French Renaissance, and their competition played out face-to-face and very intimately. So intimately, in fact, that Catherine used to lie on her bedroom floor and gaze through a peephole at her husband, Henri II, cavorting in Diane’s chamber below.
That little scene brings the entire era to life and makes me love the two principal players. How brilliant and how sad everyone was, how tragic and exquisite and luminous the setting, the personages, the history.
The Beauty
There’s not a person alive who does not love the moon. Even the moon is in love with her own reflection. If you’ve heard of Diane at all before now, you already know she was radiantly beautiful … and more than a bit vain about it, with a bespoke beauty regimen and carefully curated wardrobe. But her beauty was not just an end in itself. It was one path to power and security. At the same time, it could make jealous enemies.
The very young Diane was already goddess-like, tall and slim and elegant, with “luminous” white skin and red-gold hair, blue-green eyes, a desirably long nose, and a little rosebud mouth. Early on, she caught the eye of one Count Louis de Brézé, a powerful man with a hunched back and a big nose and mouth, plus at least five grand châteaux. He was 54. She was 15.
Times were different.
Despite the age gap, she seems to have been happy as the mistress of Louis’s medieval fortress, the Château d’Anet (pronounced like Annette). She read books, rode horses, and swam. Legend has it that she rescued a drowning woman from a river, and as a thank-you, the woman gave her a medallion that would keep her young forever.
It seems to have worked. She remained legendary until Catherine banished her from court. Some of the legends are not so nice—that she was a sorceress who practiced on herself, for example. She did concoct her own beauty treatments, and they’re not so different from what you’ll find in our own pages: She slept on her back and took a cold bath every morning (just rainwater, not milk, as is sometimes reported), then applied a moisturizing mask she made from melon juice, young barley, egg yolk, and ambergris. She kept up with daily exercise, and in an era when regular baths had fallen out of fashion, and when women who used cosmetics ended up drying out their skin and turning their teeth black, she stood out.
She does, however, appear to have used drinkable gold, aurum potabile, a wildly expensive preparation beloved by wealthy women since Roman times. The simplest form was gold flakes in water; the more elaborate types might involve chemical reactions among the gold, nitrohydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, and anything else an alchemist might dream up. Tests run on her remains in 2009 found high concentrations of gold in her hair.
It may even have been her beauty regimen, and not a lingering illness after a fall from a horse, that killed our moon goddess at the age of 66.
The Huntress
Diane saw her beauty as an investment, and she was good with investments. She was smart in an unflashy way—good with money, great with advice to Henri II, albeit maybe not quite cunning enough to advance her own career in statecraft (and maybe not all that interested in being a politician herself). When she was 24, the poet Clément Marot plied her with unwelcome attention. She reported him for eating sausages during Lent and had him jailed.
Remember, she was Diana the Huntress. What she wanted, she went after, and she usually got it.
She was also conscious of the power of a name and an image. When Diane’s husband died in 1531, she added another feature to her iconography, dressing in black and white clothing for the rest of her life. You see widows’ weeds and nuns’ habits; I see the two sides of the moon.
Those colors were her battle gear. By legal custom, her husband’s death meant she would lose some of her titles and privileges, including any say over what she’d inherited from him. She argued in court to keep them, even without any male heirs. (She had two daughters, Françoise and Louise.) And she won the right to run the estates herself and keep the money they earned—no easy feat back in the day. Sorceress? Smarty-pants. With a title: the Grande Sénéchale.
And then King François I came to her for a favor. My younger son, he said, you know—the one who stayed with you that summer before your husband died? Well, the boy is a bit of a bumbler, and that dumpy little Italian I married him to is not going to teach him court graces or anything else. You know—you were there at the wedding. The boy is 14, and I need some grandsons. Elegant grandchildren. Understand?
Diane took the young husband under her wing, and she trained him up well. Henri was over the moon. She was 35, and he was 15 (remember, different times). She loved him, certainly, but she wasn’t as openly demonstrative as he was, so we don’t have as many windows into her feelings. They stayed together until he died, although Henri did not keep it exclusive.
The royal palaces and Diane’s own Anet soon acquired some remarkable artworks, portrayals of Diane in various stages of dress and undress—most notably as Diana the Huntress. She’s tall and slim and purposefully striding off to slay with a quiver of arrows on her back and a crescent moon in her diadem, or she’s triumphant but tender, caressing a stag, or—maybe best of all—bathing in a river or in a tub, which gives a glimpse into the intimacy of private life at court. And then there were monograms and insignia (see sidebar) that made the most of her legendary connection to the moon … and also combined her initials with Henri’s.
The iconography, of course, was hard on Henri’s young wife, who was bombarded with evidence of Henri’s preference. No wonder she turned sour. Okay, venomous. Metaphorically.
The Black-Hearted Queen
Catherine hadn’t asked for any of this. She was just 14 and an orphan when her uncle sent her off to marry Prince Henri of France. Her childhood had been harsh; her extended family was as severe as they were rich, and they were very, very rich. And she seems to have had the great misfortune of falling truly in love with her husband, whose heart resided with Diane.
Those two used to sign their letters HenriDiane, for the heavens’ sake. And just look at what they did with their initials. No wonder Catherine adopted a secret motto: Odiate et aspetate—“Hate and wait.”
Then there was the trouble conceiving, for which Catherine tried several rather unsavory remedies: powdered unicorn horn and ivory in water, a girdle (belt, not shapewear) woven of goat’s hair steeped in donkey’s milk, and then various powders and beverages made from urine and the grislier parts of animals.
Trust me, you don’t want to know.
Through Catherine’s struggles, Diane was supportive. She wanted the young couple to succeed, and that must have been galling to Catherine too. She needed her enemy. When Catherine at last had her babies, Diane was there to help her recover.
There would eventually be ten little royals. Along the way, Henri’s older brother died, making Henri the dauphin, and then François died (probably from inflammation of the kidneys, either natural or poison-induced), leaving Henri the king. Aha! thought Catherine, power! But no—Diane came right along with the throne too. Catherine established a court with ladies-in-waiting, jesters, musicians, and all. Diane had all those things too.
So what was a young queen to do, other than organize a ring of court spies to keep an eye on everything and motivate some blackmail as needed? Expecting a Medici not to use threats and extortion is like expecting a Medici not to poison anyone. Catherine seems to have got her start as a spy by reporting to Diane, but she surpassed her teacher and became a spymaster par excellence. The moon, she might have thought, is happy to reflect the light of the sun—but I want to be the sun.
Actually, some reports of Catherine’s scheming may be the stuff of legend, but here’s who people thought they were dealing with: Later in life, she’s said to have called her spies the Flying Squadron, requiring the women to maintain a regulation waist of thirteen inches around. (People were smaller then, but still—thirteen.) And in August 1572, when tension erupted between Catholics and Huguenots, she engineered somewhere from five to 30,000 deaths, now known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. She has borne several names: Madame Serpent (for duplicity), the Black Queen (for her corrupt heart), and the Maggot from Italy’s Tomb (well, that’s just unkind).
Was Catherine really a poisoner? Yes—because she poisoned herself, particularly as she grew older. Like most noblewomen, she laid on a white lead foundation to look dainty, then added rouge and eye shadow. She bleached her hair, wore wigs and hairpieces, and doused her body and clothes in perfumes because, alas, she was one of those ladies who mistrusted bathing. Other than that …
Sorry, but my money here is on probably. She was probably a poisoner. Because she was probably into sorcery. She was definitely a spy.
The Palace
When Catherine summoned a carpenter to her bedchamber in the Palace of Saint-Germain, she had an unusual request: Make two holes in the bedchamber floor. Catherine and a friend would lie on their stomachs and watch the King do things to the most beautiful woman of the era. Even when the court found out about the peepholes, Catherine could not stop looking.
She watched as, sometimes, Diane got Henri excited about his marital obligation, then sent him upstairs to try for a baby. Catherine simply hated and waited.
They fought over real estate too. The palace that really mattered to both women was Chenonceau, the jewel of the Loire Valley. When it came into Henri’s hands, it was a fairly ordinary little white turreted building (ho-hum, just a palace, you know) sitting on a bank of the Cher river, with a good forest. Diane saw possibilities—romance, hunting, a bigger palace to stretch across the river, shining like a dream in the moonlight.
Her husband had tried to get it for her; her lover succeeded. Of course Catherine wanted it too, but it was up to Henri to decide who got the place. No contest.
Catherine coveted Chenonceau even more after Diane made her improvements. She built the gorgeous arched gallery over the river and established elegant gardens with elaborate Italianate parterres. (Diane, were you making a dig at your Italian frenemy? Hm.) She also planted 150 white mulberry trees for raising silkworms, which then supplied the fibers for her striking black-and-white wardrobe.
The court stayed there often. Catherine’s hatred smoldered. Chenonceau did not officially belong to Diane until 1553. In 1559, during a tournament held to celebrate a strategic double royal wedding, Henri wore Diane’s favors into the joust, as usual. His opponent’s lance was badly aimed and hit him in the head, piercing eye and cheek.
You can be sure that as soon as Henri’s body hit the ground, Catherine took charge. While it was customary for a royal mistress to tend to a dying king, she was having none of that—no matter how Henri cried out for Diane, she wasn’t allowed in. Catherine banished Diane to her original castle, Anet, and she had to give up Chenonceau and court life forever.
Catherine had her own garden planted by the Cher. It was a sign that she was never going to surrender—not to anybody, it seems, ever again. She was an iron fist, iron glove kind of person, and she borrowed a few ideas from Diane: She wore all black with a white collar for the rest of her life (with lavishly embroidered linens underneath, mind you). She raised three kings and one queen of France; she ruled for them when they were too young, was their chief adviser afterward, and overall wielded more power than most outright sovereigns at the time.
Diane … faded away at Anet. Her smart investments kept her well cared for, even without royal favor. She spent five peaceful but probably wistful years before a fall from her horse in 1565 left her bedridden. She died a year later—perhaps of lingering injuries, perhaps (some historians now speculate) from the drinkable gold that she thought was preserving her beauty.
The Resolution
So which lady won the day? Hard to judge. It’s fun to see the intrigue as evil versus good in black and white (yes, like one of Diane’s outfits), but let’s try to be fair. We’ve seen enough of those paintings and sculptures of the Grande Sénéchale as Diana, Huntress, to understand the appeal. But surely there is something to be said for Madame Serpent? After all, she had a tough row to hoe, coming in so young and so déclassé, to be married to a handsome fellow with a gorgeous aristocratic mistress already entrenched.
Together they make for a great story. Both smart, both in love, both strategizing with everything they had. Without them, France would not have looked nearly so good—or had such confounding plots at the dark, dark heart of its court.
