Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Read Online Free PDF Page B

phrase would prove prophetic.
    Black and white were the official colors of mourning in France, and the Sénéchale, as Diane was also known, decided that they flattered her pale complexion and strawberry blond hair so well that she retained them. Black and white became her signature, and from then on she wore nothing else and decorated her rooms at court as well as her great gift from Henri (upon his accession to the throne), the Château d’Anet, exclusively in those two hues. Diana was not only the Roman goddess of the hunt; she was the goddess of the moon, and black and white also represented the dark and light sides of the celestial sphere.
    From the outset, Henri made no secret of his attraction and devotion to Diane de Poitiers, and Catherine de Medici endeavored to compete with her kinswoman for his affection. But the new bride was soon compelled to acknowledge that this elegant older woman in the prime of her beauty had utterly bewitched her husband.
    In 1537, while Henri was on a military campaign in Piedmont, he impregnated a commoner named Filippa Duci, which was all it took to convince him that the fertility issues he and Catherine had been suffering in the four years since their wedding were his wife’s fault. Filippa bore a daughter, and Henri named her Diane, after the Sénéchale, to whom he gave the child to be raised alongside her own two girls. Because of the infant’s name, and the fact that the comtesse de Brézé was parenting her, rumors abounded that little Diane de France was really the bastard daughter of Diane de Poitiers and Henri. By now he had moved up a notch in the line of succession and was the dauphin, owing to the death in August 1536 of his older brother.
    Although it is possible that Diane and Henri consummated their romance as early as the end of 1536 or the start of 1537, it’s morelikely that the liaison didn’t blossom into a full-blown sexual relationship until 1538, after Henri returned from the front. The eighteen-year-old had come back more confident and mature of mind and body (not to mention a dad). An erotic poem that Diane, then thirty-seven, wrote soon after Henri’s return to France refers to her having submitted, “quivering and trembling…[to] a boy, fresh, ready, young,” so she may indeed have kept him waiting and wanting until then.
    Henri and Diane’s is one of the greatest romances in royal history. Until she slept with Henri, the Sénéchale’s sexual experience had been limited to a successful seventeen-year marriage with a man forty years her senior, a man she’d wed at fifteen, when he was old enough to have been her grandfather. With Henri she was experiencing passion for the first time in her life, but enjoying relations with a man young enough to be her son.
    One clue that their affair became carnal in 1538 is that Henri began to dress only in Diane’s colors—black and white. He also adopted the crescent moon as his emblem, and created a monogrammed device with their initials as entwined as their limbs must have been every night. Emblazoned beneath the moon, Henri’s motto became an erotic double entendre: Cum plena est, emula solis —“When full, she equals the sun.” Portraits of Diane, including nudes depicting her as Diana, goddess of the hunt, were hung everywhere. Desperately in unrequited love with her husband, the unhappy Catherine de Medici had no choice but to accept the ubiquitous HD insignias and the new decor with dignified silence, tamping down her bitterness and humiliation. There was nothing she could say, because until she gave Henri a child, she could be sent home to Florence at any time, repudiated for barrenness.
    A plot to put aside Catherine had already been set in motion by François I’s scheming blond mistress, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly. Anne wished to topple her rival courtesan, Diane de Poitiers, by finding Henri a new bride—one he would actually desire. But Catherine had an unlikely ally: her second cousin