Henri II: His Court and Times (22 page)

Diane de Poitiers — Her childhood — Her marriage with Louis de Brézé, Grand
Sénéchal of Normandy — Arrest of her father, M. de Saint-Vallier, for complicity
in the conspiracy of the Connétable de Bourbon — He is condemned to death,
but his sentence is commuted when actually on the scaffold — Accusation of the
Huguenot historian, Regnier de la Planche, that Diane redeemed her father's
life by the sacrifice of her honour to François I — Anecdote of Brantôme —
Opinions of various historians on this point — Conclusions of Georges Guiffrey —
Assertion of Lorenzo Contarini, Venetian Ambassador to the French Court, that
Diane became François's mistress at a later period — Arguments of Ludovic
Lalanne as to the authorship of a packet of love-letters addressed to the King — 
Opinions of Champollion, Sainte-Beuve, and Guiffrey — Question of the relations
between Diane and the poet Clément Marot considered — Extraordinary respect
shown by the Grande Sénéchale for the memory of her husband — Date of the
beginning of her liaison with the Dauphin — Verses of Clément Marot — Methods
adopted by the lady in the subjugation of the young prince — Politic attitude of
Catherine de' Medici towards her husband's inamorata — Antagonism of Madame
d'Étampes to Diane — Vouté's epigrams against the Sénéchale — The enmity
between the two ladies divides the Court into rival factions

T
HE
year 1536 was a very eventful one in the life of
Henri de Valois, for not only did he become, by
the death of his elder brother, heir to the throne of
France and receive his first lessons in the art of war, but it
was now that he fell under the influence of the woman who
was to mould him into what he subsequently became, and to
exercise over his heart and mind an ascendency which was
to endure until the day of his death.
⁰¹

Diane de Poitiers, whose remarkable astuteness and strength
of will, far more than the charms of her person, which, in
point of fact, tradition has a good deal exaggerated, were to
make her for twelve years the uncrowned Queen of France,
was the eldest of the three daughters of Jean de Poitiers,
Sieur de Saint-Vallier, who traced his descent from Guillaume
de Poitiers, last Duke of Aquitaine, and was born, according
to the calculation of Dreux du Radier,
⁰²
on September 3, 1499,
probably at the Château of Saint-Vallier, since it was here
that she is known to have passed her childhood. She appears
to have received a better education than most young girls of
that period, while, as we are told that she went hunting and
hawking with her father at the age of six, her physical training
was evidently not neglected. She also acquired something
which was to prove of infinite service to her in her career as
a Court beauty, namely, habits of personal cleanliness, but
too unusual in the early part of the sixteenth century; and
there can be little doubt that it was to the regular use of cold
water, and not, as certain of her contemporaries affirmed, to
the possession of some wonderful elixir, that she was indebted
for the preservation of her naturally brilliant complexion long
after the bloom of other ladies of her age had become merely
a memory.

After serving for a short time as
fille d'honneur
to Marguerite
d'Angoulême, Diane married, on March 29, 1514, Louis de
Brézé, Comte de Maulevrier, Grand Sénéchal of Normandy,
son of that Jacques de Brézé whose name recalls one of the
most tragic episodes of the reign of Louis XI. Married, somewhat
against his will, to Charlotte de France, natural daughter
of Charles VII and Agnes Sorel, he had by her six children,
but having, on the night of May 13-14, 1476, surprised her
in flagrante delicto
with her lover, Louis de la Vergne, he
poniarded them both on the spot. For this crime he was
condemned to death, and only escaped the block by the surrender
of all his property, which, however, was restored to
him after the King's death.

A middle-aged widower who bore the reputation of being
one of the ugliest men of his time was scarcely the kind of
husband to appeal to a girl of fifteen, but he was wealthy,
high in favour with the King, generous, and even-tempered,
and Diane, who was a sensible young lady, would appear
to have been well content with her lot. With the exception
of the birth of two daughters, her married life was uneventful
until 1523, the time of the conspiracy of the Connétable
de Bourbon. The Constable succeeded in making his escape
to Italy, but the majority of his accomplices were not so
fortunate, and Diane learned to her dismay that among
those who had been apprehended was her father, M. de Saint-Vallier, concerning whose treasonable dealings she had, of
course, been in entire ignorance.

Saint-Vallier had been arrested at Lyons, on the evening
of September 5, and conducted to the Château of Loches,
whence he hastened to acquaint his daughter and son-in-law
with the calamity which had befallen him.
"Monsieur mon
fils,"
he writes to Louis de Brézé, "the King has ordered me
to be arrested without any reason . . . and has caused me
to be conveyed to the Château of Loches, as a false traitor,
which occasions me such horrible grief that I am dying of it."
And to Diane: "
Madame la Grande Sénéchale
,
I have arrived at the Château of Loches, as badly treated as poor prisoner
could be. . . . I beg you to have sufficient pity upon your
poor father as to be willing to come to see him."
⁰³

From which it will be gathered that the Sieur de Saint-
Vallier was very far from being of the stuff whereof heroes are
made.

The misguided old gentleman was kept in a darksome
dungeon at Loches until the beginning of the following year,
when he was brought to Paris for trial, and on January 17,
1524, found guilty of high treason and condemned to death.
A month later, he stood, more dead than alive, upon the
scaffold on the Place de Grève, and his head was on the point
of parting company from his body, when an archer of the
King's Guard arrived, bringing an order from his Majesty
which commuted the capital sentence to "perpetual imprisonment
between four stone walls, with only a small window,
through which his food and drink will be administered
to him."

How long M. de Saint-Vallier remained in this extremely
unpleasant situation is uncertain. Any way, he was at large
again in 1532, for in that year we learn that he took unto
himself a third wife, who, we may presume, was careful to see
that his energies were employed in some less dangerous
occupation than politics.

By whose influence and at what price was the condemned
conspirator's very modified pardon obtained? This is a
question upon which the imagination of historians has been
freely exercised, at the expense of the future mistress of
Henri II and of that monarch's predecessor on the throne.

"She [Diane]," says Brantôme, "was above all things a
very good Catholic and hated bitterly those of the Religion,
which is the reason why they have very much hated and
slandered her."
⁰⁴
Diane, indeed, showed herself pitiless
towards the Protestants, and they, in their turn, were pitiless
towards her, after her empire was at an end. Not only did
they reproach her with the shame and scandal of her recent
influence, and declare her to have been a blight upon the
land, but, to avenge more fully the persecutions which she
had inspired, they accused her of having led a life of infamy
even in her youth.

In 1576, the Huguenot historian Regnier de la Planche, a
man of undoubted integrity, but implacable in his hatred,
published his
Histoire de l'Estat de France, tant de la république
tant de la religion, sous François II
, in which, after describing
in lurid terms the baneful results of her ascendency, he added:

"In her youth, Diane redeemed by her virginity the life of
the Sieur de Saint-Vallier, her father."

"It was to strike with the same arrow three persons at
once," observes Niel, "it was to chain to the same pillory,
by the fetters of debauchery, adultery, and incest, the father,
the son, and the favourite."
⁰⁵

The accusation was subsequently repeated by Brantôme
in his
Discours sur les dames qui font l'amour
, etc.:

"I have heard people speak of a great nobleman also, who,
having been condemned to lose his head, was already on the
scaffold, when his pardon arrived, which his daughter, who
was one of the most beautiful, had obtained. And, on
descending from the scaffold, the only remark that he made
was:
'Dieu sauve le bon c . . . de ma fille, qui m'a si bien
sauvé!'
"

It is true that Brantôme writes in this instance from hearsay
and without naming the persons concerned, so that his
narrative only proves that such a rumour was in circulation.
But what was merely a malicious anecdote was eagerly seized
upon by writers with a weakness for the picturesque, and,
transmitted from generation to generation, it at length came
to be regarded almost as history.
⁰⁶

Several authorities on the Valois period, however, such as
Gaillard and Dreux du Radier, in the eighteenth century, and
Niel and Lescure (
les Maîtresses de François I
), in later times,
have represented the extreme improbability of such a story;
and its falsity has, in our opinion, been finally established by
M. Georges Guiffrey, in his able and scholarly introduction to
les Lettres inédites de Dianne de Poytiers
.

The writer shows that neither in the official documents connected with the Saint-Vallier affair, nor in the testimony of
contemporary historians of repute, is any argument to be
found in support of this accusation. The
lettres de rémission
signed by the King state that it was at the entreaty of the
Grand Sénéchal of Normandy and other friends of Saint-Vallier that the latter's sentence had been commuted,
⁰⁷
while Belleforest and Le Ferron assert that Queen Claude, to whom,
in her official capacity as
dame d'honneur
, Diane enjoyed
constant access, joined her entreaties to those of Louis de
Brézé and his wife.

He further points out that the King had the strongest
possible reason for showing mercy to Saint-Vallier, since it
was Louis de Brézé, who had given the Government the first
warning of the conspiracy of Bourbon. The great service
rendered by his son-in-law is surely a sufficient explanation
of the royal clemency towards the condemned, without having
recourse to other motives!
⁰⁸

Again, debauched as François was, it is difficult to believe
that a king who had been knighted by Bayard, and who
prided himself on being
"le Premier Gentilhomme de France,"
could ever have stooped so low as to make an infamous bargain
with a daughter for her father's life. "His chivalrous spirit,
his traditional generosity," observes M. Guiffrey, "vie with
with each other in repudiating such an imputation."

Finally, there is a circumstance which scandal-loving
historians have not taken sufficiently into account. Louis de
Brézé appears to have been an honourable man, and not at
all the kind of person to accommodate himself to the rôle
of complaisant husband, or to maintain silence concerning
an affair which so nearly affected his honour. If he in the
least resembled his passionate sire, his wife's infidelity would
certainly have been followed by a terrible scandal, if not by
something worse, and, in view of the tragedy of fifty years
earlier, we should have need of positive proofs to establish
his conjugal abnegation. Such, very briefly summarised, are
the conclusions of M. Guiffrey, which may be considered to
dispose once and for all of a calumny which had held its
ground for three centuries.

But we are not yet quit of this tradition of gallantries,
according to which the father preceded the son in the favours
of Diane. There is another version of the supposed liaison
between François I and Madame la Grande Sénéchale, which
places it in the early years of the lady's widowhood, that is to
say, some time between September 1531, when she lost her
husband, and the end of 1536, when she became the mistress
of the future Henri II.

In 1552, Lorenzo Contarini, the Venetian Ambassador to
the Court of France, sent to the Senate an interesting account
of Diane, in which the following passage occurred:

"Having been left a widow, young and beautiful, she was
loved and tasted by the King François and by others also,
according to what every one says. Then she passed into the
hands of the present King, when he was only Dauphin."
⁰⁹

Now the diplomatists of the Queen of the Adriatic enjoy a
deservedly high reputation as indefatigable collectors of Court
gossip, which their official functions gave them unique
opportunities of obtaining. Nothing in the remotest degree
connected with the sovereigns to whom they were accredited
seems to have been too trivial for their flowing pens to record,
until one is almost tempted to believe that some of their
despatches were composed as much for the diversion of
the Senate as for its political enlightenment. As they wrote
without prejudice, their assertions are not to be lightly
disregarded, and that it was the opinion of many persons
at the French Court that tender relations had at one time
existed between the reigning favourite and the late King
is therefore certain. But were there any real grounds for
such a belief? If there were, it is certainly very singular not
only that the despatches of Venieri, Marino, Giustiniani, and
Bassadonna, the Venetian Ambassadors in France between
1531 and 1537 — the period during which the supposed liaison
must have been in progress — contain no mention of any such
affair, but that the chroniclers of the time are also silent
about it.