Diane de Poitiers

Ten years now without a child and the doctors say she’s deformed – my rival, my bête noir, Catherine de Medici. In the mornings, it is not the blackbirds that wake me with their fluting notes. Rather, I'm roused by the sound of Catherine’s maids pounding lavender with walnut bark and antimony, and her loud moans as they rub her belle chose with it. They are desperate to make her fertile, for now the court gossips say a divorce is looming. I hope it helps her barren womb. And for stealing my beauty sleep, I hope it stings a little, too.

Some evenings, my lover goes to her bed. Don’t imagine that I begrudge them their time together. Au contraire, I find myself squaring up to the heavy oak doors of their suite, thrusting my Henri into the royal bosom. I imagine him beginning his night's labours there with tentative kisses, as he does with me. Then, perhaps, he works his way down to where the doctors have smeared Catherine’s life source with cow dung. Hélas! He recoils at the farmyard stench, tries a chaste kiss. And on those tight little lips, at last, he is intoxicated - by the aperitif of mule's piss her majesty took at bedtime.

Despite my generosity of spirit in promoting their marital bliss, Catherine regards me with suspicion. An illustration. Last week, I was thumbing through Froissart’s Chronicles, looking for the story of the marriage of Charles VI to Isabella of Bavaria – I love a royal wedding. A splinter of wood fell onto the open book, followed by a goblet’s-worth of sawdust. It stuck to the greasy vellum page.

I looked up in irritation to see a hole growing dark and wicked as a snake’s tail in my ceiling. I snapped my book shut and stood tiptoe on my bed, peering upward. Looking back at me through the abyss was a brown eye, somewhat bulgy. Catherine. The royal boudoir, you see, is on the floor above mine and the ceilings in this place are paper thin. Now she knows when he’s with me and can even watch us together. I see her peering through her little hole some nights – the whites of her eyes - as he moves on top of me, murmuring my name. Sometimes I smile up at her.

Don’t think me cruel. I have my problems. I am twenty years older than the love of my life, older than his mother. Sycophants tell me I don’t look a day over thirty, that my skin’s so pale it doesn’t need powder, that my beauty is unchanged. Artists still ask to paint me, sculpt me. But between you and me, if you were to pull me into the tender light of morning, look at me when the dew still pearls the grass and the owls are just drifting into feathered dreams, you would see claw-marks in the corners of my eyes. And if you slipped off my gloves to kiss my hand, or loosened my lace ruff to brush your lips against my throat, you would see my ropy veins.

Desperate, I follow the fashion, follow it down the stone stairway into the bowels of the palace. There, after a few sinister twists and turns, the lair of the Gaspard the Alchemist can be discovered. I find him staring intently into a bubbling pot – well, usually he is reading Romances to himself, filthy frotteur, and I stand in the doorway watching his lips moving until he notices me. But it’s important to set the scene.

So, hunched over his cauldron, he milks the sun’s elixirs from the veins of rocks, beats scraps of leaf into a greenish blue translucency – albedo, burnout of impurity. His vial weeps a silver teardrop of mercury into the brew until metal salts burn red – rubedo, unification of man with God. When I drink the draught, I feel my skin drawn tight as a fine gold wire, but I taste nothing. Or perhaps I'm mulling something beyond taste – nigredo, blackening, corruption - the very end result. I’ve seen the deaths from drinking gold, the crumbling bones, the sputtering heartbeat. My own fair hair is thinning and the other night, as I rouged my lips in the glass, I thought I saw gold sparkling on my forehead.

It frightens me to think of disappearing, leaving my little daughter. But when Henri takes me hunting the mad boar that roam near here and we slip away from the rest of the party, our green clothes merging with the leaves of aubépine and chêne. When we lie in fallen leaves and he unclasps the doublet I borrowed from him and caresses my neck. When we twine our arms about each other and in the last throes, I watch a droplet of aureate sweat roll down my breast onto his upper lip. Then, I believe our stolen hours are worth their weight in gold.


Diane de Poitiers (3 September 1499 – 25 April 1566) was a French noblewoman and a courtier at the courts of kings Francis I and Henry II of France. She became notorious as the latter's favourite mistress, although she was 20 years his senior. She was immortalised in art as the subject of paintings by François Clouet as well as other anonymous painters. When French experts dug up the remains of Diane de Poitiers last year, they found high levels of gold in her hair. Since she was not a queen and did not wear a crown, scientists said it was hard to see how jewelry could have contaminated her hair and body. Experts now say that the popularity of drinkable gold — believed to preserve youth — in the French court makes it very likely de Poitier's beauty elixir ultimately killed her. The findings were published Thursday 17 December 2009 in British medical journal BMJ.

from wikipedia