Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe by Leslie Carroll

duchesse de Valentinois could hardly refuse to comply. Catherine was a big admirer of her father-in-law’s credo that vengeance was the mark of a feeble king and magnanimity a sign of his strength. She and her son, the new king, François II, could have been a lot crueler to a former royal mistress whose very public romance with the king had humiliated her for every one of the twenty-six years of her marriage.
    According to Diane’s biographer Princess Michael of Kent, the inscription on her tomb, which Diane herself ordered, reads, “Died 26 April, 1566, aged 66 years, 3 months and 27 days” (which places her birth date on December 31, 1499, three months later than other sources record it). When Diane’s remains were disinterred in 2009, French scientists discovered high levels of gold in Diane’s hair, evidence perhaps that the drinkable gold she regularly ingested as part of her beauty and fitness regimen may in fact have contributed to her demise. And the sixteenth-century chronicler Pierre de Brantôme referred to the “wash of liquid gold” with which it was rumored Diane bathed each morning.
    The duchesse de Valentinois had originally been entombed in a funeral chapel near the Château d’Anet commissioned by her daughter to house her remains. Diane’s sepulcher was desecrated during the French Revolution and her bones were tossed into a mass grave (however, in 2008, excavations beneath Diane’s memorial revealed bones identified as hers, and her ashes were ultimately returned to the château with great fanfare in May 2010); but her memory had been dishonored centuries before the Jacobins discovered her final resting place.
    Catherine de Medici rarely referred to Diane de Poitiers in her correspondence, whether official or personal, but nearly twenty years after the noblewoman’s death, the dowager queen of France dispatchedsome marital advice to her unhappy daughter Margot, queen of Navarre, through the French secretary of state Bellièvre. Catherine confided to her daughter, “If I made good cheer for Madame de Valentinois, it was the king that I was really entertaining, and besides, I always let him know that I was acting sorely against the grain; for never did a woman who loved her husband succeed in loving his harlot; as one cannot call her anything but that, no matter how vulgar the word.”

L OUIS XIV
    1638–1715
    R ULED F RANCE : 1643–1715
    K nown as le Roi Soleil , or the Sun King, Louis XIV ascended the throne as the king of France and Navarre in 1643 at the age of four. His parents were Anne of Austria, who was actually a Spanish Hapsburg princess, and the possibly homosexual Louis XIII. Louis XIV, the ultimate French king, was actually a geographic masala: He was in fact only twenty-five percent French. The rest was twenty-five percent German, twenty percent Spanish, and twelve percent Italian, with a smattering of Slavic and Portuguese blood, and perhaps even some Jewish and Moorish ancestry through his Aragonese antecedents.
    Because Louis XIV’s birth came twenty-three years after his parents had been estranged (although there had been four stillborn babies before him), he was nicknamed le Dieu-donné —“the God-given”—as it was a miracle that his mother had managed to conceive with a king who so rarely visited her bed.
    Louis’ father had intended for the kingdom to be governed by a regency council until his son came of age. But Anne of Austria had her husband’s will annulled and became the sole regent, although the governing power of France was entrusted to the prime minister, her purported lover, Cardinal Mazarin.
    During Louis’ minority, a two-pronged civil war known as the Fronde fractured France. The first wave, the Fronde Parlementaire (1648–1649), was a rebellion fomented by France’s judicial body, the Parlement. Consisting of aristocrats and ennobled commoners, the members of the Parlement believed themselves the natural defenders of the fundamental laws of the