The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King (32 page)

There was more trouble to come. In council, Henri suggested replacing the timorous Admiral d’Annebaut, his father’s appointee. The admiral had singularly failed to take advantage of his opportunities while sharing command with Henri at Perpignan, resulting in French retreat and shame. Although called admiral, he had no experience of the sea and failed abysmally to command the French navy. When Henri suggested that an officer with more experience might be useful, Anne d’Etampes was furious at this interference with her favorite. She convinced François that Diane de Poitiers was behind the dauphin’s suggestion and wanted to install one of her own protégés—no doubt, the disgraced Constable de Montmorency.

François was not deaf to the rumors at court concerning Anne d’Etampes, but he could not face her constant recriminations and volatile temper tantrums, invariably aimed against Diane. The king’s mistress and the dauphin’s mistress were implacable enemies; François must have regretted his description of Diane de Poitiers in his gallery of beauties as “
honnête à hanter
.” After all, it was the king who had asked her to concern herself with the young Henri on his return from prison. Now, he wished it were otherwise. In the absence of the dauphin, who was with the army, François banished Diane de Poitiers from the court.

With both Diane and Henri gone, Catherine was in her element and rediscovered her own temperament. She went back to studying Latin and Greek, took singing lessons, learned to play the guitar, and entertained. Catherine introduced to the French court an Italian custom of singing rounds for up to eight voices with accompaniment. Clément Marot’s translations into French of the first thirty psalms of David were set to the music of the composer Clément Janequin, and became very popular. Members of the court, including the dauphin, chose their personal psalms and sang them, or had them sung accompanied
by lutes, viols, spinets, and flutes. Once psalm singing became popular with the early Protestants, the court decided to abandon this rather attractive custom. Instead, they chose to set the erotic odes of Horace to music.

Catherine had always been fascinated by child care and hygiene, and in Diane’s absence she took charge of the royal nursery. During the winter of 1544, Catherine held her court, receiving Italians, even those who had fought against the French, with guitar playing and Neapolitan songs. Returning from the rigors of campaigning, Henri was shocked by the festive air in her apartments, but even more so to hear of the unwarranted disgrace and banishment of Diane. Failing in his efforts to have her recalled, Henri joined Diane at Anet.

While there, the dauphin resolved to contest the recently signed Treaty of Crespy, which robbed him of his chance to avenge his humiliation at Perpignan as well as of Milan, which he considered his birthright, and four French duchies. Joining in the plot with him and Diane was the duc de Guise and his son the comte d’Aumale, along with the duc de Vendôme and the comte d’Enghien. On December 2 at Fontainebleau, in the presence of two notaries, Henri affirmed his wish for the crown lands to be indivisible and remain intact. His formal protest to the
Parlement
was signed on December 12, 1544, and witnessed by Vendôme and Enghien. The Guises decided not to sign. The protest was a serious act, which surprised and annoyed his father and destroyed the brothers’ friendship. For Henri to dare to challenge his father and the emperor through the legal system took courage. Tensions between the king, Henri, and Charles stretched close to the breaking point.

On New Year’s Day 1545, the traditional day for an exchange of gifts, the dauphine received a beautiful diamond and a most valuable ruby, as well as a large sum of money from the king. His elder son’s legal attack eventually sobered François, who realized that he could have been too harsh with his heir. François’ health was declining—perhaps the time had come to make amends. In February, the king felt sufficiently recovered to set off in a litter to hunt in the valley of the Loire, and declared himself well again “except in respect of the ladies.” Diane was recalled and regained her former position at court by
Henri’s side, where she took overall charge of the education and nutrition of, now, two royal children.

While François I continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong with him, members of the court noticed he was growing weaker. Since 1540, the king had been a sick man. On the eve of the emperor’s visit to France in 1539, François had fallen ill with an abscess in his lower stomach. Now six years later, in July 1545, the imperial ambassador, Jean de Saint-Mauris, wrote home predicting that the king would die from a burst vein in his prostate and the development of an abscess in that area. The doctors tried everything, even a course of “Chinese wood,” or gayac, a tropical wood now known as lignum vitae, imported by the Portuguese from their colony of Goa, and used for the treatment of syphilis. The Sultan Suleiman had Barbarossa send the king his own pills, which contained untreated mercury, a famous cure for syphilis, with notorious side effects. François I, this lover of women, was heard to lament: “God punishes me there where I have sinned.”

W
ITH spring, the war began again. This time the enemy was Henry VIII, and France launched a three-pronged attack against England. Armed with the blind courage of youth, the two princes and their friends—Brissac, Aumale, Enghien, Nevers, Laval, and Louis La Trémoille—competed fiercely for the laurels of a Lancelot. During one skirmish, François d’Aumale was pierced by a lance just below the eye. The blow came with such force that the lance broke off in his head to a depth of six inches. Aumale was taken at once to the rear guard, and operated on by the king’s famous surgeon, Ambroise Paré, who had nothing better than a pair of blacksmith’s pincers to extricate the piece of lance from Aumale’s face. In the presence of his officers, the brave count said he resigned himself to the inevitable torture, and did not flinch or move or cry out. Only once did he make a sound—at the most dreadful moment of the operation. He exclaimed, “O my God!” as the surgeon pressed his foot against Aumale’s face to give himself the leverage to pull out the shaft. For four days and nights it was not certain he
would survive, but he did. Henri was overwhelmed by the man’s courage and announced that he would trust this hero to lead him anywhere, even blindfolded.

Campaigning and sharing hardship succeeded in bringing the two princely brothers closer together. The court case that Henri brought against the terms of the Treaty of Crespy was not directed against his brother Charles, but against the manner of its implementation; and, rightly, he blamed the influence of the duchesse d’Etampes.

In the early autumn of 1545, the dauphin, Charles d’Orléans, and their friends were en route to Boulogne to join the French army, which was besieging the English there. They were all young and full of energy, and the constant danger of war made them foolhardy. Near their lodgings at Faremoutiers, they found several houses that had been abandoned due to an epidemic. Ignoring the signs of plague, they broke in and began a grand pillow fight, scattering feathers on one another, and shredding mattresses with their swords. Announcing that “No son of the king of France ever died of the plague,” Charles lay down on a used bed, and, for a wager, rolled in the sheets.

Later that evening, after dining with his father and brother in an abbey not far from Boulogne, Charles began to run a fever and vomit, his arms and legs shaking violently. The doctors opened a vein and bled him. Fearing contagion, they refused admittance to the king, and Henri had to be forcibly restrained from going to his brother’s side. The prince rallied for a while, but then succumbed. The twenty-three-year-old Charles d’Orléans, a young man so full of promise, was dead.
When he heard the news, the king fainted. At first, poison was suspected, but then all agreed he had died of the plague.
¹⁰

François I’s greatest source of pride was his sons: now another had been taken from him. With Charles d’Orléans died François’ dream of joining the Habsburg and the Valois dynasties. Nothing had come of the king’s last effort—an attempt to marry his youngest daughter, Marguerite (Margot), to Philip of Spain as Charles V wanted a French
prince
, not a princess, to join his family. The king of France descended into a deep depression, and abandoned his plans to invade England. On June 7, 1546, François I and Henry VIII signed the Treaty of Ardres, guaranteeing England’s neutrality in the next war between France and the empire.

That same year, the Venetian ambassador Marino Cavalli wrote a detailed description of François I:

François had succeeded in bringing the Renaissance to France, but no amount of beauty and pleasure could keep the restless king in any of his splendid châteaux for longer than a week or two, except in winter. If anything, he moved around the country more than before, desperate
to visit every place he loved. With the death of his son Charles, François had transferred his affection to another gallant youth to remind him of his own early manhood. His choice fell on a young friend of Henri’s, the comte d’Enghien, a brave soldier and a positive influence on the dauphin, balancing that of the Guise family.

With the passing of each year, the king searched more feverishly for distraction: distraction from his failures; distraction from sorrow; distraction from the horrors of the Protestant persecutions and his confusion as he ordered burned for heresy great Humanist scholars he had encouraged and promoted; distraction from his painful venereal disease and from his growing impotence. Anne d’Etampes took a lover, Etienne Dolet, to compensate for the king’s inadequacies, and scandals shocked even this lax court. At the wondrous château of Chambord, described by Charles V in admiration as “the essence of what human industry can achieve,” François wrote two lines with a diamond tip on a windowpane:

The king built more houses, created more gardens, collected more paintings, and continued the frantic, endless hunting of game with the whole court of twelve thousand following him from one château to the next. It was as if he had to chase the stag until the last moment of his life in order to forget the gnawing pain in his body.

There was a story that François I caught his venereal disease from a Spanish lady with whom he had dallied during his captivity in Madrid. Her husband had objected strongly to his wife’s behavior, and as he was forbidden from fighting a duel with the hostage king, he devised a hideous vengeance. Visiting a brothel, he deliberately had himself infected, then passed the painful keepsake to his wife. According to other sources, François had already contracted venereal disease at the age of seventeen—it was virtually endemic in Europe—and a surviving early letter from his mother, Louise de Savoie, mentions it. But the king’s constitution was so robust that he not only survived the ravages of the disease (and the efforts of his doctors) for many years, he was reported by a reliable witness to appear in excellent health as late as 1540.