I thought today, as a companion piece to our travel journal, I would write a little about Diane of Poitiers. Tomorrow, in the journal you can read about our visit to Anet, where her Chateau is.It intrigues me as to how a woman like this would be perceived had she lived in the modern age. I think she would have been something of a rockstar groupie figure. By all accounts a good-looking woman, she was also very fit, an outdoors type, and an accomplished horserider. She was to become the favourite of the young Henri II, and I do mean young.Henri and his brother had been incarcerated in Spain at the ages of 7 and 8, and there he had read the tale Amadis de Gaula, a knight errant story, featuring the kind of Gentlewomen Diane came to embody for the young prince. It is thought she became his mistress in 1538, if allusions in their correspondence are anything to go by.
She enjoyed the King's favour, even at the expense of his wife, Catherine de Medici. He built the Chateau de Anet for her,
even entrusting her with the Crown Jewels. She weilded an extraordinary influence for a mistress. With a penchant for posing nude or topless for a series of portraits, her notoriety and influence would have made irresistible tabloid fodder nowadays. Maintaining her looks into her fifties,even her emblem has a touch of rock and roll about it, not unlike one of the Four Symbols from Led Zeppelin' fourth album
Today I imagine she would be viewed part Princess Diana, part Pamela Anderson.
Her influence waned when the King was injured in a jousting tournament, Catharine restricting access to him, repeatedly calling for Diane in vain. When he died, she was banished to the Chateau at Chaumont,where her emblem can clearly be seen carved above one of the fireplaces. She remained there for a short time before moving to her beloved Anet, where she live in comfort, but died in relative obscurity. She was laid to rest in a mausoleum next to the Chateau, but as you will see in our travel tale tomorrow, that wasn't quite the last injustice visited upon Diane.
Immortalised in the 1950's Hollywood Movie starring Lana Turner, Diane remains a Sixteenth Century Pop Icon, who certainly had the X Factor!
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