n, on the cornices of the windows, on the
panels of the doors, in the apartments of Henri's wife, Catherine de'
Medici, everywhere, the initials D and H, interlaced, were blazoned.
Dianne had taken for device a crescent. It never set. No other star
eclipsed it. When she was sixty her colors were still worn by the king who
in absence wrote to her languorously:

Madame ma mye, je vous suplye avoir souvenance de celuy quy n'a
jamais connu que ung Dyeu et une amye, et vous assurer que n'aurez
poynt de honte de m'avoyr donne le nom de serviteur, lequel je vous
suplye de me conserver pour james.[64]

Dianne too had but ung Dyeu et un amy--one God and one friend. It was not
the king. More exactly it was a king greater than he. This woman who
fascinated everybody even to Henri's vampire-wife was, financially,
insatiable. The exactions of the Pompadour and the exigencies of the Du
Barry were trumpery beside the avidity with which she absorbed castles,
duchies, provinces, compelling her serviteur to grant her all the vacant
territories of the realm--a fourth of the kingdom. At his death, beautiful
still, "aussy fraische et aussy belle que jamais," she retreated to her
domain, slowly, royally, burdened with the spoils of France.

Brantome was right. She did drink gold. She was an enchantress. She was
also a precedent for women who in default of royal provinces for
themselves got royal dukedoms for their children.

By comparison Catherine de' Medici is spectral. In her train were perfumes
that were poisons and with them what was known as moeurs italiennes,
customs that exceeded anything in Suetonius and with which came
hybrid-faced youths whose filiation extended far back through Rome,
through Greece, to the early Orient and who, under the Valois, were
mignons du roi. Apart from them the atmosphere of the queen had in it
corruption of decay, an odor of death from which Henri II recoiled as from
a serpent, issued, said Michelet, from Italy's tomb. Cold as the blood of
the defunct, at once sinister and magnificent, committing crimes that had
in them the grandeur of real majesty, the accomplice if not the instigator
of the Hugenot massacre, Satan gave her four children:--Francois II, the
gangrened husband of Mary Stuart; Charles IX, the maniac of St.
Bartholomew; Henri III who, pomp deducted, was Heliogabalus in his quality
of Imperatrix, and the Reine Margot, wife of Henri IV.

It would have been interesting t