Personal rivals?

Anne and Diane lived off and on at the royal court from the early 1520s until 1547. Contemporaries remark on tensions between them from the early 1540s on, and, as I have noted, historians have often described the bad blood as personal envy, blaming it for the tension between the king and the dauphin, on the one hand, and, on the other, between the dauphin and his younger brother, Charles duke of Orleans.^[547] Already in his chronicle composed between 1643—51, Franpois Eudes de Mezeray claims that the two women, motivated by their mutual ani­mosity, had gathered factions around themselves:

There were two factions at court, that of Madame d’Etampes, mistress of the king, and that of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of the dauphin.

Nineteenth-century historians draw on this notion of female jealousy. In his 1865 study of the love life of Franpois I, Adolphe Mathurin de Lescure laments the “intrigues that, under the reign of women, replace politics, and the funereal results for an entire people of such powder room battles.”^[549] “These two beautiful and implacable enemies, like the real women they were,” he continues,

began by slapping each other in the face. Anne threw her age at the head of Diane, who responded with a list of her infidelities. “The year I was born,” the Duchess of Etampes affected to say with a perfidious disingenuousness, “is the year that Madame the Seneschale got married.”^[550]

In his study of 1871, popular historian Arthur-Leon Imbert de Saint-Amand describes a “feminine duel” played out for the merriment of all, especially the king, who delighted in the “quarrels,” “zizanies” and “intrigues.”^[551] Francis Decrue de Stoutz in his still indispensable biography of Montmorency of 1885 claims that the female rivals “transmit[ted] their mutual hatred to their royal lovers” and that Emperor Charles V, seeing the battle lines drawn and wish­ing to incite further trouble, invested his own son with Milan, giving Franpois I the excuse he needed to eject Montmorency.^[552] Thus, concludes Decrue, the real

The Duchess of Etampes and Diane de Poitiers | 157 reason for Montmorency’s disgrace was “the jealousy between the king’s lover and the Dauphin’s.”^[553]

Such characterizations have retained their influence. According to a web site of popular history,

while Diane de Poitiers attracted the sympathy of Henri, she made an enemy in the person of Anne de Pisseleu, Duchess of Etampes, mistress of Franςois I.

The women’s later antipathy began as personal dislike but escalated into conflict, according to a popular history of Catherine de Medicis, as Anne, “whose cupidity and hold over Francis can only be described as phenomenal, began to fear the day that she would be displaced by Diane.”^[555] When the king proposed to the emperor in 1538 that Prince Charles marry the emperor’s daughter and be invested with Milan, it was because he was “egged on by his favourite,” who hoped in this way to make Charles powerful enough to care for her when the king was dead.^[556] The proposition aroused the ire of the dauphin, who considered Milan his own prize, and tensions between the brothers devolved into a “dangerous feud,” led by the “two rivals Diane de Poitiers and the Duchesse d’Etampes....'^v'^[557] Another popu­lar history admits that the conflict did not arise from feminine rivalry alone, but that the

petty Anne de Pisseleu threw the first punch by commissioning vile verses about Diane from a poet of little talent, Jean Voulte. More subtle, Diane began the rumor that Anne de Pisseleu was unfaithful to Franςois I and made fun of his sentiments.^[558]

Even scholarly histories at times depict the women as slightly ridiculous divas, describing the royal court, for example, as a “theatre for rivalry between the lead­ing court ladies.”^[559]