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Diane de Poitiers

(see under "By Era" for French Revolution fiction)
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Misfit
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Diane de Poitiers

Post by Misfit » Tue June 23rd, 2009, 1:32 am

Hopefully someone can help. We're reading Courtesan by Diane Haeger over at Goodreads and a bit confused over the age of Henri when the sexual relationship first began and how. The book has him as a teen sometime after he's released from the Spanish prison and they're hopelessly attracted to each other, although I think the author might be fudging on the dates/Henri's age. I can't get a clear enough picture over at Wik. Can anyone add some input?
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Post by boswellbaxter » Tue June 23rd, 2009, 2:00 am

According to Leonie Frieda in her biography of Catherine de Medici (the only reliable source I have on hand), Diane and Henry became lovers around 1538, when he was around 19 and she was 38. Henry had already fathered a child by another woman in 1537, but the baby, named Diane, was placed in Diane's care.
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Post by Misfit » Tue June 23rd, 2009, 12:31 pm

Thanks, I'll have to check those dates to what's in the book. I must mosey off to work at the moment, but there was mention of Henry preparing to marry Anne Boleyn if that helps.

PS, when they start the relationship he can't be older than 13-15 as book two starts two years later and his older brother is now 18.
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Post by zsigandr » Tue June 23rd, 2009, 4:29 pm

I found a website on Diane de Poitiers that leads one to speculate that this affair could have started back when Henri was 15:

"Henri, whose childhood was marred by years of captivity in Spain, developed a strong affection for Diane which, from his 15th year on, became more and more ardent."

This is the website dedicated to Diane's life:

http://www.dianedepoitiers.sharibeck.com/king.htm

It is an interesting site,
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Misfit
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Post by Misfit » Tue June 23rd, 2009, 4:53 pm

Thank you, I'm off to read and share it with the troops at Goodreads. We're all getting quite discouraged with the book though.
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Post by Chatterbox » Tue June 23rd, 2009, 5:09 pm

Anne Boleyn would have been dead by 1538, of course... :-)

But based on the chronology you outline -- where the relationship starts 2 years before the book, and when the book starts, his brother is 18, with him being 14, Henry could just have been marrying Anne? It's feasible, I suppose. He would have had to start younger than Leonie Frieda's bio suggests, of course.

C.W. -- you out there to shed light on this??

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Post by Misfit » Tue June 23rd, 2009, 6:34 pm

CW where are you???

I know it's Wik but I just found this.
With his brother, he spent three years in Spain as a hostage to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, as surety for his father, who had been captured at the Battle of Pavia. Henry married Catherine de' Medici (13 April 1519 – 5 January 1589) on 28 October 1533, when both were fourteen years old.

The following year he became involved with the thirty-five-year-old widow Diane de Poitiers. They had always been very close: she had publicly embraced him on the day he set off to Spain; and during a jousting tournament he had insisted that his lance carry her ribbon instead of his wife's.
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Post by cw gortner » Tue June 23rd, 2009, 11:29 pm

I'm here! Okay, based on what I've researched, Henri and Diane probably became intimate the year he married Catherine or shortly before; apparently, he was physically mature for his age. It's almost impossible to know for certain, of course, as neither he nor Diane recorded the date of the first time they went to bed together, but the signs point to this time-frame for the onset of their sexual relationship.

They'd known each other for several years before, as Diane was assigned to take care of Henri following his return from captivity from Spain. This has led some historians to speculate that they did not become lovers in the physical sense until Henri became king, and before that Henri was merely acting out a knightly role for Diane. But this seems unlikely, given all the other anecdotal evidence.

I strongly suspect that Diane was the principal reason that Catherine did not bear children in the first years of her and Henri's marriage, i.e., Diane sought to control how, when and where Henri bedded his wife. I've read all kinds of theories that allegedly explain Catherine's early barrenness (she had an overly thick hymen that needed to be pierced surgically; he had a oddly-shaped penis; one of his testicles had failed to drop, reducing his sperm count, etc.) but I think the straightforward explanation is the actual one: Diane was busy molding Henri as her lover and she viewed Catherine as a potential threat, whose influence she had to curtail.

Hope this helps! FYI: I think Courtesan presents an extremely romanticized portrayal of Henri and Diane. By all accounts, Diane de Poitiers was a venal and cold-hearted woman who cared only for her own self-interests.
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Post by Misfit » Wed June 24th, 2009, 12:05 am

Thanks CW, I'll post a link to this over at the thread on Goodreads - feel free to drop in and join the chat over The Courtesan here.
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Post by Chatterbox » Wed June 24th, 2009, 12:50 am

CW -- tks! I remember reading the Catherine de Medici trilogy by Plaidy, and while Catherine certainly didn't emerge as an attractive character, I kept feeling that Diane was just as unattractive, but in a different way -- manipulative in the extreme... If I recall, that control over Henri's sexual relations with his wife was a feature of Plaidy's book -- "ok go bed your wife now". I got the sense that Plaidy struggled to make her a romantic heroine when she really didn't fit the bill. She was an Anne Boleyn in the making -- someone who wanted power and status, regardless of the cost to others.

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