The Medici Queen aka The Devil’s Queen

Poitiers looked after Henri and tried to be like a mother to him. That’s why he looks to her for approval now.”

Francois was not the only dear friend I discovered in my new family. The King’s sister Marguerite, Queen of Navarre-that tiny country south of France and north of Spain, bordering the Pyrenees-lived at Court with her five- year-old daughter, Jeanne. Marguerite and I adored each other at first glance; our affection was strengthened when we discovered our shared passion for books. Marguerite was tall, warm, and sparkling, with such prominent cheeks that, when she smiled, they partially eclipsed her eyes.

Like her brother, she had been born in Cognac, not far from the central eastern coast, where Italian art and letters were properly appreciated, and she had insisted that King Francois bring the aging Florentine master Leonardo da Vinci to France and pay him handsomely-“even though,” she said, with gentle, rueful humor, “he was too old and blind to do much painting.” He had brought with him some of his best works-including a small, lovely portrait of a smiling, dark-haired woman, one of my favorites, which still hangs at the Chateau of Amboise.

“However,” Marguerite warned, “don’t believe the King when he tells you that Leonardo died in his arms. My brother likes to forget that he was not in Amboise at the master’s final hour.”

She also spoke with pride of her brother’s work to create the grandest, most complete library in Europe-housed at the country Chateau at Blois. I promised that at my first opportunity I would visit it.

Meanwhile, I settled into an ostensibly magnificent life. We quit Marseille’s sunny coastline for the country’s wintry interior as King Francois grew restless after a month or two in any one location.

Before I arrived in France, I had thought I lived in luxury, with my needs attended to by many servants, but my error was one of scope. In Italy, power was scattered and a ruler’s subjects few. The Sforzas ruled Milan; the Medici, Florence; the d’Estes, Ferrara; a hundred different barons ruled a hundred different towns. Rome lay under the authority of the Pope; Venice, under that of a Republic. But France was a nation with a single monarch, and the greatness of that fact struck me when I first traveled with Francois I’s Court-not so much a court as a city of thousands.

Most of the royal employees served in one of three domains: the chamber, the chapel, or the hostel. Under the first, the Grand Chamberlain supervised the provision and maintenance of clothing, the ritual of dressing the King, and all activities related to the King’s personal toilette. Its staff included valets, gentlemen of the chamber, cupbearers and bread carriers, barbers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, chambermaids, and fools.

The domain of the chapel, managed by the Grand Almoner, included the King’s confessor, dozens of chaplains, almoners, choirs, and the King’s reader.

The domain of the hostel, run by the Grand Master, fed the King and his enormous entourage. There were other lesser domains, including those of the stables, which encompassed the royal messengers; the hunt, which cared for the dogs and birds; and the fourriers, who faced the harrowing task of moving the Court and its belongings from location to location. In addition, there were councillors, secretaries, notaries, bookkeepers, pages, apothecaries, doctors, surgeons, musicians, poets, artists, jewelers, architects, bodyguards, archers, quartermasters, sumpters, and squires.

And these were only those who were in the King’s employ. There were also those who attended his family-his sister, children, and cousins-as well as the foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, and all of the King’s friends whose boon companionship pleased him.

I left Marseille in a sumptuously appointed carriage and turned to look at the winding caravan of wagons, horses, and heavy-laden mules behind me. Twenty thousand mounts, five hundred dogs, and as many hawks and falcons, as well as a lynx and a lion, traveled with our circus. We stayed at various lodgings-mostly the chateaus of nobles happy to entertain the Crown-until we made our way into the Loire Valley.

The royal Chateau at Blois was magnificent and contradictory. To one side stood a red-brick castle built by Francois I’s pre de ces sor, Louis XII, and inherited by his daughter, Claude. It was here that Jeanne d’Arc received a blessing from the Archbishop of Reims before leading her troops into battle. Claude had been fond of the property, and when she married Francois-thus securing his claim to the French throne-he added a modern four-story palace.

The palace was unlike Italian palazzi. The interior apartments were connected to all other areas not by corridors but by spiraling staircases. My first few days at Blois, I was constantly short of breath, but within a week, I was running up and down the steps without a thought. The King was so fond of spiral staircases that he had a massive, dramatic one-adorned with statues, in Gothic fashion-placed outside at the building’s center.

The King’s and Queen’s apartments were on the second floor-as was, in flagrant violation of tradition, that of Francois’s mistress, Madame d’Etampes. The children’s apartments were all on the third floor. Persons of lesser importance lived on the ground floor, where the refectories, kitchen, and guardroom were also located. Numerous outbuildings housed cardinals, clerks, courtiers, bookkeepers, doctors, tutors, and a host of others.

Night had fallen by the time I ate and saw my trunks unpacked. I was shown my spacious apartment, next to that of Henri’s sisters, by lamplight; the King was expected on the morrow and would take up residence in his. I was used to a bedchamber and antechamber, but now I had a bedchamber, an antechamber, a garderobe large enough to hold all my clothes as well as a sleeping servant, and a cabinet, a small, private office. On the brick over my bedroom fireplace was the golden image of a salamander-King Francois’s personal symbol-and beneath it, the motto Notrisco al buono, stingo el reo, “ I feed off the good fire and extinguish the bad.”

I dismissed all the French attendants and called for one of my own ladies-in-waiting, Madame Gondi, to undress me.

Marie-Catherine de Gondi was an astonishingly beautiful woman of thirty with prematurely silver hair and delicate black eyebrows. Her skin was flawless, save for a tiny dark mole on one cheek, near the corner of her lips. She was well-educated, intelligent, and possessed of a natural daintiness that held no whiff of affectation.

She was French but with a comforting difference: She had lived in Florence for many years before joining my entourage, with the result that she spoke fluent Tuscan. I was not of a mind to speak French that night, and her conversation was a comfort to me. After she undressed me, I asked her to read to me and gave her a copy of one of Aunt Marguerite’s poems, “Miroir de l’Ame Pecheresse, Mirror of a Lost Soul.”

She read for some time, and I sent her to bed as the poor woman was exhausted after a long day of travel. I was still restless and recalled what Aunt Marguerite had told me about the royal library. I wrapped myself modestly in a cloak and, lamp in hand, made my way onto the spiraling staircase that exited my apartment.

The layout of the chateau was confusing, but after several false starts, I found the staircase that led me to the library. The room was vast and as dark, on that moonless night, as a high-ceilinged cave. I held my brave little lamp close, my hand in front of me to prevent any immediate encounters with walls or furniture.

As I sensed a looming presence in the darkness, I reached out and felt the smooth edge of molded wood and silk-covered spines-a shelf of books. Eagerly, I moved closer and lifted the lamp, whose glow revealed a wooden case stretching from floor to ceiling; in the shadows, even more cases stretched back into infinity. The books were all of a uniform size, bound in different colors of watered silk. There were the obligatory editions of Dante’s Commedia, Petrarch’s Trionfi and Canzoniere, and of course Boccaccio’s Decameron.

There were also titles I had never seen before: a newly bound volume of Pantagruel, by Rabelais; Utopia, by Sir Thomas More, and an astonishing collection by Boccaccio, De claris mulieribus, On Famous Women.

I soon stumbled onto greater riches: a copy of Theologica Platonica de Immortalitate Animae, Platonic Theology of the Immortal Soul, by Marsilio Ficino. I pulled it down at once, of course, and might have stopped my searching right there, but my appetite was whetted. A chill coursed through me at the sight of De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres by Cornelius Agrippa. I had just stumbled onto the King’s occult collection, and a lifting of my lamp revealed volume after volume on the subjects of astrology, alchemy, qabala, and talismans.

In my mind, I heard the magician’s voice: The Wing of Corvus Rising, from Agrippa, created under the aegis of Mars and Saturn. Instinctively, I lifted a hand to my breasts, between which the talisman hung.

It seemed to me that the sudden appearance of these works by Ficino and Agrippa was a providential indication: If Henri was the bloodied man in my dream, I needed all the secret wisdom I could find.

This notion filled me with an eerie excitement; I opened Agrippa’s book and began to read. I was so utterly