The modern history of love opens with laughter, the rich faunesque laugh of François Ier. In Italy he had lost, as he expressed it, everything—fors l’honneur. For his consolation he found there gallantry, which Montesquieu defined as love’s light, delicate and perpetual lie.
Platonism is the melody of love; gallantry the parody. Platonism beautifies virtue, gallantry embellishes vice. It makes it a marquis, gives it brilliance and brio. However it omit to spiritualize it does not degrade. Moreover it improves manners. Gallantry was the direct cause of the French Revolution. The people bled to death to defray the amours of the great sent in their bill. Love in whatever shape it may appear is always educational.
Hugo said that the French Revolution poured on earth the floods of civilization. Mignet said that it established a new conception of things. Both remarks apply to love. But before it disappeared behind masks, patches, falbalas and the guillotine, to reappear in the more or less honest frankness which is its Anglo-Saxon garb to-day, there were several costumes in its wardrobe.
In Germany, and in the North generally, the least becoming fashions of the Middle Ages were still in vogue. In Spain was the constant mantilla. Originally it was white. The smoke of the auto-da-fé had, in blackening it, put a morbid touch of hysteria beneath. In France, a brief bucolic skirt, that of Amaryllis, was succeeded by the pretentious robes of Rambouillet. In England, the Elizabethan ruff, rigid and immaculate—when seen from a distance—was followed by the yielding Stuart lace. Across the sea fresher modes were developing in what is now the land of Mille Amours.
In Italy at the moment, gallantry was the fashion. François Ier adopted it, and with it splendor, the magnificence that goes to the making of a monarch’s pomp. In France hitherto every castle had been a court than which that of the king was not necessarily superior. François Ier was the first of French kings to make his court first of all courts, a place of art, luxury, constant display. It became a magnet that drew the nobility from their stupid keeps, detaining them, when young, with adventure; when old, with office, providing, meanwhile, for the beauty of women a proper frame. Already at a garden party held on a field of golden cloth the first Francis of France had shown the eighth Henry of England how a king could shine. He was dreaming then of empire. The illusion, looted at Pavia, hovered over Fontainebleau and Chambord, royal residences which, Italian artists aiding, he then constructed and where, though not emperor, for a while he seemed to be.
Elsewhere, in Paris, in his maison des menus plaisirs—a house in the rue de l’Hirondelle—the walls were decorated with salamanders—the fabulous emblems of inextinguishable loves; or else with hearts, which, set between alphas and omegas, indicated the beginning and the end of earthly aims. The loves and hearts were very many, as multiple as those of Solomon. Except by Brantôme not one of them was compromised. François Ier was the loyal protector of what he called l’honneur des dames, an honor which thereafter it was accounted an honor to abrogate for the king.[63]
“If,” said Sauval, “the seraglio of Henri II was not as wide as that of François Ier, his court was not less elegant.”
The court at that time had succumbed to the refinements of Italy. Women who previously were not remarkable for fastidiousness, had, Brantôme noted, acquired so many elegancies, such fine garments and beautiful graces that they were more delectable than those of any other land. Brantôme added that if Henri II loved them, at least he loved but one.
That one was Dianne de Poytiers. Brantôme suspected her of being a magician, of using potable gold. At the age of seventy she was, he said, “aussy fraische et aussy aymable comme en l’aage de trente ans.” Hence the suspicion, otherwise justified. In France among queens—de la main gauche—she had in charm but one predecessor, Agnes Sorel, and but one superior, La Vallière. The legendary love which that charm inspired in Henri II had in it a troubadourian parade and a chivalresque effacement. In its fervor there was devotion, in its passion there was poetry, there was humility in its strength. At the Louvre, at Fontainebleau, on the walls without, in the halls within, 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 donné le nom de serviteur, lequel je vous suplye de me conserver pour jamès.[64]