Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/133

118 were, perhaps, the only wiles that could have caught the Dauphin. And Diana, with the dignity, had not the disadvantage of her years. Hers was not the loveliness that fades with youth. Her penetrating Armida graces were unchanged, her grand style, her grave and delicate air, gained rather than lost by the sparer outlines and paler tints of waning youth. Tall and slender, she was ever soberly clad; she affected no rivalry with the cloth of gold and gems of younger beauties; she wore black and white in honour of her widowhood. When the Dauphin became her lover, she still wore her quiet weeds for her dead husband, and he also took for his badge the mourning-colours of the man he had supplanted; all the Dauphin's Court assumed the hues of widowhood.

No one seems to have found it strange. Diana was so inaccessible, so remote, and distant, that rumour itself could find no fault with her. She continued the most pious, the most Catholic, the wisest, the most respectable of ladies. Many said, and say, that she had conferred on Francis the affections that now she bestowed on his son. There is no evidence. There was no evidence then to what degree the Dauphin was her lover, though the Revolution which desecrated the grave of Diana and of two dead babies in her chapel at Anet has settled that question for a later world.

"She has undertaken," says Cavalli, "to indoctrinate the Dauphin, to correct and counsel him, and to urge him on towards all actions worthy of hint."

The moon was her emblem, the crescent moon, with the equivocal device, "Donec totum impleat orbem" And if the star of Saturn shone fitly on the Dauphin's birth, for her the natural planet was the pale, the solemn, the enchanting moon. Cold, narrow-hearted,