Page:Margaret of Angoulême, Queen of Navarre (Robinson 1886).djvu/134

Rh fanatic rather than religious, curious rather than impassioned, Diana was truly a daughter of the moon, a moon that stooped to kiss her gloomy young Endymion. The Dauphin fell at once under her enchantment. He was then eighteen; but when he died, twenty-three years later, King Henry II. was no less devoted. It was a possession rather than a passion. The amused courtiers laughed in their sleeves. The country people, awe-struck by her name, said that she had enchanted Prince Henry with a philtre. They found her, in her lunar beauty, the image of that pale Diana of the Forests, whom witches hymn by night; and they declared that every morning of her life she drank a draught of molten gold.

This, in a sense, was true. Diana knew how to lend and how to give, but she knew still better how to grasp. Her delicate, tenacious hands filled themselves with the wealth and the power of France. She and Montmorency stood one on either side the melancholy Dauphin and whispered their counsels in his ears. Round them swiftly gathered a strange, sad, rigid, fanatic little Court, an assembly of the orthodox, the pious, the bien pensants, the centre of all that was Romanist and Latinist, a society illumined by the dubious crescent of Diana, and dressed all in black and white in honour of her widowhood.

Naturally, this new little Court gained immensely by the death of the Dauphin Francis. Now that Henry was the heir, his faction became scarce less puissant than his father's. It stood in the sharpest contrast so the splendid, free-living, tolerant Court of Francis, the Court for which Andrea and Lionardo had painted, the Court which established the College of France, which dreamed of the League with Luther