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Diane. It was in Diane’s interest as well that her lover retain his homely little wife; otherwise she, too, ran the risk of being cast aside. So she became the couple’s sex therapist.
    Meanwhile, Catherine availed herself of every known remedy inan effort to become fertile: wearing a girdle under her gowns that was made by a witch (soaked in she-donkey’s milk and bearing charms such as the middle finger of a fetus); sporting an amulet about her neck containing the ashes of a giant frog; ingesting myrrh pills and mare’s urine; and slathering herself with poultices of cow’s dung and ground stag antlers. But as things transpired, part of their conception problem may have been Henri’s. Referred to in several diplomatic dispatches, he suffered from a mild deformity of the penis, a downward curvature known as chordee or hypospadias. Evidently, Catherine’s real medical issue was an inverted uterus, and some scholars have hypothesized that had Henri’s penis been straight, she would have had far less trouble conceiving.
    Henri was an adventurous lover with Diane but never attempted anything too exotic with his wife. Diane advised Catherine to jettison all the quack remedies, and instead (in concordance with the royal physicians), she suggested a number of sexual positions to the royal couple that would facilitate successful intercourse, including making love à levrette —which we might call doggie style, a levrette being a greyhound.
    Not only did the gossip regarding Henri and Catherine’s embarrassing sex life spread through the French court, but foreign ambassadors provided the intelligence to their employers. It humiliated Catherine all the more that the whole world seemed to know that Henri’s mistress “at night urges [him] to that couch to which no desire draws him.”
    By reminding Henri of Catherine’s many fine qualities of character as well as encouraging him to become more acrobatic in his spouse’s boudoir, Diane was able to thwart Anne d’Heilly’s scheme to supplant the dauphine, thereby maintaining her own place in Henri’s affections and bed. Diane would get Henri all hot and bothered and then send him upstairs to his wife’s bedchamber to perform his conjugal duty.
    Catherine reveled in each visit, but for Henri it was purely an obligation. He could not even bear to look his Medici bride in the face while they made love, and when he finished he would return to his mistress’s slender arms. It was a body slam to Catherine’s ego. Whatdid Diane de Poitiers have that she didn’t? Catherine’s curiosity got the better of her when she hired an Italian carpenter to drill a pair of holes in her floor so she could spy on Henri and his paramour. What she saw sickened her: “a beautiful, fair woman, fresh and half undressed, was caressing her lover in a hundred ways, who was doing the same to her.” They were all over Diane’s furniture, and on the floor, made more comfortable and sensuous by her velvet rug puddled about them. Brokenhearted, Catherine admitted to her friend the duchesse de Montpensier that Henri had “never used her so well.”
    In any event, Diane’s advice proved fruitful and Catherine bore children. To Catherine’s displeasure, Henri thanked his lover for her successful sex counseling by giving her a role in the raising of his children. Diane’s cousin Jean d’Humières was awarded the governorship of the nursery, and Diane appropriated Catherine’s private nicknames for the royal children. To the future queen, even in her maternal triumph, nothing remained entirely hers; her husband’s mistress was not only in his bedroom, but in their children’s sphere as well. At least she was qualified. Diane, who had successfully raised two daughters of her own, in addition to Henri’s illegitimate Diane de France, would eventually be placed in charge of the education of Henri and Catherine’s offspring, which she managed until 1551.
    On March 31, 1547, Henri became king of