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France upon the death of his father. After a lavish procession in which he passed beneath a trio of triumphal arches, one of which bore the motto he and Diane devised as their own, Donec totum impleat orbem —“Until it fills the whole world”—Henri was crowned at Reims on July 26. His black velvet doublet and coronation robes were embroidered not with the traditional lilies of France but with Diane’s insignias in countless seed pearls: her quivers, bows and arrows, her entwined crescent moons, and their initials—an H and double D. From then on, these would become Henri’s kingly symbols, a public acknowledgment of his liaison with his moon goddess, openly, if not defiantly, bringing their romance into the sunlight. Not only the king’s garments and his horses’ caparisons, but each royal property would eventually become emblazoned and embellished everywhere one looked with their combined ciphers and insignias.
    As queens of France were merely consorts and were not crowned beside their husbands, the very pregnant and opulently gowned Catherine was no more than an honored spectator at Henri’s coronation. But she was outshone by the even more resplendently attired Diane de Poitiers, whose fair hair was adorned with a diamond crescent that to the eye of every beholder looked like a crown. The new queen did not even spend her husband’s coronation night celebrating privately with him. According to the Italian ambassador, after the banquet, the king “went to find the Sénéchale.”
    As soon as the crown was on his head, Henri showered Diane, whom he called “madame,” or ma dame (“my lady,” in the high-flown chivalric sense), with jewels, real estate, and revenues, many of which his father had previously given to his maîtresse en titre , Anne d’Heilly. Among Diane’s new perquisites was a percentage of income from a tax imposed on every church bell in France. This unusual love token prompted the poet Rabelais to bawdily quip that the monarch had hung the bells of his kingdom about the neck of his mare.
    Rabelais realized that Diane was Henri’s paramour in the fullest sense, but there were some at court who still didn’t believe it, unwilling to wrap their brains around the idea that such a young, virile man had any sexual desire for a woman twenty or so years his senior. Ambassador Lorenzo Contarini, in his dispatches to the Vatican in 1547 (after the pair had been lovers for nearly ten years), wrote that the French king displayed a “real tenderness” toward Diane de Poiters, “but it is not thought that there is anything lascivious about it, but that this affection is like that between a mother and son.” It’s a testament to the lovers’ discretion that they managed to fool at least some of the people some of the time.
    However, not every ambassador was so taken in, and the paramours weren’t always so tactful. At the outset of Henri’s reign he created an intimate circle of loyal nobles, which excluded his queen, but included his official mistress. The imperial ambassador Jean de Saint-Mauris, whose boss was the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, Charles V (the same monarch who had held Henri a prisoner when he was a boy), was exceptionally disparaging of both the king and his mistress. Saint-Mauris wrote of this relationship:
    “After dinner [his midday meal] he visits [Diane] and when he has reported to her details of all the matters he has discussed in the morning meetings, he sits on her lap and plays the guitar to her, frequently asking [his Grand Master of the Household, the duc de Montmorency] whether she had not preserved her beauty, occasionally caressing her breasts and looking at her face, like a man dominated by his infatuation…. The king has many good qualities, and I would hope much more of him if he were not so foolish as to allow himself to be led as he is…none may dare to remonstrate with the king in case he offends [Diane], fearing that the king will tell her,