Diane de Poitiers and the Gold She Drank

Diane de Poitiers was the most powerful woman at the court of Henri II of France, and she was famous above all for looking as though she had not aged. The courtier and memoirist Brantôme, who saw her six months before she died, wrote that her beauty, her grace and her bearing were exactly what they had always been.^[1] She died in 1566.^[2]

In the same breath, he recorded how people said she managed it.

Brantôme's account is specific. He says he saw her at seventy as fair of face, as fresh and as lovable as at thirty; that she had broken a leg when her horse slipped on the paving at Orléans, and that it had not changed her face; and that above all she had a very great whiteness, sans se farder aucunement, without painting herself at all.^[3] He was generous with her age. She was not yet seventy when she died.

Then comes the qualification. Mais on dit bien, but it is said, that every morning she took broths made with drinkable gold and other drugs, of the kind good physicians and subtle apothecaries prepare.^[3] Brantôme does not claim to know. He reports what the court said.

During the Revolution her remains were taken from the tomb and thrown into a pit outside the château walls.^[4] In 2008 remains identified as hers were exhumed from the cemetery at Anet.^[5] A French team led by the forensic specialist Philippe Charlier analysed them and published the results in the BMJ in 2009, under the title A gold elixir of youth in the 16th century French court.^[6]

The gold was there. The concentration was reported as five hundred times the reference value, far above anything ordinary life supplies, and consistent with the habit Brantôme had heard about.^[5]

Drinkable gold, aurum potabile, had a respectable place in the medicine of the period. Gold does not tarnish, and a substance that did not decay was a plausible candidate for preserving a body that did. Apothecaries prepared it in solution; accounts of the practice describe gold made drinkable with the help of gold chloride and diethyl ether.^[7]

It is worth being exact about what this case is. It is not a cosmetic applied to the skin. It is a regimen swallowed in pursuit of a complexion, and its evidence is unusually good: a named contemporary witness passing on a rumour, and a chemical result, more than four centuries later, that agrees with him.^[8]

Whether the gold hastened her death. The reports of the study describe thin, brittle hair and fragile bones, consistent with long exposure, but a body four centuries old cannot settle a cause of death, and she was in her sixties in any case.^[9]

Nor is it known how many others did the same. Drinkable gold was expensive, and the king's favourite was unusually well placed to buy it; one well-documented case says little about a fashion.