The Two Dianas

Two Women, One Name

The novel takes its title from a deliberate, elegant piece of historical wordplay: two of the most prominent women in Henri II's France both happened to be named Diane. Diane de Poitiers, twenty years the king's senior, was his celebrated and politically powerful mistress for decades; Diane de France was his acknowledged illegitimate daughter, later legitimized and married into the highest ranks of the nobility. The novel's fictional heroine, also named Diane, moves through a court defined by both women's real influence.

The novel's most dramatic real event arrives at the end of Henri II's story: his death in 1559 from a wound sustained in a friendly jousting match against the Comte de Montgommery, the historical figure whose name the novel's fictional hero shares. History records the jousting accident as fact; everything the novel imagines about the personal relationship between the fictional Gabriel de Montgommery and his royal namesake's real family is, as this edition's own prefatory note puts it, "romance" built on top of a single, documented tragedy.

A Sweeping Three-Volume Romance

Across its three volumes, the novel follows its central couple through mistaken identities, a doubled character based on the famous real case of Martin Guerre, and the tightening net of a court where Diane de Poitiers's influence touches nearly everything. It also brushes against the beginnings of the French Wars of Religion, depicting the early stirrings of Protestant reform under John Calvin that would soon convulse the France of the following generation — the same fractures Dumas's Valois trilogy would later dramatize in more detail.

Where the Story Continues

The novel was followed by a sequel, The Page of the Duke of Savoy, continuing the story of its characters into the years beyond Henri II's death. Both books have historically been treated as a matched pair, sharing the same disputed authorship question and the same richly detailed mid-sixteenth-century French setting.