Catherine de' Medici watched her husband ride into a tournament wearing another woman's colours. He was carried out with a lance through his eye and called for his mistress from the bed where he was dying. Catherine refused to let Diane de Poitiers in. The queen had finally found a door she could close.
She arrived in France at sixteen unable to speak French. Two years later she learned that the man she had married had ordered the massacre of thousands of his own subjects. She asked for her book of hours and prayed for him.