For even his wife had failed him. She was but a giddy butterfly, who, though educated in the Reformed Faith, had never professed any attachment for it, and had forsaken it without a regret. As for her husband, she appears to have married him merely because he happened to be the best match which offered itself, and because her relatives desired it. His sombre nature, embittered by the new trials to which he was being subjected, was but little to her taste, and she infinitely preferred the society of the Duc d’Anjou, who had conceived for her a most violent passion. If we are to believe Brantôme, this affair had begun some few months before the lady’s marriage to Condé, and Anjou had not been permitted to sigh in vain. “This same prince [Anjou],” he writes, “aware that she [Marie de Clèves] was about to marry a prince [Condé] who had displeased him and very much troubled the State of his brother [Charles IX.], debauched her ... and then, in two months’ time, she was given to the aforesaid prince [Condé] to wife, as a pretended virgin, which was a very sweet revenge.” We can well believe that the seduction of the promised wife of an enemy would have been just the kind of exploit to appeal to the future Henri III.; but Brantôme is too incorrigible a scandalmonger for much reliance to be placed on his unsupported testimony. However, that may be, Anjou’s admiration for Marie de Clèves was now the talk of the Court, and the poet Philippe Desportes, who prostituted his muse to the services of the last Valois, as we shall see Malherbe, at a later date, minister to the amorous fancies of Henri IV., hastened to immortalize the affair in verse, and composed an elegy, in which the lovers figured under the names of Eurylas and Olympias, and the jealousy of the husband was unmercifully ridiculed. Anjou was already provided with a mistress in the person of one of Catherine’s maids-of-honour, Renée de Rieux, demoiselle de Châteauneuf--called _la belle_ Châteauneuf--a ravishing blonde of twenty summers, with wonderful blue eyes, a complexion of lilies and roses, and “hair which looked like a crown of gold.” She passed for the most perfect beauty of the Court, and one could pay a lady no higher compliment than to say that she resembled her.[97]