After the disastrous battle of St. Quentin she gave the first indications of her skill in public matters. The king had urgent need of money, and as he was absent from Paris, Catherine went to the parliament, explained the royal necessities, and obtained a grant of 300,000 livres. “She thanked them in such words that all wept with tenderness.... Throughout the city men talked of nothing but her majesty’s prudence.”[31] After this time (we are told) the king went more into her society. During her husband’s life, she possessed but little influence: his dislike to her at one time nearly approaching to hatred. He often taunted her with her plebeian origin; and, but for the love Francis I. bore her, she would have been repudiated and sent back to her relations. In the earlier years of her wedded life she was unpopular, because she was childless, and because her uncle, Clement, who deceived all who trusted in him, had evaded his engagements. By degrees, however, she won the love of the people, who would willingly have shed their blood for her.[32] If she did not love her husband, she made a great show of sincere attachment. When he was away from her with the army, she would put herself and her attendants into mourning; and go in procession to various shrines to pray for his happiness and success. She has been described as _molto religiosa_, but that means very little in an Italian mouth. In later years, it was not easy to tell when she was sincere, or when playing a part. She had been trained in that school whence Machiavelli derived his maxims. She thought nothing of right or wrong: her principles, if such they may be termed, were prudence, expediency, and success; and she preferred a tortuous to a straightforward policy. During the life of her husband, Catherine had filled a subordinate position, having the title, but little of the respect, that surrounds a queen. She never had fair play, and her early years were blighted by the shadow cast upon them by Diana of Poitiers. Diana, Duchess of Valentinois, was the widow of Louis de Brézé, high seneschal of Normandy,[33] and the most beautiful woman of the age.[34] In her youth she had captivated the affections, such as they were, of Francis I., and even during his life-time had enthralled the future king by her dazzling charms. Henry used to wear her colors, black and white;[35] consult her on affairs of state, and permit her to dispense the ecclesiastical patronage.[36] It has been said that the love between them was purely platonic: the statement--borne out in some degree by the difference of their years--is not, however, in accordance with the opinion of her contemporaries.[37] The king at one time seems to have been quite infatuated with her. At the foot of her portrait he wrote the first words of Marot’s version of the forty-second Psalm-- As pants the hart for cooling streams, While heated in the chase, So longs my soul for thee!