On this date in 1793, two commissioners of the Sûreté from
Dreux, with a handful of protesters, desecrated Diane's resting place, opened
her coffin and hurried her body in a hastily dug grave in the parish
churchyard.
Alexandre Lenoir, art lover and founder of the Musée des
Monuments Français in Paris, succeeded in rescuing numerous treasures torn from
the château. He persuaded the State to buy many of the scattered pieces of
Diane's tomb: the funerary statue, the black marble sarcophagus - which was being
used as a pig trough at a neighboring farm - and the altar piece by Pierre
Bontemps.
Visitors to Anet can visit the funerary chapel and see it
exactly as it was in the years following Diane’s death. The centrepiece of the
chapel is the sarcophagus upon which a kneeling figure of Diane de Poitiers is mounted on a cenotaph of black marble.
Enjoy these photographs!
