Diane's Funerary Chapel at Anet

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!