Jeanne d'Albret Buying Poisoned Gloves from Catherine de' Medici's Perfumer, René

This painting by Pierre-Charles Comte, signed 1858 and likely exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1852, depicts **Jeanne d'Albret**, Queen of Navarre, accompanied by her son Henri de Navarre and Marguerite de Valois, buying perfumed gloves from the Florentine **René**, Catherine de' Medici's personal perfumer — gloves that legend holds to have been poisoned. This accusation, spread by the Protestant pamphleteer Agrippa d'Aubigné in his _Histoire universelle_, took firm hold in the popular imagination after Jeanne d'Albret's death on 9 June 1572, weeks before the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre; no reliable contemporary source or inquiry, however, ever substantiated it, and modern historians regard it merely as a black legend built around Catherine de' Medici's reputation. Painted nearly three centuries after the events, this work testifies less to historical truth than to the enduring literary and artistic fortune of this poisoning rumour in the nineteenth century.