“La Vermine Hérétique”

Despite the enthusiasm with which King Francis received the Anne Boleyn balls, he never used them on court. He was a cultivated, sensitive man, given to secrecy, and though he made a show of satisfaction and mockery when they were presented to him, he never took them out of their box. It was natural in a man of his type, chilly and careful.

Francis I was not a creature of tennis courts and macho posturing. He had been a benefactor of poets and musicians, a patron of Leonardo; he collected books. When he was at last able to seize Milan from Charles V, he plundered all the classical art he could with rigorous benevolence and then lost the city again. His collections would be the foundation for what was later the Louvre—which he rebuilt—and the Bibliothèque Nationale. He financed the expedition of Giovanni da Verrazzano on which Virginia, Maryland, and New York were discovered, with no thought of expanding his realm.

It was in the city of New York that three of the balls made from the hair of the beheaded queen finally ended up. I saw them in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street, where they are kept in the archives of historic sporting equipment.

King Francis took the three balls to the Palace of Fontainebleau in 1536. There they remained, and never touched a tennis court, as the curator who is in charge of their care today explained to me. Most likely, he said with the air of someone who has spent much time thinking about something, they didn’t spend long in the trophy hall before they were assigned a humbler and more honorable role as bookends. Were they removed even once from the box before they arrived in America? I ventured. Unlikely. Can I touch them? No. Why are they here? Andrew Carnegie bought them in a lot of French manuscripts and donated them to us; they arrived with the steel beams that hold up the ceilings of the library’s underground stacks. I persisted: Is there any proof that they’re the same balls from the box that Rombaud gave to Francis I? He pointed with his gloved index finger to an inscription on one of them in letters indecipherable to me: “Avec cheveux de la vermine hérétique.” He translated for me, smugly: With hair from the heretic vermin.