Cassandre as the mistress of Pierre de Ronsard in Les Amours (1552).

Cassandre Salviati was the daughter of a Florentine banker, Bernard Salviati, seigneur de Talcy. She was married in 1546 to Jean de Peigné, seigneur de Pray. At this time the ladies of the court of Catherine de'Medici were as free-living as Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets, though still treated with Petrarchan gallantry by poets. Ronsard is best in his amatory verse (the long series of sonnets and odes to Cassandre, Pikles, Marie, Genévre, Héléne--Héléne de Surgeres, a later and mainly "literary" love--etc.), and in his descriptions of the country (the famous "Mignonne allons voir si la rose," the "Fontaine Bellerie," the "Forêt de Gastine," and so forth), which have an extraordinary grace and freshness, like Shakespeare's Forest of Arden in As You Like It (actually near Stratford). Image: UCB Shakespeare Program Collection, photographer Velma Bourgeois Richmond. Some data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia).