Murdered: France's 'first bimbo'

A 600-year-old mystery has been at least partially solved with the revelation that Agnes Sorel, the 28-year-old mistress of France's Charles VII, was murdered. A paleopathologist will today reveal the specific metal, used by alchemists, that killed Sorel.

Sorel was the first woman to be officially named mistress to the king of France.

Contemporary chroniclers such as Thomas Basin blame her for turning Charles from reticent ruler into sex-mad monarch.

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Her extravagances were legendary: she invented the off-the-shoulder gown (which occasionally became the one-breast-in, one-breast-out gown) and spent fortunes on monumental fur-lined robes with trains of up to eight metres long, becoming the best client of the court's principal merchant and financier, Jacques Coeur.

She exercised, by all accounts, a remarkable influence over Charles, steering many of his political choices and almost certainly urging him to retake Normandy from the English once and for all.