Catherine de Medici | Page 8

moral assassination. But the sudden death of Francois II., and
that of Charles IX., were no injury to the Calvinists, and therefore the
causes of these two events remained in their secret sphere, and were
never suspected either by the writers of the people of that day; they
were not divined except by de Thou, l'Hopital, and minds of that calibre,
or by the leaders of the two parties who were coveting or defending the
throne, and believed such means necessary to their end.
Popular songs attacked, strangely enough, Catherine's morals. Every
one knows the anecdote of the soldier who was roasting a goose in the
courtyard of the chateau de Tours during the conference between
Catherine and Henri IV., singing, as he did so, a song in which the
queen was grossly insulted. Henri IV. drew his sword to go out and kill
the man; but Catherine stopped him and contented herself with calling
from the window to her insulter:--
"Eh! but it was Catherine who gave you the goose."
Though the executions at Amboise were attributed to Catherine, and
though the Calvinists made her responsible for all the inevitable evils
of that struggle, it was with her as it was, later, with Robespierre, who
is still waiting to be justly judged. Catherine was, moreover, rightly
punished for her preference for the Duc d'Anjou, to whose interests the
two elder brothers were sacrificed. Henri III., like all spoilt children,
ended in becoming absolutely indifferent to his mother, and he plunged
voluntarily into the life of debauchery which made of him what his
mother had made of Charles IX., a husband without sons, a king
without heirs. Unhappily the Duc d'Alencon, Catherine's last male child,

had already died, a natural death.
The last words of the great queen were like a summing up of her
lifelong policy, which was, moreover, so plain in its common-sense
that all cabinets are seen under similar circumstances to put it in
practice.
"Enough cut off, my son," she said when Henri III. came to her death-
bed to tell her that the great enemy of the crown was dead, "/now piece
together/."
By which she meant that the throne should at once reconcile itself with
the house of Lorraine and make use of it, as the only means of
preventing evil results from the hatred of the Guises,--by holding out to
them the hope of surrounding the king. But the persistent craft and
dissimulation of the woman and the Italian, which she had never failed
to employ, was incompatible with the debauched life of her son.
Catherine de' Medici once dead, the policy of the Valois died also.
Before undertaking to write the history of the manners and morals of
this period in action, the author of this Study has patiently and minutely
examined the principal reigns in the history of France, the quarrel of the
Burgundians and the Armagnacs, that of the Guises and the Valois,
each of which covers a century. His first intention was to write a
picturesque history of France. Three women--Isabella of Bavaria,
Catharine and Marie de' Medici--hold an enormous place in it, their
sway reaching from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, ending in
Louis XIV. Of these three queens, Catherine is the finer and more
interesting. Hers was virile power, dishonored neither by the terrible
amours of Isabella nor by those, even more terrible, though less known,
of Marie de' Medici. Isabella summoned the English into France
against her son, and loved her brother-in-law, the Duc d'Orleans. The
record of Marie de' Medici is heavier still. Neither had political genius.
It was in the course of these studies that the writer acquired the
conviction of Catherine's greatness; as he became initiated into the
constantly renewed difficulties of her position, he saw with what
injustice historians--all influenced by Protestants--had treated this
queen. Out of this conviction grew the three sketches which here follow;
in which some erroneous opinions formed upon Catherine, also upon
the persons who surrounded her, and on the events of her time, are
refuted. If this book is placed among the Philosophical Studies, it is

because it shows the Spirit of a Time, and because we may clearly see
in it the influence of thought.
But before entering the political arena, where Catherine will be seen
facing the two great difficulties of her career, it is necessary to give a
succinct account of her preceding life, from the point of view of
impartial criticism, in order to take in as much as possible of this vast
and regal existence up to the moment when the first part of the present
Study begins.
Never was there any period, in any land, in any sovereign family, a
greater contempt for legitimacy than in the famous house of the Medici.