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.