There is no policy, no statesmanship possible where discussion is permanent.
Therefore we ought to recognize the grandeur of the woman who had the eyes to see this future and fought it bravely. That the house of Bourbon was able to succeed to the house of Valois, that it found a crown preserved to it, was due solely to Catherine de' Medici. Suppose the second Balafre had lived? No matter how strong the Bearnais was, it is doubtful whether he could have seized the crown, seeing how dearly the Duc de Mayenne and the remains of the Guise party sold it to him. The means employed by Catherine, who certainly had to reproach herself with the deaths of Francois II. and Charles IX., whose lives might have been saved in time, were never, it is observable, made the subject of accusations by either the Calvinists or modern historians.
Though there was no poisoning, as some grave writers have said, there was other conduct almost as criminal; there is no doubt she hindered Pare from saving one, and allowed the other to accomplish his own doom by 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.
