Catherine’s whole life may be said to have combined romance with history.  She was the daughter of Lorenzo de Medici, that famous ruler of Florence for whom Machiavelli wrote his “Prince.”  Having been left an orphan at an early age, she was sent to a convent to be educated, but left there at fourteen to become the wife of the Dauphin, afterwards Henry II. of France.  Her royal father-in-law was the celebrated Francis I., the life-long rival of Henry VIII. of England, on the one hand, and the Emperor Charles V., on the other.  During his reign Catherine remained in obscurity, and was even threatened with divorce, as for ten years she remained childless.  On hearing that Francis was considering this decree for state reasons, she planned her first bold stroke.  With Italian finesse she made her way to the King at a favourable moment, threw herself at his feet, and expressed her willingness to submit to the royal will.  “Do with me as you choose, sire,” she said; “let me remain the dutiful wife of your son; or if it may please you to choose another, let me serve as one of her humblest attendants.”  Her speech won the heart of Francis, she was reinstated in favour, and finally had the happiness of bringing him grandchildren ere he died.  This was one reason for the great veneration in which Catherine always held his memory, and to which Brantome alludes.

Indeed, the dominant trait with her throughout her long life was loyalty to her family and their interests,—­a loyalty fine in the abstract, but which was to lead her along many doubtful and devious ways.  It caused her to match prince against prince, party against party, religion against religion, until the culminating horror of St. Bartholomew’s Massacre was reached,—­chargeable directly to her, despite the strenuous denials of Brantome.  Henry IV., the royal son-in-law who suffered so much at her hands, was broad-minded enough to palliate her offences on the ground of this family loyalty.  Claude Grouard quotes him as saying to a Florentine ambassador in regard to Catherine:  “I ask you what a poor woman could do, left by the death of her husband, with five little children on her arms, and two families in France who were thinking to grasp the crown,—­ours and the Guiges.  Was she not compelled to play strange parts to deceive first one and then the other, in order to guard, as she has done, her sons who have successively reigned through the wise conduct of that shrewd woman?  I am only surprised that she never did worse.

Sainte-Beuve in his “Causeries du Lundi” gives us additional glimpses of this Queen, basing his views upon those of Mezeray, author of the older “History of France”:  Mezeray, who never thinks of the dramatic, nevertheless makes known to us at the start his principal personages; he shows them more especially in action, without detaching them too much from the general sentiment and interests of which they are the leaders and representatives, while, at the same time, he leaves to each his individual