In France she grew up at the court of Catherine de’ Medici, that imperious intriguer whose splendid surroundings were tainted with the corruption which she had brought from her native Italy.  It was, indeed, a singular training-school for a girl of Mary Stuart’s character.  She saw about her a superficial chivalry and a most profound depravity.  Poets like Ronsard graced the life of the court with exquisite verse.  Troubadours and minstrels sang sweet music there.  There were fetes and tournaments and gallantry of bearing; yet, on the other hand, there was every possible refinement and variety of vice.  Men were slain before the eyes of the queen herself.  The talk of the court was of intrigue and lust and evil things which often verged on crime.  Catherine de’ Medici herself kept her nominal husband at arm’s-length; and in order to maintain her grasp on France she connived at the corruption of her own children, three of whom were destined in their turn to sit upon the throne.

Mary Stuart grew up in these surroundings until she was sixteen, eating the fruit which gave a knowledge of both good and evil.  Her intelligence was very great.  She quickly learned Italian, French, and Latin.  She was a daring horsewoman.  She was a poet and an artist even in her teens.  She was also a keen judge of human motives, for those early years of hers had forced her into a womanhood that was premature but wonderful.  It had been proposed that she should marry the eldest son of Catherine, so that in time the kingdom of Scotland and that of France might be united, while if Elizabeth of England were to die unmarried her realm also would fall to this pair of children.

And so Mary, at sixteen, wedded the Dauphin Francis, who was a year her junior.  The prince was a wretched, whimpering little creature, with a cankered body and a blighted soul.  Marriage with such a husband seemed absurd.  It never was a marriage in reality.  The sickly child would cry all night, for he suffered from abscesses in his ears, and his manhood had been prematurely taken from him.  Nevertheless, within a twelvemonth the French king died and Mary Stuart was Queen of France as well as of Scotland, hampered only by her nominal obedience to the sick boy whom she openly despised.  At seventeen she showed herself a master spirit.  She held her own against the ambitious Catherine de’ Medici, whom she contemptuously nicknamed “the apothecary’s daughter.”  For the brief period of a year she was actually the ruler of France; but then her husband died and she was left a widow, restless, ambitious, and yet no longer having any of the power she loved.

Mary Stuart at this time had become a woman whose fascination was exerted over all who knew her.  She was very tall and very slim, with chestnut hair, “like a flower of the heat, both lax and delicate.”  Her skin was fair and pale, so clear and so transparent as to make the story plausible that when she drank from a flask of wine, the red liquid could be seen passing down her slender throat.