physiognomy....  Catherine de Medici is painted there in all her dissimulation and her network of artifices, in which she herself was often caught; ambitious of sovereign power without possessing either the force or the genius for it; striving to obtain it by craft, and using for this purpose a continual system of what we should call today ’see-sawing’—­’rousing and elevating for a time one faction, putting to sleep or lowering another; uniting herself sometimes with the feeblest side out of caution, lest the stronger should crush her; sometimes with the stronger from necessity; at times standing neutral when she felt herself strong enough to command both sides, but without intention to extinguish either.’  Far from being always too Catholic, there are moments when she seems to lean to the Reformed religion and to wish to grant too much to that party; and this with more sincerity, perhaps, than belonged to her naturally.  The Catherine de Medici, such as she presents herself and is developed in plain truth on the pages of Mezeray is well calculated to tempt a modern writer.”

It is precisely to this temptation that Balzac has yielded, in his book already mentioned.  His summing-up of her character is as follows:  “Catherine de Medici has suffered more from popular error than almost any other woman... and yet she saved the throne of France, she maintained the royal authority under circumstances to which more than one great prince would have succumbed.  Face to face with such leaders of the factions, and ambitions of the houses of Guise and of Bourbon as the Cardinals de Lorraine and the two ‘Balafres,’ the two Princes de Conde, Henry IV., Montmorency, the Colignys, she was forced to put forth the rarest fine qualities, the most essential gifts of statesmanship, under the fire of the Calvinist press.  These, at any rate, are indisputable facts.  And to the student who digs deep into the history of the sixteenth century in France, the figure of Catherine de Medici stands out as that of a great king...

“Hemmed in between a race of princes who proclaimed themselves the heirs of Charlemagne, and a factious younger branch that was eager to bury the Constable de Bourbon’s treason under the throne; obliged too, to fight down a heresy on the verge of devouring the monarchy, without friends, and aware of treachery in the chiefs of the Catholic party and of republicanism in the Calvinists, Catherine used the most dangerous but the surest of political weapons—­Craft.  She determined to deceive by turns the party that was anxious to secure the downfall of the house of Valois, the Bourbons who aimed at the Crown, and the Reformers....  Indeed, so long as she lived, the Valois sat on the throne.  The great M. de Thou understood the worth of this woman when he exclaimed on hearing of her death:  ’It is not a woman, it is Royalty that dies in her’!”