Having to make
head against factions and ambitions like those of the Guises and the
house of Bourbon, against men such as the two Cardinals of Lorraine,
the two Balafres, and the two Condes, against the queen Jeanne
d'Albret, Henri IV., the Connetable de Montmorency, Calvin, the three
Colignys, Theodore de Beze, she needed to possess and to display the
rare qualities and precious gifts of a statesman under the mocking
fire of the Calvinist press.
Those facts are incontestable. Therefore, to whosoever burrows into
the history of the sixteenth century in France, the figure of
Catherine de' Medici will seem like that of a great king. When calumny
is once dissipated by facts, recovered with difficulty from among the
contradictions of pamphlets and false anecdotes, all explains itself
to the fame of this extraordinary woman, who had none of the
weaknesses of her sex, who lived chaste amid the license of the most
dissolute court in Europe, and who, in spite of her lack of money,
erected noble public buildings, as if to repair the loss caused by the
iconoclasms of the Calvinists, who did as much harm to art as to the
body politic.
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