"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.
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