eu at last won
over her (on the Day of the Dupes) was due solely to the discovery the
cardinal made, and imparted to Louis XIII., of secret documents relating
to the death of Henri IV.

Catherine de' Medici, on the contrary, saved the crown of France; she
maintained the royal authority in the midst of circumstances under which
more than one great prince would have succumbed. 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. Hemmed
in between the Guises who claimed to be the heirs of Charlemagne and
the factious younger branch who sought to screen the treachery of the
Connetable de Bourbon behind the throne, Catherine, forced to combat
heresy which was seeking to annihilate the monarchy, without friends,
aware of treachery among the leaders of the Catholic party, foreseeing
a republic in the Calvinist party, Catherine employed the most dangerous
but the surest weapon of public policy,--craft. She resolved to trick
and so defeat, successively, the Guises who were seeking the ruin of the
house of Valois, the Bourbons who sought the crown, and the Reformers
(the Radicals of those days) who dreamed of an impossible republic--like
those of our time; who have, however, nothing to reform. Consequently,
so long as she lived, the Valois kept the throne of France. The great
historian of that time, de Thou, knew well the value of this woman
when, on hearing