f France": Mezeray, who never thinks
of the dramatic, nevertheless makes known to us at the start his
principal personages; he shows them more especially in action,
without detaching them too much from the general sentiment and
interests of which they are the leaders and representatives,
while, at the same time, he leaves to each his individual
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 Charlemag