Catherine de\' Medici

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Catherine de' Medici

By

Honore de Balzac


Translated by

Katherine Prescott Wormeley




DEDICATION

To Monsieur le Marquis de Pastoret, Member of the Academie des
Beaux-Arts.

When we think of the enormous number of volumes that have been
published on the question as to where Hannibal crossed the Alps,
without our being able to decide to-day whether it was (according
to Whittaker and Rivaz) by Lyon, Geneva, the Great Saint-Bernard,
and the valley of Aosta; or (according to Letronne, Follard,
Saint-Simon and Fortia d'Urbano) by the Isere, Grenoble,
Saint-Bonnet, Monte Genevra, Fenestrella, and the Susa passage;
or (according to Larauza) by the Mont Cenis and the Susa; or
(according to Strabo, Polybius and Lucanus) by the Rhone, Vienne,
Yenne, and the Dent du Chat; or (according to some intelligent
minds) by Genoa, La Bochetta, and La Scrivia,--an opinion which I
share and which Napoleon adopted,--not to speak of the verjuice
with which the Alpine rocks have been bespattered by other learned
men,--is it surprising, Monsieur le marquis, to see modern history
so bemuddled that many important points are still obscure, and the
most odious calumnies still rest on names that ought to be
respected?

And let me remark, in passing, that Hannibal's crossing has been
made almost problematical by these very elucidations. For
instance, Pere Menestrier thinks that the Scoras mentioned by
Polybius is the Saona; Letronne, Larauza and Schweighauser think
it is the Isere; Cochard, a learned Lyonnais, calls it the Drome,
and for all who have eyes to see there are between Scoras and
Scrivia great geographical and linguistical resemblances,--to say
nothing of the probability, amounting almost to certainty, that
the Carthaginian fleet was moored in the Gulf of Spezzia or the
roadstead of Genoa. I could understand these patient researches if
there were any doubt as to the battle of Canna; but inasmuch as
the results of that great battle are known, why blacken paper with
all these suppositions (which are, as it were, the arabesques of
hypothesis) while the history most important to the present day,
that of the Reformation, is full of such obscurities that we are
ignorant of the real name of the man who navigated a vessel by
steam to Barcelona at the period when Luther and Calvin were
inaugurating the insurrection of thought.[*]

You and I hold, I think, the same opinion, after having made, each
in his own way, close researches as to the grand and splendid
figure of Catherine de' Medici. Consequently, I have thought that
my historical studies upon that queen might properly be dedicated
to an author who has written so much on the history of the
Reformation; while at the same time I offer to the character and
fidelity of a monarchical writer a public homage which may,
perhaps, be valuable on account of its rarity.

[*] The name of the man who tried this experiment at Barcelona
should be given as Salomon de Caux, not Caus. That great man
has always been unfortunate; even after his death his name is
mangled. Salomon, whose portrait taken at the age of forty-six
was discovered by the author of the "Comedy of Human Life" at
Heidelberg, was born at Caux in Normandy. He was the author of
a book entitled "The Causes of Moving Forces," in which he
gave the theory of the expansion and condensation of steam.
He died in 1635.




CATHERINE DE' MEDICI



INTRODUCTION

There is a general cry of paradox when scholars, struck by some
historical error, attempt to correct it; but, for whoever studies
modern history to its depths, it is plain that historians are
privileged liars, who lend their pen to popular beliefs precisely as
the newspapers of the day, or most of them, express the opinions of
their readers.

Historical independence has shown itself much less among lay writers
than among those of the Church. It is from the Benedictines, one of
the glories of France, that the purest light has come to us in the
matter of history,--so long, of course, as the interests of the order
were not involved. About the middle of the eighteenth century great
and learned controversialists, struck by the necessity of correcting
popular errors endorsed by historians, made and published to the world
very remarkable works. Thus Monsieur de Launoy, nicknamed the
"Expeller of Saints," made cruel war upon the saints surreptitiously
smuggled into the Church. Thus the emulators of the Benedictines, the
members (too little recognized) of the Academie des Inscriptions et
Belles-lettres, began on many obscure historical points a series of
monographs, which are admirable for patience, erudition, and logical
consistency. Thus Voltaire, for a mistaken purpose and with ill-judged
passion, frequently cast the light of his mind on historical
prejudices. Diderot undertook in this direction a book (much too long)
on the era of imperial Rome. If it had not been for the French
Revolution, /criticism/ applied to history might then have prepared
the elements of a good and true history of France, the proofs for
which had long been gathered by the Benedictines. Louis XVI., a just
mind, himself translated the English work in which Walpole endeavored
to explain Richard III.,--a work much talked of in the last century.

Why do personages so celebrated as kings and queens, so important as
the generals of armies, become objects of horror or derision? Half the
world hesitates between the famous song on Marlborough and the history
of England, and it also hesitates between history and popular
tradition as to Charles IX. At all epochs when great struggles take
place between the masses and authority, the populace creates for
itself an /ogre-esque/ personage--if it is allowable to coin a word to
convey a just idea. Thus, to take an example in our own time, if it
had not been for the "Memorial of Saint Helena," and the controversies
between the Royalists and the Bonapartists, there was every
probability that the character of Napoleon would have been
misunderstood. A few more Abbe de Pradits, a few more newspaper
articles, and from being an emperor, Napoleon would have turned into
an ogre.

How does error propagate itself? The mystery is accomplished under our
very eyes without our perceiving it. No one suspects how much solidity
the art of printing has given both to the envy which pursues
greatness, and to the popular ridicule which fastens a contrary sense
on a grand historical act. Thus, the name of the Prince de Polignac is
given throughout the length and breadth of France to all bad horses
that require whipping; and who knows how that will affect the opinion
of the future as to the /coup d'Etat/ of the Prince de Polignac
himself? In consequence of a whim of Shakespeare--or perhaps it may
have been a revenge, like that of Beaumarchais on Bergasse (Bergearss)
--Falstaff is, in England, a type of the ridiculous; his very name
provokes laughter; he is the king of clowns. Now, instead of being
enormously pot-bellied, absurdly amorous, vain, drunken, old, and
corrupted, Falstaff was one of the most distinguished men of his time,
a Knight of the Garter, holding a high command in the army. At the
accession of Henry V. Sir John Falstaff was only thirty-four years
old. This general, who distinguished himself at the battle of
Agincourt, and there took prisoner the Duc d'Alencon, captured, in
1420, the town of Montereau, which was vigorously defended. Moreover,
under Henry VI. he defeated ten thousand French troops with fifteen
hundred weary and famished men.

So much for war. Now let us pass to literature, and see our own
Rabelais, a sober man who drank nothing but water, but is held to be,
nevertheless, an extravagant lover of good cheer and a resolute
drinker. A thousand ridiculous stories are told about the author of
one of the finest books in French literature,--"Pantagruel." Aretino,
the friend of Titian, and the Voltaire of his century, has, in our
day, a reputation the exact opposite of his works and of his
character; a reputation which he owes to a grossness of wit in keeping
with the writings of his age, when broad farce was held in honor, and
queens and cardinals wrote tales which would be called, in these days,
licentious. One might go on multiplying such instances indefinitely.

In France, and that, too, during the most serious epoch of modern
history, no woman, unless it be Brunehaut or Fredegonde, has suffered
from popular error so much as Catherine de' Medici; whereas Marie de'
Medici, all of whose actions were prejudicial to France, has escaped
the shame which ought to cover her name. Marie de' Medici wasted the
wealth amassed by Henri IV.; she never purged herself of the charge of
having known of the king's assassination; her /intimate/ was
d'Epernon, who did not ward off Ravaillac's blow, and who was proved
to have known the murderer personally for a long time. Marie's conduct
was such that she forced her son to banish her from France, where she
was encouraging her other son, Gaston, to rebel; and the victory
Richelieu 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 of
her death, he exclaimed: "It is not a woman, it is monarchy itself
that has died!"

Catherine had, in the highest degree, the sense of royalty, and she
defended it with admirable courage and persistency. The reproaches
which Calvinist writers have cast upon her are to her glory; she
incurred them by reason only of her triumphs. Could she, placed as she
was, triumph otherwise than by craft? The whole question lies there.

As for violence, that means is one of the most disputed questions of
public policy; in our time it has been answered on the Place Louis
XV., where they have now set up an Egyptian stone, as if to obliterate
regicide and offer a symbol of the system of materialistic policy
which governs us; it was answered at the Carmes and at the Abbaye;
answered on the steps of Saint-Roch; answered once more by the people
against the king before the Louvre in 1830, as it has since been
answered by Lafayette's best of all possible republics against the
republican insurrection at Saint-Merri and the rue Transnonnain. All
power, legitimate or illegitimate, must defend itself when attacked;
but the strange thing is that where the people are held heroic in
their victory over the nobility, power is called murderous in its duel
with the people. If it succumbs after its appeal to force, power is
then called imbecile. The present government is attempting to save
itself by two laws from the same evil Charles X. tried to escape by
two ordinances; is it not a bitter derision? Is craft permissible in
the hands of power against craft? may it kill those who seek to kill
it? The massacres of the Revolution have replied to the massacres of
Saint-Bartholomew. The people, become king, have done against the king
and the nobility what the king and the nobility did against the
insurgents of the sixteenth century. Therefore the popular historians,
who know very well that in a like case the people will do the same
thing over again, have no excuse for blaming Catherine de' Medici and
Charles IX.

"All power," said Casimir Perier, on learning what power ought to be,
"is a permanent conspiracy." We admire the anti-social maxims put
forth by daring writers; why, then, this disapproval which, in France,
attaches to all social truths when boldly proclaimed? This question
will explain, in itself alone, historical errors. Apply the answer to
the destructive doctrines which flatter popular passions, and to the
conservative doctrines which repress the mad efforts of the people,
and you will find the reason of the unpopularity and also the
popularity of certain personages. Laubardemont and Laffemas were, like
some men of to-day, devoted to the defence of power in which they
believed. Soldiers or judges, they all obeyed royalty. In these days
d'Orthez would be dismissed for having misunderstood the orders of the
ministry, but Charles X. left him governor of a province. The power of
the many is accountable to no one; the power of one is compelled to
render account to its subjects, to the great as well as to the small.

Catherine, like Philip the Second and the Duke of Alba, like the
Guises and Cardinal Granvelle, saw plainly the future that the
Reformation was bringing upon Europe. She and they saw monarchies,
religion, authority shaken. Catherine wrote, from the cabinet of the
kings of France, a sentence of death to that spirit of inquiry which
then began to threaten modern society; a sentence which Louis XIV.
ended by executing. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an
unfortunate measure only so far as it caused the irritation of all
Europe against Louis XIV. At another period England, Holland, and the
Holy Roman Empire would not have welcomed banished Frenchmen and
encouraged revolt in France.

Why refuse, in these days, to the majestic adversary of the most
barren of heresies the grandeur she derived from the struggle itself?
Calvinists have written much against the "craftiness" of Charles IX.;
but travel through France, see the ruins of noble churches, estimate
the fearful wounds given by the religionists to the social body, learn
what vengeance they inflicted, and you will ask yourself, as you
deplore the evils of individualism (the disease of our present France,
the germ of which was in the questions of liberty of conscience then
agitated),--you will ask yourself, I say, on which side were the
executioners. There are, unfortunately, as Catherine herself says in
the third division of this Study of her career, "in all ages
hypocritical writers always ready to weep over the fate of two hundred
scoundrels killed necessarily." Caesar, who tried to move the senate to
pity the attempt of Catiline, might perhaps have got the better of
Cicero could he have had an Opposition and its newspapers at his
command.

Another consideration explains the historical and popular disfavor in
which Catherine is held. The Opposition in France has always been
Protestant, because it has had no policy but that of /negation/; it
inherits the theories of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Protestants on the
terrible words "liberty," "tolerance," "progress," and "philosophy."
Two centuries have been employed by the opponents of power in
establishing the doubtful doctrine of the /libre arbitre/,--liberty of
will. Two other centuries were employed in developing the first
corollary of liberty of will, namely, liberty of conscience. Our
century is endeavoring to establish the second, namely, political
liberty.

Placed between the ground already lost and the ground still to be
defended, Catherine and the Church proclaimed the salutary principle
of modern societies, /una fides, unus dominus/, using their power of
life and death upon the innovators. Though Catherine was vanquished,
succeeding centuries have proved her justification. The product of
liberty of will, religious liberty, and political liberty (not,
observe this, to be confounded with civil liberty) is the France of
to-day. What is the France of 1840? A country occupied exclusively
with material interests,--without patriotism, without conscience;
where power has no vigor; where election, the fruit of liberty of will
and political liberty, lifts to the surface none but commonplace men;
where brute force has now become a necessity against popular violence;
where discussion, spreading into everything, stifles the action of
legislative bodies; where money rules all questions; where
individualism--the dreadful product of the division of property /ad
infinitum/--will suppress the family and devour all, even the nation,
which egoism will some day deliver over to invasion. Men will say,
"Why not the Czar?" just as they said, "Why not the Duc d'Orleans?" We
don't cling to many things even now; but fifty years hence we shall
cling to nothing.

Thus, according to Catherine de' Medici and according to all those who
believe in a well-ordered society, in /social man/, the subject cannot
have liberty of will, ought not to /teach/ the dogma of liberty of
conscience, or demand political liberty. But, as no society can exist
without guarantees granted to the subject against the sovereign, there
results for the subject /liberties/ subject to restriction. Liberty,
no; liberties, yes,--precise and well-defined liberties. That is in
harmony with the nature of things.

It is, assuredly, beyond the reach of human power to prevent the
liberty of thought; and no sovereign can interfere with money. The
great statesmen who were vanquished in the long struggle (it lasted
five centuries) recognized the right of subjects to great liberties;
but they did not admit their right to publish anti-social thoughts,
nor did they admit the indefinite liberty of the subject. To them the
words "subject" and "liberty" were terms that contradicted each other;
just as the theory of citizens being all equal constitutes an
absurdity which nature contradicts at every moment. To recognize the
necessity of a religion, the necessity of authority, and then to leave
to subjects the right to deny religion, attack its worship, oppose the
exercise of power by public expression communicable and communicated
by thought, was an impossibility which the Catholics of the sixteenth
century would not hear of.

Alas! the victory of Calvinism will cost France more in the future
than it has yet cost her; for religious sects and humanitarian,
equality-levelling politics are, to-day, the tail of Calvinism; and,
judging by the mistakes of the present power, its contempt for
intellect, its love for material interests, in which it seeks the
basis of its support (though material interests are the most
treacherous of all supports), we may predict that unless some
providence intervenes, the genius of destruction will again carry the
day over the genius of preservation. The assailants, who have nothing
to lose and all to gain, understand each other thoroughly; whereas
their rich adversaries will not make any sacrifice either of money or
self-love to draw to themselves supporters.

The art of printing came to the aid of the opposition begun by the
Vaudois and the Albigenses. As soon as human thought, instead of
condensing itself, as it was formerly forced to do to remain in
communicable form, took on a multitude of garments and became, as it
were, the people itself, instead of remaining a sort of axiomatic
divinity, there were two multitudes to combat,--the multitude of
ideas, and the multitude of men. The royal power succumbed in that
warfare, and we are now assisting, in France, at its last combination
with elements which render its existence difficult, not to say
impossible. Power is action, and the elective principle is discussion.
There is no policy, no statesmanship possible where discussion is
permanent.

Therefore we ought to recognize the grandeur of the woman who had the
eyes to see this future and fought it bravely. That the house of
Bourbon was able to succeed to the house of Valois, that it found a
crown preserved to it, was due solely to Catherine de' Medici. Suppose
the second Balafre had lived? No matter how strong the Bearnais was,
it is doubtful whether he could have seized the crown, seeing how
dearly the Duc de Mayenne and the remains of the Guise party sold it
to him. The means employed by Catherine, who certainly had to reproach
herself with the deaths of Francois II. and Charles IX., whose lives
might have been saved in time, were never, it is observable, made the
subject of accusations by either the Calvinists or modern historians.
Though there was no poisoning, as some grave writers have said, there
was other conduct almost as criminal; there is no doubt she hindered
Pare from saving one, and allowed the other to accomplish his own doom
by moral assassination. But the sudden death of Francois II., and that
of Charles IX., were no injury to the Calvinists, and therefore the
causes of these two events remained in their secret sphere, and were
never suspected either by the writers of the people of that day; they
were not divined except by de Thou, l'Hopital, and minds of that
calibre, or by the leaders of the two parties who were coveting or
defending the throne, and believed such means necessary to their end.

Popular songs attacked, strangely enough, Catherine's morals. Every
one knows the anecdote of the soldier who was roasting a goose in the
courtyard of the chateau de Tours during the conference between
Catherine and Henri IV., singing, as he did so, a song in which the
queen was grossly insulted. Henri IV. drew his sword to go out and
kill the man; but Catherine stopped him and contented herself with
calling from the window to her insulter:--

"Eh! but it was Catherine who gave you the goose."

Though the executions at Amboise were attributed to Catherine, and
though the Calvinists made her responsible for all the inevitable
evils of that struggle, it was with her as it was, later, with
Robespierre, who is still waiting to be justly judged. Catherine was,
moreover, rightly punished for her preference for the Duc d'Anjou, to
whose interests the two elder brothers were sacrificed. Henri III.,
like all spoilt children, ended in becoming absolutely indifferent to
his mother, and he plunged voluntarily into the life of debauchery
which made of him what his mother had made of Charles IX., a husband
without sons, a king without heirs. Unhappily the Duc d'Alencon,
Catherine's last male child, had already died, a natural death.

The last words of the great queen were like a summing up of her
lifelong policy, which was, moreover, so plain in its common-sense
that all cabinets are seen under similar circumstances to put it in
practice.

"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.