Dark Eminence Catherine De Medici And Her Children by Marguerite Vance (good e books to read .TXT) 📗

was helpless and listened, incredulous, while he ordered the death of some of his closest friends who were Huguenots, among them La Rochefoucauld who had come to Paris for Marguerite's wedding, bringing his new bride. Both were killed.

There the horrible Saturnalia rests and as long as time shall be, no one can know of a certainty who was responsible. Did Catherine and Anjou prod and lash Charles, taunting him for giving his affection and trust to the great Coligny, until in a lunatic outburst he did actually order the killing of the hero he worshiped? Did he, driven to it by his mother, send out the Guises to inflame the brutish passions of the Paris mob? How much of all that happened was coincidence? No one will ever know. But the name of Catherine de Medici remains an integral part of it. There is no doubt that she spent much of the rest of her life trying to convince the Catholic world that she and she alone had seen it through as a divinely inspired expulsion of sin, and the Protestant world

that it was all a deeply regretted accident. Somehow she never quite succeeded in doing either. A damaging letter remains, written to Philip of Spain on the 28th of August*

My son, I have no douht that you will share with us our joy at God's goodness in giving my son the King the means to rid himself of subjects rebellious equally to God and to himself, and that it pleased Him to preserve us all from the cruelty of their hands, for which we feel assured you will praise God with us, both for our sakes and for the good which will result to all Christendom and the honor and glory of God . . . and I rejoice still more that this occasion will confirm and augment the friendship between you and the King your brother, which is the thing in this world I most desire. . . . I send my greetings to my grandchildren the Infantas. . . .

Paris, this 28th day of August, 1572

Your good mother and sister Caterine

* Milton Waldman, Biography of a "Family (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1936), 137.

Chapter 10 HENRY III

THE dynastic stature of her children continued to he Catherine's major interest. That they warred so among themselves was a nettle in her side. Charles, the King, definitely tubercular and mentally unsound, hated hoth his brothers, Anjou and Alenjon, and held Marguerite in contempt, calling her "that woman*" Anjou, knowing Charles was insanely jealous of him as a successful campaigner in the wars, did nothing to lessen the tension between them. Young Alengon loathed them both.

For years Catherine had been moving heaven and earth to obtain for her favorite son the election to the throne of Poland. She knew the aged Sigismond Augustus, Poland's great humanist and theologian king, was failing; meanwhile she would pawn the crown jewels, build a fleet, engage some of the shrewdest fiction writers of the day to explain away

Saint Bartholomew's. Sigismond Augustus died. Henry, Duke of Anjou, was elected.

He was not at all pleased; to leave France now was the very last thing he wanted. Alengon, nineteen, seemed to have won over Marguerite for some of his harebrained political intrigues against Henry who must now turn his Lack on them, giving them free rein. Furthermore, Anjou was deeply in love—for the only time in his life—and to go to far-off Poland leaving Marie de Cleves behind was sheer torment. But Catherine as usual had her way. Tears, though she cried seldom, were always her trump card, so now she wept a little, saying, "I love your honor and grandeur more than my own pleasure for I am not one of those mothers who love their children selfishly; I love you that you may be first in splendor and esteem before men. . . ." And, weeping, perhaps she really did not suspect how selfish she was.

Before leaving Paris, Anjou took Marguerite aside and begged her to be friends again, to forget what she chose to call his treachery. But the new Queen of Navarre, in no mood for reconciliations, turned her cheek for his farewell kiss and wished him a cool bon voyage.

Uneasily Catherine watched the new friendliness growing between Marguerite and Alengon. As children they had had nothing in common; now suddenly they seemed to find much to talk about, many projects to share. With something evilly jubilant in their manner they watched Charles's pitifully shrunken figure moving about the palace trying to maintain his air of arrogant infallibility; watched the terrible paroxysms of coughing that left him ashen-hued and crying

weakly behind his cupped Lands. Exchanging glances of mutual understanding, the brother and sister smiled and looked away.

Like her mother, Marguerite had a genius for carrying a grudge and for exacting vengeance. Now, just dimly at first but growing clearer daily, a way seemed to be presenting itself through which she believed she could settle the score with Anjou for the slight he had been guilty of five years earlier. And it should be done through Alengon, ugly, stunted little Alengon.

Catherine and a fabulously equipped entourage, together with members of the royal family, accompanied Henry on his Polish journey as far as Blamont Castle on the German border. Charles had to drop out at Vitry, chagrined at the weakness that put him at such a bitter disadvantage before Henry. And Henry, embracing him at parting, added to his misery by patting him patronizingly on the back. So the brothers parted for the last time.

The Queen Mother had acted unwisely in prolonging her absence from Paris where high taxes and famine in the face of the vast expenditures for the King of Poland's farewell festivities had once more roused the populace to anger. Whichever way she turned she