not important, had not wielded so much influence and decided the fate
of so many great men, women, and even states, she would not be the
subject of so much writing, of such fierce denunciation and
strong praise. To her family, France owes her finest palaces,
her masterpieces of art—painting, bookmaking, printing, binding,
sculpture.

M. Saint-Amand declares that "isolated from her contemporaries,
Catherine de' Medici is a monster; brought back within the circle of
their passions and their theories, she once more becomes a woman."
But Catherine was the instigator, the embodiment of all that is vice,
deceit, cunning, trickery, wickedness, and bold intrigue; she set
the example, and her ladies followed her in all that she did; "the
heroines bred in her school (and what woman was not in her school?)
imitate, with docility, the examples she gives them." She was not
only the type of her civilization,—brutal, gross, immoral, elegant,
polished, and _mondain_,—but she was also its leader.

Greatness of soul, real moral force, strict virtue, are not attributes
of the sixteenth-century woman—they are isolated and rare exceptions;
these Catherine did not possess. Nor was she influenced deeply by her
environments; the latter but encouraged and developed those
qualities which were hers inherently,—will, intelligence, inflexible
perseverance, tenacity of purpose, unscrupulousness, cruelty;
hence, to say "She is the victim rather than the inspiration of the
corruption of her time" is misleading, to say the least. If, upon
her arrival at court, "she at once pleased every one by her grace and
affability, modest air, and, above all, by her extreme gentleness,"
she could not have changed, say her defenders, into the perfidious,
wicked, and cruel creature she is said to have become as soon as she