Catherine De Medici, Honoré de Balzac [best short novels of all time TXT] 📗

for those who deny the power of occult science. This horoscope predicted the misfortunes which during the siege of Florence imperilled the beginning of her life; also her marriage with a son of the king of France, the unexpected succession of that son to his father's throne, the birth of her children, their number, and the fact that three of her sons would be kings in succession, that two of her daughters would be queens, and that all of them were destined to die without posterity. This prediction was so fully realized that many historians have assumed that it was written after the events.

It is well known that Nostradamus took to the chateau de Chaumont, whither Catherine went after the conspiracy of La Renaudie, a woman who possessed the faculty of reading the future. Now, during the reign of Francois II., while the queen had with her her four sons, all young and in good health, and before the marriage of her daughter Elizabeth with Philip II., king of Spain, or that of her daughter Marguerite with Henri de Bourbon, king of Navarre (afterward Henri IV.), Nostradamus and this woman reiterated the circumstances formerly predicted in the famous nativity. This woman, who was no doubt gifted with second sight, and who belonged to the great school of Seekers of the Great Work, though the particulars of her life and name are lost to history, stated that the last crowned child would be assassinated. Having placed the queen-mother in front of a magic mirror, in which was reflected a wheel on the several spokes of which were the faces of her children, the sorceress set the wheel revolving, and Catherine counted the number of revolutions which it made. Each revolution was for each son one year of his reign. Henri IV. was also put upon the wheel, which then made twenty-four rounds, and the woman (some historians have said it was a man) told the frightened queen that Henri de Bourbon would be king of France and reign that number of years. From that time forth Catherine de' Medici vowed a mortal hatred to the man whom she knew would succeed the last of her Valois sons, who was to die assassinated. Anxious to know what her own death would be, she was warned to beware of Saint-Germain. Supposing, therefore, that she would be either put to death or imprisoned in the chateau de Saint-Germain, she would never so much as put her foot there, although that residence was far more convenient for her political plans, owing to its proximity to Paris, than the other castles to which she retreated with the king during the troubles. When she was taken suddenly ill, a few days after the murder of the Duc de Guise at Blois, she asked the name of the bishop who came to assist her. Being told it was Saint-Germain, she cried out, "I am dead!" and did actually die on the morrow,--having, moreover, lived the exact number of years given to her by all her horoscopes.

These predictions, which were known to the Cardinal de Lorraine, who regarded them as witchcraft, were now in process of realization. Francois II. had reigned his two revolutions of the wheel, and Charles IX. was now making his last turn. If Catherine said the strange words which history has attributed to her when her son Henri started for Poland,--"You will soon return,"--they must be set down to her faith in occult science and not to the intention of poisoning Charles IX.

Many other circumstances corroborated Catherine's faith in the occult sciences. The night before the tournament at which Henri II. was killed, Catherine saw the fatal blow in a dream. Her astrological council, then composed of Nostradamus and the two Ruggieri, had already predicted to her the death of the king. History has recorded the efforts made by Catherine to persuade her husband not to enter the lists. The prognostic, and the dream produced by the prognostic, were verified. The memoirs of the day relate another fact that was no less singular. The courier who announced the victory of Moncontour arrived in the night, after riding with such speed that he killed three horses. The queen-mother was awakened to receive the news, to which she replied, "I knew it already." In fact, as Brantome relates, she had told of her son's triumph the evening before, and narrated several circumstances of the battle. The astrologer of the house of Bourbon predicted that the youngest of all the princes descended from Saint-Louis (the son of Antoine de Bourbon) would ascend the throne of France. This prediction, related by Sully, was accomplished in the precise terms of the horoscope; which led Henri IV. to say that by dint of lying these people sometimes hit the truth. However that may be, if most of the great minds of that epoch believed in this vast science,--called Magic by the masters of judicial astrology, and Sorcery by the public,--they were justified in doing so by the fulfilment of horoscopes.

It was for the use of Cosmo Ruggiero, her mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, that Catherine de' Medici erected the tower behind the Halle aux Bles,--all that now remains of the hotel de Soissons. Cosmo Ruggiero possessed, like confessors, a mysterious influence, the possession of which, like them again, sufficed him. He cherished an ambitious thought superior to all vulgar ambitions. This man, whom dramatists and romance-writers depict as a juggler, owned the rich abbey of Saint-Mahe in Lower Brittany, and refused many high ecclesiastical dignities; the gold which the superstitious passions of the age poured into his coffers sufficed for his secret enterprise; and the queen's hand, stretched above his head, preserved every hair of it from danger.


II. SCHEMES AGAINST SCHEMES

The thirst for power which consumed the queen-mother, her desire for dominion, was so great that in order to retain it she had, as we have seen, allied herself to the Guises, those enemies of the throne; to keep the reins of power, now obtained, within her hands, she was using every means, even to the sacrifice of her friends and that of her children. This woman, of whom one of her enemies said at her death, "It is more than a queen, it is monarchy itself that has died,"--this woman could not exist without the intrigues of government, as a gambler can live only by the emotions of play. Although she was an Italian of the voluptuous race of the Medici, the Calvinists who calumniated her never accused her of having a lover. A great admirer of the maxim, "Divide to reign," she had learned the art of perpetually pitting one force against another. No sooner had she grasped the reins of power than she was forced to keep up dissensions in order to neutralize the strength of two rival houses, and thus save the Crown. Catherine invented the game of political see-saw (since imitated by all princes who find themselves in a like situation), by instigating, first the Calvinists against the Guises, and then the Guises against the Calvinists. Next, after pitting the two religions against each other in the heart of the nation, Catherine instigated the Duc d'Anjou against his brother Charles IX. After neutralizing events by opposing them to one another, she neutralized men, by holding the thread of all their interests in her hands. But so fearful a game, which needs the head of a Louis XI. to play it, draws down inevitably the hatred of all parties upon the player, who condemns himself forever to the necessity of conquering; for one lost game will turn every selfish interest into an enemy.

The greater part of the reign of Charles IX. witnessed the triumph of the domestic policy of this astonishing woman. What adroit persuasion must Catherine have employed to have obtained the command of the armies for the Duc d'Anjou under a young and brave king, thirsting for glory, capable of military achievement, generous, and in presence, too, of the Connetable de Montmorency. In the eyes of the statesmen of Europe the Duc d'Anjou had all the honors of the Saint-Bartholomew, and Charles IX. all the odium. After inspiring the king with a false and secret jealousy of his brother, she used that passion to wear out by the intrigues of fraternal jealousy the really noble qualities of Charles IX. Cypierre, the king's first governor, and Amyot, his first tutor, had made him so great a man, they had paved the way for so noble a reign, that the queen-mother began to hate her son as soon as she found reason to fear the loss of the power she had so slowly and so painfully obtained. On these general grounds most historians have believed that Catherine de' Medici felt a preference for Henri III.; but her conduct at the period of which we are now writing, proves the absolute indifference of her heart toward all her children.

When the Duc d'Anjou went to reign in Poland Catherine was deprived of the instrument by which she had worked to keep the king's passions occupied in domestic intrigues, which neutralized his energy in other directions. She then set up the conspiracy of La Mole and Coconnas, in which her youngest son, the Duc d'Alencon (afterwards Duc d'Anjou, on the accession of Henri III.) took part, lending himself very willingly to his mother's wishes, and displaying an ambition much encouraged by his sister Marguerite, then queen of Navarre. This secret conspiracy had now reached the point to which Catherine sought to bring it. Its object was to put the young duke and his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre, at the head of the Calvinists, to seize the person of Charles IX., and imprison that king without an heir,--leaving the throne to the Duc d'Alencon, whose intention it was to establish Calvinism as the religion of France. Calvin, as we have already said, had obtained, a few days before his death, the reward he had so deeply coveted,--the Reformation was now called Calvinism in his honor.

If Le Laboureur and other sensible writers had not already proved that La Mole and Coconnas,--arrested fifty nights after the day on which our present history begins, and beheaded the following April,--even, we say, if it had not been made historically clear that these men were the victims of the queen-mother's policy, the part which Cosmo Ruggiero took in this affair would go far to show that she secretly directed their enterprise. Ruggiero, against whom the king had suspicions, and for whom he cherished a hatred the motives of which we are about to explain, was included in the prosecution. He admitted having given to La Mole a wax figure representing the king, which was pierced through the heart by two needles. This method of casting spells constituted a crime, which, in those days, was punished by death. It presents one of the most startling and infernal images of hatred that humanity could invent; it pictures admirably the magnetic and terrible working in the occult world of a constant malevolent desire surrounding the person doomed to death; the effects of which on the person are exhibited by the figure of wax. The law in those days thought, and thought justly, that a desire to which an actual form was given should be regarded as a crime of _lese majeste_. Charles IX. demanded the death of Ruggiero; Catherine, more powerful than her son, obtained from the Parliament, through the young counsellor, Lecamus, a commutation of the sentence, and Cosmo was sent to the galleys. The following year, on the death of the king, he was pardoned by a decree of Henri III., who restored his pension, and received him at court.

But, to return now to the moment of which we are writing, Catherine had, by this time, struck so many blows on the heart of her son