Painting by François Clouet, Chantilly.] Catherine de’ Medici was a woman devoid of every womanly instinct, every womanly virtue, every womanly attribute. She was the very incarnation of the terrible Medusa, petrifying all noble impulses, destroying all virtuous aspirations, killing every kindly feeling in the hearts of those around her. She had been taught the doctrines of Machiavelli, whose ideal of a prince was one who should work by force, fraud, cruelty, and dissimulation to gain his desired ends; but even these dangerous theories of that crafty, though brilliant-minded Florentine, were far out-stripped in unprincipled chicanery by his ambitious follower, Catherine de Medici; so that the term Machiavellian is far too weak a word to apply to her diabolical villanies. France ran red with blood. The terrible tocsin at midnight tolled forth the death-doom of one hundred thousand lives. The wild shrieks of the dying freighted the air of France with heart-curdling wailings from centre to circumference. French soil was deluged with the blood of her people. The blasphemous curses of the fiendish murderers polluted the very air of heaven, until it seemed as though the furies of hell were let loose upon this realm, to wreck upon the helpless people the infernal hate of the arch-demon himself. Who was the diabolical instigator of this atrocious work? Alas! a woman! and that woman _Catherine de’ Medici_. The innocent soul of a child, naturally moved by good impulses, was tutored in every vice of which human nature is capable. His childish lips were taught to pronounce the most terrible blasphemies, his kind heart was mocked and sneered at, and tempted with every ensnaring device of vile and polluting pleasures offered by the most dissolute and alluring companions, until no wickedness seemed too great to be undertaken, no degrading diversion too low to be indulged in. His constitution was purposely weakened, his mind purposely dwarfed and debased, that his life might be short, and that his will might be broken; that another’s ambitious power might be increased even though it cost the death of body and soul of the helpless victim. Who was this fiend incarnate, who could thus toy with a human soul, hourly dragging it nearer and nearer the yawning jaws of the bottomless pit of perdition? That one was a woman, the _mother_ of her quivering victim; this malevolent Gorgon was _Catherine de’ Medici_.