"Historians are privileged liars"--this is a truism as valid to-day as when expressed by its brilliant creator. The throne of France was saved by Catherine de' Medici, the royal power was maintained by her under such difficulties as few rulers would have withstood. She is painted by Catholic and Protestant writers alike as standing without the gates of the Louvre, the morning after the massacre, and there gloating over the bodies of the slain lying about the palace entrance. Apart from her political duty, as she understood it, and which meant the upholding of the monarchy, Catherine was a true woman; kind to her suite, faithful to her friends. She had none of the weaknesses of her sex; she lived chaste amid the debauchery of the most licentious court in Europe. The losses to art caused by the destructive Calvinists she replaced by erecting noble buildings and beautifying Paris. But she had the sense of royalty developed to the utmost; she defended it to the extreme. In France the opposition was always Protestant. It was her enemy, the enemy of the crown, the arch-enemy of France. It is laid to her charge that she coquetted with the Huguenots, whom she afterward slew. This there is no denying; she had but her craft with which to oppose the Guise faction, the various court cliques, and the Huguenots themselves. An expert at the game, she played one piece against another, skilfully avoiding the checkmate. Pawns might be lost, bishops fall to her hand, knights be unhorsed, but her king was secured. She could only triumph by cunning. A state cannot be governed by the same rule of morality as that which should govern individual conduct; it is impossible that it should be so. Professor Saintsbury says: "Every cool-headed student of history and ethics will admit that it was precisely the abuse of the principle at this time, and by the persons of whom Catherine de' Medici, if not the most blamable, _has had the most blame put on her_, that brought the principle itself into discredit."[1] [1] The author, not Professor Saintsbury, is responsible for the Italics. Casimir Perier, the noted French statesman, wrote, "All power is a permanent conspiracy." This is as true to-day in republican America as it was at that time in monarchical France. And it was not religion, as such, that led to the horrible scenes of that fatal August 24th; it was a move in the game of politics. Protestantism spelt republicanism; to one raised as Catherine had been, taught her life through by bitter experience, any means available, any course adopted, was righteous if it answered the purpose of saving the realm.