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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: Though there was no poisoning, as some grave writers have said, there
was other conduct almost as criminal; there is no doubt she hindered
Pare from saving one, and allowed the other to accomplish his own doom
by moral assassination. But the sudden death of Francois II., and that
of Charles IX., were no injury to the Calvinists, and therefore the
causes of these two events remained in their secret sphere, and were
never suspected either by the writers of the people of that day; they
were not divined except by de Thou, l'Hopital, and minds of that
calibre, or by the leaders of the two parties who were coveting or
defending the throne, and believed such means necessary to their end.
Popular songs attacked, strangely enough, Catherine's morals. Every
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