ABSTRACT
Catherine de Medici had worn her widow’s weeds and the mourning of a misunderstood queen and she died forgotten, misjudged, and cast aside. The poet’s intuition had penetrated to the deeper truths of a soul that was full of suffering, a soul to which only her courage brought the comfort of hope constantly reborn, which only the rebellion of her favourite son could finally destroy. At that moment her physical resistance also gave way. The chronicler, who had no illusions left on the score of human vanities, after recalling the fury of the people of Paris against the Queen Mother, concluded: ‘As for Blois, where she was adored and venerated like the Juno of the Court, no sooner had she drawn her last breath than nowhere did they pay more notice to her than to a dead goat’.
