Catherine De Medici Quotes

The truth is, not one of is innocent. We all have sins to confess.

Love is a treacherous emotion. You will fare better without it. We Medici always have.

The truth is, not one of us is innocent. We all have sins to confess.

Miroir de l'Ame Pecheresse, Mirror of a Lost Soul.

I had a choice: to quail, or to harden. I hardened.

I had learned a fundamental truth about killing: The victim's anguish is brief and fleeting, but the murderer's endures forever.

Catherine de Medici brought her cooks to France when she married, and those cooks brought sherbet and custard and cream puffs, artichokes and onion soup, and the idea of roasting birds with oranges. As well as cooks, she brought embroidery and handkerchiefs, perfumes and lingerie, silverware and glassware and the idea that gathering around a table was something to be done thoughtfully. In essence, she brought being French to France.

Femeile al caror suflet si ale caror intentii sunt pure, se folosesc de virtuti pentru a-i domina pe barbatii pe care-i iubesc; dar femeile care nu le vor binele ii guverneaza servindu-se de cusururile lor.

There are many ways to obtain our desires, ma petite. Remember that, for it will serve you well.

You'll fare beer without love. We Medici always do." As soon as I spoke, I regretted it. I'd remembered Papa Clement's phrase exactly, used it to the same horrid purpose. I saw her flinch, take a small step back. I wanted to console her, to somehow ease the harsh reality of what I'd said. But I could not. I would not lie to her nor pretend the task I set before her was anything other than what it was: an act of submission, which could entail the loss of her youthful dreams.

She was obviously devastated by her loss. But not so devastated that she did not find the energy to utterly vanquish Diane.

But we are each created in God's image and must be allowed to seek our path to Him in our own way.

Nicicând plăcerea nu adusese cuiva atăta durere.

Prudenta lui ii egala averea. Era de o umilinta excesiva. Niciodata orgoliul nu-l prinsese in capcanele sale. Acest negustor se facea atat de mic, de bland, de placut si de sarac la curte, in fata printeselor, regilor si favoritilor, incat aceasa modestie si bonomie ii pazisera afacerea.

with the queen

No truth can be determined that concerns the future.

Adversity is solitary, while prosperity dwells in a crowd.

Czy zawsze musisz zobaczyć, żeby uwierzyć?

Nie rozumiesz, bo nie wiesz jak wielka jest niszcząca moc władzy. Nadal wierzysz, że można wszystko rozwiązać dzięki logice, że ludzie posłuchają głosu rozsądku, bo przecież w gruncie rzeczy w obliczu Boga wszyscy jesteśmy równi.

In religious matters she was no fanatic except when her sons and their birthright were concerned. The Catholic Mass suited her, a lifelong habit that she found comforting, almost as though it were another talisman to ward off evil.

Interesting … Still, these Huguenot gatherings must be curtailed somehow. Calvin does not rule here.” “Then do it gently. Calvin does not rule here, and neither should the cardinal.

Parisians had no doubt that, should the Huguenots succeed in seizing power in France, as it was obvious they were trying to do, the Catholic population would be either forced to convert or suffer annihilation. But

Huguenot party, as the French Protestants were called. The majority of the Parisian populace loathed and feared the Huguenots. Huguenots attacked Catholic churches, destroying precious relics and statues that they claimed were evidence of idolatry; they refused to attend Mass and worked openly to abolish sacred ceremonial processions.

He rode into Vassy on March 1, 1562, accompanied by an entourage of two hundred armed knights and found the local Huguenot congregation, numbering some five or six hundred people, including many women and children, conducting its Sunday morning meeting not outside the city walls, as was specified in the Edict of Toleration, but right in town—and, worse, on his property in one of his very own buildings, which they had appropriated without his permission, an unimaginable insult. An altercation between the duke’s people and the Protestants promptly ensued. Being for the most part unarmed, the Huguenots had to improvise. Rocks were thrown. Members of the lower classes were not supposed to throw stones at their superiors from the upper classes. The duke’s soldiers retaliated by shooting and stabbing as many of the dissenters as they could (which was quite a few, as their opponents were trapped inside the building attending a church service), accompanied by rousing shouts of “Kill! Kill! By God’s death kill these Huguenots!” An hour later the Massacre of Vassy, as this infamous incident would later be dubbed, was over. Fifty Huguenots lay dead, another two hundred were wounded, and a flaming torch had been thrust into the tinderbox of religious controversy that would blaze up into the bonfire of the Wars of Religion.

ominous murmur ran through the legion of onlookers, who had heretofore maintained an uncharacteristic silence. Their resentment was palpable. Five days later Coligny was assassinated, and the streets of Paris ran with blood as the entire Huguenot wedding party was hunted down and slaughtered in one of the most infamous episodes in French history, known today as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. But this horrific mass murder, which claimed more than five thousand martyrs over the course of a week, was no spontaneous bloodletting. Rather, it was the denouement of a carefully constructed plot that utilized the unsuspecting Margot as both victim and bait to lure Coligny and his faction to their doom, an intrigue planned, instigated, and executed by the one individual in France powerful enough

In twenty cities, or about that number, the godly [Huguenots] have been slaughtered by raging mobs,” Calvin noted grimly to his chief disciple, Théodore Beza, in a letter written in May 1561. In Provence, enraged Protestants ransacked Catholic churches and destroyed relics in retaliation.

The vast majority of Huguenots supported the king and the royal family and wished to live in peace, he explained. The problem was that the Protestant movement had been more or less hijacked by extremists who desired political power. This radical element was using the general unhappiness with the Guises’ governance, and especially with their vicious policy of persecution, to forward their own ambitions.

Men commit injuries either through fear or through hate.

Thus it is ever in Courts,” she observed bitterly. “Adversity is solitary, while prosperity dwells in a crowd.

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

For solace at this time of sadness and confusion, Marguerite turned to a source that would remain a refuge to her throughout her life: books.

With the departure of the acknowledged head of the Catholic party, the Protestants gained a degree of influence over the royal family completely out of proportion to their numbers in the general population.

A prince should therefore have no other aim or thought, nor take up any other thing for his study, but war and its order and discipline, for that is the only art that is necessary to one who commands.

In short, I was constantly receiving some fresh mortification, so that I hardly passed a day in quiet.

Although passionate, she required a more complex wooing. The groom’s taste ran to more easily available conquests. (Or, as a future scholar would tactfully put it, “Henry needed much affection, openly expressed.”)

Every now and then there comes a moment in history when an individual not previously credited with any particular integrity is elevated to a position of authority and unexpectedly assumes the character of the office and rises to a higher purpose. Although it meant sacrificing her personal happiness, Marguerite, appalled by all she had witnessed and understanding that, as queen of Navarre, she was all that stood between her husband and annihilation, refused to participate in the bloodshed and elected to save Henry.

Whoever thinks that in high personages new benefits cause old offences to be forgotten, makes a great mistake.

The duchess of Retz, who was fluent in Latin and Greek (languages she had acquired as a result of her first husband’s frustrating lack of sociability, which had obliged her to live like a hermit out in the countryside for years, with only her books for company), was especially interested in the literary arts.

It was better to take a chance on the devil she didn’t know than to leave herself completely unprotected against the man who (despite his recent assurances of devotion) had made it his business to torment her in the past.

As we are ready to give ear and credit to those we love, he believed all she said. From this time he became distant and reserved towards me, shunning my presence as much as possible; whereas, before, he was open and communicative to me as to his sister… What I had dreaded, I now perceived had come to pass. This was the loss of his favor and good opinion; to preserve which I had studied to gain his confidence by a ready compliance with his wishes.

The character of people varies, and it is easy to persuade them of a thing, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion.

They needn’t have worried. Three hundred men, it turned out, were not enough to massacre a man like Bussy.* The assassination attempt had not only failed, it backfired completely by adding to the warrior’s renown.

Margot was utterly unable to control her fury. “I was so greatly offended with this fresh indignity, after so many of the kind formerly received, that I could not help yielding to resentment; and my grief and concern getting the upper hand of my prudence, I exhibited a great coolness and indifference towards my husband,” she admitted. “Le Guast and Madame de Sauves were successful in creating a like indifference on his part, which, coinciding with mine, separated us altogether, and we neither spoke to each other nor slept in the same bed.

Throughout her career, Catherine seems to have believed that simply by reiterating her demands over and over she could either convince her opponents of the correctness of her position or overwhelm them until they conceded to her wishes.

Fortresses may or may not be useful according to the times; if they do good in one way, they do harm in another.

The day on which he [Épernon] arrives, and so long as he remains, I shall dress myself in garments which I shall never wear again: those of dissimulation and hypocrisy,

Medici lacked the talent of her famous predecessor, Catherine de Medici, but she possessed all her treachery, bigotry, and baseness. She was a profound believer in witchcraft, and guided the vessel of the State by her astrological calculations.

the only women important enough to have them in Henry II’s reign were Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers.

Lucullus placed a live fish in a glass jar in front of every diner at his table. The better the death, the better the meal would taste. Catherine de Medici brought her cooks to France when she married, and those cooks brought sherbet and custard and cream puffs, artichokes and onion soup, and the idea of roasting birds with oranges. As well as cooks, she brought embroidery and handkerchiefs, perfumes and lingerie, silverware and glassware and the idea that gathering around a table was something to be done thoughtfully. In essence, she brought being French to France. Everything started somewhere else. She thought of Tim's note: write to me. He didn't want to hear about Lucullus and Catherine de Medici; but she loved her old tomes and the things unearthed there, the ballast they lent, the safety of information. She spread her notebooks open across the table. There was a recipe for roasted locusts from ancient Egypt, and on the facing page, her own memory of the first thing she ever cooked, the curry sauce and Anne's chocolate.

In the charged atmosphere of these months it was easy for exiles to gild insignificant grievances.

Whatever thier individual reasons, Ippolito’s presence in Rome created a focus around which all sorts of people discontented with Alessandro’s reign might coalesce to oppose the Duke.

While Alessandro’s arms were displayed hanging around Cosimo’s residences, Cosimo proved to slow to apprehend Lorenzo.

Lorenzino's Apology for the murder made him famous, a celebrity killer of the Renaissance. Queen Marguerite of Navarre wrote a story about Alessandro's assassination. Versions of the tale featured on the London stage. It let itself to the genre of Jacobean revenge drama.

Lorenzino featured in several stage plays, enchanting one by Alfred de Musset and another by Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Muskateers. His blow for republicanism found favour with nineteenth-century writers and audiences.

A few contemporaries referred to his mother’s slave status, but thanks to chance and contingency Alessandro was able to trump his illegitimate status and rise to the highest level of society, just as his relative Giulia de’Medici, Pope Clement VII, had done before him.

How might Alessandro’s history have looked, if written by his friends? Among the hostility, there are little hints of the qualities they might have emphasised: intelligence, wisdom beyond his years, respect for law and justice.

A long and fruitful marriage might have laid to rest some of the worst tales of sensual excess.

It seems to me unhelpful to insist on categorizing Alessandro’s mother as either black (sub-Saharan) African or North African, as if the people of these two groups never mixed. In reality they did, and for many centuries had mixed with Italians too.

Simonetta may not have been a slave herself, but the descendant of an African who had arrived in Italy decades before.

The statue representing the body of the Duke stood on the funeral bier, amid numerous lights at the entrance to the Palazzo de’Medici, for as long as the procession took to pass. The mourners made their way through the city; past the churches of Santa Trinità, San Michele, and the great cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Their destination, the church of San Lorenzo, was filled with candles.

Alessandro was gone, but his regime lived on.

Fiippo Strozzi was taken prisoner and held in the Fortezza da Basso (which no longer bore Alessandro’s name). He was tortured and pressured to confess to involvement in Alessandro’s murder. He died, probably by his own hand, leaving a suicide note that framed him as a defiant hero of Florentine liberty, though for most of his life he had been a loyal servant of the Medici.

Mary was surrounded in her childhood by powerful women: the French Queen Catherine de Medici; the King’s lover, advisor and friend, Diane de Poitiers; Mary’s grandmother, Antoinette de Guise and finally her own mother, the Dowager Queen of Scotland. In direct contrast, Elizabeth’s earliest experiences were of the transience and impotence of women. Her mother had no real existence for her, her life snuffed out when she was no longer useful to the King. Stepmothers came and went, powerless in the grip of fate or the terrifying whim of her autocratic father. Even Catherine Parr, who inspired in the young Elizabeth a certain affection and admiration, was prematurely erased from life by the scourge of puerperal fever. The only constant image of power in Elizabeth’s growing years was the once magnificent, but increasingly mangy and irascible old lion of England, her father, the King.

-Nie wracajmy do przeszłości. -Nie możemy. Musimy stanąć z nią twarzą w twarz, gdyż jedynie wtedy zdołamy odnaleźć pokój

- Wiedziałeś i nie powiedziałeś mi? - Czy uwierzyłabyś mi, gdybym przyszedł do Ciebie, nie przynosząc dowodów? Musiałem je mieć, skoro Ty, Pani, raz za razem rozstrzygałaś wątpliwości na jego korzyść. Był niesłychanie ostrożny; samo przejęcie jego korespondencji wymagało cudów zręczności.

Wlepiał oczy w wymalowane kurwy jak głodny w plastry cielęciny

Nauczyłam się, że albo akceptujemy to, co daje nam życie, albo gaśniemy.

Czasem musimy zadać cios pierwsi, zanim inni go nam zadadzą.

... gdy mężczyźni walczą ze sobą otwarcie, my musimy toczyć skryte boje

Takie jest życie, ma petite. Czasem musimy zadać cios pierwsi, zanim inni nam go zadadzą

The wealth of the Medici family was based on the wool trade but most importantly on banking. By the beginning of the fifteenth century they were one of the leading families in Florentine government. In 1421 Giovanni di Bicci de’Medici became gonfolaniere—literally, the standard-bearer of the republic, one of the most prestigious offices in the city. He was also a banker to the popes in Rome, and his bank has been called ‘the most successful commercial enterprise in Italy.’ It was the basis for his son Cosimo the Elder’s rise to power.

Mary Stuart and Elizabeth both aimed at toleration in an intolerant age, in the same ways that Catherine de’ Medici, the mother-in-law of one and the almost mother-in-law of another English queen, labored her whole life to heal the rift between Catholic and Protestant in France. All three of these queens worked as diligently and as astutely as they might to restrain the fratricidal wars of Christian against Christian. What they had to hold up against that violent seismic shift in human sensibility was the orderly traditions of monarchy. If they did not ultimately succeed, they slowed and tempered the disorder and violence.