Protestantism in France From Death of Francis I to Edict of Nantes - James Aitken Wylie

short as the period was since the Pacification had
been signed, not fewer than three thousand
Huguenots had fallen by the poignard of the
assassin. In truth, there was no longer in France
only one nation. There were now two nations on its
soil. The perfidy and wrong which had marked the
whole policy of the court had so deeply parted the
Huguenot and Romanist, that not the hope only,
but the wish for conciliation had passed away. The
part Catherine de Medici had imposed upon
herself--of standing well with both, and holding the
poise between the two, yet ever making the
preponderance of encouragement and favor to fall
on the Roman Catholic side--was an extremely
difficult one; but her Italian nature and her
discipline of thirty years made the task, which to
another would have been impossible, to her
comparatively easy.
Her first care was to mould her son, Charles IX,
into her own likeness, and fit him for being an
instrument, pliant and expert, for her purposes.
Intellectually he was superior to his brother Francis
II, who during his short reign had been treated by
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