Marie de Médicis as Queen and Regent of France
J.H.M. Salmon describes how lust for power was the consuming motive of Marie de Médicis' life, but also how she failed to identify her personal ambitions with the symbolic meaning of the French crown.
In February 1589 the body of Catherine de Médicis, mother of the last Valois Kings, had to be interred quietly at Blois, because the zealots of the Catholic League threatened to throw it into the Seine if it were brought to Paris. Catherine deserved to lie among the tombs of the Kings of France at Saint-Denis, for she had laboured skilfully to preserve the authority of the monarchy through the years of its degradation.
Yet her supposedly Italianate machinations had earned her family an unenviable reputation, and there was some foreboding when, precisely twelve years later, a second Médicis Queen entered the capital as the prospective mother of the new Bourbon dynasty. As complaisant royal consort and then as Regent of France, Marie de Médicis was called upon to play a role resembling that of her distant cousin.
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