In the days when the word "Italian" was often synonymous with "poisoner," the French constantly referred to Catherine de Medici as "The Italian Woman."
And now, no longer humiliated and neglected, Catherine was free to seek revenge on those who had slighted her for so long. Henry II of France was dead and she was Queen Regent.
Mother of Kings--those three sickly boys who, through the excesses of their forebears, were tainted in body and mind--she stood in contrast to another queen, Jeanne of Navarre, a woman of an entirely different nature. Jeanne's forthright loyalty was pitted against the Italian's Machiavellian craft in a conflict which began when Catherine sent a member of her unholy band, her Escadron Volant, to seduce Jeanne's husband.
Possessed of a love which bordered on idolatry for her son Henry, Catherine emerges as a most unnatural mother whose children were terrified of her--and with good reason. There was sickly Francis, pathetically devoted to Mary, the lovely Queen of Scots; Charles, subject to bouts of madness; Henry, handsome and perverted; and Margot, that wild and most fascinating of Princesses who would be known as the Messalina of her times. For them Catherine would scheme and kill.
Among the colorful personalities of her court, which included the tragic Jeanne of Navarre, the vacillating Antoine de Bourbon, the ambitious Guises, Coligny and the amorous Margot, Catherine crept sinuously along her unholy road. Without conscience, without morality, she used now one, now another, as seemed to her most expedient, in order to keep the throne for Henry and rule France through him.