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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: with all the arts of that unique period of the splendors of humanity,
are now denuded and whitewashed! Reformers and Catholics were pressing
in to hear the news and to watch faces, quite as much as to pay their
duty to the king. Francois II.'s excessive love for Mary Stuart, to
which neither the queen-mother nor the Guises made any opposition, and
the politic compliance of Mary Stuart herself, deprived the king of
all regal power. At seventeen years of age he knew nothing of royalty
but its pleasures, or of marriage beyond the indulgence of first
passion. As a matter of fact, all present paid their court to Queen
Mary and to her uncles, the Cardinal de Lorraine and the Duc de Guise,
rather than to the king.
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