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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: opportunity to speak to one of the three young men who had arrived in
such haste. This was a young nobleman named Chiverni, apparently a
tool of the cardinal, in reality a devoted servant of Catherine.
Catherine also counted among her devoted servants two Florentine
nobles, the Gondi; but they were so suspected by the Guises that she
dared not send them on any errand away from the court, where she kept
them, watched, it is true, in all their words and actions, but where
at least they were able to watch and study the Guises and counsel
Catherine. These two Florentines maintained in the interests of the
queen-mother another Italian, Birago,--a clever Piedmontese, who
pretended, with Chiverni, to have abandoned their mistress, and gone
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