"On New Year’s Eve Catherine made a supreme effort to dress, go to Mass in the chapel and then visit her old friend Cardinal de Bourbon who was imprisoned in his apartments. She gave him her assurance that the King meant him no harm and that he would be safe. Bourbon replied ferociously to the frail old woman standing before him, shouting, ‘It is on your word that we came here and you led us to this butchery!’ Catherine sobbed at his angry reproach, turned and left without another word. She then stubbornly decided, against Cavriani’s advice, to take a short walk although the day was extremely cold. Her fever returned.
By the morning of 5 January 1589 the Queen Mother could hardly breathe. On so many earlier occasions Catherine had, by sheer force of her personality, overcome bodily weaknesses, but not this time. Her demise was clearly imminent, ‘to the great astonishment of us all,’ wrote one observer. She asked to make her last testament. By now her voice had become so feeble that Henri had to dictate his mother’s whispered wishes. No mention was made of Margot, the only other surviving child of the ten she had borne for her beloved husband Henry and for France. After receiving the Sacrament, Catherine de Medici, wife of one King of France and mother of three others, died at half past one in the afternoon, on the eve of the Epiphany, or what the French call ‘Le Jour des Rois’ (the day of the kings). She was sixty-nine.”
- Leonie Frieda, Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France
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