The book by Kondraty Birkin (P.P. Karataev), an almost forgotten Russian writer, offers readers a rare opportunity to feel the atmosphere of palace secrets, intrigues and scandals in Russia, England, Italy, France and other states in the period of the 16th–18th centuries. Against this bloody background, we will present to the reader (alternately) several silhouettes, human in appearance, and hellish monsters in terms of their atrocities. Of these, the first place belongs to a woman, no longer young, but stately and beautiful. The author expressed himself about the cunning and cunning of Catherine de Medici in this kind of progression: “Italians are cunning in general, the inhabitants of Tuscany in particular; Of the Tuscans, the most crafty are the Florentines; of the latter, Catherine de Medici was the most crafty and cunning woman!”