Jean Nicot Presenting Tobacco to Catherine de' Medici

This print, held at the Library of Congress and catalogued under a 1655 edition but depicting an episode from 1561, shows the diplomat **Jean Nicot** presenting the tobacco plant to the queen mother **Catherine de' Medici** and the grand prior of the House of Lorraine. French ambassador to Lisbon since 1559, Nicot had discovered this plant, then unknown in France, and praised its supposed medicinal virtues, helping to popularise its use at court; his name would remain attached to the plant through the word 'nicotine'. This anecdote, occurring at the very start of Charles IX's reign, illustrates a lighter side of a court otherwise absorbed by the growing religious tensions of that same year, 1561.