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Title: Political Women, Vol. 1

Author: active 1840-1883 Sutherland Menzies

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Most recently updated: September 2, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POLITICAL
WOMEN, VOL. 1 ***

POLITICAL WOMEN.

POLITICAL WOMEN.

BY
SUTHERLAND MENZIES,
AUTHOR OF “ROYAL FAVOURITES,” ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.

Henry S. King & Co.,
65, Cornhill, and 12, Paternoster Row, London.
1873.

[All rights reserved.]

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.

PART I.

PAGE
Introduction vii

BOOK I.

CHAP. I. —Anne de
Bourbon
(sister of the
Great Condé) 3

II. —The
Duchess de
Longueville 12

III. & IV. —The
Duchess de
Chevreuse 17, 35

BOOK II.

CHAP. I. —Anne of
Austria’s
Prime Minister
and his policy 43

II. —The
Duchess de
Montbazon—
Affair of the
dropped letters
—The Quarrel
of the rival
Duchesses 66

III. —The
Importants 77

IV. —Conspiracy
of the Duchess
de Chevreuse
and the Duke
de Beaufort to
get rid of
Mazarin 82

V. —Failure of
the plot to
assassinate
Mazarin—
Arrest of
Beaufort—
Banishment of
Madame de
Chevreuse and
dispersion of
the Importants 99

VI. —Results of
the quarrel
between the
Duchesses—
Fatal duel
between the
Duke de Guise
and Count
Maurice de
Coligny 110

BOOK III.

CHAP. I. —The
Duchess de
Longueville
and the Duke
de la
Rochefoucauld 121

II. —La
Rochefoucauld
draws
Madame de
Longueville
into the vortex
of politics and
civil war 131

III. —The
Duchess de
Chevreuse
driven into
exile for the
third time 143

IV. —Fatal
influence of
Madame de
Longueville’s
passion for La
Rochefoucauld
—The Fronde 149

V. —Madame de
Longueville
wins over her
brother Condé
to the Fronde 161

VI. —The causes
which led to
the coup d’état
—The arrest
of the Princes 168

VII. —Madame de
Longueville’s
adventures in
Normandy—
The Women’s
War 178

BOOK IV.

CHAP. I. —The
Princess
Palatine 187

II. —The young
Princess de
Condé
conducts the
war in the
south 203

III. —State of
Parties on the
liberation of
the Princes 214

IV. —The
Duchesses de
Longueville
and de
Chevreuse and
the Princess
Palatine in the
last Fronde—
Results of the
rupture of the
marriage
projected
between the
Prince de
Conti and
Mademoiselle
de Chevreuse 221

V. —Condé,
urged by his
sister, goes
unwillingly
into rebellion 257

VI. —Madame de
Longueville
coquets with
the Duke de
Nemours 262

BOOK V.

CHAP. I. —Condé’s
adventurous
expedition 275

II. —Political and
gallant
intrigues—The
Duchess de
Châtillon’s
sway over
Condé—
Shameful
conspiracy
against
Madame de
Longueville 290

INTRODUCTION.

In selecting the careers of certain celebrated women who have flung
themselves with ardour into the vortex of politics, the author’s choice has
not been so much an arbitrary one as it might seem, but rather guided by
instances in which the adventurous game has not been restricted to the
commonplace contentions of the public platform, or the private salon, but
played on the grandest scale and on the most conspicuous arena; when
Peace and War, crowns and dynasties, have trembled in the balance, and
even the fate of a nation has been at stake.

The untoward results of the lives thus devoted—dazzling and heroic as
some passages in their dramatic vicissitudes may appear—point the moral
of the futility of such pursuit on the part of the gentler sex, and indicate the
certainty of the penalty to be paid by those who by venturing into the fervid,
exhausting struggle, and rashly courting exposure to the rough blows of the
battle of political life, with its coarse and noisy passions, have discovered
too late that the strife has done them irreparable injury. In the cases of those
selected it will be seen that the fierce contention has commonly involved
the sacrifice of conjugal happiness, the welfare of children, domestic peace,
reputation, and all the amenities of the gentle life.

That clever women abound in the present day we have undeniable proof
—many as clever, no doubt, as that famous philosopheress Madame du
Chatelet, who managed at one and the same moment the thread of an

intrigue, her cards at piquet, and a calculation in algebra, but who may still
lack the qualifications indispensably necessary to make clever politicians.
Perhaps, therefore, we might be allowed to suggest that it would be well for
ladies who are ambitious of figuring in either or both spheres that politics
and diplomacy are special and laborious pursuits, involving a great deal of
knowledge as difficult, and in the first instance as repulsive, to acquire as
Greek or chemistry. Yet, fully admitting their capacity to qualify themselves
intellectually, and supposing them to attain the summit of their ambition of
figuring successfully in public life, a grave question still arises—would they
thereby increase or diminish their present great social influence? They have
now more influence of a certain kind than men have; but if they obtain the
influence of men, they cannot expect to retain the influence of women.
Nature, it may be thought, has established a fair distribution of power
between the two sexes. Women are potent in one sphere, and men in
another; and, if they are conscious of the domestic sway they already
exercise, they will not imperil it by challenging dominion in a field in
which they would be less secure.

Root and bond of the family, woman is no less a stranger by her natural
aptitudes than by her domestic ministrations to the general interests of
society; the conduct of the latter demands, in fact, a disengagement of heart
and mind to which she can only attain by transforming herself, to the
detriment of her duties and of her true influence. Ever to subordinate
persons to things, never to overstep in her efforts the strict measure of the
possible—those two conditions of the political life are repugnant to her
ardent and devoted nature. Even amongst women in whom those gifts are
met with in the highest degree, clearness of perception has been almost
always obscured by the ardour of pursuit or that of patronage—by the
irresistible desire of pushing to the extremity of success her own ideas, and
especially those of her friends.

Again, let us imagine political life to resemble a great game at cards, the
rules of which have been settled beforehand, and the winnings devoted to
the use of the greatest number; well, a woman ought never to take a hand in
it. Her place should be at the player’s elbow, to warn and advise him, to
point out an unperceived chance, to share in his success, more than all to
console him, should luck run against him. Thus, whilst all her better
qualities would be brought into play, all her weaker would not in any wise
be at stake.

We would put it, therefore, to the womanly conscience—Is it not a
hundred times more honourable to exercise, so to speak, rights that are
legitimately recognised, though wisely limited, than to suffer in
consideration, and often in reputation, from an usurpation always certain of
being disputed?

It has been the author’s endeavour to show the truth of these conclusions
by tracing the political career of certain well-born and singularly-gifted
women—women whose lofty courage, strength of mind, keen introspection,
political zeal, and genius for intrigue enabled them to baffle and make head
against some of the greatest political male celebrities of modern history,
without, however, winning us over to their opinions or their cause; women
who, in some instances, after passing the best period of their lives in
political strife, in fostering civil war, in hatching perilous plots, and who,
having cast fortune and all the “gentle life” to the winds, preferred exile to
submission, or to wage a struggle as fruitless as it was unceasing; until
having arrived at the tardy conviction of its futility, and that they had
devoted their existence to the pursuit of the illusory and the chimerical, they
found at length repose and tranquillity only in solitude and repentance.

In the stirring careers of certain among these remarkable personages, it
will be seen that the mainspring of their political zeal was either the fierce

excitement of an overmastering passion, an irresistible proclivity to
gallantry, or an absorbing ambition, rather than any patriotic motive. This
may go far to explain the singular sagacity, finesse, and energy displayed in
their devotion to what otherwise appears alike mischievous and chimerical
by those three high-born and splendidly-gifted women who figured so
conspicuously in the civil war of the Fronde; and, though so much self-
abnegation, courage, constancy, and heroism, well or ill displayed, may
obtain some share of pardon for errors it would be wrong to palliate or
condone, their example, it is to be hoped, will prove deterrent rather than
contagious. La Rochefoucauld—a moralist, though by no means a moral
man—who well knew the sex, had seen at work these political women of
the time of the Fronde. That opportunity does not appear to have inspired
him with an unbounded admiration for them from that point of view.

Of the peril and mischief that fair trio inflicted upon Anne of Austria’s
great Prime Minister and the State he governed we have an interesting
personal record. When, in 1660, Mazarin’s policy, triumphant on every side,
had added the treaty of the Pyrenees to that of Westphalia, the honour of the
conclusion of the protracted conference held at the Isle of Pheasants was
reserved for the chief Ministers of the two Crowns—the Cardinal and Don
Louis de Haro. The latter congratulated his brother premier on the well-
earned repose he was about to enjoy, after such a long and arduous struggle.
The Cardinal replied that he could not promise himself any repose in
France, for there, he said, the female politicians were more to be dreaded
than the male; and he complained bitterly of the torments he had undergone
at the hands of certain political women of the Fronde—notably the Duchess
de Longueville, the Duchess de Chevreuse, and the Princess Palatine, each
of whom, he asserted, was capable of upsetting three kingdoms.

“You are very lucky here in Spain,” he added. “You have, as everywhere
else, two kinds of women—coquettes in abundance, and a very few simple-

minded domestic women. The former care only to please their lovers, the
latter their husbands. Neither the one nor the other, however, have any
ambition beyond indulging themselves in vanities and luxuries. They only
employ their pens in scribbling billet-doux or love-confessions, neither one
nor other bother their brains as to how the grain grows, whilst talking about
business makes their heads ache. Our women, on the contrary, whether
prudes or flirts, old or young, stupid or clever, will intermeddle with
everything. No honest woman,” to use the Cardinal’s own words, “would
permit her spouse to go to sleep, no coquette allow her lover any favour, ere
she had heard all the political news of the day. They will see all that goes
on, will know everything, and—what is worse—have a finger in everything,
and set everything in confusion. We have a trio, among others”—and he
again named the three fair factionists above mentioned—“who threw us all
daily into more confusion than was ever known in Babel.”

“Thank heaven!” replied Don Louis, somewhat ungallantly, “our women
are of the disposition seemingly so well known to you. Provided that they
can finger the cash, whether of their husbands or their lovers, they are
satisfied; and I am very glad to say that they do not meddle with politics,
for if they did they would assuredly embroil everything in Spain as they do
in France.”

It was during the minority of Louis XIV. that Mazarin had but too good
cause to complain of the three clever and fascinating women he thus named
to Don Louis de Haro, who through their political factions, intrigues, and
gallantries gave Anne of Austria’s Minister no rest, and for a long period
not only thwarted and opposed him, but at intervals placed the State, and
even his life, in imminent jeopardy.

Fortunately, in our political history the instances are rare of women who
have quitted the sphere of domesticity and private life to take an active part

in the affairs of State. We say “fortunately;” for in our opinion such
abstention has tended to the happiness of both sexes in England.

In French memoirs, politics and scandal, the jokes of the salons and the
councils of the Cabinet are inextricably mixed up together, and reveal a
political system in which the authority exercised under free institutions by
men had been transferred to the art, the tact, and the accomplishments of the
female sex. We therein see how much women have done by those subtle
agencies. If France was a despotism tempered by epigrams, it was the life of
the salons which brought those epigrams to perfection; and the salons thus
constituted a sort of social parliament, which, though unable to stop the
supplies or withhold the Mutiny Act, still possessed a formidable weapon of
offence in the power of making the Government ridiculous. Such was the
difference existing between two quite distinct modes of government;
between Parliamentary government and closet government; between the
mace of the House of Commons and the fan of the Duchess de Longueville.
England, as we need hardly say, has never had a government of this
description. The nearest approach to it which she has ever seen was under
the sway of Charles the Second, and, accordingly, the nearest approach to
French memoirs which our literature possesses is in the volumes of Pepys
and Hamilton. To the almost universal exemption of Englishwomen from
taking an overt part in political affairs a striking exception must be made in
Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. She is the strongest example, perhaps, in
the history of the world—certainly in the history of this empire—of the
abuse of female favouritism, and the most flagrant instance of household
familiarity on the destinies of mankind. Sarah Jennings, the political
heroine of her age, and Viceroy, as she was called, in England, had,
however, for contemporaries two other remarkable women, who touched
the springs of political machinery quite as powerfully as—if not more
powerfully than, save herself, any to be found within the limits of Europe—
Madame de Maintenon and the Princess des Ursins. In the respective

careers of that other formidable trio of female politicians may be traced the
important, the overwhelming, influence, which female Ministers, under the
title of Court ladies, had obtained over the destinies of England, France, and
Spain. At that momentous period—the commencement of the eighteenth
century—the memoirs of a bed-chamber lady constitute the history of
Europe. The bed-chamber woman soon became the pivot of the political
world. The influence of Mrs. Masham first endangered and finally
overthrew the power of the great Duke of Marlborough. Some of the
characteristics of the reign of Charles the Second reappeared partially and
in a very unattractive form under the two first Georges, and have served to
impart a tinge of French colour to the memoirs which describe their Courts.
But, fortunately for England, neither Walpole nor his royal master were men
of refined taste. It would have been hard for a monarch like Charles the
Second, or a minister like Lord Bolingbroke, to resist the charms of those
beautiful and sprightly girls who sparkle like diamonds in all the memoirs
of that time. Their political influence was but small. George the First and
his successor pursued their unwieldy loves and enjoyed their boorish romps
in a style not seductive to English gentlemen. Politics were surrendered to
Walpole; and the consequence was that, although there was plenty of
immorality under those gracious Sovereigns, yet the feminine element of
Court life had no longer that connection with public policy which once for a
brief space it had possessed; and the resemblance to French manners in this
respect grew less and less, till it disappeared altogether with the accession
of George the Third.

During the reign of that domesticated paterfamilias a slight exception, it
is true, occurred in the instance of Georgina Spencer, Duchess of
Devonshire. Young, beautiful, amiable, and witty, and not altogether free
from coquetry, she reckoned amongst her admirers some of the most
distinguished men of that day. She fascinated them all without encouraging
the pretensions of any; and notwithstanding the jealousy which so great a

superiority necessarily excited among her own sex, and despite the rancour
to which the inutility of their efforts to please her gave birth in the bosoms
of certain of the men, she preserved a reputation for discretion beyond all
suspicion. One circumstance of her life might indeed have cast a slur upon
her fair fame if her irreproachable conduct, added to her natural graces, had
not condoned a species of notoriety which opinion in England very
generally reproves. The Duchess of Devonshire had friendly relations with
the celebrated Charles James Fox, and that friendship had taken the tinge of
party spirit. Fox presented himself as a candidate to represent Westminster
in Parliament. He had two very formidable opponents, and it was thought
that he would have succumbed in the struggle had not several amiable and
energetic women made extraordinary efforts to procure him votes. At the
head of these fair solicitors was the Duchess of Devonshire. A butcher
whose vote she requested promised it to her on the condition that he might
give her a kiss. To this she cheerfully consented, and that kiss added one
more vote to her friend’s poll. Such familiarity was far less shocking to our
English manners than the too active and public part taken by a lady of
distinction in politics. Very few of her countrywomen before her time had
given occasion for a like scandal.[1]

The existence of those literary assemblies in France during the eighteenth
century, the most important of which were those presided over by Madame
du Deffand, Mdlle. de Lespinasse, and Madame Geoffrin, were a
characteristic feature of the time. It is a notable fact that the abstention from
politics in those assemblies indirectly tended to increase the power and
importance of the women who frequented them. Alluding to their influence,
Montesquieu caustically remarked that a nation where women give the
prevailing tone must necessarily be talkative. Then, however, it was the
men who talked and the women who listened. The men talked because they
could do little else; women gave the prevailing tone because men of all

classes were partly compelled, and partly willing, to gather around them.
The nobles being excluded from politics—in which none but the Ministers
and their creatures could interfere—exercising no control either as
individuals or as a body, naturally gave themselves up to the pleasures of
society. Their political insignificance thus increased the power and
importance of women.

To a far greater degree was their power and importance increased, on the
contrary, during the first decade of the French Revolution, when, from the
exceptional position they held, the salons of Madame Roland, Madame
Necker, Madame de Suard, and others were essentially political—that of
Madame Roland being almost an echo of the Legislative Assembly. But
women who love freedom abstractedly for its own sake, and are ready to
suffer and die for a political principle, like Madame Roland, are very rarely
met with.

Towards the close of the century the female leaders of the hitherto
literary and social salons were so irresistibly swept into the whirlpool of
public questions and events that they for the most part involuntarily became
mere political partisans. Among others, but with a considerable
modification on the score of the literary element, may be instanced Madame
de Staël, who by descent, education, and natural bias was inevitably
destined to aim at political power. The extent and prominence of that
exercised by her must have been considerable, though certainly overrated
by Napoleon, in whom, however, it excited such unreasonable apprehension
as led him to inflict ten years’ banishment from France upon the talented
daughter of Necker.

It must not be inferred that we desire to reduce women to the condition of
a humiliating inaction. Far from it. In the position we would place them
they could never feel, think, or act with greater interest or vivacity. Whilst it

is desirable that every kind of artifice or intrigue should be interdicted from
the interior of their domesticity, it is quite permissible for them to watch
attentively important matters that may be occurring in public life. To that
function they may bring their care and their solicitude, in order to follow
and second continually the companion of their existence. “Les hommes
même,” says Fénelon, “qui ont toute l’autorité en public, ne peuvent par
leurs délibérations établir aucun bien effectif, si les femmes ne leur aident à
l’exécuter.” Such was the legitimate influence exercised by the Princess
Esterhazy, Ladies Holland, Palmerston, and Beaconsfield, in our day. It is
no secret that the late lamented Viscountess Beaconsfield took the deepest
interest in every great movement in which her illustrious husband was
engaged. Such, too, was the case with Lady Palmerston, in reference to the
great statesman whose name she bore. The influence of women in the
politics of recent days is something peculiar and new. Our time has seen
many women whose share in the politics of men was frank, unconcealed,
and legitimate, while yet it never pretended or sought to be anything more
than an influence—never attempted to be a ruling spirit. By following these
examples, the women of England may make their power felt, without
demanding to be put upon the same footing as their husbands.

Woman’s reign, it has been truly said, “is almost absolute within the four
walls of a drawing-room.” It is undisputed in family direction and in the
management of children; but the cases are rare indeed where it extends to
public questions of any kind. The Frenchwoman of the present day is
essentially a woman. Her objects are almost always feminine; she does not
seek to go beyond her sphere; she understands her mission as one of duty in
her house and of attraction towards the world; she is generally very ignorant
of politics and all dry subjects, and shrinks from any active part in their
discussion. Of course there are exceptions by the thousand; but the rule is
that she voluntarily abstains from interference in outside topics, whatever
be their gravity or their importance. She may have a vague opinion on such

matters, picked up from hearing men talk around her, but the bent of her
nature leads her in other ways—her tendency is towards things which
satisfy her as a woman. It naturally follows that men do not give her what
she does not seem to want. They consult her on matters of mutual interest,
they ask for and often follow her advice in business; but in nine cases out of
ten no husband would allow his wife to tell him how to vote at an election,
or what form of government to support. This distinction is infinitely more
remarkable in France than any analogous condition would be in England,
because of the existence there of several rivals to the throne, and the
consequent splitting up of the entire nation into adherents of each pretender.
Yet even this exceptional position does not induce Frenchwomen to become
politicians. Some few of them, of course, are so, and fling themselves with
ardour into the cause they have adopted; but, fortunately for the tranquillity
of their homes, the greater part of them have wisdom enough to
comprehend that their real functions on the earth are of another kind.

The majority of the champions of the enfranchisement of the sex have
loudly protested against the hackneyed truisms, formerly so rife, which
impute to women every imaginable form of silliness and frivolity; that they,
like Alphonse Karr’s typical woman, have nothing to do but “s’habiller,
babiller et se déshabiller.” But it will be well to remember the existence of
another class of maxims of even greater weight, which dwell on the subtle
influence of women, and of its illimitable consequences. “If the nose of
Cleopatra,” remarks the most famous of these aphorists—Pascal—“had
been a hair’s-breadth longer, the fortunes of the world would have been
altered.” Has the influence of the sex decreased since the days of the dusky
beauty whose irresistible fascinations
“——lost a world, and bade a hero fly?”

Rather, is it not infinitely more subtle, wider, and more prevailing than
ever? No one who recognises the skill with which that immense influence

may be exercised can listen without astonishment to the flimsy arguments
which are usually advanced in support of the question of the political
enfranchisement of the sex. That the results of giving this particular form of
ability—a power which is irresistible to the highest intellectual refinement
—the political arena for its field have not only proved widely injurious to
women who have so exercised it, but to those most closely connected with
them, it has been the author’s object to show.

“And what hope of permanent success,” it has been cogently asked,
“could women have if they were to enter into competition with men in
callings considered peculiarly masculine, many of which are already
overstocked?” We are also brought here again face to face with that evil—
the lessening or the complete loss of womanly grace and purity. Take away
that reverential regard which men now feel for them, leave them to win
their way by sheer strength of body or mind, and the result is not difficult to
conjecture. Let the condition of women in savage life tell. Towards
something like this, although in civilised society not so coarsely and
roughly exposed to view, matters would tend if these agitators for women’s
rights were successful. Husbands, brothers, sons, have too keen a sense of
what they owe of good to their female relatives to risk its loss; or to
exchange the gentleness, purity, and refinement of their homes for boldness,
flippancy, hardness and knowledge of evil.

Nature, herself, then, has disqualified women from fighting and from
entering into the fierce contentions of the prickly and crooked ways of
politics. There is a silent and beautiful education which Heaven intended
that all alike should learn from mothers, sisters, and wives. Each home was
meant to have in their gentler presence a softening and refining element, so
that strength should train itself to be submissive, rudeness should become
abashed, and coarse passions held in check by the natural influence of
women. High or low, educated or uneducated, there is the proper work of

the weaker sex. And, finally, we venture to address her in the words of Lord
Lyttelton:—
“Seek to be good, but aim not to be great;
A woman’s noblest station is retreat;
Her fairest virtues fly from public sight;
Domestic worth—that shuns too strong a light.”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] An anecdote of her has been preserved which proves how very general was
the impression the grace and beauty of the Duchess of Devonshire made upon
men in every station of society. On one occasion of her being present on the
racecourse at Newmarket, a burly farmer who stood near her carriage, after
having for some time gazed at her in a species of ecstasy, exclaimed aloud, “Ah!
why am I not God Almighty?—she should then be Queen of Heaven!” The
Duchess preserved her personal charms far beyond the period of life when they
commonly disappear among women, though she lost one of her eyes a few years
before her death in 1806.

BOOK I.

PART I.

POLITICAL WOMEN.

CHAPTER I.

ANNE DE BOURBON,
SISTER OF THE GREAT CONDÉ, AFTERWARDS DUCHESS DE
LONGUEVILLE.

The brilliant heroine of the Fronde, of whose grace, beauty, and influence
Anne of Austria was so jealous—not to speak of the mortal rivalry of the
gay Duchesses de Montbazon and de Châtillon—although the youngest of
that famous trio whom Mazarin found so formidable in the arena of politics,
obviously claims alike from her exalted rank and the memorable part she
played in the tragi-comedy of the Fronde, priority of notice among the bevy
of the Cardinal’s fair political opponents.

Some time in the month of August, 1619, Anne Geneviève de Bourbon-
Condé first saw the light in the donjon of Vincennes, where her parents had
been kept State prisoners for three years previously. She was the eldest of
the three children of Henry (II.) de Bourbon-Condé, first prince of the
blood, and of that Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency, “the beauty,
perfect grace and majesty of her time.”[2] The lovely Montmorency on
coming to Court in her fifteenth year had sorely troubled the heart of the
amorous soldier-king, Henry of Navarre, who had married her in 1609 to
his nephew of Condé with the covert hope of finding him an
accommodating husband; but the latter, alike defiant and uxorious, made

the jovial Bearnois plainly understand that he had wedded the blooming
Charlotte exclusively for himself. The gaillard monarch, however, at length
grew so deeply enamoured that the prince, perceiving there was too much
cause to fear the result of the constant assiduities of his royal uncle, fled
precipitately with his young wife from France, only to return thither after
tidings reached him of the great Henry’s assassination. To the fair
Montmorency’s very decided proclivity to gallantry was to be attributed—if
we may believe the scandal-loving Tallemant des Reaux—her long
confinement, by the Regent Marie de’ Medici’s consent, within the gloomy
fortress of Vincennes, rather than any reason of State for her sharing her
husband’s imprisonment. In fact, it was believed that the jealous prince
procured her incarceration simply to keep her out of harm’s way.

Deriving from her mother the threefold gifts of grace, beauty, and
majesty, the fair Bourbon inherited also, it must be owned, a share of that
princess’s inclination to l’honnête galanterie. The restriction to a share
should be noted; for at no period of her heydey, not even during the licence
of the Fronde, could Anne Geneviève be accused of having—as Madame de
Motteville tells us the Princess de Condé had,—adorers “in every rank and
condition of life, from popes, kings, princes, cardinals, dukes, and marshals
of France, down to simple gentlemen.”

The mind and heart, however, of Anne de Bourbon, although predestined,
alas! eventually to culpable passion, seemed at first but little inclined to the
gay world—with all its blandishments and seductions, or even to its
innocent pleasures. When quite a child she was in the habit of
accompanying her mother in her visits to the convent of the Carmelites at
Paris. For though still possessing great personal attractions, Madame de
Condé had become serious and of a somewhat demonstrative piety. Those
visits, which were frequent, strengthened Anne’s gentle and susceptible
mind in its tendency to devotion. The impression, too, which somewhat

later the tragic fate of her uncle, the unfortunate Duke de Montmorency,[3]
left on her memory, inspired her with the resolution to quit the outer world
at the earliest possible moment, and, renouncing all its pomps and
grandeurs, hide beneath the veil her budding attractions. Although her
mother opposed an inflexible resistance to her embracing that holy
vocation, and strove to combat by forcible arguments the cold and
disdainful demeanour exhibited by her daughter when mixing in gay
society, the fair girl persevered from the age of thirteen to seventeen in her
longing to embrace the life of the cloister. Futile for a time were the
parental arguments, unfruitful every effort! Anne Geneviève would not
consort with worldlings, persisted in her distaste for mundane pleasures,
and continued to cherish persistently her desire for conventual seclusion. At
length the princess, in 1636, having resolved upon the adoption of more
energetic measures, suddenly ordered her daughter to make preparations for
appearing at a Court ball, and that, too, in three days. With what despair did
the young princess hear the cruel sentence! What affliction, too, befell the
Carmelite nuns when they heard of the fatal mandate. What a flood of sighs
and tears and prayers! The good sisters gathered themselves together to take
counsel one with another, and decided that, since Mdlle. de Bourbon could
not avoid the wretched fate that awaited her, before going through the trying
ordeal she should indue her lovely form with an undergarment of hair-cloth
(commonly called a cilice), and, protected by such armour of proof, she
might then fearlessly submit herself to all the temptations lurking beneath
the ensnaring vanities of her Court attire. The cilice, however, did not, it
seems, prove invulnerable as the ægis of Minerva, for the subtle shafts
winged by homage and admiration pierced through that slight breast-plate
to a heart which in truth was by nature framed to inspire and welcome both.
The Princess de Condé rejoiced greatly at her daughter’s conversion to
more reasonable views of mundane existence. The commencement of her
noviciate was no longer thought of, and her visits to the Carmelites became

sufficiently rare. But it was only a deferment of that calm vocation, it being
Anne de Bourbon’s destiny to embrace it at the close of her feverish
political career.

This era of her entrance into the great world was probably the happiest,
the most joyous of the fair Bourbon’s life. Lofty distinction of birth, great
personal beauty, and rare mental fascination, contributed to place her in the
very foremost rank of the Court circle—in the “height of company”—
conspicuous amongst lovely dames and distinguished men of the time. Her
peerless loveliness at once meeting with universal recognition, “la belle
Condé” was toasted with acclamation by courtiers, young and old—at
Chantilly, at Liancourt, at the Louvre, and at the Hôtel de Rambouillet.
Contemporaries of either sex have rendered unanimous testimony to the
varied and exceptional character of her attractions, and we will let a
woman’s pen add to Petitot’s pencilling some of those delicate traits which
neither the burin nor even the vivid tints of the enamel have the power to
convey.

“Her beauty,” says Mdme. de Motteville, “consisted more in the
brilliance of her complexion”—(“it had the blush of the pearl,” writes
another contemporary)—“than in perfection of feature. Her eyes were not
large, but bright, and finely cut, and of a blue so lovely it resembled that of
the turquoise. The poets could only apply the trite comparison of lilies and
roses to the carnation which mantled on her cheek, whilst her fair, silken,
luxuriant tresses, and the peculiar limpidity of her glance, added to many
other charms, made her more like an angel—so far as our imperfect nature
allows of our imagining such a being—than a mere woman.” Somewhat
later, the smallpox, in robbing her of the bloom of her beauty, still left her
all its brilliancy, to repeat the remark of that eminent connoisseur of female
loveliness, Cardinal de Retz.

To sum up the general opinion of her contemporaries: Mdlle. de Bourbon
rather charmed by the very peculiar style of her countenance than by its
linear regularity. One of her greatest fascinations lay in an indescribable
languor, both of mind and manner—“a languor interrupted at intervals,”
says De Retz, “by a sort of luminous awakenings, as surprising as they were
delightful. This physical and intellectual indolence presented later in life a
piquant contrast to her then”—according to Mdme. de Motteville
—“somewhat too passionate temperament.” She was of good height, and
altogether of an admirable form. It is evident also, from the authentic
portraits of her still extant, that she had that kind of attraction so much
prized during the seventeenth century, and which, with beautiful hands, had
made the reputation of Anne of Austria. In speech, we are told, she was very
gentle. Her gestures, with the expression of her countenance, and the sound
of her voice, produced the most perfect music. But her peculiar charm
consisted in a graceful ease—a languor, as all her contemporaries expressed
it—which would quickly change to the highest degree of animation when
stirred by emotion, but which usually gave her an air of indolence and
aristocratic nonchalance, sometimes mistaken for ennui, sometimes for
disdain.

Crediting the unvarying testimony of these and other of her
contemporaries, the daughter of Bourbon-Condé must have been at least as
beautiful as her mother—endowed, indeed, with almost every attribute and
feature of female loveliness.

“Beauty,” remarks a philosophic panegyrist of physical perfection,
“extends its prestige to posterity itself, and attaches a charm for centuries to
the name alone of the privileged creatures upon whom it has pleased heaven
to bestow it.” Beauty has also its epochs. It does not belong to all men and
to all ages to enjoy it in its exquisite perfection. As there are fashions which
spoil it, so there are periods which affect its sentiment. For instance, it

belonged to the eighteenth century to invent pretty women—charming dolls
—all powder, patches, and perfume, affecting the attractions which they did
not possess under their vast hoops and great furbelows. Let us venture to
say that the foundation of true beauty, as of true virtue, as of true genius, is
strength. Shed over this strength the vivifying rays of elegance, grace,
delicacy, and you have beauty. Its perfect type is the Venus of Milo,[4] or
again, that pure and mysterious apparition, goddess or mortal, which is
called Psyche, or the Venus of Naples.[5] Beauty is certainly to be seen in
the Venus de’ Medici, but in that type we feel that it is declining, or about to
decline. Look at, not the women of Titian, but the virgins of Raphael and
Leonardo: the face is of infinite delicacy, but the body evinces strength.
These forms ought to disgust one for ever with the shadows and monkeys à
la Pompadour. Let us adore grace, but not separate it in everything too
much from strength, for without strength grace soon shares the fate of the
flower that is separated from the stem which vitalizes and sustains it.

What a train of accomplished women this seventeenth century presents to
us! They were not all politicians. Women who were loaded with admiration,
drawing after them all hearts, and spreading from rank to rank that worship
of beauty which throughout Europe received the name of French gallantry.
In France they accompany this great century in its too rapid course; they
mark its principal epochs, beginning with Charlotte de Montmorency and
ending with Mdme. de Montespan. The Duchess de Longueville has
perhaps the most prominent place in that dazzling gallery of lovely women,
having all the characteristics of true beauty, and joining to it a charm
exclusively her own.

In early girlhood she had been taken, along with her elder brother, the
Duke d’Enghien, to the Hotel de Rambouillet; and the salons of the Rue St.
Thomas du Louvre were probably the most fitting school for such a mind as
hers, in which grandeur and finesse were almost equally blended—a

grandeur allied to the romantic, and associated with a finesse frequently
merging into subtilty, as indeed may be discerned in Corneille himself, the
most perfect mental representative of that period.

To follow step by step the course of Anne de Bourbon’s life at this period
of it through all its earliest rivalries, would involve the task of recording the
manifold caprices of a tender, yet ambitious nature, in which the mind and
heart were unceasingly dupes of each other. It would be like an attempt to
follow the devious path of the light foam and laughing sparkle of the billow
—

“In vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.”

Our purpose lies mainly with her political life, but ere entering upon it
we will give a short but comprehensive view of her character in the words
of one who, more than anybody else, had the means of judging her correctly
—La Rochefoucauld. “This Princess,” writes the Duke, “possessed all the
charms of mind, united to personal beauty, to so high a degree, that it
seemed as though nature had taken pleasure in forming in her person a
perfectly finished work. But those fine qualities were rendered less brilliant
through a blemish rarely seen in one so highly endowed, which was that, far
from giving the law to those who had a particular admiration for her, she
transfused herself so thoroughly into their sentiments that she no longer
recognised her own.”

Now La Rochefoucauld should have been the last person to complain of
that defect, since he was the first to foster it in the Duchess. In her bosom
love awoke ambition, but the awakening was so sudden, in fact, that any
difference in the two passions was never perceptible.

Singular contradiction! The more we contemplate the political bias of
Madame de Longueville the more it becomes mingled with her amorous

caprice; but when we analyse her love more narrowly (and later on in life
she herself made the avowal), it appears nothing else than ambition
travestied—a desire to shine only the more magnificently brilliant.

Her character, then, was entirely wanting in consistency, in self-will; and
her mind, be it observed, however brilliant and acute, had nothing that was
calculated to counterbalance that defect of character. One may possess the
faculty of right perception without strength of mind to do that which is
right. One may be rational in mind and the contrary in conduct—character
being at fault between the two. But here the case was different. Madame de
Longueville’s mind was not, above all else, rational; it was acute, prompt,
subtle, witty by turns, and readily responsive to the varying humour of the
moment. It shone voluntarily in contradiction and subterfuge, ere
exhausting itself finally in scruples. There was much of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet in such a mind as hers.

“The mind in the majority of women serves rather to confirm their folly
than their reason.” So says the author of the “Maxims;” and Madame de
Longueville, with all her metamorphoses, was undoubtedly present before
him when he penned the sentence. For she, the most feminine of her sex,
would offer to him the completest epitome of all the rest. In short, evidently
as he has made his observations upon her, she also seems to have drawn her
conclusions from him. So the agreement is perfect.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Lenet.

[3] Brought to the scaffold by Richelieu in 1632.

[4] Quatremère de Quincy, Dissertation upon the Antique Statue of Venus
Discovered in the Island of Milo. 1836.

[5] Millingen: Ancient Inedited Monuments. Fol. 1826.

CHAPTER II.

MADAME DE LONGUEVILLE.

A young Princess of the Blood so lovely, fascinating, and witty as Anne
de Bourbon, was surely destined, it might be thought, to contract an early
and altogether suitable matrimonial alliance. It was therefore somewhat
surprising to find how much difficulty there was in mating her. Foremost
among those who sought her hand was that hair-brained, handsome, coarse-
mannered Duke de Beaufort, younger son of Cæsar de Vendôme, himself
the bastard of the jovial Bearnois by the Fair Gabrielle.[6] Beaufort
inherited his unfortunate grand-dame’s beauty—had a Phœbus-Apollo style
of head, set off with a profusion of long, curly, golden locks; was a young,
brave, and flourishing gallant, and somewhat later (during the Fronde),
from his blunt speech and familiar manners with the Parisian mob, became
the idol of the market-women, and was therefore dubbed Roi des Halles.
But this scapegrace suitor withdrew his pretensions in order to gratify, it is
said, the handsome though decried Duchess de Montbazon, who had
enthralled him in her flowery chains as a led-captain. On entering her
nineteenth year Mdlle. de Bourbon was promised in marriage to the Prince
de Joinville, son of Charles of Lorraine (Duke de Guise), but that young
nobleman having died prematurely in Italy, no other serious matrimonial
project seems to have been entertained until the Princess had reached her
twenty-third year. The fortunate suitor was one of Beaufort’s rivals—or,

rather, colleagues—for that would be the more correct term when
designating their mutual relations to the unscrupulous Duchess de
Montbazon. The widower, Henry of Orleans (Duke de Longueville), by
birth, dignity, and wealth was looked upon as the first match in France.
Unfortunately, in his case, those dazzling attributes were materially abated
through disparity of age, for he had reached the ripe maturity of forty-
seven, whilst the bride of his choice had not yet seen half that cycle of
summers. To be twenty-four years her senior was, for the husband of a
youthful princess so excelling in wit and beauty, certainly a formidable
inequality, and so Mdlle. de Bourbon seems to have thought. At the
command, however, of her father, who intimated that his determination was
inflexible in thus disposing of his daughter’s hand, Anne Geneviève meekly
complied, and was espoused in June, 1642, to Henri de Bourbon, Duke de
Longueville.[7]

The young Duchess found herself speedily surrounded by a swarm of
courtiers, attracted by her sprightly and refined intelligence, her majestic
beauty, her nonchalant and languishing grace. What more adorable mistress
could an audacious aspirant dream of? Bold adventurers for such a lady’s
love there was no lack of; and would not many be encouraged with the
thought that such a prize could only be defended by a husband already
verging towards the decline of life, and whose heart, moreover, was
believed to be in the keeping of another? The sighs of the suitors, however,
all adventurous and calculating as they might be, were wasted, their hopes
altogether fallacious. For six long years there was nothing more accorded to
that crowd of often-renewed adorers save the smiles of an innocent
coquetry. He who, during that period of honest gallantry, coming near to La
Rochefoucauld, seems to have made the liveliest impression, was Coligny;
and it was only slanderers who whispered that the young Count was happier
than became the adorer of a heroine of the De Rambouillet school.

Madame de Longueville, nevertheless, possessed the characteristics of
her sex; she had alike its lovable qualities and its well-known
imperfections. In a sphere where gallantry was the order of the day, that
young and fascinating creature, married to a man already in the decline of
life, and, moreover, with his affections engaged elsewhere, merely followed
the universal example. Tender by nature, the senses, she herself says in her
confessions—the humblest ever made—played no minor part in the affairs
of the heart. But, surrounded unceasingly by homage, she found pleasure in
receiving it. Very lovable, she centred her happiness in being loved. Sister
of the Great Condé, she was not insensible to the idea of playing a part
which should occupy public attention; but, far from pretending to
domination, there was so much of the woman in her that she allowed herself
to be led by him whom she loved. Whilst, around her, interest and ambition
assumed so frequently the hues of love, she listened to the dictates of her
heart alone, and devoted herself to the interest and ambition of another. All
contemporary writers are unanimous on that point. Her enemies sharply
reproach her alike for not having a fitting object in her political intrigues,
and for being unmindful of her own interests. But they appear not to be
aware that, in thinking to overwhelm her memory by such accusation, they
rather elevate it, and they are assiduous to cover her faults and misconduct
—faults which, after all, are centred in one alone. In short, some writers
cast the greater part of the blame the young Duchess’s conduct merits upon
her husband, who, according to them, knew not how to make amends for
his own disadvantage, on the score of disparity of age, by an anxious and
indulgent tenderness.

Before their marriage was solemnised it was stipulated that the Duke de
Longueville should break off his liaison with the Duchess de Montbazon—
then notorious as one of the most unrestrained among the women of fashion
at the Court of the Regent. This, however, the Duke unhappily failed to do.

In declaring its adhesion to Mazarin at the commencement of the
Regency, the House of Condé had drawn upon itself the hatred of the party
of the Importants, though that enmity scarcely rebounded upon Madame de
Longueville. Her amiableness in everything where her heart was not
seriously concerned, her perfect indifference to politics at this period of her
life, together with the graces of her mind and person, rendered her
universally popular, and shielded her against the injustice of partisan
malice. But outside the pale of politics she had an enemy, and a formidable
one, in the Duchess de Montbazon. That bold and dangerous woman having
by her fascinations enslaved Beaufort, the quondam admirer of Madame de
Longueville, the young Duke through her intrigues became a favourite chief
of the Importants. Amongst the earliest to swell the ranks of that faction
were two other personages who had played a very conspicuous part during
the reign of Louis XIII. The first of these, Madame de Montbazon’s step-
daughter, was the witty, beautiful, and errant Duchess de Chevreuse, whom
Louis had judged so dangerous that he had expressly forbidden by his will,
when on the point of death, that she should ever be recalled from exile to
Court. By the same prohibition was affected the former Keeper of the Seals,
the Marquis de Châteauneuf, who had displayed considerable talent under
Richelieu, but had ultimately made himself obnoxious to that great
Minister, after having given many a sanguinary proof of his devotion to
him. A glance at the antecedents of that remarkable woman, Madame de
Chevreuse, the early favourite of Anne of Austria, will now be necessary in
order to understand clearly her relative position to the Queen and Mazarin
at the commencement of the Regency, as well as to those incipient
Frondeurs, the Importants, at the moment of her dragging the Prince de
Marsillac (afterwards Duke de Rochefoucauld) into that party.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Created Duchess de Beaufort by Henry IV.

[7] The Duke was descended from the “brave Dunois,” bastard of Orleans.

CHAPTER III.

THE DUCHESS DE CHEVREUSE.

From the long-sustained, vigorous, and very eminent part played by
Marie de Rohan in opposing the repressive system of the two great Cardinal
Ministers, her name belongs equally to the political history as to that of the
society and manners of the first half of the sixteenth century.

She came of that old and illustrious race the issue of the first princes of
Brittany, and was the daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Duke de Montbazon, a
zealous servant of Henry IV., by his first wife Madeleine de Lenoncourt,
sister of Urbain de Laval, Marshal de Bois-Dauphin. Born in December,
1600, she lost her mother at a very early age, and in 1617 was married to
that audacious favourite of Louis XIII., De Luynes, who from the humble
office of “bird-catcher” to the young King, rose to the proud dignity of
Constable of France, and who, upon the faith of a king’s capricious
friendship, dared to undertake the reversal of the Queen-mother, Marie de’
Medici’s authority; hurl to destruction her great favourite, the Marshal
d’Ancre; combat simultaneously princes and Protestants, and commence
against Richelieu the system of Richelieu. Early becoming a widow, Marie
next, in 1622, entered the house of Lorraine by espousing Claude, Duke de
Chevreuse, one of the sons of Henry de Guise, great Chamberlain of
France, whose highest merit was the name he bore, accompanied by good

looks and that bravery which was never wanting to a prince of Lorraine;
otherwise disorderly in the conduct of his affairs, of not very edifying
manner of life, which may go far to explain and extenuate the errors of his
young wife. The new Duchess de Chevreuse had been appointed during the
sway of her first husband, surintendante (controller) of the Queen’s
household, and soon became as great a favourite of Anne of Austria as the
Constable de Luynes was of Louis the Just. The French Court was then very
brilliant, and gallantry the order of the day. Marie de Rohan was naturally
vivacious and dashing, and, yielding herself up to the seductions of youth
and pleasure, she had lovers, and her adorers drew her into politics. Her
beauty and captivating manners were such as to fascinate and enthral the
least impressible who crossed her path, and their dangerous power was
extensively employed in influencing the politics of Europe, and
consequently had a large share in framing her own destiny. A portrait in the
possession of the late Duke de Luynes[8] represents her as having an
admirable figure, a charming expression of countenance, large and well-
opened blue eyes, chesnut-tinted fair hair in great abundance, a well-formed
neck, with the loveliest bust possible, and throughout her entire person a
piquant blending of delicacy, grace, vivacity, and passion. The following
summary of her character by the clever, caustic, but little scrupulous De
Retz, graphic as it is, and based on a certain amount of truth, must not be
unhesitatingly accepted, it being over-coloured by wilful exaggeration:—“I
have never seen anyone else,” says he, “in whom vivacity so far usurped the
place of judgment. It very often inspired her with such brilliant sallies that
they flashed like lightning, and so sensible withal, that they might not have
been disowned by the greatest men of any age. The manifestation of this
faculty was not confined to particular occasions. Had she lived in times
when politics were non-existent, she would not have rested content with the
idea only that they ought to have been rife. If the Prior of the Carthusians
had pleased her, she would have become a sincere recluse. M. de Luynes

initiated her into politics, the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Holland
corresponded with her upon them, and Châteauneuf amused her with them.
She gave herself up to their pursuit because she abandoned herself, without
reserve, to everything which pleased the individual whom she loved, and
simply because it was indispensable that she should love somebody. It was
not even difficult to give her a lover by setting an eligible suitor to pay her
court with an ostensible political motive; but as soon as she accepted him,
she loved him solely and faithfully, and she owned to Mdme. de Rhodes
and myself that, through caprice, she said, she had never really loved those
whom she esteemed the most, with the exception of the unfortunate George
Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Devotion to the passion which in her might
be called eternal, although she might change the object of it, did not prevent
even a fly from causing her mental abstraction; but she always recovered
from it with a renewed exuberance which made such phases rather
agreeable than otherwise. No one ever took less heed about danger, and
never woman had more contempt for scruples and duties: she never
recognised other than that of pleasing her lover.”

This epigrammatic sketch is almost worthy of the exaggerated author of
the Historiettes,[9] and the reader is advised to accept only its more salient
and truthful traits—the keen and accurate glance of Mdme. de Chevreuse in
scanning the prevailing aspect of the political horizon, her dauntless
courage, the fidelity and devotion of her love. Retz, moreover, mistakes
entirely the order of her adventures; he forgets and then invents. In striving
after epigrammatic point, he sacrifices truth to smartness of style, and
writes as though he looked upon events in which the passions of the
Duchess made her take part as mere trifles, whereas among them there were
some than which none were ever of graver or even more tragic moment.

Mdme. de Chevreuse, in fact, possessed almost all the qualities befitting
a great politician. One alone was wanting, and precisely that without which

all the others tended to her ruin. She failed to select for pursuit a legitimate
object, or rather she did not choose one for herself, but left it to another to
choose for her. Mdme. de Chevreuse was womanly in the highest possible
degree; that quality was alike her strength and her weakness. Her secret
mainspring was love, or rather gallantry,[10] and the interest of him whom
she loved became her paramount object. It is this which explains the
wonderful sagacity, finesse, and energy she displayed in the vain pursuit of
a chimerical aim, which ever receded before her, and seemed to draw her on
by the very prestige of difficulty and danger. La Rochefoucauld accuses her
of having brought misfortune upon all those whom she loved;[11] it is
equally the truth to add that all those whom she loved hurried her in the
sequel into insensate enterprises. It was not she evidently who made of
Buckingham a species of paladin without genius; a brilliant adventurer of
Charles IV. of Lorraine; of Chalais a hair-brained blunderer, rash enough to
commit himself in a conspiracy against Richelieu, on the faith of the
faithless Duke d’Orleans; of Châteauneuf, an ambitious statesman,
impatient of holding second rank in the Government, without being capable
of taking the first. Let no one imagine that he is acquainted with Mdme. de
Chevreuse from having merely studied the foregoing portrait traced by De
Retz, for that sketch is an exaggeration and over-charged like all those from
the same pen, and was destined to amuse the malignant curiosity of Mdme.
de Caumartin—for without being altogether false, it is of a severity pushed
to the verge of injustice. Was it becoming, one might ask, of the restless and
licentious Coadjutor to constitute himself the remorseless censor of a
woman whose errors he shared? Did he not deceive himself as much and for
a far longer period than she? Did he show more address in political strategy
or courage in the dangerous strife, more intrepidity and constancy in defeat?
But Mdme. de Chevreuse has not written memoirs in that free-and-easy and
piquant style the constant aim of which is self-elevation, obtained at the
expense of everybody else. There are two judges of her character the

testimony of whose acts must be held to be above suspicion—Richelieu and
Mazarin. Richelieu did all in his power to win her over, and not being able
to succeed, he treated her as an enemy worthy of himself.

To revert briefly to her long-continued struggle with Richelieu, it must
not be forgotten that for twenty years she had been the personal friend and
favourite of Anne of Austria, and for ten years she had suffered persecution
and privation on that account. Exiled, proscribed, and threatened with
imprisonment, she had narrowly escaped Richelieu’s grasp by disguising
herself in male attire, and in that garb traversing France and Spain on
horseback, had succeeded in eluding his pursuit, and after many adventures
in safely reaching Madrid. Philip IV. not only heaped every kind of honour
upon his sister’s courageous favourite, but even, it is said, swelled the
number of her conquests. Whilst in the Spanish capital she had allied
herself politically with the Minister Olivarez, and obtained great
ascendancy over the Cabinet of Madrid. The war between France and Spain
necessarily rendering her position in the latter country delicate and
embarrassing, she had, early in 1638, sought refuge in England. Charles I.
and Henrietta Maria gave her the warmest possible reception at St. James’s;
and the latter, on seeing again the distinguished countrywoman who had
some years back conducted her as a bride from Paris to the English shores
to the arms of Prince Charles, embraced her warmly, entered into all her
troubles, and both the English King and Queen wrote letters pleading in her
behalf, to Louis XIII., Anne of Austria, and Richelieu with regard to the
restoration of her property and permission to rejoin her children at
Dampierre. She herself resumed the links of a negotiation with the Cardinal
which had never been entirely broken off, and the success of which seemed
quite practicable, since it was almost equally desired by both. That
negotiation was being carried on for more than a year, and when link after
link had been frequently snapped and re-soldered, only to be once more

broken, Richelieu at length gave his solemn word that she might return with
perfect safety to Dampierre.

On the eve of her departure from the English Court, a vessel being in
readiness to convey her to Dieppe, where a carriage awaited her landing,
the Duchess received an anonymous letter warning her that certain ruin
awaited her if she set foot on the soil of France, followed by another, still
more explicit with regard to Richelieu’s designs to effect her destruction,
from no less a person than Charles of Lorraine. This second warning from
so reliable a source, followed shortly afterwards by other advice—held by
her in the light of a command—enchained her to a foreign land. She for
whom during ten long years the Duchess had suffered all things, braved all
things, her august friend Anne of Austria cautioned her not to trust to
appearances. Thus vanished the last hope of a sincere reconciliation
between two persons who knew each other too well to discard distrust and
to confide in words, of which neither were sparing, without requiring
solemn guarantees that they could not or would not give.

Choosing stoically, therefore, to still undergo the pangs of absence, to
consume the noontide of the days of her attractive womanhood in privation
and turmoil rather than risk her liberty, Mdme. de Chevreuse on her part did
not remain idle. From the moment she felt convinced that Richelieu was
deceiving her, attracting her back to France only to hold her in a state of
dependence, and if need were, to incarcerate her—having broken with him,
she considered herself as free from all scruple, and thought of nothing
further than paying him back blow for blow. Her old duel with the Cardinal
thus once more renewed, she formed in London, with the aid of the Duke de
Vendôme, La Vieuville, and La Valette, a faction of active and adroit
emigrants, who, leaning on the Earl of Holland, then one of the chiefs of the
Royalist party and a general in the army of Charles of England; upon Lord
Montagu, an ardent Papist and intimate adviser of Queen Henrietta Maria;

upon Digby and other men of influence at Court, maintained likewise the
closest intelligence with the Court of Rome through its envoy in England,
Rosetti, and especially with the Cabinet of Madrid; encouraging and
kindling the hopes of all the proscribed and discontented, strewing obstacles
at all points in the path of Richelieu, and accumulating formidable perils
around his head.

On the breaking out of the Civil War in England, Mdme. de Chevreuse
repaired to Brussels, where in 1641 we find her acting as the connecting
link between England, Spain, and Lorraine. Without attributing to the
Duchess any especial motive beyond seconding an enterprise directed
against the common enemy, she did not the less play an important part in
the affair of the Count de Soissons—the most formidable conspiracy that
had hitherto been hatched against Richelieu. Anne of Austria was certainly
privy to the plot and lent it her aid. She might have been ignorant of the
secret treaty with Spain; but for all the rest, and so far as it menaced the
Cardinal, she had a perfect understanding with the conspirators. That high-
handed Minister, by overstraining the springs of government, by prolonging
the war, by increasing the public expenditure, and by oppressing all classes
whilst he crushed some in particular, had excited a hatred so bitter and
widespread that at length he governed the State almost entirely through
terror. Whilst the grandeur of his designs commanded respect and
veneration from a select few, his genius towered above the bulk of his
countrymen. But that harsh rule, continuing unrelaxed, and so many
sacrifices being perpetually renewed, at length wearied out the greater
number, the King himself not excepted. Louis’s reigning favourite, the
Grand-Écuyer, Cinq Mars, undermined and blackened the Cardinal as much
as possible in his royal master’s estimation. He knew of the conspiracy of
the Count de Soissons, and without taking a share in it, he favoured it. He
might therefore be reckoned upon to figure in the next. The Queen, still in
disgrace in spite of the two heirs she had given to the crown, naturally

breathed vows for the termination of a rule which so oppressed her. Gaston,
the King’s brother, had pledged his word, however little the reliance that
might be placed upon it; but the Duke de Bouillon, an experienced soldier
and an eminent politician, had openly declared himself; and his stronghold
of Sedan, situated on the frontiers of France and Belgium, offered an
asylum whence could be braved for a long while all the power of the
Cardinal. A widespread understanding had been established throughout
every part of the kingdom, amongst the clergy, and in the Parliament. There
were conspirators in the very Bastille itself, where Marshal de Vitry and the
Count de Cramail, prisoners as they were, had prepared a coup de main
with an admirably-kept secrecy. The Abbé de Retz, then twenty-five,
preluded his adventurous career by this attempt at civil war. The Duke de
Guise, having effected his escape from Rheims, and taken refuge in the
Low Countries, was about to share the dangers of the conspiracy at Sedan.
But the greatest—the firmest—hope of the Count de Soissons rested upon
Spain: that power alone could enable him to take the field from Sedan, to
march upon Paris, and crush the power of Richelieu. He therefore
despatched Alexandre de Campion, one of his bravest and most intelligent
gentlemen, to Brussels to negotiate with the Spanish Ministers and obtain
from them troops and money. There he addressed himself to Mdme. de
Chevreuse, and confided to her the mission with which he was charged,
which she hastened to second with all her influence. Having prevailed upon
Olivarez to strenuously support those requirements which the Count de
Soissons and the Duke de Bouillon sought at his hands, she despatched
letters by a secret agent in the service of Spain to the Duke de Lorraine,
entreating him not to fail her in this supreme opportunity of repairing her
past misfortunes and of dealing a mortal blow to their remorseless enemy.
The Duke Charles, thus solicited at once by Mdme. de Chevreuse, by his
kinsman the Duke de Guise, by the Spanish Minister, and, more than all, by
his own restless and adventurous ambition, broke the solemn compact he

had so recently made with France, entered into an alliance with Spain and
the Count de Soissons, and prepared with all diligence to march to the aid
of Sedan. And whilst Mdme. de Chevreuse and the emigrants brought into
play every engine they could lay hands on, Lamboy and Metternich set out
for Flanders at the head of six thousand Imperialists. France—all the
nationalities of Europe, were on the tiptoe of expectation. Richelieu had
never been menaced with a greater danger, and the loss of the battle of
Marfée would have proved a fatal event had not the Count de Soissons met
his death simultaneously with his triumph.

If Mdme. de Chevreuse were a stranger in 1642 to the fresh conspiracy of
Gaston, Duke d’Orleans, Cinq Mars, and the Duke de Bouillon against her
relentless foe, it would have been the only one in which she had not taken a
leading part. It is indeed more than probable that she was in the secret as
well as Queen Anne, whose understanding with Gaston and Cinq Mars
cannot be contested. La Rochefoucauld repeatedly remarks touching a
matter in which he seems to have been implicated, “The dazzling reputation
of M. le Grand (Cinq Mars) rekindled the hopes of the discontented; the
Queen and the Duke d’Orleans united with him; the Duke de Bouillon and
several persons of quality did the same.” De Bouillon also declares that the
Queen was closely allied with Gaston and the Grand-Écuyer, and that she
herself had invited his concurrence. “The Queen, whom the Cardinal had
persecuted in such a variety of ways, did not doubt that, if the King should
chance to die, that minister would seek to deprive her of her children, in
order to assume the Regency himself. She secretly instigated De Thou to
seek the Duke de Bouillon with persevering entreaties. She asked the latter
whether, in the event of the King’s death, he would promise to receive her
and her two children in his stronghold of Sedan, believing—so firmly
persuaded was she of the evil designs of the Cardinal, and of his power—
that there was no other place of safety for them throughout the realm of
France.” De Thou further told the Duke de Bouillon that since the King’s

illness the Queen and the Duke d’Orleans were very closely allied, and that
it was through Cinq Mars that their alliance had been brought about. Now,
where the Queen was so deeply implicated it was not likely that Mdme. de
Chevreuse would stand aloof. A friend of Richelieu, whose name has not
come down to us, but who must have been perfectly well informed, does
not hesitate to place Mdme. de Chevreuse as well as the Queen amongst
those who then endeavoured to overthrow Richelieu. “M. le Grand,” he
writes to the Cardinal,[12] “has been urged to his wicked designs by the
Queen-mother, by her daughter (Henrietta Maria), by the Queen of France,
by Mdme. de Chevreuse, by Montagu, and other English Papists.” At length
the Cardinal, on an early day in June, 1642, retired to Tarascon, ostensibly
for the sake of his health, but doubtless for safety also, accompanied by his
two bosom friends, Mazarin and Chavigny, and the faithful regiments of his
guards. Finding himself surrounded by peril on all sides, and representing to
Louis XIII. the gravity of the situation, he cited that which had been alleged
of Mdme. de Chevreuse as amongst the most striking indications of the
truth of what he stated.[13]

But what was the party in fact then conspiring against Richelieu? Was it
not the party of former coalitions—of the League, of Austria, and of Spain?
And Mdme. Chevreuse at Brussels, through her connection with the Duke
de Lorraine, the Queen of England, the Chevalier de Jars at Rome, the
Minister Olivarez at Madrid—was she not one of the great motive powers
of that party? When, therefore, such machinery was found to be again in
activity, it was quite reasonable to suspect the hand of Mdme. de Chevreuse
in all its movements.

The gathering cloud that now lowered so thick and threatening above the
head of Richelieu seemed pregnant with inevitable destruction to his power
and life. But ere long his eagle glance pierced through the overshadowing
gloom, and the aim of Cinq Mars’ dark intrigue became clearly revealed to

his far-seeing introspection. A treachery, the secret of which has remained
impenetrable to every research made during the last two centuries, caused
the treaty concluded with Spain through the intervention of Fontrailles, and
bearing the signatures of Gaston, Cinq Mars, and the Duke de Bouillon, to
fall into his hands. From that instant the Cardinal felt certain of victory. He
knew Louis XIII. thoroughly; he conjectured that he might in some access
of his morbid and changeful humour have uttered reproachful words against
his Minister in the favourite’s ear—even expressed a wish to be rid of him,
as did our first Plantagenet when tired of the despotism of Thomas à Becket
—and had perhaps listened to strange proposals for effecting such object.
But the Cardinal knew right well also to what extent Louis was a king and a
Frenchman, and devoted by self-interest to their common system. He
despatched, therefore, Chavigny in all haste from Narbonne with
irrefragable evidence of the treaty made with Spain. Louis, thunderstricken,
could scarcely believe his own eyes. He sank into a gloomy reverie, out of
which he emerged only to give way to bursts of indignation against the
favourite who could thus abuse his confidence and conspire with the
foreigner. It was needless to inflame his anger, he was the first to call for an
exemplary punishment. Not for a day, not for an hour, did his heart soften
towards the youthful culprit who had been so dear to him. He thought only
of his crime, and signed without an instant’s hesitation his death-warrant. If
Louis the Just spared the Duke de Bouillon, it was merely to acquire Sedan.
If he pardoned his brother Gaston, he at the same time dishonoured him by
depriving him of all authority in the State. Upon a report spread by a
servant of Fontrailles, and which Fontrailles’ memoirs fully confirm, his
suspicions were directed towards the Queen; and no one afterwards could
divest his mind of the conviction that in this instance, as in the affair of
Chalais, Anne of Austria had an understanding with his brother, the Duke
d’Orleans. What would he have done had he perused the statement of
Fontrailles, the Duke de Bouillon’s memoirs, a letter of Turenne, and the

declaration of La Rochefoucauld? Their united testimony is so concordant
that it is altogether irresistible. The Queen racked her brains to exorcise this
fresh storm, and to persuade the King and Richelieu of her innocence. Anne
went much farther; she did not confine herself to falsehood and
dissimulation. Menaced by imminent danger, she went so far as to repudiate
that courageous friend who had been so long and steadfastly devoted to her.
Had fortune declared in her favour she would have embraced the Duchess
as a deliverer. Vanquished and disarmed, she abandoned her. As she had
protested in terms of horror against the conspiracy that had failed, her two
young, imprudent, and ill-starred accomplices, Cinq Mars and De Thou,
mounted the scaffold without breathing her name. Finding also both the
King and Richelieu violently exasperated against Mdme. de Chevreuse, and
firmly resolved to reject the renewed entreaties of her family to obtain her
recall, Anne of Austria, far from interceding for her faithful adherent,
warmly sided with her enemies; and further, to indicate the change in her
own sentiments, and seem to applaud that which she could not prevent, she
asked as an especial favour that the Duchess might be estranged from her
person, and even from France. “The Queen,” wrote Chavigny, Richelieu’s
Minister for Foreign Affairs, “has pointedly asked me if it were true that
Mdme. de Chevreuse would return; and, without waiting for a reply, she
signified to me that she should be vexed to find her presently in France; that
she now saw the Duchess in her proper light; and she commanded me to
pray His Eminence on her part, if he had any mind to favour Mdme. de
Chevreuse, that it might be done without granting her permission to return
to France. I assured her Majesty that she should have satisfaction on that
point.”[14]

Poor Marie de Rohan! Her heart already bled from many wounds, but
this last was the “unkindest cut of all.” Her position had indeed become
frightful, and calculated to sink her to the lowest depth of despair. No hope

of seeing her native land again, her princely château, her children, her
favourite daughter Charlotte! Deriving scarcely anything from France,
deeply in debt, and with credit exhausted, she found herself entirely at the
end of her resources. How thoroughly did the banished woman then realise
the woes of exile—how hard it is to climb and descend the stranger’s stair,
experience the hollowness of his promise, and the arrogance of his
commiseration. And, finally, as though fated to drain her cup of bitterness to
the last drop, to learn that she, her long-loved bosom friend and royal
mistress, who owed her, at the very least, a silent fidelity, had openly ranged
herself on the side of fortune and Richelieu!

In a condition of mental torture the most acute, resulting from such
accumulated misfortune, Madame de Chevreuse remained for several
months with no other support than that of her innate high-souled courage.
At length, towards the close of that eventful year, the golden grooves of
change rung out a joyous pæan to gladden the heart of the much-enduring
exile. Suddenly Marie—all Europe—heard with a throb that the inscrutable,
iron-handed man of all the human race most dreaded alike by States as by
individuals, had yielded to a stronger power than his own, and had closed
his eyes in death (December 4, 1642). Within a few short months afterwards
the King also, whose regal power he had consolidated at such a cost in
blood and suffering, followed the great statesman to the tomb; having
entrusted the Regency, very much against his will, to the Queen, but
controlled by a Council, over which presided as Prime Minister the man
most devoted to Richelieu’s system—his closest friend, confidant, and
creature—Jules Mazarin.

A passage in the funeral oration on Louis XIII. summed up briefly but
significantly the result of Richelieu’s gigantic efforts to consolidate the
regal power. “Sixty-three kings,” it said, “had preceded him in rule of the
realm, but he alone had rendered it absolute, and what all collectively had

been impotent to achieve in the course of twelve centuries for the grandeur
of France, he had accomplished in the short space of thirty-three years.” It
was against that absolute power incarnate in Richelieu, which from the
steps of the throne hurled men to the earth with its bolts rather than
governed them, that Mazarin was destined later to encounter the reaction of
the Fronde.

Distrustful of leaving Anne of Austria in uncontrolled possession of regal
authority, Louis by his last will and testament had placed royalty, including
his brother Gaston as lieutenant-general of the realm, in a manner under a
commission. And further, Louis did not believe that he could ensure quiet to
the State after his death without confirming and perpetuating, so far as in
him lay, the perpetual exile of Madame de Chevreuse.

As the pupil and confidential friend of Richelieu, Mazarin had imbibed
both that statesman’s and the late king’s opinions and sentiments touching
the influence of that eminently dangerous woman. Though he had never
seen her hitherto, he was not the less well acquainted with her by repute:
dreading her mortally, and cherishing a like antipathy to her friend
Châteauneuf. He knew the Duchess to be as seductive as she was talented,
experienced and courageous in party strife—an instance of which was that
she could sway entirely a man of such ambition and capacity as the former
Keeper of the Seals. Attached, moreover, in secret to Lorraine, to Austria,
and to Spain, all this was as absolutely incompatible with the exclusive
favour to which he aspired at the hands of his royal mistress as it was with
all his diplomatic and military designs. The solemn injunctions of the late
king’s will, while denouncing Madame de Chevreuse and Châteauneuf as
the two most illustrious victims of the close of his reign, embodied also the
heads of the policy which it was that monarch’s wish should be continued
by Richelieu’s successor. “Forasmuch,” ran the will, “that for weighty
reasons, important to the welfare of our State, we found ourselves

compelled to deprive the Sieur de Châteauneuf of the post of Keeper of the
Seals of France, and have him sent to the Castle of Angoulême, in which he
has remained by our command up to the present time, we will and intend
that the said Sieur de Châteauneuf remain in the same state in which he is at
present, in the said Castle of Angoulême, until after the peace be concluded
and executed; under charge, nevertheless, that he shall not then be set at
liberty save by the order of the Queen-Regent, under the advice of her
Council, which shall appoint a place to which he shall retire, within the
realm or without the realm, as may be judged best. And as our design is to
take foresight of all such subjects as may possibly in some way or other
disturb the precautionary arrangements which we have made to preserve the
repose and safety of our realm, the knowledge that we have of the bad
conduct of the Lady Duchess de Chevreuse, of the artifices which she has
employed up to this moment without the kingdom with our enemies, made
us judge it fitting to forbid her, as we do, entrance into our kingdom during
the war: desiring even that after the peace be concluded and executed she
may not return into our kingdom, save only under the orders of the said
Lady Queen-Regent, with the advice of the said Council, under charge,
nevertheless, that she shall not either take up her abode or be in any place
near to the Court or to the said Queen-Regent.”

Within a few days only after the decease of Louis XIII. that same
Parliament which had enrolled his will reformed it. The Queen-Regent was
freed from every fetter and restriction, and invested with almost absolute
sovereignty; the ban was removed from the proscribed couple so solemnly
denounced, Châteauneuf’s prison doors were thrown open, and Madame de
Chevreuse quitted Brussels triumphantly, with a cortége of twenty
carriages, filled with lords and ladies of the highest rank in that Court, to
return once more to France and to the side of her royal friend and mistress.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] This nobleman died at Rome in December, 1867, at the age of sixty-five,
having gone thither to aid the Pope against the Garibaldians.

[9] Tallement des Réaux.

[10] Mdme. de Motteville.

[11] Mémoires, Petitot’s Collection, 2nd series, vol. li. p. 339.

[12] Archives des Affaires Étrangères; France, tom. CI.

[13] Archives des Affaires Étrangères; France, tom. cii. Inedited Memoir of
Richelieu.

[14] Archives des Affaires Étrangères, France, tom. CI.

CHAPTER IV.

RETURN OF MADAME DE CHEVREUSE TO COURT.

After ten years’ absence from the scene of her former triumphs, social
and political, did the brilliant Duchess then once more find herself safe and
free in France. The Gazette de Renaudot—the Moniteur of that day—
recording the return of Madame de Chevreuse, on the 14th of June, 1643,
remarks[15]:—“During such long exile, this princess has manifested what an
elevated mind like hers can do, in spite of all those vicissitudes of fortune
which her constancy has surmounted. The Duchess went to pay homage to
their Majesties, during which visit she received so many tokens of affection
from the Queen-Regent, and gave her in return such proofs of her zeal in
everything relating to her service, and so much resignation to her will, that
it indeed appears that length of time, distance, or thorny asperities can only
prevail over common minds. Hence the great train of visitors from this
Court to her daily, and for which her spacious hotel scarcely affords room,
does not excite so much wonder as the fact which has been the subject of
remark, that the fatigue consequent upon long journeys and the rigour of
adverse fortune have worked no change in her magnanimity, nor—which is
the more extraordinary—in her beauty.”

Making due allowance for the inflated diction of the complaisant Court
newswriter, let us endeavour to approach somewhat nearer to the truth.

Madame de Chevreuse had then entered upon her forty-third year.
Though still surprisingly well-preserved, her beauty, tried by adversity, was
visibly on the decline. The inclination to gallantry still existed, but subdued,
politics having gained the supremacy. She had formed the acquaintance of,
and held political relations with, the most celebrated statesmen in Europe.
She had figured at almost all its Courts, the strength and weakness of its
several Governments were known to her, and in her wanderings, having
seen “men and cities,” she had acquired a large experience. The tried
favourite hoped to find Anne of Austria the same as she had left her—
averse to business, and very willing to allow herself to be led by those for
whom she had a particular affection; and as Madame de Chevreuse had
been in her youthful days paramount in the Queen’s affection, she fully
expected to exercise over her that twofold ascendancy which love and
capacity would jointly give. More ambitious for her friends than for herself,
she saw them already rewarded for their long sacrifices, replacing
everywhere the creatures of Richelieu, and at their head, in the highest post,
as first minister, him who for her sake had broken with the triumphant
Cardinal, and had endured an imprisonment of ten tedious years. She did
not care much about Mazarin, with whom she had no acquaintance, whom
she had never seen, and who appeared to her unsupported either by the
Court or the French nation, whilst she felt herself sustained by all that was
illustrious, powerful, and accredited therein. She believed that she could
make sure of the Duke d’Orleans through his wife, the beautiful Margaret,
sister of Charles of Lorraine. She could dispose almost at will of the Houses
of Rohan and Lorraine, particularly of the Duke de Guise and the Duke
d’Elbeuf, like herself just returned from Flanders. She reckoned upon the
Vendômes, upon the Duke d’Epernon, upon La Vieuville, her old
companions in exile in England; upon the ill-treated Bouillons, upon La
Rochefoucauld, whose disposition and pretensions were so well known to
her; upon Lord Montagu, who had been her slave, and at that moment

possessed the entire confidence of Anne of Austria; upon La Châtre, the
friend of the Vendômes, and Colonel-General of the Swiss Guards; upon
Treville, upon Beringhen, upon Jars, upon La Porte, who were all emerging
from exile, prison, and disgrace. Among the women, her young stepmother
and her sister-in-law seemed secure—Madame de Montbazon and Madame
de Guéméné, the two greatest beauties of the time, who drew after them a
numerous crowd of old and young adorers. She knew also that among the
first acts of the Regent had been the recall to her side of the two noble
victims of Richelieu—Madame de Senécé and Madame de Hautefort,
whose virtue and piety had conspired so beneficially with other influences,
and had given them an inestimable weight in the household of Anne of
Austria. All those calculations seemed accurate, all those hopes well-
founded; and Madame de Chevreuse left Brussels firmly persuaded that she
was about to re-enter the Louvre as a conqueress. She deceived herself: the
Queen was already changed, or very nearly so.

To show due honour to her former favourite, however, Anne of Austria
despatched La Rochefoucauld to greet and escort her homewards; but
before he set out she charged him to inform the Duchess of the altered
disposition in which she would find her royal mistress. During that
audience Rochefoucauld did his utmost to reinstate his charming friend and
close ally in the Queen’s good graces. “I spoke to her,” says he, “with more
freedom perhaps than was becoming. I set before her Madame de
Chevreuse’s fidelity, her long-continued services, and the severity of the
misfortunes which they had entailed upon her. I entreated her to consider of
what fickleness she would be thought capable, and what interpretation
might be placed upon such inconsiderateness if she should prefer Cardinal
Mazarin to Madame de Chevreuse. Our conversation was long and stormy,
and I saw clearly that I had exasperated her.” He then started to meet the
Duchess on the road from Brussels, and found her at Roye, whither
Montagu had already preceded him. Montagu had travelled to Roye to place

Mazarin’s homage at the feet of Madame de Chevreuse, with the view of
bringing about at any cost an union and identity of policy between the old
and the new favourite. He was no longer the gay and sprightly Walter
Montagu, the friend of Holland and Buckingham, the enamoured knight
ever ready to break a lance against all comers for a glance of the bright eyes
of Madame de Chevreuse. Time had changed him as well as others: he had
become a bigot and a devotee, and already contemplated taking orders in
the Church of Rome. He still remained, however, attached to the object of
his former adoration, but above all he belonged to the Queen, and
consequently resigned to Mazarin. La Rochefoucauld—ever ready to
ascribe to himself the chief share in any undertaking in which he figured, as
well as the character of a great politician—asserts that he entreated Madame
de Chevreuse not to attempt at first to govern the Queen, but to endeavour
solely to regain in Anne’s mind and heart that place of which it had been
sought to deprive her, and to put herself in a position in which she would be
able to protect or ruin the Cardinal, according to conduct or circumstances
emanating from himself.

The Duchess listened attentively to the advice of both her old friends,
promised to follow it, and did so in fact, but in her own peculiar way, and in
that of the interest of the party she had so long served, and which she would
not abandon. As Anne of Austria seemed much pleased at seeing the noble
wanderer again, and gave her a warm reception, Marie did not perceive any
difference in the Queen’s sentiments, and flattered herself that by constant
assiduousness she would ere long resume that sway over the Regent’s mind
she had formerly exercised.

Operating against this not unreasonable expectation of Madame de
Chevreuse, Mazarin had a silent but potent ally in the newly-awakened
inclination of Anne for repose and a tranquil life. The first draughts of
almost supreme power tasted by the long-oppressed Queen were not yet

embittered by faction and anarchy. In bygone days, insult, neglect, and
persecution had stirred her at intervals into mental activity, and urged her
upon dangerous courses; but now, having obtained all she aimed at, happy,
and beginning to form attachments, she entertained a dread of troublesome
adventures and hazardous enterprises. She therefore feared Madame de
Chevreuse quite as much as she loved her. The astute Cardinal anxiously
strove to foster such distrust. He looked for support from the Princess de
Condé, then high in the Queen’s favour, both through her own merit as well
as that of the Prince her husband, but more than all through the brilliant
exploits of her son, the Duke d’Enghien; through the services also of her
son-in-law the Duke de Longueville, who had, with honourable distinction,
commanded the armies of Italy and Germany, and by her recently-married
daughter, Madame de Longueville, already the darling of the salons and the
Court. The Princess, like Queen Anne, had in the heyday of her beauty been
fond of homage and gallantry, but had now grown serious, and displayed a
somewhat lively piety. She held Madame de Chevreuse in aversion, and
detested Châteauneuf, who, in 1632, at Toulouse, had presided at the trial
and condemnation of her brother, Henri de Montmorency. She therefore had
striven, in concert with Mazarin, to destroy or at least weaken Madame de
Chevreuse’s hold upon the Queen. Armed with the last will of Louis XIII.,
they had made it appear something like a fault in the Queen’s eyes to
disregard it so soon and so entirely. They had given her to understand that
former days and associations could never return; that the amusements and
passions of early youth were but “evil accompaniments”[16] of a later period
of life; that now she was before all things a mother and a Queen; that
Madame de Chevreuse, dissipated and carried away by passion, and
cherishing the same inclination for gallantry and idle vanity as hitherto, was
no longer worthy of her confidence; that she had brought good fortune to no
one; and that in lavishing wealth and honour upon the Duchess the debt of
gratitude she owed her would be sufficiently discharged.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] No. lxxvii. p. 579.

[16] Madame de Motteville, tom. i. p. 162.—“Mauvais accompagnements.”

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.

ANNE OF AUSTRIA’S PRIME MINISTER AND HIS POLICY.

And now what was the actual position of Mazarin on succeeding to
power in 1643?

Richelieu had died admired and abhorred. The people, glad to be
delivered from so heavy a yoke, obeyed with joy the incipient rule of the
Queen-Regent. The courtiers were at first enchanted with a Government
that refused nothing asked of it. It appeared, as one of the number said, that
there were no more than five little words in the French language: “La reine
est si bonne!”[17] The State prisons threw open their gates; the rights of
parliaments were respected; the princes of the blood and the great nobles
were restored to their governorships. There was for a season one unanimous
concert of praise and thanksgiving. But when the princes and parliaments
were desirous, as before Richelieu’s rule, of participating in the general
direction of the State, and especially in the distribution of place and
patronage, great was the surprise of both at finding a steady resistance on
the part of the Queen-Regent. To see her manifest a disposition to govern
without them was looked upon as something scandalous. Every attempt she
made thenceforward to retain a power which they evaded, or to repossess
herself of that which she had imprudently suffered to escape from her grasp,
seemed to them nothing less than a continuation of the odious system of

Richelieu. Their exasperation was increased to the highest degree, therefore,
when they beheld her give her entire confidence to a foreigner, to a
Cardinal, to a creature of Richelieu. By that triple title Mazarin was equally
hateful to the great nobles, the members of parliament, and the middle class.
The tyranny of Richelieu had in the end attained to something noble by the
high-handed heedlessness of all his acts. If the people were to be trampled
on, it was a species of consolation that their oppressor was feared by others
as well as themselves. But that the oppression of the doomed French nation
was to be continued by a more ignoble hand was altogether intolerable.
Frenchmen had begun to ask one another, who was this Mazarin who had
come to rule over them? He could not—like Richelieu—boast of his high
birth, of descent from a long line of noble ancestors—Frenchmen. Poets and
romancers, ye whose imaginations delight to dwell upon sudden downfalls
and rapid rises, mark well that little lad at play upon the Sicilian shore near
the town of Mazzara! Springing from the lowest of the plebeian class, his
family have not even a surname. He is the son of one Pierre, a fisherman,
whose humble hut stands yonder beneath the cliff. But a day will come
when that lowly-born lad, joining his baptismal name to that of the town
which sheltered his cradle, will become Jules de Mazarin, robed in the
Roman purple, quartering his shield with the consular fasces of Julius
Cæsar, governing France, and through her preparing and influencing the
destinies of entire Europe.

It was not, however, by easy steps that Richelieu’s disciple and successor
obtained a firm grasp of that plenary power which the master mind of the
former had consolidated and long wielded so grandly and terribly. The
Queen herself at the commencement of the Regency had not yet renounced
her former friendships. During a considerable portion of her married life
Anne had impatiently endured the slights and disparagements to which she
was so long subjected, both by her husband and his Minister. Through
engaging in divers dangerous and unsuccessful enterprises, she had been

deprived of all influence, and was a queen only in name. But, a woman and
a Spaniard, she had descended to dissimulation, and in that “ugly but
necessary virtue”[18] made rapid progress. Up to the time of Richelieu’s
death she had played a double game—made partisans in secret, with the
object of subverting the Cardinal’s power, whilst feigning the semblance of
friendship towards him, and did not scruple to humiliate herself on
occasions, in order to carry her point. After that great man’s decease,
through rare patience, great caution, and a persistent line of conduct, she
ultimately attained that for which she had been willing to make any and
every sacrifice—the Regency. During the King’s last illness, the mistrusted
Queen and wife had profited by Mazarin’s unhoped-for service, as Prime
Minister, in prevailing over the unwillingness of the dying King to appoint
her custodian of his son, and Regent during his minority. She regarded this,
therefore, as a first and most important service on the part of Mazarin
towards her, and for which she felt proportionately grateful. Such was the
Cardinal’s first stepping-stone to the good graces of Anne of Austria, and
his twofold talent both as a laborious and indefatigable statesman and a
consummate courtier, speedily helped to secure for him her entire
confidence. The singular personal resemblance he bore to that desperate
enamorado of her early womanhood, the brilliant Buckingham, may
probably also have served him as a favourable prestige. On her accession to
power Anne did not manifest much firmness of character. Naturally
indolent, she disliked the drudgery attendant upon business details, and
hence continued through convenience the services of a man who, by taking
off her hands the wearisome routine of State affairs, allowed her to reign at
her ease.

Mazarin, moreover, had never been displeasing to her. He had begun to
ingratiate himself during the month preceding the death of Louis XIII.,[19]
and she named him Prime Minister about the middle of May—partly

through personal liking, but more through political necessity. Far from
appearing to resemble the impassive and imperious Richelieu, Anne
perhaps might have recalled with agreeable emotion the words of her
deceased consort when he first presented Mazarin to her (in 1639 or 1640)
—“He will please you, madame, because he bears a striking resemblance to
Buckingham.” By degrees the liking increased, and grew sufficiently strong
to resist every assault from his enemies. At the same time the Minister to
whom the Queen owed so much, instead of dictating to and presuming to
govern her, was ever at her feet, and prodigal of that attention, respect, and
tenderness to which she had been hitherto a stranger.

It is a delicate matter to investigate with exactitude the means by which
Mazarin obtained entire sway over the Queen-Regent, and one which La
Rochefoucauld scarcely touches upon; but it is too interesting a point in
history to be left in the dark, and thereby to altogether disregard that which
first constituted the minister’s strength, and soon afterwards became the
centre and key of the situation. After a long season of oppression, regal
powers and splendour gilded the hours of Anne of Austria, and her Spanish
pride exacted the tribute of respect and homage. Mazarin was prodigal of
both. He cast himself at her feet in order to reach her heart. In her heart of
hearts she was not the less touched by the grave accusation brought against
him that he was a foreigner, for was not she also a foreigner? Perhaps that
of itself proved the source of a mysterious attraction to her, and she may
have found it a singular pleasure to converse with her Prime Minister in her
mother tongue as a compatriot and friend. To all this must be added the
mind and manners of Mazarin—supple and insinuating, always master of
himself, of an unchangeable serenity amidst the gravest circumstances, full
of confidence in his good star, and diffusing that confidence around him. It
must also be remembered that Cardinal although he was, Mazarin was not a
priest; that imbued with the maxims which formed the code of gallantry of
her native land, Anne of Austria had always loved to please the other sex;

that she was then forty-one and still beautiful, that her Prime Minister was
of the same age, that he was exceedingly well-made and of a most pleasing
countenance, in which finesse, was blended with a certain air of greatness.
He had readily recognised that without ancestry, establishment, or support
in France, and surrounded by rivals and enemies, all his strength centred in
the Queen. He applied himself therefore above all things to gain her heart,
as Richelieu had tried before him; and as he happily possessed far other
means for attaining success in that respect, the handsome and gentle-
mannered Cardinal eventually succeeded. Once master of her heart, he
easily directed the mind of Anne of Austria, and taught her the difficult art
of pursuing ever the same end by the aid of conduct the most diverse,
according to the difference of circumstances.

But favourable and indeed gracious as his royal mistress had shown
herself towards him personally, and apart from any particular line of policy,
at the outset of his premiership Mazarin had nevertheless to contend against
a formidable host of enemies; and not the least redoubtable among them
might be reckoned that intrepid political heroine the lately-banished
Duchess de Chevreuse. No sooner did she again find herself at the side of
Anne of Austria than the indefatigable Marie set to work with all her
characteristic dash, spirit, and energy to attack Richelieu’s system and its
adherents, now directed by Mazarin.

The first point she sought to carry was the return of Châteauneuf to
office. “The good sense and long experience of M. de Châteauneuf,” says
La Rochefoucauld, “were known to the Queen. He had undergone a
rigorous imprisonment for his adhesion to her cause; he was firm, decisive,
loved the State, and more capable than anyone else of re-establishing the
old form of government which Richelieu had first begun to destroy. Firmly
attached to Mdme. de Chevreuse, she knew sufficiently-well how to govern
him. She therefore urged his return with much warmth.” Châteauneuf had

already obtained as a royal boon that the “rude and miserable condition” of
close incarceration under which he had groaned for ten years should be
changed for a compulsory residence at one of his country houses. Mdme. de
Chevreuse demanded the termination of this mitigated exile, that she might
once more behold him free who had endured such extremities for the
Queen’s sake and her own. Mazarin saw that he must yield, but only did so
tardily, never appearing himself to repulse Châteauneuf, but always alleging
the paramount necessity of conciliating the Condé family, and especially the
Princess, who, as already said, bore bitter enmity towards him as the judge
of her brother, Henri de Montmorency. Châteauneuf was therefore recalled,
but with that reservation accorded to the last clause of the King’s will, that
he should not appear at Court, but reside at his own house of Montrouge,
near Paris, where his friends might visit him.

The next step was to transfer him thence to some ministerial office.
Châteauneuf was no longer a young man, but neither his energy nor his
ambition had deserted him, and Mdme. de Chevreuse made it a point of
honour to reinstate him in the post of Keeper of the Seals, which he had
formerly held and lost through her, and which all Queen Anne’s old friends
now saw with indignation occupied by one of the most detested of
Richelieu’s creatures, Pierre Séguier. This last, however, was a man of
capacity—laborious, well-informed and full of resources. To these
qualifications he added a remarkable suppleness, which made him very
useful and accommodating to a Prime Minister. He moreover had the
support of friends who stood high in the Queen’s favour, and was further
strengthened by the opposition of the Condés and the Bishop of Beauvais to
Châteauneuf. The Duchess perceiving that it was almost impossible to
surmount so powerful an opposition, took another way of arriving at the
same end. She contented herself with asking for the lowest seat in the
cabinet for her friend; well knowing that once installed therein,
Châteauneuf would soon manage all the rest and aggrandise his position.

At the same time that she strove to extricate from disgrace the man upon
whom rested all her political hopes, Madame de Chevreuse, not daring to
attack Mazarin overtly, insensibly undermined the ground beneath his feet,
and step by step prepared his ruin. Her experienced eye enabled her
promptly to perceive the most favourable point of attack whence to assail
the Queen, and the watchword she passed was to fan and keep alive to the
utmost the general feeling of reprobation which all the proscribed, on
returning to France, had aroused and disseminated against the memory of
Richelieu. This feeling was universal—among the great families he had
decimated or despoiled;—in the Church, too firmly repressed not to be
unmindful of its abasement;—in the Parliament, strictly confined to its
judicial functions, and aspiring to break through such narrow limits. The
same feeling was still alive in the Queen’s bosom, who could not have
forgotten the deep humiliation to which Richelieu had subjected her, and
the fate for which he had probably reserved her. These tactics succeeded,
and on every side there arose against the late violence and tyranny, and, by
a rebound, against the creatures of Richelieu, a storm so furious that
Mazarin’s utmost ability was taxed to allay it.

Madame de Chevreuse likewise supplicated Anne of Austria to repair the
long-endured misfortunes of the Vendôme princes, by bestowing upon them
either the Admiralty, to which an immense power was attached, or the
government of Brittany, which the head of the family, Cæsar de Vendôme,
had formerly held—deriving it alike from the hand of his father, Henry IV.,
and as the heritage of his father-in-law, the Duke de Mercœur. This was
nothing less than demanding the aggrandisement of an unfriendly house,
and at the same time the ruin of two families that had served Richelieu with
the utmost devotion, and were best capable of supporting Mazarin. The
Minister parried the blow aimed at him by the Duchess by dint of address
and patience, never refusing, always eluding, and summoning to his aid his
grand ally, as he termed it—Time. Before the return of Madame de

Chevreuse he had found himself forced to win over the Vendômes, and to
secure them in his interest. On Richelieu’s death he had strenuously
contributed to obtain their recall, and had since made them every kind of
advance; but he soon perceived that he could not satisfy them without
bringing about his own destruction. The Duke Cæsar de Vendôme, son of
Henry IV. and The Fair Gabrielle, had early carried his pretensions to a
great height, and had shown himself restless and factious as a legitimate
prince. He had passed his life in revolts and conspiracies, and in 1641 had
been compelled to flee to England through suspicion of being implicated in
an attempt to assassinate Richelieu. He did not dare return to France until
after the Cardinal’s death; and, as may well be imagined, he came back
breathing the direst vengeance. Against the ambition of the Vendômes
Mazarin skilfully opposed that of the Condés, who were inimical to the
aggrandisement of a house too nearly rivalling their own. But it was very
difficult to retain Brittany in the hands of its newly-appointed governor, the
Marshal La Meilleraie, in face of the claim of a son of Henry the Great,
who had formerly held it, and demanded it back as a sort of heirloom.
Mazarin therefore resigned himself to the sacrifice of La Meilleraie, but he
lightened it as much as possible. He persuaded the Queen to assume to
herself the government of Brittany, and have only a lieutenant-general over
it—a post, of course, beneath the dignity of the Vendômes, and which
would, therefore, remain in La Meilleraie’s hands. The latter could not take
offence at being second in power therein to the Queen; and to arrange
everything to the entire satisfaction of a person of such importance,
Mazarin solicited for him soon afterwards the title of duke, which the
deceased King had, in fact, promised the Marshal, and the reversion of the
post of Grand Master of the Artillery for his son—that same son on whom
subsequently Mazarin bestowed, with his own name, the hand of his niece,
the beautiful Hortense.

Mazarin was so much the less inclined to favour the house of Vendôme
from having encountered a dangerous rival in the Queen’s good graces, in
Vendôme’s youngest son, Beaufort, a young, bold, and flourishing gallant,
who displayed ostentatiously all the exterior signs of loyalty and chivalry,
and affected for Anne of Austria a passionate devotion not likely to be
displeasing. “He was tall, well-made, dexterous, and indefatigable in all
warlike exercises,” says La Rochefoucauld, “but artificial withal, and
wanting in truthfulness of character. Mentally he was heavy and badly
cultivated; nevertheless he attained his objects cleverly enough through the
blunt coarseness of his manners. He was of high but unsteady courage, and
was not a little envious and malignant.”[20] De Retz does not, like La
Rochefoucauld, accuse Beaufort of artificiality, but represents him as
presumptuous and of thorough incapacity. His portrait of him, though over-
coloured, like most others from the coadjutor’s pen, is sufficiently faithful,
but at the commencement of the Regency, the defects of the Duke de
Beaufort had not fully declared themselves, and were less conspicuous than
his good qualities. Some few days before her husband’s death, Anne of
Austria had placed her children under his charge—a mark of confidence
that so elated him that the young Duke conceived hopes which his
impetuosity hindered him from sufficiently disguising. Indeed, these were
presumed upon so far as to give offence to the Queen; and, as the height of
inconsistency, he committed at the same time the egregious folly of publicly
enacting the led-captain in the rosy chains of the handsome but decried
Duchess de Montbazon. It was only, however, by slow degrees that the
Queen’s liking for him abated. At first, she had proposed to confer upon
him the post of Grand-Écuyer, vacant since the death of the unfortunate
Cinq-Mars, which would have kept him in close attendance upon her, and
was altogether a fitting appointment—for Beaufort had nothing of the
statesman in him; with little intellect and no reticence, he was also averse to
steady application to business, and capable only of some bold and violent

course of action. The Duke had the folly to refuse this post of Grand-
Écuyer, hoping for a better; and then, altering his mind when it was too late,
he solicited it only to incur disappointment.[21] The more his favour
diminished, the more his irritation increased, and it was not long ere he
placed himself at the head of the Cardinal’s bitterest enemies.

Madame de Chevreuse hoped to be more fortunate in securing the
governorship of Havre for a very different sort of person—for a man of
tried devotedness and of a rare and subtle intellect—La Rochefoucauld. She
would thereby recompense the services rendered to the Queen and herself,
strengthen and aggrandize one of the chiefs of the Importants, and weaken
Mazarin by depriving of an important government a person upon whom he
had entire reliance—Richelieu’s niece, the Duchess d’Aiguillon. The
Cardinal succeeded in rendering this manœuvre abortive, without appearing
to have any hand in it. And herein, as in many other matters, the art of
Mazarin was to wear the semblance of merely confirming the Queen in the
resolves with which he inspired her.

In thus attributing these various designs, this connected and consistent
line of conduct, to Madame de Chevreuse, we do not advance it as our own
opinion, but as that of La Rochefoucauld, who must have been perfectly
well informed. He attributes it to her both in his own affairs and in those of
the Vendômes. Neither was Mazarin blind to the fact, for more than once in
his private notes we read these words:—“My greatest enemies are the
Vendômes and Madame de Chevreuse, who urges them on.” He tells us also
that she had formed the project of marrying her charming daughter
Charlotte, then sixteen, to the Vendôme’s eldest son, the Duke de Mercœur,
whilst his brother Beaufort should espouse the wealthy Mademoiselle
d’Epernon, who foiled these designs, and even greater still, by throwing
herself at four-and-twenty into a convent of Carmelites. These marriages,
which would have reconciled, united, and strengthened so many great

houses, moderately attached to the Queen and her minister, terrified
Richelieu’s successor. He therefore sought to foil them by every means in
his power, and succeeded in prevailing upon the Queen to frustrate them in
an underhand way; having found that the union of Mademoiselle de
Vendôme with the brilliant but restless Duke de Nemours had caused him
more than ordinary anxiety.

If the intricate details of those counter intrigues of Mazarin and Madame
de Chevreuse be followed attentively, we are at a loss to say to which of the
two antagonists the palm for skill, sagacity, and address should be given.
Whilst Mazarin was astute enough to make a certain amount of sacrifice in
order to reserve to himself the right of not making greater—treating
everyone with apparent consideration, rendering no one desperate,
promising much, holding back the least possible proprio motu of himself,
and surrounding Madame de Chevreuse herself with attention and homage
without suffering any illusion to beguile him as to the nature of her
sentiments—she, on her part, paid him back in the same coin. La
Rochefoucauld says that during these mollia tempora, Madame de
Chevreuse and Mazarin actually flirted with each other. The Duchess, who
had always intermingled gallantry with politics, tried, as it appears, the
power of her charms upon the Cardinal. The latter, on his side, failed not to
lavish honeyed words, and “essayoit même quelque fois de lui faire croire
qu’elle lui donnoit de l’amour.”[22] There were other ladies also, it seems,
who would not have been sorry to please the handsome First Minister a
little. Amongst these might be numbered the Princess de Guéméné,[23] one
of the greatest beauties of the French Court, who, certainly, if only one half
the stories related of her be true, was by no means of a ferocious disposition
in affairs of gallantry. This lady, as well as her husband, were both
favourable to Mazarin, in spite of all the efforts of Madame de Montbazon,
and Madame de Chevreuse, her sister-in-law. It may be readily imagined

that Mazarin devoted great attention to Madame de Guéméné, and did not
fail to pay her a host of compliments, as he did to Madame de Chevreuse;
but as he went no further, the two gay ladies were at a loss to conceive what
so many compliments coupled with so much reserve meant. They
sometimes asked which of the two was really the object of his admiration;
and as he still made no further advances at the same time that he continued
his gallant protestations, “these ladies,” says Mazarin, “si esamina la mia
vita e si conclude che io sia impotente.”[24]

Political intrigue had become such an affair of fashion among the Court
dames of that day, that those of the highest rank made no scruple of
bringing into play all the artillery of their wit and beauty whenever they
could contribute to the success of their enterprises. Still endowed with those
two potent gifts to an eminent degree, Madame de Chevreuse brought all
her various influences into perfect combination, and had grown so
passionately fond of the fierce excitement of conspiring, that love was to
her now merely a means and political victory the end. She devoted literally
her entire existence to it, living in the confidence and intimacy of the
Vendômes and other noble perturbators of the hour. Her activity, her
penetration, her energy obtained for her among the party of the Importants
the importance she coveted. It was not long, therefore, ere she begun to give
Mazarin cause for grave anxiety. During the encounters resulting from this
strenuous antagonism, reconciliations occasionally took place, in which
even the Cardinal’s coldness, caution, and his laborious occupation, could
not, it is said, place him beyond reach of the Duchess’s irresistible
fascinations. But the latter, well aware that the rôle of Mazarin’s mistress
would not give to her grasp the helm of the State, which he reserved
exclusively to himself, preferred, therefore, rather to remain his enemy, and
figure at the head and front of the faction antagonistic to his government.

This flirting and skirmishing had gone on for some time, but at last
natural feeling prevailed over political reticence. Madame de Chevreuse
grew impatient at obtaining words only, and scarcely anything serious or
effective. She had, it is true, received some money for her own use, either in
repayment of that which she had formerly lent the Queen, or for the
discharge of debts contracted during exile and in the interest of Anne of
Austria. On returning to Court, one of her earliest steps was to withdraw her
friend and protégé, Alexandre de Campion, from the service of the
Vendômes, and place him in a suitable position in the Queen’s household.
Châteauneuf had been reinstated in his former post of Chancellor (des
Ordres du Roi), and later his governorship of Touraine was restored to him
on the death of the Marquis de Gèvres, who fell at the siege of Thionville;
but the Duchess considered that that was doing very little for a man of
Châteauneuf’s merit—for him who had staked fortune and life, and
undergone ten years’ imprisonment. She readily perceived, therefore, that
the perpetual delay of favours ever promised, ever deferred in the instances
of the Vendômes and La Rochefoucauld, were so many artifices of the
Cardinal, and that she was his dupe. This conviction put the spirited partisan
upon her mettle. She began to titter, to mock, and to expostulate by turns,
and sometimes twitted the minister in pert and derisive terms. This,
however, betrayed a want of her ordinary precaution, and only served to fill
Mazarin’s quiver with shafts to be used against herself. He made the Queen
believe that Madame de Chevreuse sought to rule her with a rod of iron;
that she had changed her mask, but not her character; that she was ever the
same impulsive and restless person, who, with all her talent and
devotedness, had never worked aught but mischief around her, and was only
instrumental in ruining others as well as herself. By degrees, underhand and
hidden as it might be, war between the Duchess and the Cardinal declared
itself unmistakably. The commencement and progress of this curious
struggle for supremacy has been admirably depicted by La Rochefoucauld;

and, while the autograph memoranda of Mazarin cast a fresh flood of light
upon it, they enhance infinitely Madame de Chevreuse’s ability by
revealing to what an extent that Minister dreaded her.

In every page of these invaluable carnets he indicates her as being the
head and mainspring of the Importants. “It is Madame de Chevreuse,” he
writes repeatedly, “who stirs them all up. She endeavours to strengthen the
hands of the Vendômes; she tries to win over every member of the house of
Lorraine; she has already gained the Duke de Guise, and through him she
strives to carry away from me the Duke d’Elbeuf.” “She sees clearly
through everything; she has guessed very accurately that it is I who have
secretly persuaded the Queen to hinder the restoration of the government of
Brittany to the Duke de Vendôme. She has said so to her father, the Duke de
Montbazon, and to Montagu. She has quarrelled with Montagu, in fact,
because he raises an obstacle to Châteauneuf by supporting Séguier.”
“Nothing discourages Madame de Chevreuse; she entreats the Vendômes to
have patience, and sustains them by promising a speedy change of scene.”
“Madame de Chevreuse never relinquishes the hope of displacing me. The
reason she gives for this is, that when the Queen refused to put Châteauneuf
at the head of the government, she stated that she could not do it
immediately, as she must have some consideration for me, whence Madame
de Chevreuse concludes that the Queen has much esteem and liking for
Châteauneuf, and that when I shall be no longer where I am, the post is
secured for her friend. Hence the hopes and illusions with which they are
buoyed up.” “The Duchess and her friends assert that the Queen will shortly
send for Châteauneuf; and by so doing they abuse the minds of all, and
prompt those who are looking to their future interests to pay court to her
and seek her friendship. They make an excuse for the Queen’s delay in
giving him my place, by saying that she has still need of me for some short
time.” “I am told that Madame de Chevreuse secretly directs Madame de
Vendôme (a pious person who has great influence over the bishops and

convents), and gives her instructions, in order that she may not fall into
error, and that all the machinery used against me may thoroughly answer its
purpose.” From this last entry it is clear that Madame de Chevreuse,
without being in the smallest degree possible a dévote, knew right well how
to make use of the parti dévot, which then exercised great influence over
Anne of Austria’s mind, and gave serious uneasiness to Mazarin.

The Prime Minister’s chief difficulty was to make Queen Anne—the
sister of the King of Spain, and herself of a piety thoroughly Spanish—
understand that it was necessary, notwithstanding the engagements which
she had so often contracted, notwithstanding the instances of the Court of
Rome and those of the heads of the episcopate, to continue the alliance with
the Protestants of Germany and Holland, and to persist in only consenting
to a general peace in which the allies of France should equally find their
account as well as that country itself. On the other side, it was continually
dinned into the Queen’s ear that it was practicable to make a separate treaty
of peace, and negotiate singly with Spain on very fitting conditions, that by
such means the scandal of an impious war between “the very Christian” and
“the very Catholic” King would cease, and a relief be afforded to France
very much needed. Such was the policy of the Queen’s old friends. It was at
least specious, and reckoned numerous partisans among men the most
intelligent and attached to the interests of their country. Mazarin, the
disciple and successor of Richelieu, had higher views, but which it was not
easy at first to make Anne of Austria comprehend. By degrees, however, he
succeeded, thanks to his judicious efforts, renewed incessantly and with
infinite art; thanks especially to the victories of the Duke d’Enghien—for in
all worldly affairs success is a very eloquent and right persuasive advocate.
The Queen, however, remained for a considerable interval undecided, and it
may be seen by Mazarin’s own memoranda that during the latter part of
May, as well as through the whole of June and July, the Cardinal’s greatest
effort was to induce the Regent not to abandon her allies, but to firmly carry

on the war. Madame de Chevreuse, with Châteauneuf, defended the old
party policy, and strove to bring over Anne of Austria to it. “Madame de
Chevreuse,” wrote Mazarin, “causes the Queen to be told from all quarters
that I do not wish for peace, that I hold the same maxims as Cardinal
Richelieu on the point—that it is both easy and necessary to make a
separate treaty of peace.” On several occasions he made indignant
protestation against such arrangement, pointing out the danger with which it
was fraught, and that it would render ineffectual those sacrifices which
France had for so many years made. “Madame de Chevreuse,” he
exclaimed, “would ruin France!” He knew well that, intimately associated
with Gaston, her old accomplice in all the plots framed against Richelieu,
she had won him over to the idea of a separate peace by holding out the
hope of a marriage between his daughter Mademoiselle de Montpensier and
the Arch-duke, which would have brought him the government of the Low
Countries. He knew that she had preserved all her influence with the Duke
de Lorraine; he knew, in fine, that she boasted of having the power of
promptly negotiating a peace through the mediation of the Queen of Spain,
who was at her disposal. Thus informed, he entreated his royal mistress to
reject all Madame de Chevreuse’s propositions, and to tell her plainly that
she would not listen to anything relating to a separate treaty, that she was
decided upon not separating herself from her allies, that she desired a
general peace, that with such view she had sent her ministers to Munster,
who were then negotiating that important matter, and that it was superfluous
to speak to her any more upon the subject.

Though baffled on these different points, Madame de Chevreuse did not
consider herself vanquished. She rallied and emboldened her adherents by
her lofty spirit and firm resolution. The party feud went on—intrigues were
multiplied—but up to the close of August, 1643, no change had taken place,
though the acrimony of party feeling had become largely increased. Finding
that she had fruitlessly employed insinuation, flattery, artifice, and every

species of Court manœuvre, her daring mind did not shrink from the idea of
having recourse to other means of success. She kept up a brisk agitation
amongst the bishops and devotees, she continued to weave her political
plots with the chiefs of the Importants, and at the same time she formed a
closer intimacy with that small cabal which formed in some sort the
advance-guard of that party, composed of men reared amongst the old
conspiracies, accustomed to and always ready for coups de main, who had
of old embarked in more than one desperate enterprise against Richelieu,
and who, in an extremity, might be likewise launched against Mazarin. The
memoirs of the time, and especially those of De Retz and La
Rochefoucauld, make us sufficiently well acquainted with their names and
characters. The former mistress of Chalais found little difficulty in
acquiring sole sway over a faction composed of second-rate talents. She
caressed it skilfully; and, with the art of an experienced conspirator, she
fomented every germ of false honour, of quintessential devotedness, and
extravagant rashness. Mazarin, who, like Richelieu, had an admirable
police, forewarned of Madame de Chevreuse’s machinations, fully
comprehended the danger with which he was menaced. No one could have
been better informed as to his exact position than the Cardinal: and the
plans of the Duchess and the chiefs of the Importants developed themselves
clearly under Mazarin’s sharp-sightedness—either by their incessant and
elaborately-concerted intrigues with the Queen, to force her to abandon a
minister to whose policy she had not yet openly declared her adhesion, or,
should it prove necessary, treat that minister as De Luynes had done the last
Queen-mother’s favourite d’Ancre, and as Montrésor, Barrière, and Saint-
Ybar would have served Richelieu. The first plan not having succeeded,
they began to think seriously about carrying out the second, and Madame de
Chevreuse, the strongest mind of the party, proposed with some show of
reason to act before the return of the young hero of Rocroy, the Duke
d’Enghien; for that victorious soldier once in Paris would unquestionably

shield Mazarin. It became necessary, therefore, to profit by his absence in
order to strike a decisive blow. Success seemed certain, and even easy. They
were sure of having the people with them, who, exhausted by a long war
and groaning under taxation, would naturally welcome with delight the
hope of peace and repose. They might reckon on the declared support of the
parliament, burning to recover that importance in the State of which it had
been deprived by Richelieu, and which was then a matter of dispute with
Mazarin. They had all the secret, even overt sympathy of the episcopate,
which, with Rome, detested the Protestant alliance, and demanded the
restoration of that of Spain. The eager concurrence of the aristocracy could
not be doubted for a moment; which ever regretted its old and turbulent
independence, and whose most illustrious representatives, the Vendômes,
the Guises, the Bouillons, and the La Rochefoucaulds were strenously
opposed to the domination of a foreign favourite, without fortune, of no
birth, and as yet without fame. The princes of the blood resigned themselves
to Mazarin rather than to liking him. The Duke d’Orleans was not
remarkable for great fidelity to his friends, and the politic Prince de Condé
looked twice ere he quarrelled with the successful. He coaxed all parties,
whilst he clung to his own interests. His son, doubtless, would follow in his
father’s footsteps, and he would be won over by being overwhelmed with
honours. The day following that on which the blow should be struck there
would be no resistance to their ascendancy, and on the very day itself
scarcely any obstacle. The Italian regiments of Mazarin were with the army;
there were scarcely any other troops in Paris save the regiments of the
guards, the colonels of which were nearly all devoted to the Importants. The
Queen herself had not yet renounced her former friendships. Her prudent
reserve even was wrongly interpreted. As it was her desire to appease and
deal gently on all hands, she gave kind words to everybody, and those kind
words were taken as tacit encouragement. Anne had not hitherto shown
much firmness of character; a certain amount of liking for the Cardinal was

not unjustly imputed to her, and undue significance already attributed to the
steadily increasing attachment of a few short months.

Mazarin, on his own part, indulged in no illusions. He was decidedly not
yet master of Anne of Austria’s heart; since at that moment—that is to say,
during the month of July, 1643—in his most secret notes he displays a deep
inquietude and despondency. The dissimulation of which everybody
accused the Queen obviously terrified him, and we see him passing through
all the alternations of hope and fear. It is very curious to trace and follow
out the varied fluctuations of his mind. In his official letters to ambassadors
and generals he affects a security which he does not feel. With his own
intimate friends he permits some hint of his perplexities to escape him, but
in his private memoranda they are all laid bare. We therein read his inmost
carks and cares, and his passionate entreaties that the Queen-Regent would
open her mind to him. He feigns the utmost disinterestedness towards her;
he simply asks to make way for Châteauneuf, if she has any secret
preference for that minister. The ambiguous conduct of the Regent harasses
and distresses him, and he conjures her either to permit him to retire or to
declare herself in favour of his policy.

This exciting contest continued with the keenest activity, but no change
had occurred up to the end of July, and even the first days of August, 1643,
though this critical state of affairs had become greatly aggravated. The
violence of the Importants increased daily; the Queen defended her
minister, but she also showed consideration for his enemies. She hesitated
to take the decided attitude which Mazarin required at her hands, not only
in his individual interest, but in that of his government. Suddenly an
incident, very insignificant apparently, but which by assuming larger
proportions brought about the inevitable crisis—forced the Queen to declare
herself, and Madame de Chevreuse to plunge deeper into a baleful
enterprise, the idea of which had already forced itself upon her imagination.

A great scandal occurred. We allude to a quarrel between the two duchesses,
de Longueville and de Montbazon.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] De Retz Memoirs, Petitot Collection.

[18] Madame de Motteville.

[19] Louis died May 14th, 1643.

[20] La Rochefoucauld.

[21] Mazarin himself has furnished this fact, otherwise unknown, in one of his
diaries (Carnet, pp. 72, 73). The Cardinal-Minister was in the habit of jotting
down the chief events of each day in these small memorandum books (Carnets),
which he kept in the pocket of his cassock.

[22] La Rochefoucauld, Memoirs, p. 383.

[23] Anne de Rohan, wife of M. de Guéméné, eldest son of the Duke de
Montbazon, and brother of Madame de Chevreuse.

[24] Carnet, iii. p. 39.

CHAPTER II.

THE DUCHESS DE MONTBAZON.—THE AFFAIR OF THE DROPPED
LETTERS.—THE QUARREL OF THE TWO DUCHESSES.

On declaring itself of the party of Mazarin, the house of Condé had
drawn down the hatred of the Importants, though their hostility scarcely fell
upon Madame de Longueville. Her gentleness in everything in which her
heart was not seriously engaged, her entire indifference to politics at this
period of her life, with the graces of her mind and person, rendered her
pleasing to every one, and shielded her from party spite. But apart from
affairs of State, she had an enemy, and a formidable enemy, in the Duchess
de Montbazon. We have said that Madame de Montbazon had been the
mistress of the Duke de Longueville, and as one of the principal personages
of the drama we are about to relate, she requires to be somewhat better
known.

We shall pass over in silence many of her foibles, without attempting to
excuse any. Before sketching her life, or at least a portion of it, it will be
necessary, in order to protect her memory against an excess of severity, to
recall certain traditions and examples for which unhappily her family was
notorious.

Daughter of Claude de Bretagne, Baron d’Avangour, she was on her
mother’s side granddaughter of that very complaisant Marquis de La

Varenne Fouquet, who, successively scullion, cook, and maître d’hôtel of
Henry the Fourth, “gained more by carrying the amorous King’s poulets
than basting those in his kitchen.” Catherine Fouquet, Countess de Vertus,
his daughter, Madame de Montbazon’s mother, was beautiful, witty,
somewhat giddy, and very gallant. Impatient of all hindrance, she had
authorised one of her lovers to assassinate her husband; but it was the
husband who assassinated the lover. The tragical termination of this
rencontre does not seem to have cast a gloom over the life of the Countess
de Vertus, for at seventy she began to learn to dance, and when seventy-
three, married a young man over head and ears in debt.

In 1628, Marie d’Avangour quitted her convent to espouse Hercule de
Rohan, Duke de Montbazon, who was the father, by his first marriage, of
Madame de Chevreuse and of the Prince de Guéméné. She was sixteen, and
he sixty-one. Thorough fool as he was, the Duke did not conceal from
himself, it is said, the conviction that such an union was fraught with some
danger to him; but we may venture to affirm that he could not have foreseen
all its dangers. Full of respect for the virtues of Marie de’ Medicis, he
recommended her example to his wife; then, with every confidence in the
future, he conducted her to Court.

In beauty the daughter was worthy of the mother, but in vices she left her
far behind. Tallemant says she was one of the loveliest women imaginable.
Her mind was not her most brilliant side, and the little that she had was
turned to intrigue and perfidy. “Her mind,” says the indulgent Madame de
Motteville, “was not so fine as her person; her brilliancy was limited to her
eyes, which commanded love. She claimed universal admiration.” In regard
to her character, all are unanimous. De Retz, who knew her well, speaks of
her in these terms: “Madame de Montbazon was a very great beauty.
Modesty was wanting in her air. Her jargon might, during a dull hour, have
supplied the defects of her mind. She showed but little faith in gallantry,

none in business. She loved her own pleasure alone, and above her pleasure
her interest. I never saw a person who, in vice, preserved so little respect for
virtue.” Supremely vain and passionately fond of money, it was by the aid
of her beauty that she sought influence and fortune. She, therefore, took
infinite care of it, as of her idol, as of her resources, her treasure. She kept it
in repair, heightened it by all sorts of artifices, and preserved it almost
uninjured till her death. Madame de Motteville asserts that, during the latter
part of her life, she was as full of vanity as if she were but twenty-five years
of age; that she had the same desire to please, and that she wore her
mourning garb in so charming a manner, that “the order of nature seemed
changed, since age and beauty could be found united.” Ten years before, in
1647, at the age of thirty-five, when Mazarin gave a comedy in the Italian
style, that is, an opera, there was in the evening a grand ball, and the
Duchess de Montbazon was present, adorned with pearls, with a red feather
on her head, and so dazzling in her appearance that the whole company was
completely charmed. We can imagine what she was in 1643, at the age of
thirty-one.

Of the two conditions of perfect beauty—strength and grace, Madame de
Montbazon possessed the first in the highest degree. She was tall and
majestic, and she had all the charms of embonpoint. Her throat reminded
one of the fulness, in this particular, of the antique statues—exceeding
them, perhaps, somewhat. What struck the beholder most were her eyes and
hair of intense blackness, upon a skin of the most dazzling white. Her defect
was a nose somewhat too prominent, with a mouth so large as to give her
face an appearance of severity. It will be seen that she was the very opposite
of Madame de Longueville. The latter was tall, but not to excess. The
richness of her form did not diminish its delicacy. A moderate embonpoint
exhibited, in full and exquisite measure, the beauty of the female form. Her
eyes were of the softest blue; her hair of the most beautiful blonde. She had
the most majestic air, and yet her peculiar characteristic was grace. To these

were added the great difference of manners and tone. Madame de
Longueville was, in her deportment, dignity, politeness, modesty, sweetness
itself, with a languor and nonchalance which formed not her least charm.
Her words were few, as well as her gestures; the inflexions of her voice
were a perfect music.[25] The excess, into which she never fell, might have
been a sort of fastidiousness. Everything in her was wit, sentiment, charm.
Madame de Montbazon, on the contrary, was free of speech, bold and easy
in her tone, full of stateliness and pride.

The Duchess was, nevertheless, a very attractive creature when she
desired to be so, and such we must conceive her to have been if we would
take account of the admiration she excited, and not exactly like the person
which Cousin represents her when, at the age of nearly forty, she had
become “a Colossus”—to use Tallemant’s phrase. At the same time it is true
that, even in youth, she had less grace than strength, less delicacy than
majesty. It is also true that she was free of speech, and in tone was bold and
offhand; but those very defects for which she was remarkable only the
better assured her empire over what, in modern parlance, would be termed
the “fast” portion of the Court, and the sentiments to which she gave
utterance revealed the most singular extravagance. But not a single voice
protested when the Duke d’Hocquincourt proclaimed her la belle des belles.
In the eyes of the foreigner she was the marvel which the generals who
dreamed of the capture of Paris coveted; in other words, she was par
excellence “the booty” most desirable, on the subject of which the Duke of
Weimar perpetrated a thoroughly German joke, which we must be pardoned
for not repeating: Anne of Austria might have smiled at it without blushing,
but it is too gross to risk raising a laugh by its repetition in our days.

She had a great number of adorers, and of happy adorers, from Gaston
Duke of Orleans, and the Count de Soissons, slain at Marfée, to Rancé, the
young and gallant editor of Anacreon, and the future founder of La Trappe.

M. de Longueville had been for some time her lover by title, and he
afforded her considerable advantages. When he married Mademoiselle de
Bourbon, Madame the Princess exacted—without, however, being very
faithfully obeyed—the discontinuance of all intercourse with his old
mistress. Hence, in that interested soul, an irritation, which wounded vanity
redoubled, when she saw this young bride, with her great name, her
marvellous mind, her indefinable charms, advance into the world of
gallantry, without the least effort draw after her all hearts, and take
possession of, or at least share that empire of beauty of which she was so
proud, and which was to her so precious. On the other hand, the Duke de
Beaufort had not been able to restrain a passionate admiration for Madame
de Longueville, which had been very coldly received. He was wounded by
it, and his wound bled for a long time, as his friend, La Châtre, informs us,
[26]
even after he had transferred his homage to Madame de Montbazon.
The latter, as may be easily imagined, was again exasperated. Finally, the
Duke de Guise, recently arrived in Paris, placed himself in the party of the
Importants and at the service of Madame de Montbazon, who received him
very favourably, at the same time she was striving to keep or recall the
Duke de Longueville, and that she was ruling Beaufort, whose office near
her was somewhat that of a cavalier servente. Thus it will be seen that
Madame de Montbazon disposed through Beaufort and through Guise, as
through her daughter-in-law Madame de Chevreuse, of the house of
Vendôme and that of Lorraine, and she employed all this influence to the
profit of her hatred against Madame de Longueville. She burned to injure
her, and was not long in finding an opportunity of doing it.

One day when a numerous company was assembled in her salon, one of
her young lady friends picked up a couple of letters which had been
dropped on the floor, bearing no signatures, but in a feminine handwriting,
and of a somewhat equivocal style. They were read, and a thousand jokes

perpetrated concerning them, and some effort made to discover the author.
They were from a woman who wrote tenderly to some one whom she did
not hate. Madame de Montbazon pretended that they had fallen from the
pocket of Maurice de Coligny, who had just gone out, and that they were in
the handwriting of Madame de Longueville. The word of command thus
once given, the Duke de Beaufort was amongst the first to spread the
insinuation which was a calumny, all the echoes of the party of the
Importants took it up, and Madame de Montbazon herself found pleasure in
repeating it during several following days, so that the incident became the
entertainment of the Court. A frivolous curiosity has very faithfully
preserved the text of the two letters thus found at the Duchess’s house.[27]

I.

“I should much more regret the change in your conduct if I thought myself less worthy
of a continuation of your affection. I confess to you that so long as I believed it to be true
and warm, mine gave you all the advantages which you could desire. Now, hope nothing
more from me than the esteem which I owe to your discretion. I have too much pride to
share the passion which you have so often sworn to me, and I desire to punish your
negligence in seeing me, in no other way than by depriving you entirely of my society. I
request that you will visit me no more, since I have no longer the power of commanding
your presence.”

II.

“To what conclusion have you come after so long a silence? Do you not know that the
same pride which rendered me sensible to your past affection forbids me to endure the
false appearances of its continuation! You say that my suspicions and my inequalities
render you the most unhappy person in the world. I assure you that I believe no such thing,
although I cannot deny that you have perfectly loved me, as you must confess that my
esteem has worthily recompensed you. So far we have done each other justice, and I am
determined not to have in the end less goodness, if your conduct responds to my intentions.

You would find them less unreasonable if you had more passion, and the difficulties of
seeing me would only augment instead of diminishing it. I suffer for loving too much, and
you for not loving enough. If I must believe you, let us exchange humours. I shall find
repose in doing my duty, and you in doing yours, and you must fail in doing yours, in order
to obtain liberty. I do not perceive that I forget the manner in which I passed the winter
with you, and that I speak to you as frankly as I have heretofore done. I hope that you will
make as good use of it, and that I shall not regret being overcome in the resolution which I
have made to return to it no more. I shall remain at home for three or four days in
succession, and will be seen only in the evening: you know the reason.”

These letters were not forgeries. They had been really written by
Madame de Fouquerolles to the handsome and elegant Marquis de
Maulevrier, who had been silly enough to drop them in Madame de
Montbazon’s salon. Maulevrier, trembling at being discovered, and at
having compromised Madame de Fouquerolles, ran to La Rochefoucauld,
who was his friend, confided to him his secret, and begged him to undertake
to hush up the affair. La Rochefoucauld made Madame de Montbazon
understand that it was for her interest to be generous on this occasion, for
the error or fraud would be easily recognised as soon as the writing should
be compared with that of Madame de Longueville. Madame de Montbazon
placed the original letters in the hands of La Rochefoucauld, who showed
them to M. the Prince and to Madame the Princess, to Madame de
Rambouillet, and to Madame Sablé, particular friends of Madame de
Longueville, and, the truth being well established, burned them in the
presence of the Queen, delivering Maulevrier and Madame de Fouquerolles
from the terrible anxiety into which they had been for some time thrown.

The house of Condé felt a lively resentment at the insult offered to it. The
Duke and Duchess de Longueville desired, it is true, the one by a sentiment
of interested prudence, the other by a just feeling of dignity, to take no
further notice of the matter. But the Princess, impelled by her high spirit,
and still intoxicated by her son’s success, exacted a reparation equal to the
offence, and declared loudly that, if the Queen and the government did not

defend the honour of her house, she and all her family would withdraw
from the Court. She was indignant at the mere idea of placing her daughter
in the scales with the granddaughter of a cook. In vain did the whole party
of the Importants, with Beaufort and Guise at their head, agitate and
threaten; in vain did Madame de Chevreuse, who had not yet lost all her
influence with the Queen, strive earnestly in behalf of her mother-in-law. It
did not suffice for the resentment of the Princess and the Duke d’Enghien
that Madame de Longueville’s innocence was fully recognised; they
demanded a public reparation. Madame de Motteville has left us an
amusing recital of the “mummeries,” as she terms them, of which she was a
witness.

The Queen was in her state cabinet and the Princess beside her, in great
emotion and looking very fierce, declaring the affair to be nothing less than
the crime of high treason. Madame de Chevreuse, interested for a thousand
reasons in the quarrel of her mother-in-law, was busy with Cardinal
Mazarin arranging the composition of the apology to be made. At every
word there was a pour-parler of half an hour. The Cardinal went from one
side to the other to accommodate the difference, as if such a peace was
necessary for the welfare of France, and his own in particular. It was
arranged that the criminal should present herself at the Princess’s hotel on
the morrow.

The apology was written upon a small piece of paper and attached to her
fan, in order that she might repeat it word for word to the Princess. She did
it in the most haughty manner possible, assuming an air which seemed to
say, “I jest in every word I utter.”

Mademoiselle de Montpensier gives us the two speeches made upon the
occasion. “Madame, I come here to protest to you that I am innocent of the
wickedness of which I have been accused: no person of honour could utter a

calumny such as this. If I had committed a like fault, I should have
submitted to any punishment which it might have pleased the Queen to
inflict upon me; I should never have shown myself again in the world, and
would have asked your pardon. I beg you to believe that I shall never fail in
the respect which I owe to you and in the opinion which I have of the virtue
and of the merit of Madame de Longueville.”[28] That lady was not present
at the ceremony, and her mother, to whom the Duchess addressed herself,
made a very short and dry reply. This reconciliation did not deceive any one
of those present; it was, in fact, only a fresh declaration of war.

Besides the satisfaction which she had just obtained, the Princess had
asked and had been permitted the privilege of never associating with the
Duchess de Montbazon. Some time after, Madame de Chevreuse invited the
Queen to a collation in the public garden of Renard. This was then the
rendezvous of the best society. It was at the termination of the Tuileries,
near the Porte de la Conférence, which abutted on the Cours de la Reine. In
the summer, on returning from the Cours, which was the “Rotten Row” of
the day, and the spot where the beauties of the time exercised their powers,
it was customary to stop at the garden Renard for the purpose of taking
refreshments, and to listen to serenades performed after the Spanish
fashion. The Queen took pleasure in visiting this place during fine summer
evenings. She desired Madame the Princess to partake with her the collation
offered by Madame de Chevreuse, assuring her at the same time that
Madame de Montbazon would not be present; but the latter person was
really there, and even pretended to do the honours of the collation as
mother-in-law of the lady who gave it. The Princess wished to withdraw, in
order that the entertainment might not be disturbed: the Queen had no right
whatever to detain her. She, therefore, begged Madame de Montbazon to
pretend sickness, and by leaving the party, to relieve her from
embarrassment. The haughty Duchess would not consent to fly before her

enemy, and kept her place. The Queen, offended, refused the collation and
quitted the promenade. On the morrow an order from the King enjoined
upon Madame de Montbazon to leave Paris. This disgrace irritated the
Importants. They thought themselves humiliated and enfeebled, and there
were no violent or extreme measures which they did not contemplate. The
Duke de Beaufort, smitten at once in his influence and his love, uttered loud
denunciations, and it was reported that a plot had been formed against the
life of Mazarin.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Villefore, p. 32.

[26] Mémoires of La Châtre. Petitot Collection, vol. li. p. 230.

[27] Mémoires of Madlle. de Montpensier, vol. i. pp. 62, 63.

[28] Mémoires, vol. i. p. 65.

CHAPTER III.

THE IMPORTANTS.

It is necessary, at this juncture, to have a just idea of the general position
of political affairs in France, as well as of the attitude of the faction known
as the Importants, who were then most active in opposing the government
of Mazarin, in order to understand clearly the gravity of an incident which
otherwise in itself might seem to be of little consequence.

La Rochefoucauld, the historian of that party, has made us tolerably
familiar with the men who composed it. They were a band of eccentric and
mischievous spirits, bold of heart, ready of hand, and of boundless fidelity
to one another. Professing to hold the most outrageous maxims, incessantly
invoking Brutus and old Rome, and intermingling gallant with political
intrigues, they suffered themselves to be hurried beyond the bounds of
reason through a Quixotic idea of always pleasing the ladies. They had all
been more or less fellow-sufferers with Anne of Austria during the period of
her affliction and persecution by Richelieu, and from the commencement of
her Regency, these returning exiles and liberated prisoners had been
gathering round her until at last, formed into a faction, they gave
themselves out as the Queen’s party, and by adopting a high-flown, turgid,
and mysterious style of phraseology, and assuming bombastic and braggart
airs of authority, coupled with an affectation of capacity and profundity,

obtained for themselves from the wits of the Court and city the nickname of
The Importants, under which they figured until absorbed a few years later in
the more general and popular designation of Frondeurs. Their favourite
chief was the Duke de Beaufort, of whom we have already spoken as
possessing very nearly the same characteristics as the rest—at once
artificial and extravagant, with great pretensions to loyalty and patriotism,
professing to be a man of independent action, but in fact wholly ruled by
Madame de Montbazon, who, in her turn, was swayed by the Duchess de
Chevreuse.

On the sudden disappearance from Paris of one of the most distinguished
of the lady leaders of the Importants—like a star of the first magnitude
fallen from their system—the entire party was thrown into commotion,
whilst the more intimate friends and admirers of the banished beauty raised
a fierce outcry. Such an open disgrace of the young and beautiful Duchess
sorely irritated her restless partisans. They considered themselves
humiliated and weakened by it, and there was no violence or extremity to
which they were not prepared to resort. Her slave and adorer, the Duke de
Beaufort, assailed at once on the score of his political interest and personal
gallantry, vapoured and stormed furiously. Thoughts of vengeance, which,
like the mutterings of an approaching tempest, had begun to brood beneath
the roof of the Hôtel de Vendôme, now became concentrated in a plot to get
rid of Mazarin by fair means or foul, divers modes of its execution being
earnestly discussed.

In such conjunctures, the Cardinal rose to the level of Richelieu. At the
same time he had to secure safety and success mainly through his own
courage and patience. But he knew right well how to play his part. The wily
minister already stood well with the Queen—had begun to seem necessary,
or at least very useful to her, though Anne of Austria had not yet formally
declared her approval of his policy. Mazarin represented to her what she

owed alike to the State and the royal authority now seriously threatened.
That she must prefer the interest of her son and his crown to friendships—
satisfactory enough at other times, but which had now become dangerous.
He brought before her eyes most indubitable proofs of a conspiracy to take
his life, and entreated her to choose between his enemies and himself. Anne
of Austria did not hesitate, and the ruin of the Importants was decided upon.

More dangerous ground could scarcely have been found whereon to post
the Importants. The Duchess de Montbazon, as disreputable in morals and
character as she was remarkable for her beauty, had attacked a young wife,
who, having just made her appearance at the Regent’s court, had already
become the object of universal admiration. To a loveliness at once so
graceful and dazzling that it was pronounced to be angelic, Madame de
Longueville added great intelligence, a most noble heart, and was a person
of all others whom it behoved the Importants to conciliate; for her natural
generosity of character had disinclined her to side with the party of
repression, and thereby had even given some umbrage to the Prime
Minister. At that moment, she was merely occupied with intellectual
pursuits, innocent gallantry, and above all with the fame of her brother, the
Duke d’Enghien; but there were, it must be owned, already perceptible in
her mind, some germs of an Important, which, later, Rochefoucauld knew
only too well how to develop. But the slanderous attack that had been made
upon her, the disgraceful motive of which was sufficiently clear, revolted
every honest heart. The ungovernable impetuosity of Beaufort on this
occasion was—as it deserved to be—strongly stigmatised. Having formerly
paid his addresses to Mademoiselle de Bourbon, and been rejected, his
conduct assumed the aspect of an obvious revenge. Moreover, Madame de
Chevreuse’s every effort being directed towards depriving Mazarin of
supporters, she incited the devotees of either sex who were about the Queen
to act against him, and Madame de Longueville was no less the idol of the
Carmelites and the party of the Saints than that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet.

Again, the Duke d’Enghien, already covered with the laurels of Rocroy, and
about to entwine therewith those of Thionville, was so evidently the arbiter
of the situation, that Madame de Chevreuse insisted, with much force, that
Mazarin should be got rid of whilst the young Duke was occupied with the
distant enemy, and before he should return from the army. To wound him
through so susceptible a medium as that of an adored sister, to turn him
against herself without any necessity, and hasten his return, would be a silly
extravagance. Therefore, all who had any sense among the Importants—La
Rochefoucauld, La Châtre, and Campion—anxiously sought to hush up and
terminate this deplorable affair; and Madame de Chevreuse, sedulous to pay
court to the Queen at the same time that she was weaving a subtle plot
against her minister, had prepared the little fête for her at Renard’s garden
with the design of dispersing the last remaining cloudlets of the lately-spent
tempest. But the Duchess’s politic purpose was, as we have seen, destined
to fail through the insane pride of a woman who was as senseless as she was
heartless.[29]

Under these critical circumstances how did it behove Madame de
Chevreuse to act? She was compelled to restrain Madame de Montbazon,
but she could neither abandon her nor be false to herself. She resolved
therefore to follow up energetically the formidable project which had
become the last hope and supreme resource of her party. Through Madame
de Montbazon, Beaufort had been dragged into it. The latter had mustered
the men of action already mentioned, and who were wholly devoted to him.
A plot had been devised and every measure concerted for surprising and
perhaps killing the Cardinal.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] Alexandre de Campion, in the Recueil before cited, writes to Madame de
Montbazon:—“Si mon avis eut été suivi chez Renard, vous seriez sortie, pour

obéir à la Reine, vous n’habiteriez pas la maison de Rochefort, et nous ne serions
pas dans le péril dont nous sommes menacés.”

CHAPTER IV.

THE CONSPIRACY OF THE DUCHESS DE CHEVREUSE AND THE
DUKE DE BEAUFORT TO GET RID OF MAZARIN.

One need not be greatly astonished at such an enterprise on the part of
two women of high rank and a grandson of Henry the Great. At that stirring
epoch of French history—the interval between the League and the Fronde
—energy and strength were the distinctive traits of the French aristocracy.
Neither court life nor a corrupting opulence had yet enervated it. Everything
was then in extremes, in vice as in virtue. Men attacked and defended one
another with the same weapons. The Marshal d’Ancre had been massacred;
more than one attempt had been made to assassinate Richelieu; whilst he,
on his side, had not been backward in having recourse to the sword and
block. Corneille paints faithfully the spirit of the epoch. His Emilie is also
involved in an assassination, and she is not the less represented as a perfect
heroine. Madame de Chevreuse had long been accustomed to conspiracies;
she was bold and unscrupulous. She did not gather round her such men as
Beaupuis, Saint-Ybar, De Varicarville, and de Campion merely to pass the
time in idle conversation. She had not remained a stranger to the designs
they had formerly concocted against Richelieu, for in 1643 she fomented, as
we have seen, their exaltation and their devotedness; and it was not
unreasonable, certainly, that Mazarin should attribute to her the first idea of
the project which Beaufort was to accomplish.

At the same time it must be remembered that the Importants and their
successors the Frondeurs denied this project and declared it the invention of
the Cardinal. It is a point of the highest historical importance and deserves
serious examination, as upon this conspiracy, real or imaginary, as may be
determined after careful investigation, rests the fact whether Mazarin owed
in reality all his career and the great future which then opened before him to
a falsehood cunningly invented and audaciously sustained; or whether
Madame de Chevreuse and the Importants, after having tried their utmost
against him, now resolving to destroy him with the armed hand, were
themselves destroyed and became the instruments of his triumph. The
evidence available irresistibly leads to the latter conclusion, and we think
that we shall be able to show that the plot attributed to the Importants, far
from being a chimæra, was the almost inevitable solution of the violent
crisis just described.

La Rochefoucauld, without having indulged in the insane hopes of his
friends and lent his hand to their rash enterprise, made it a point of honour
to defend them after their discomfiture, and set himself to cover the retreat.
He affects to doubt whether the plot which then made so much noise was
real or supposititious. In his eyes, the greater probability was that the Duke
de Beaufort, by a false finesse, endeavoured to excite alarm in the Cardinal,
believing that it was sufficient to strike terror into his mind to force him to
quit France, and that it was with this view that he held secret meetings and
gave them the appearance of conspiracy. La Rochefoucauld constitutes
himself especially the champion of Madame de Chevreuse’s innocence, and
declares himself thoroughly persuaded that she was ignorant of Beaufort’s
designs.

After the historian of the Importants, that of the Frondeurs holds very
nearly the same arguments. Like La Rochefoucauld, De Retz has only one
object in his Memoirs—that of investing himself with a semblance of

capacity and making a great figure in every way, in evil as well as good. He
is often more truthful, because he cares less about other people, and that he
is disposed to sacrifice all the world except himself. In this matter it is hard
to conceive the motive for his reserve and incredulity. He knew right well
that the majority of the persons accused of having taken part in the plot had
already been implicated in more than one such business. He himself tells us
that he had conspired with the Count de Soissons, that he had blamed him
for not having struck down Richelieu at Amiens, and that with La
Rochepot, he, the Abbé de Retz, had formed the design of assassinating him
at the Tuileries during the ceremony of the baptism of Mademoiselle (de
Montpensier). The Co-adjutorship of the Archbishopric of Paris, which the
Regent had just granted him, in consideration of his own services and the
virtues of his father, had mollified him, it is true; but his old accomplices,
who had not been so well treated as he, had remained faithful to their cause,
to their designs, to their habitudes. Was De Retz then sincere when he
refused to believe that they had attempted against Mazarin that which he
had seen them undertake, and which he had himself undertaken against
Richelieu? In his blind hatred he throws everything upon Mazarin: he
pretends that he was terrified, or that he feigned terror. It was the Abbé de la
Rivière, he tells us, who, in order to rid himself of the rivalry of the Count
de Montrésor in the Duke d’Orleans’ favour, must have persuaded Mazarin
that there was a plot set on foot against him, in which Montrésor was mixed
up. It was the Prince de Condé also who must have tried to destroy Beaufort
through fear lest his son, the Duke d’Enghien, might engage with him in
some duel, as he wished to do, to avenge his sister, during the short visit he
made to Paris after taking Thionville.

To the suspicious opinions of de Retz and La Rochefoucauld let us
oppose testimony more disinterested, and before all other the silence of
Montrésor,[30] who, whilst protesting that neither he nor his friend the

Count de Béthune had meddled with the conspiracy imputed to the Duke de
Beaufort, says not a single word against the reality of that conspiracy,
which he would not have failed to ridicule had he believed it imaginary.
Madame de Motteville, who was not in the habit of overwhelming the
unfortunate, after having reported with impartiality the different rumours
circulated at Court, relates certain facts which appear to her authentic, and
which are decisive.[31] One of the best informed and most truthful of
contemporary historians expresses not the slightest doubt on this head. “The
Importants,” says Monglat, “seeing that they could not drive the Cardinal
out of France, resolved to despatch him with their daggers, and held several
councils on this subject at the Hôtel de Vendôme.” That opinion is
confirmed by new and numerous particulars with which Mazarin’s carnets
and confidential letters furnish us.

The person whom Mazarin signalizes in his carnets and letters as the
trusted friend of Beaufort and after him the principal accused, the Count de
Beaupuis, son of the Count de Maillé, had found means of sheltering
himself from the minister’s first searches; he had succeeded in escaping
from France and sought an asylum at Rome under the avowed protection of
Spain. Mazarin left no stone unturned to obtain from the Court of Rome the
extradition of Beaupuis, in order that he might be legally tried. The Pope at
first could not refuse, at least for form’s sake, to have Beaupuis committed
to the Castle of St. Angelo. But he was soon liberated, and provided with a
State lodging wherein he was allowed to see nearly every one who came.
Mazarin complained loudly of such indulgence. “It is all arranged,” said he,
“that when necessary he may escape, or at any rate the Duke de Vendôme is
furnished with every facility for poisoning him, in order that with Beaupuis
may perish the principal proof of his son’s treason. If all this happened in
Barbary, people would be highly indignant. And this is suffered to take

place in Rome, in the capital of Christianity, under the eyes and by the
orders of a Pope!”

Failing Beaupuis, Mazarin would have liked to put his hand upon one of
the brothers Campion, intimately connected as they were with Beaufort and
Madame de Chevreuse, and too closely in the confidence of both not to
know all their secrets. He himself complains, as we have seen, of being
very badly seconded. And then he had to do with emerited conspirators,
consummate in the art of concealing themselves and of leaving no trace of
their whereabouts—with the active and indefatigable Duchess de
Chevreuse, and with the Duke de Vendôme, who, in order to save his son,
set about forwarding the escape of all those whose depositions might help
to convict him, or kept them somehow in his own hands, hidden and shut up
close at Anet. Mazarin was thus only able to arrest a few obscure
individuals who were ignorant of the plot, and could throw no light upon it.

But it is needless to exhaust existing proofs in demonstration of the fact
that Mazarin did not enact a farce by instituting proceedings against the
conspirators, that he pursued them with sincerity and vigour, and that he
was perfectly convinced that a project of assassination had been formed
against him, when the existence of that project is elsewhere averred, when,
in default of a sentence of the parliament, which could not have been given
in the teeth of insufficient evidence, neither Beaupuis, nor the Campions,
nor Lié, nor Brillet having been arrested, better proof being extant in the
full and entire confession of one of the principal conspirators, with the plan
and all the details of the affair set forth in Memoirs of comparatively recent
publication, but the authenticity of which cannot be contested. We allude to
the precious Memoirs of Henri de Campion,[32] brother of Madame de
Chevreuse’s friend, whom that lady had introduced also to the service of the
Duke de Vendôme, and more particularly to that of the Duke de Beaufort.
Henri had accompanied the Duke in his flight to England after the

conspiracy of Cinq Mars, and he had returned with him; he possessed his
entire confidence, and he relates nothing in which he himself had not taken
a considerable part. Henri’s character was very different to that of his
brother Alexandre. He was a well-educated man, full of honour and
courage, not in the least given to boasting, averse to all intrigue, and born to
make his way through life by the straightest paths in the career of arms. He
wrote these Memoirs in solitude, to which after the loss of his daughter and
his wife he had retired to await death amidst the exercise of a genuine piety.
It is not in such a frame of mind that a man is disposed to invent fables, and
there is no middle way. What he says is that which we must believe
absolutely, or if we have any doubt that he speaks the truth, he must be
considered as the worst of villains. No interested feeling could have
directed his pen, for he compiled his Memoirs, or at least he finished them,
a short time after Mazarin’s death, without thought, therefore, of paying
court to him by making very tardy revelations, and scarcely two years
before he himself died in 1663. Thus it may be fairly inferred that Henri de
Campion wrote strictly under the inspiration of his conscience. One has
only to open his Memoirs to see confirmed, point by point, all the
particulars with which Mazarin’s carnets are filled. Nothing is there
wanting, everything coincides, all marvellously corresponds. It appears,
indeed, as though Mazarin in making his notes had had before his eyes de
Campion’s Memoirs, or that the latter whilst penning them had Mazarin’s
carnets before him: he at once so thoroughly takes up the thread and
completes them.

His brother Alexandre, in his letters of the month of August, 1643, had
already let slip more than one mysterious sentence. He wrote to Madame de
Montbazon in banishment:—“You must not despair, madam, there are still
some half-a-dozen honest folks who do not give up.... Your illustrious
friend will not abandon you. If to be prudent it were necessary to renounce
your acquaintance, there are those who would prefer rather to pass for fools

all their days.” Like Montrésor, he does not once say that there was no plot
framed against Mazarin, which is a kind of tacit avowal; and when the
storm burst, he took care to conceal himself, advised Beaupuis to do the
same, and ends with these significant words:—“In embarking in Court
affairs one cannot be certain of being master of events, and whilst we profit
by the lucky ones, we must resolve to put up with the unlucky.” Henri de
Campion raises this already very transparent veil.

He declares plainly that there was a project on foot to get rid of Mazarin,
and that that project was conceived, not by Beaufort, but by Madame de
Chevreuse in concert with Madame de Montbazon. “I think,” says he, “that
the Duke’s design did not spring from his own particular sentiment, but
from the persuasion of the duchesses de Chevreuse and de Montbazon, who
exercised entire sway over his mind and had an irreconcilable hatred to the
Cardinal. What makes me say so, is that, whilst he was under that
resolution, I always observed that he had an internal repugnance which, if I
mistake not, was overcome by some pledge which he may have given to
those ladies.” There was, therefore, a plot, and its real author, as Mazarin
truly said, and Campion repeats, was Madame de Chevreuse; if so, Madame
de Montbazon was only an instrument in her hands.

Beaufort, once inveigled, drew in also his intimate friend, Count de
Maillé’s son, the Count de Beaupuis, cornet in the Queen’s horse-guards. To
them Madame de Chevreuse adjoined Alexandre de Campion, the elder
brother of Henri. “She loved him much,” remarks the latter, and in a way
which, added to certain ambiguous words of Alexandre, excites suspicion
whether the elder Campion were not in fact one of the numerous successors
of Chalais. He was then thirty-three, and his brother confesses that he had
caught from the Count de Soissons the taste for and the habitudes of
faction. Beaupuis and Alexandre de Campion approved of the plot when
communicated to them, “the former,” says Henri, “believing that it would

be a means for him of attaining to a position of greater importance, and my
brother seeing therein Madame de Chevreuse’s advantage and by
consequence his own.”

Such were the two first accomplices of Beaufort. A little later he opened
his mind on the subject to Henri de Campion, one of his principal
gentlemen; to Lié, captain of his guards; and to Brillet, his equerry. There
the secret rested. Many other gentlemen and domestics of the house of
Vendôme were destined to take action in the affair, but were admitted to no
confidence. The project was well conceived and worthy of Madame de
Chevreuse. There were at most five or six conspirators—three capable of
keeping the secret, and who did keep it. Below them, the men of action,
who did not know what they would be called on to do; and in the
background, the men of the morrow, who might be reckoned upon to
applaud the blow, when it had been struck, without it being judged fitting to
admit them to the conspiracy. At least Henri de Campion does not even
name Montrésor, Béthune, Fontraille, Varicarville, Saint-Ybar, which
explains wherefore Mazarin, whilst keeping his eye upon them, did not
have them arrested. Neither does Campion speak of Chandenier, La Châtre,
de Treville, the Duke de Bouillon, the Duke de Guise, De Retz, nor La
Rochefoucauld, whose sentiments were not doubtful, but who were not
inclined to go so far as to sully their hands with an assassination. And that
further explains the silence of Mazarin with regard to them in all that relates
to Beaufort’s conspiracy, although he did not cherish the slightest illusion as
to their dispositions, and as to the part they would have taken if the plot had
succeeded, or even if a serious struggle had taken place.

The conspiracy rested for some time between Madame de Chevreuse,
Madame de Montbazon, Beaufort, Beaupuis, and Alexandre de Campion.
The final resolution was only taken at the end of July or in the first days of
August, that is to say, precisely during the height of the quarrel between

Madame de Montbazon and Madame de Longueville, which ushered in the
crisis and opened the door to all the events which followed. It was then only
that Beaufort spoke of it to Henri de Campion, in presence of Beaupuis.
Mazarin’s crime was the continuation of Richelieu’s system. “The Duke de
Beaufort told me that he thought I had remarked that the Cardinal Mazarin
was re-establishing at court and throughout the kingdom the tyranny of
Cardinal de Richelieu, with even more of authority and violence than had
been shown under the government of the latter; that having entirely gained
the Queen’s mind and made all the ministers devoted to him, it was
impossible to arrest his evil designs save by depriving him of life; that the
public weal having made him resolve to take that step, he informed me of it
in order that I might aid him with my advice and personally assist in its
execution. Beaupuis next ‘took up his parable,’ and warmly represented the
evils which the too great authority of Richelieu had caused France, and
concluded by saying that we must prevent the like inconvenience before his
successor had rendered matters remediless.” Such conclusion embodied as
nearly as possible the views and language of Importants and Frondeurs, of
La Rochefoucauld and De Retz. Henri de Campion represents himself as
having at first combatted the Duke’s project with so much force that more
than once he was shaken; but the two duchesses wound him up again very
quickly, and Beaupuis and Alexandre de Campion, instead of holding him
back, encouraged him. Shortly afterwards, Beaufort having declared that he
had made up his mind, Henri de Campion gave in on two conditions: “The
one,” he tells us, “of not laying his hand on the Cardinal, since I would
rather take my own life than do a deed of such nature. The other, that if the
Duke should arrange that the project should be put into execution during his
absence, I would never mix myself up in it; whereas if he were himself to
be present, I should without scruple keep myself near his person, in order to
defend him against any mischance that might happen, my duty and affection
towards him equally obliging me thereto. He granted me those two

conditions, testifying at the same time that he esteemed me more for having
made them, and added that he would be present at the execution of the
project, so that he might authorise it by his presence.”

The plan was to attack the Cardinal in the street, whilst paying visits in
his carriage, commonly having with him only a few ecclesiastics, besides
five or six lackeys. It would be necessary to present themselves in force and
unexpectedly, stop the vehicle and strike Mazarin. To do that, it was
necessary that a certain number of the Vendôme domestics, who were not in
the secret, should post themselves daily, from early morning, in the cabarets
around the Cardinal’s abode, which was then at the Hôtel de Cleves, near
the Louvre. Among the domestics let into the secret, Henri de Campion
names positively Gauseville. Over them were placed “the Sieurs
d’Avancourt and De Brassy, Picardians, very resolute men and intimate
friends of Lié.” The pretext given out was that the Condés proposing to put
an affront upon Madame de Montbazon, the Duke de Beaufort, in order to
oppose it, desired to have in hand a troop of gentlemen well mounted and
armed. Their parts were allotted beforehand. A certain number were to
pounce upon the Cardinal’s coachman, at the same moment that others were
to open the two doors and strike him, whilst the Duke would be at hand on
horseback, with Beaupuis, Henri de Campion, and others, to cut down or
drive off those who should be disposed to resist. Alexandre de Campion
was to keep near the Duchess de Chevreuse and at her orders; and she
herself ought more than ever to be assiduous in her attentions to the Queen,
in order to smooth the way for her friends, and, in case of success, draw the
Regent to the side of the victorious.

Several occasions favourable to the execution of this plan presented
themselves. In the first instance, Henri de Campion being with his band in
the Rue du Champ-Fleuri—one end of which joins the Rue Saint-Honoré
and the other approaches the Louvre—saw the Cardinal leave the Hôtel de

Cleves in his carriage with the Abbé de Bentivoglio, the nephew of the
celebrated cardinal of that name, with a few ecclesiastics and valets.
Campion inquired of one of them whither the Cardinal was going, and was
answered—to visit the Marshal d’Estrées. “I saw,” says Campion, “that if I
had made use of the information, his death would have been inevitable. But
I thought that I should be so guilty in the eyes of God and man that I
resisted the temptation to do so.”

The next day it was known that the Cardinal would be present at a
collation to be given by Madame du Vigean at her charming residence of La
Barre, at the entrance of the valley of Montmorency, where Madame de
Longueville was staying, and which the Queen had promised to honour
with a visit, and who had already set out. The Cardinal was repairing
thither, having with him in his coach only the Count d’Harcourt. Beaufort
ordered Campion to assemble his troop and to ride after him, but Campion
represented to the Duke that if they attacked the Cardinal in the company of
the Count d’Harcourt, they must decide upon killing both, Harcourt being
too generous to see Mazarin stabbed before his eyes without defending him,
and that the murder of Harcourt would raise against them the entire house
of Lorraine.

Some days afterwards information was given that the Cardinal was
engaged to dine at Maisons, with the Marshal d’Estrées, to meet the Duke
d’Orleans. “I made the Duke consent,” says Campion, “that should the
minister be in the same carriage with his Royal Highness, the design should
not be executed; but he said, that if he were alone, he must be killed. Early
in the morning he had the horses out and kept himself in readiness at the
Capucins with Beaupuis, near the Hôtel de Vendôme, posting a valet on foot
in the street to tell him when the Cardinal should pass, and enjoining me to
keep with those whom I was accustomed to muster at the Cabaret l’Ange, in
the Rue Saint-Honoré, very near the Hôtel de Vendôme, and if the Cardinal

journeyed without the Duke d’Orleans, I should mount instantly with all my
men, and intercept him when passing the Capucins. I was,” adds Campion,
“in a state of anxiety which may readily be imagined, until I saw the
carriage of the Duke d’Orleans pass, and perceived the Cardinal inside with
him.”

At length, Beaufort’s irritation being carried to the highest pitch by the
banishment from court of Madame de Montbazon (which was certainly on
the 22nd of August), goaded by Madame de Chevreuse, by passion, and by
a false sense of honour, he became himself impatient to act. Seeing that,
during the day, he encountered incessant difficulties of which he was far
from divining the cause, he resolved to strike the blow at night, and
prepared an ambuscade, the success of which seemed certain, and the
details of which we have from Campion. The Cardinal went every evening
to visit the Queen, and returned sufficiently late. It was arranged to attack
him between the Louvre and the Hôtel de Cleves. Horses were to be in
readiness in some neighbouring inn. The Duke himself should keep watch
with Beaupuis and Campion, during the time the minister should be with
the Queen, and so soon as he came forth, all three should advance and make
a signal to the rest, who, in the meanwhile, should remain on horseback on
the quay, by the river side, close to the Louvre. All which could be very
well done at night without awakening any suspicion.

It must be remembered that the person who furnishes these very precise
details was one of the principal conspirators, that he wrote at sufficiently
considerable distance from the event, in safety, and, to repeat it once again,
with no interest, fearing nothing more from Mazarin, who had recently
died, and expecting nothing from him. It must be also remembered that
speaking as he has done, he accuses his own brother; that, without doubt, he
attributes to himself laudable intentions and even some good actions, but
that he confesses having entered into the plot, and that, if its execution had

taken place he would have taken part in it, in fighting by the side of
Beaufort. The process submitted to the parliament not having led to
anything, through failure of evidence, Campion did not imagine that
Mazarin had ever known “the circumstances of the plot, nor those
acquainted with it to the very bottom, and who were engaged in it.” He adds
also, “that now the Cardinal is dead there is no longer any reason to fear
injuring any one in stating matters as they are.” He therefore does not
defend himself; he believes himself to be sheltered from all quest, he writes
only to relieve his conscience.

From these curious revelations we further learn what importance Mazarin
attached to the arrest of Henri Campion; and that writer’s statements are not
only substantially confirmed by various entries in the carnets, but read like
a translation into French of those pages from the Cardinal’s Italian. “They
threw,” he says, “into the Bastille, Avancourt and Brassy, where they
deposed that I had mustered them on several occasions, on the part of the
Duke de Beaufort, for the interests of Madame de Montbazon, as I had told
them. This did not afford any motive for interrogating the Duke, since they
owned that he had not spoken to them; thus he would not have failed to
deny having given the orders which I carried to them on his part. It was
then seen that the process against him could not be carried on before I had
been arrested, in order to find matter whereon to interrogate him after my
own depositions, and so thoroughly to embarrass us both that every trace of
the affair might be discovered. The proof of this conspiracy was of most
essential importance to the Cardinal, who directing all his efforts to the
establishment of his government, and affecting to do so by gentle means,
had been unfortunate enough to be constrained, in the outset, to use
violence against one of the greatest men in the realm, for his own individual
interest, without a conviction to prove that he was compelled to treat the
Duke with rigour. The Cardinal, despairing of being able to persuade others
of that of which he was entirely assured, had a great desire to get me into

his hands. He was nevertheless of opinion that he must give me time to
reassure myself of safety in order to take me with the greater facility.”

We may add to all this that Henri de Campion, sought after sharply, and
closely shut up in his retreat at Anet, under the protection of the Duke de
Vendôme, having fled from France and joined his friend the Count de
Beaupuis at Rome, gives an account of the obstinate efforts made by
Mazarin to obtain the extradition of the latter, the resistance of Pope
Innocent X., the regard shown to Beaupuis when they were compelled to
confine him in the Castle of Saint-Angelo; all of which being equally to be
met with in the carnets and letters of Mazarin and the memoirs of Henri de
Campion, places beyond doubt the perfect sincerity of the Cardinal’s
proceedings and the accuracy of his information.

Are not these, we may ask, proofs sufficient to reduce to naught the
interested doubts of La Rochefoucauld and the passionate denials of the
chief of the Fronde, the very clever but very little truthful Cardinal de Retz,
the most ardent and most obstinate of Mazarin’s enemies? It would seem,
indeed, either that there is no certitude whatever in history, or that it must
be considered henceforth as a point absolutely demonstrated that there was
a project determined upon to kill Mazarin; that that project had been
conceived by Madame de Chevreuse, and in some sort imposed by her upon
Beaufort with the aid of Madame de Montbazon; that Beaufort had for
principal accomplices the Count de Beaupuis and Alexandre de Campion;
that Henri de Campion had entered later into the affair, at the pressing
solicitation of the Duke, as well as two other officers of secondary rank;
that during the month of August there were divers serious attempts to put it
into execution, particularly the last one after the banishment of Madame de
Montbazon, at the very end of August or rather on the 1st of September; and
that such attempt only failed through circumstances altogether independent
of the will of the conspirators.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Mémoires, Petitot Collection, t. lix.

[31] Mémoires, t. i., p. 184.

[32] “Mémoires de Henri de Campion, &c.,” 1807. Treuttel and Würtz. Paris.

CHAPTER V.

FAILURE OF THE PLOT TO ASSASSINATE MAZARIN. ARREST OF
BEAUFORT, BANISHMENT OF MADAME DE CHEVREUSE, AND
DISPERSION OF THE “IMPORTANTS.”

Let us now inquire how the last attempt against Mazarin’s life—that
nocturnal ambuscade so well planned and so deliberately set about on the
1st of September, 1643—chanced to fail, and what was the result of such
failure. Without stopping to discuss the conjectures of Campion on this
point, it may suffice to state that Mazarin, who was on his guard, evaded the
blow destined for him by not visiting the Queen during the evening on
which it was resolved to kill him as he should return from the Louvre. Next
day the scene was changed. A rumour spread rapidly that the Prime Minister
had expected to have been murdered by Beaufort and his friends, that he
had escaped, fortune having declared in his favour. A plot to assassinate,
more especially when it fails, invariably excites the strongest indignation,
and the man who has extricated himself from a great peril and seems
destined to sweep all such from his path, readily finds adherents and
defenders. A host of people who would probably have supported Beaufort
victorious, now flocked to offer their swords and services to the Cardinal,
and on that morning he went to the Louvre escorted by three hundred
gentlemen.

For several days previously, Mazarin had seen clearly that, cost what it
might, he must cut his way through the knotted intricacy of the situation,
and that the moment had arrived for forcing Anne of Austria to choose her
part. The occasion was decisive. If the peril which he had just undergone,
and which was only suspended over his head, did not suffice to draw the
Queen from her incertitude, it would prove that she did not love him; and
Mazarin knew well that, amidst the many dangers surrounding him, his
entire strength lay in the Queen’s affection, and that thereon depended his
present safety and future fate. Whether, therefore, through policy or sincere
affection, it was always to Anne of Austria’s heart that he addressed
himself, and at the outset of the crisis he had said to himself: “If I believed
that the Queen was merely making use of me through necessity, without
having any personal inclination for me, I would not stay here three days
longer.”[33] But enough has been said to show plainly that Anne of Austria
loved Mazarin. Comparing him with his rivals, she appreciated him daily
more and more. She admired the precision and clearness of his intellect, his
finesse and penetration, and that extraordinary energy which enabled him to
bear the weight of government with marvellous ease—his quick and
accurate introspection, his profound prudence, and at the same time the
judicious vigour of his resolves. She saw the affairs of France prospering on
all sides under his firm and skilful hand. The Cardinal, it is true, was not
quite a nullity, in the fierce war which had inaugurated the new reign so
dazzlingly; but a power of no slight weight was manifest in the success
which had followed his advent to office, and which proved to startled
Europe that the victory of Rocroy was not a lucky stroke of chance. When
every member of the Council was opposed to the siege of Thionville, and
when Turenne himself, on being consulted, did not venture to declare his
opinion on the subject, it was Mazarin who had insisted with an unflinching
persistence that the victory of Rocroy should be profited by, and that France
should extend her frontier to the Rhine. That proposition, doubtless,

emanated from the youthful conqueror, but Mazarin had the merit of
comprehending, sustaining, and causing it to triumph. If no first minister
had ever before been so served by such a general, neither had general ever
been so supported by such a minister; and thanks to both, on the 11th of
August, whilst the chivalrous Importants were exhausting their combined
talents in putting a shameful affront upon the noble sister of the hero who
had just served France so gloriously, and who was about to aggrandize it
further—whilst they were displaying their vapid and turgid eloquence in the
salons, or sharpening their poniards in gloomy council chambers,
Thionville, then one of the chief strongholds of the Empire, surrendered
after an obstinate defence. Thus, the Regency of Anne of Austria had
opened under the most brilliant auspices.

But in the height of this national glory and signal triumph, Queen Anne
must indeed have shuddered when Mazarin placed before her all the proofs
of the odious conspiracy formed against him. Explanations the most minute
and confidential thereupon ensued between them. It was now more than
ever compulsory for her to “raise the mask,”[34] to sacrifice to a manifest
necessity the circumspection she was studious of preserving—to brave
somewhat further the tittle-tattle of a few devotees of either sex, and at all
events to permit her Prime Minister to defend his life. Up to this moment
Anne of Austria had hesitated, for reasons which may be readily
comprehended. But Madame de Montbazon’s insolence had greatly irritated
her; the conviction she acquired that numerous attempts to assassinate
Mazarin had only by chance failed, and might be renewed, decided her; and
it was, therefore, towards the close of August, 1643, when the date of that
declared ascendancy, open and unrivalled, must be certainly fixed, of the
Minister of the Queen Regent. These conspirators, by proceeding to the last
extremities, and thereby making her tremble for Mazarin’s life, hastened the
triumph of the happy Cardinal; and on the morrow of the last nocturnal

ambush in which he was marked for destruction, Jules Mazarin became
absolute master of the Queen’s heart, and more powerful than Richelieu had
ever been after the Day of Dupes.

The minister’s carnets will be searched in vain for any traces of the
explanations which Mazarin must have had with the Queen during this
grave conjuncture. Such explanations are not of a nature likely to be
forgotten, and of which there is any need to take notes. An obscure passage,
however, is to be met with, written in Spanish, of which the following
words have a meaning clear enough to be understood: “I ought no longer to
have any doubt, since the Queen, in an excess of goodness, has told me that
nothing could deprive me of the post which she has done me the honour of
giving me near her; nevertheless, as fear is the inseparable companion of
affection, &c.”[35] At this anxious moment, Mazarin was attacked with a
slight illness, brought on by incessant labour and wearing anxieties, and an
attack of jaundice having supervened, the Cardinal jotted down the
following brief but highly suggestive memorandum:—“La giallezza
cagionata dà soverchio amore.”[36]

Madame de Motteville was in attendance on Anne of Austria when the
rumour of the abortive attempt at assassination brought a crowd of courtiers
to the Louvre in hot haste to protest their devotedness to the Crown. The
Queen, with great emotion, whispered to her trusty lady-in-waiting: “Ere
eight and forty hours elapse you shall see how I will avenge myself for the
evil tricks these false friends have played me.” “Never,” adds Madame de
Motteville, “can the remembrance of those few brief words be effaced from
my mind. I saw at that moment, by the fire that flashed in the Queen’s eyes,
and in fact by what happened on that very evening and next day, what it is
to be a female sovereign when enraged, and with the power of doing what
she pleases.”[37] Had the cautious lady-in-waiting been less discreet, she

might have added, “especially when that sovereign lady is a woman in
love.”

The break-up and dispersion of the Importants once decided upon, the
first step was to arrest Beaufort, and bring him to trial. To this the Queen
gave her consent. Of the authority Mazarin had acquired, such proceeding
was a striking indication, and showed how far Anne of Austria might one
day go in defence of a minister who was dear to her. The Duke de Beaufort
had been, before her husband’s death, the man in whom the Queen placed
most confidence, and for some time he was thought destined to play the
brilliant part of a royal favourite. In a brief space he had effectually thrown
away his chance by his presumptuous conduct, his evident incapacity, and
yet more by his public liaison with Madame de Montbazon. Still the Queen
had shown a somewhat singular weakness in his favour, and at the
expiration of three short months to sign an order for his arrest was a great
step—necessary, it is true, but extreme, and which was the manifest sign of
an entire change in the heart and intimate relations of Anne of Austria. The
dissimulation even with which she acted in that affair marks the deliberative
firmness of her resolution.

The 2nd of September, 1643, was truly a memorable day in the career of
Mazarin, and we may say, in the annals of France; for it witnessed the
confirming of the royal power, shaken to its base by the deaths of Richelieu
and Louis XIII., and the ruin of the party of the Importants.

On the morning of the 2nd, all Paris and its Court rang with the report of
the ambuscade laid for Mazarin the night previous, between the Louvre and
the Hôtel de Cleves. The five conspirators who had joined hands with
Beaufort in it had taken flight and placed themselves in safety. Beaufort and
Madame de Chevreuse could not imitate them: flight for them would have
been a self-denunciation. The intrepid Duchess therefore had not hesitated

to appear at Court, and she was at the Regent’s side during the evening of
the 2nd together with another person, a stranger to these dark plots and even
incapable of putting faith in them—a very different enemy of Mazarin—the
pious and noble Madame de Hautefort. As for the Duke, careless and
courageous, he had gone to the chase in the morning, and at his return he
went, according to his custom, to present his homage to the Queen. On
entering the Louvre he met his mother, Madame de Vendôme, and his sister
the Duchess de Nemours, who had accompanied the Queen all day and
remarked her emotion. They did all they could to prevent him going up
stairs, and entreated him to absent himself for a while. He, without
troubling himself in the slightest degree, answered them in the words of the
doomed Duke de Guise—“They dare not!”—and entered the Queen’s great
cabinet, who received him with the best grace possible, and asked him all
sorts of questions about his hunting, “as though,” says Madame de
Motteville, “she had no other thought in her mind.” The Cardinal having
come in in the midst of this gentle chat, the Queen rose and bade him
follow her. It appeared as if she wished to take counsel with him in her
chamber. She entered it, followed by her Minister. At the same time the
Duke de Beaufort, about to leave, met Guitant, captain of the guard, who
arrested him, and commanded the Duke to follow him in the names of the
King and Queen. The Prince, without showing any surprise, after having
looked fixedly at him, said, “Yes, I will; but this, I must own, is strange
enough.” Then turning towards Mesdames de Chevreuse and de Hautefort,
who were talking together, he said to them, “Ladies, you see that the Queen
has caused me to be arrested.” The young nobleman then submitted to the
royal mandate without offering the slightest resistance; slept that night at
the Louvre, and the next morning was taken to the donjon of Vincennes,
while a general decree of banishment was pronounced against all the
principal members of the faction.

The Vendômes were ordered to retire to Anet; and the Chateau d’Anet
having soon become what the Hôtel de Vendôme at Paris had been, a haunt
of the conspirators, Mazarin demanded them from the Duke Cæsar, who
took good care not to give them up. The Cardinal was almost reduced to the
necessity of laying siege to the château in regular form. He threatened to
enter the place by main force and lay hands on Beaufort’s accomplices;
unable to endure the scandal that a prince even of the blood should brave
law and justice with impunity, he had determined to push matters to the
uttermost, and was about to take energetic measures, when the Duke de
Vendôme himself decided on quitting France, and went to Italy to await the
fall of Mazarin, as formerly he had awaited in England that of Richelieu.

The arrest of Beaufort, the dispersion of his accomplices, his friends and
his family, was the first indispensable measure forced upon Mazarin to
enable him to face a danger that seemed most imminent. But what would it
have availed him to lop off an arm had he left the head untouched—had
Madame de Chevreuse remained at Court, ever ready to surround the Queen
with attention and homage, assiduous to retain and husband the last remnant
of her old favour, in order to sustain and secretly encourage the
malcontents, inspire them with her audacity, and stir them up to fresh
conspiracies? She still held in her grasp the scarcely-severed threads of the
plot; and at her right hand there was a man too wary to allow himself to be
again compromised by such dark doings, but quite ready to profit by them,
and whom Madame de Chevreuse had sedulously exhibited not only to
Anne of Austria, but to France and all Europe, as a man singularly capable
of conducting State affairs. Mazarin, therefore, did not hesitate; but on the
day following Beaufort’s arrest, Châteauneuf, Montrésor, and St. Ybar were
banished. The first-named was invited to present himself at Court, kiss the
Queen’s hand, and then betake himself to his government in Touraine.
Richelieu’s late Keeper of the Seals deemed it something to have escaped
an open disgrace, to have resumed the eminent post he had formerly

occupied under the Crown, and the government of a large province. Yet did
his ambition soar far higher still: but he kept it in check, and merely
postponed its flight for a less stormy hour—obeyed the Queen, skilfully
remained friends with her, and likewise kept on very good terms with her
Prime Minister—biding his time until he might displace him. He had to
wait a long time, however; but eventually did not quit life without once
more grasping, for a moment at least, that power which the indulgence of an
insensate passion had lost him, but which an inviolable and unswerving
friendship in the end restored to him.[38]

Madame de Chevreuse unhappily lacked the wisdom displayed
throughout this fiery ordeal by Châteauneuf. She forgot for once to look
with a smiling face upon the passing storm, in which she was too suddenly
caught to escape altogether scatheless. La Châtre—one of her friends, and
who saw her almost every day—relates that during the very same evening
on which Beaufort was arrested at the Louvre, “Her Majesty told the
Duchess that she believed her to be innocent of the prisoner’s designs, but
that nevertheless to avoid scandal she deemed it fitting that Madame de
Chevreuse should quietly withdraw to Dampierre, and that after making
some short sojourn there she should retire into Touraine.”[39] The Duchess,
therefore, saw plainly that she had nothing for it but to go at once to
Dampierre; but no sooner did she arrive at her favourite château than,
instead of remaining quiet, she began to move heaven and earth to save
those who had compromised themselves for her sake. She began, indeed, to
knot the meshes of a new web of intrigue, and even found means of placing
a letter in the Queen’s own hand. Message after message was, however, sent
to hasten her departure—Montagu being despatched to her on the same
errand, as was also La Porte. She received them haughtily, and deferred her
journey under divers pretexts. It will be remembered that on going to meet
the Duchess when on her road from Brussels, Montagu had offered her, on

the Queen’s part as well as that of Mazarin, to discharge in her name the
debts she had contracted during so many years of exile. The Duchess had
already received heavy sums, but was unwilling to set forth for Touraine
until after the Queen should have performed all her promises. Marie de
Rohan had left the Louvre and Paris, her bosom swelling with grief and
rage, as Hannibal had quitted Italy. She felt that the Court and capital and
the Queen’s inner circle formed the true field of battle, and that to remove
herself from it was to abandon the victory to the enemy. Her retreat, indeed,
was an occasion of mourning to the entire Catholic party, as well as to the
friends of peace and the Spanish alliance, but, on the contrary, of public
rejoicing for the friends of the Protestant alliance. The Count d’Estrade
actually went to the Louvre on the part of the Prince of Orange, from whom
he was accredited, to thank the Regent officially for it.

Madame de Chevreuse made her way, therefore, to her estate of
Duverger, between Tours and Angiers. The deep solitude that there reigned
around her embittered all the more the feeling of defeat. She kept up,
however, a brisk correspondence with her stepmother, Madame de
Montbazon—banished to Rochefort; and the two exiled Duchesses
mutually exhorted each other to leave no stone unturned towards effecting
the overthrow of their common enemy. Vanquished at home, Madame de
Chevreuse centred all her hopes in foreign lands. She revived the friendly
relations which she had never ceased to cherish with England, Spain, and
the Low Countries. Her chief prop, the centre and interposer of her
intrigues, was Lord Goring, our ambassador at the French Court; who, like
his ill-starred master, and more especially his royal mistress, belonged to
the Spanish party. Croft, an English gentleman who had figured in the train
of the Duchess some years previously, bestirred himself actively and openly
in her behalf, whilst the Chevalier de Jars intrigued warily and in secret for
Châteauneuf. Beneath the mantle of the English embassy a vast

correspondence was carried on between Madame de Chevreuse, Vendôme,
Bouillon, and the rest of the Malcontents.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Entry in Carnet, iii. p. 10, in Spanish:—“Sy yo creyera lo que dicen que
S.M. se sierve di mi per necessidad, sin tener alguna inclination, no pararia aqui
tres dias.”

[34] “Quitarse la maschera.” Carnet, ii. p. 65.

[35] Carnet, iii. p. 45.—“Mas contodo esto siendo el temor un compagnero
inseparabile dell’affection,” &c.

[36] Carnet, iv. p. 3.

[37] Mémoires, vol. i. p. 185.

[38] Châteauneuf held the seals from March, 1650, when Mazarin went into
voluntary exile, until April, 1651. He died in 1653, at the age of seventy-three.

[39] “Allontanar Cheverosa che fà mille cabelle.” Mazarin’s Carnet, iii. 81,
82.

CHAPTER VI.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE QUARREL BETWEEN THE DUCHESSES
DE LONGUEVILLE AND DE MONTBAZON.—FATAL DUEL
BETWEEN THE DUKE DE GUISE AND COUNT MAURICE DE
COLIGNY.

As has been said, the 2nd of September, 1643, had been truly a
memorable day in the career of Mazarin, and, indeed, in the annals of
France; for it witnessed the confirming of the royal power, shaken to its
base by the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII., and the ruin of that
dangerous faction the Importants. The intestine discords which threatened
the new reign were thus forced to await a more favourable opportunity for
development. They did not raise their heads again until five years
afterwards—on the breaking out of the Fronde, in which they showed
themselves just the same men as ever, with the same designs, the same
politics, foreign and domestic; and after raising sanguinary and sterile
commotions, re-appeared only to break themselves to pieces once more
against the genius of Mazarin and the invincible firmness of Anne of
Austria.

Mazarin, therefore, who soon found himself without a rival in the
Queen’s good graces, continued steadily to carry on within and without the
realm the system of his predecessor, and royalty, as well as France,

reckoned upon a succession of halcyon years, thanks to the re-union of the
Princes of the blood with the Crown, to the tactics and personal conduct of
the Prime Minister, and to his political sagacity, seconded by the military
genius of the Duke d’Enghien. The imprudence of Madame de Montbazon
and her lover Beaufort in the affair of the dropped letters had the effect of
increasing Mazarin’s power incalculably, and that at the very moment that a
splendid victory gained by the young Duke d’Enghien had made him and
his sister paramount at Court—paramount by a popularity so universal that
it almost made the Queen and her minister their protégés rather than their
patrons.

The Duke d’Enghien had returned to Paris after Rocroy, and at the end of
a campaign in which he had taken a very important stronghold, passed the
Rhine with the French army, and carried the war into Germany. The Queen
had received him as the liberator of France. Mazarin, who looked more to
the reality than the semblance of power, intimated to the young conqueror
that his sole ambition was to be his chaplain and man of business with the
Queen. At a distance, the Duke d’Enghien had praised everything that had
been done, and came from the camp over head and ears in love with
Madlle. du Vigean, and furious that any one should have dared to insult a
member of his house. He adored his sister, and he had a warm friendship for
Coligny.[40] He was aware of and had favoured his passion for that sister.
Engaged himself in a suit as ardent as it was chaste, he readily
comprehended that his beautiful sister might well have been not insensible
to the fervent assiduities of the brave Maurice, but he revolted at the
thought of the amatory effusions of a Madame de Fouquerolles being
attributed to her, and he assumed a tone in the matter which effectually
arrested any further insinuation from even the most insolent and daring.

Amongst the especial friends of Beaufort and Madame de Montbazon,
foremost of all stood the Duke de Guise.[41] They had manœuvred to secure

him as well as the rest of his family to their party, through Gaston, Duke
d’Orleans, who had espoused as his second wife a princess of the house of
Lorraine—the lovely Marguerite, sister of Charles IV. and second daughter
of Duke Francis. The Duke de Guise had already played many strange
pranks and committed more than one folly, but he had not as yet signally
failed in any serious enterprise. His incapacity was not patent. He had the
prestige of his name, youth, good looks, and a courage carried even to
temerity. The avowed slave of Madame de Montbazon, he had espoused her
quarrel, and to gratify her had joined in propagating those calumnious
reports, but without exhibiting the violence of Beaufort, and had remained
erect, confronting and defying the victorious Condés.

Coligny had had the good sense to keep aloof during the storm, for fear
of still further compromising Madame de Longueville by exhibiting himself
openly as her champion: but a few months having elapsed, he thought that
he might at last show himself, and, as a certain authority[42] tells us, “the
imprisonment of the Duke de Beaufort having deprived that noble of the
chance of measuring swords with him, he addressed himself to the Duke de
Guise.” La Rochefoucauld says, “the Duke d’Enghien, unable to testify to
the Duke de Beaufort, who was in prison, the resentment he felt at what had
passed between Madame de Longueville and Madame de Montbazon, left
Coligny at liberty to fight with the Duke de Guise, who had mixed himself
up in this affair.” The Duke d’Enghien, therefore, knew and approved of
what Coligny did. In fact, he found himself without an adversary in the
affair of sufficient rank to justify a prince of the blood in drawing his sword
against him. So far as regards Madame de Longueville, it is absurd to
suppose that, desirous of vengeance, she it was who had urged on Coligny,
for everybody ascribed to her a line of conduct characterised by great
moderation, as contrasted with that of the Princess de Condé. Far from
envenoming the quarrel, she wished to hush it up, and Madame de

Motteville thus significantly alludes to that fact: “The enmity she bore
Madame de Montbazon being proportionate to the love she bore her
husband, it did not carry her so far but that she found it more à propos to
dissimulate that outrage than otherwise.”

La Rochefoucauld gives some particulars which explain what follows.
Coligny, just risen out of a long illness, was still very much enfeebled, and,
moreover, not very “skilful of fence.” Such was his condition when, as the
champion of Madame de Longueville, he confronted the Duke de Guise in
mortal duel, whilst the latter, like most heroes of the parade-ground,
possessed rare cunning at carte and tierce. With regard to the seconds
chosen, they are in every respect worthy of notice. In those days, seconds
were witnesses of the duel in which they themselves fought. Coligny
selected as his second, and to give the challenge, as was then the custom,
Godefroi, Count d’Estrades, a man of cool and tried courage. The Duke de
Guise’s second was his equerry, the Marquis de Bridieu, a Limousin
gentleman and brave officer, faithfully attached to the house of Lorraine,
who, in 1650, admirably defended Guise against the Spanish army and
against Turenne, and for that brave defence, during which there were
twenty-four days of open trenches, he was made lieutenant-general.

It was arranged that the affair should come off at the Place Royale—the
usual arena for those sort of encounters, and which had been a hundred
times stained with the best blood of France. The mansions around the Place
Royale were then tenanted by ladies of the highest rank and fashion,
amongst the rest, Marguerite, Duchess de Rohan, Madame de Guéméné,
Madame de Chaulnes, Madame de St. Geran, Madame de Sablé, the
Countess de St. Maure, and many others, under the influence of whose
bright eyes those volatile and valiant French gentlemen delighted to cross
swords. And there many a noble form had been struck down never to rise
again, and many a noble heart had throbbed its last. During the first quarter

of the seventeenth century, the duel was a custom at once useful and
disastrous, inasmuch as it kept up the warlike spirit of the nobles, but which
mowed them down as fast as war itself, and but too frequently for frivolous
causes. To draw swords for trifles had become the obligatory
accompaniment of good manners; and as gallantry had its finished fops, so
the duel had its refined rufflers. In the comparatively short period of a few
years, nine hundred gentlemen perished in these combats. To stop this
scourge, Richelieu issued a royal edict, which punished death by death, and
sent the offenders from the Place Royale to the Place de Grève. On this
head Richelieu showed himself inflexible, and the examples of
Montmorency-Bouteville, beheaded with his second, the Count
Deschappelles, for having challenged Beuvron and fought with him on the
Place Royale at mid-day, impressed a salutary terror, and rendered
infraction of the edict very rare. Coligny, however, braved everything; he
challenged Guise, and on the appointed day the two noble adversaries,
accompanied by their seconds, D’Estrades and Bridieu, met upon the Place
Royale.

Of this memorable duel, thanks to contemporary memoirs as well as
various kinds of MSS., the minutest details have been preserved.

On the 12th of December, 1643, D’Estrades went in the morning to call
out the Duke de Guise on the part of Coligny. The rendezvous was fixed for
the same day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, at the Place Royale. The two
adversaries did not appear abroad during the whole morning, and at three
o’clock they were on the ground. A sentence is ascribed to Guise which
invests the scene with an unwonted grandeur, and arrays for the last time in
bitterest animosity and deadly antagonism the two most illustrious
representatives of the League wars in the persons of their descendants. On
unsheathing his sword Guise said to Coligny: “We are about to decide the

old feud of our two houses, and to see what a difference there is between
the blood of Guise and that of Coligny.”

Coligny’s only reply was to deal his adversary a long lunge; but, weak as
he was, his rearward foot failed him, and he sank upon his knee. Guise
advanced upon him and set his foot upon his sword, in such manner as
though he would have said, “I do not desire to kill you, but to treat you as
you deserve, for having presumed to address yourself to a prince of such
birth as mine, without his having given you just cause,”—and he struck him
with the flat of his sword-blade. Coligny, furious, collected his strength,
threw himself backwards, disengaged his sword, and recommenced the
strife. In this second bout, Guise was slightly wounded in the shoulder, and
Coligny in the hand. At length, Guise, in making another thrust at his
adversary, grasped his sword-blade, by which his hand was slightly cut, but,
wresting it from Coligny’s grasp, dealt him a desperate thrust in the arm
which put him hors de combat. Meanwhile D’Estrades and Bridieu had
grievously wounded each other.

Such was the issue of that memorable duel—the last, it appears, of the
famous encounters on the Place Royale. We thus see that, though cowed,
the French noblesse had not been tamed by Richelieu’s solemn edict. This
last duel did very little honour to Coligny, and almost everybody took part
with the Duke de Guise. The Queen manifested very lively displeasure at
the violation of the edict, and the Duke d’Orleans, urged thereto by his wife
and the Lorraine family, made a loud outcry. The Prince and Princess de
Condé also found themselves compelled to declare against Coligny—
doubly in the wrong, both because he had been the challenger and been
unfortunate in the result. Proof that there was an understanding between
Coligny and the Duke d’Enghien is evident from the latter not deserting the
unlucky champion of his sister, that he received the wounded man into his
house at Paris, afterwards at Saint Maur, and that he did not cease from

surrounding him with his protection and care in spite of his father, the
Prince de Condé. When the matter was referred to the Parliament,
conformably to the edict, and the two adversaries were summoned to
appear, the Duke de Guise announced his intention of repairing to the
chamber with a retinue of princes and great nobles; whilst, on his side, the
Duke d’Enghien threatened to escort his friend after the same fashion. But
the initiative proceedings were stayed through the deplorable condition into
which poor Coligny was known to have fallen.

That unfortunate young man languished for some months, and died in the
latter part of May, 1644, alike in consequence of his wounds and of despair
for having so badly sustained the cause of his own house, as well as that of
Madame de Longueville.

This affair, with all its dramatic features and tragical termination, created
an immense and painful impression not only in Paris, but throughout
France. It momentarily awakened party feelings which had for some time
slumbered, and suspended the festivals of the winter of 1644. It not only
occupied the families more closely concerned and the Court, but forcibly
affected the whole of the highest class of society, and long remained the
absorbing topic of every saloon. It may be readily conceived that the story
in spreading thus widely became enlarged with imaginary incidents one
after another. At first, it was supposed that Madame de Longueville was in
love with Coligny. That was necessary to give the greater interest to the
narrative. From thence came the next invention, that she herself had armed
Coligny’s hand, and that D’Estrades, charged to challenge the Duke de
Guise, having remarked to Coligny that the Duke might probably repudiate
the injurious words attributed to him, and that honour would thus be
satisfied, Coligny had thereupon replied: “That is not the question. I
pledged my word to Madame de Longueville to fight him on the Place
Royale, and I cannot fail in that promise.”[43] There was no stopping a

cavalier in such a chivalrous course as that, and Madame de Longueville
would not have been the sister of the victor of Rocroy—a heroine worthy of
sustaining comparison with those of Spain, who beheld their lovers die at
their feet in the tournament—had she not been present at the duel between
Guise and Coligny. It is asserted, therefore, that on the 12th of December
she was stationed in an hôtel on the Place Royale belonging to the Duchess
de Rohan, and that there, concealed behind a window-curtain, she had
witnessed the discomfiture of her preux chevalier.

Then, as now, it was verse—that is to say, the ballad—which set its seal
on the popular incident of the moment. When the event was an unlucky one,
the song was a burlesquely pathetic complaint, and always with a vein of
raillery running through it. Such was the effusion with which every ruelle
rang, and it was really set to music, for the notation is still to be found in the
Recueil de Chansons notées, preserved at the Arsenal at Paris. It ran thus:—
“Essuyez vos beaux yeux,
Madame de Longueville,
Coligny se porte mieux.
S’il a demandé la vie,
Ne l’en blâmez nullement;
Car c’est pour être votre amant
Qu’il veut vivre éternellement.”

FOOTNOTES:

[40] Grandson of the famous Admiral de Coligny, who perished in the
massacre of St. Bartholomew.

[41] Henry, son of Charles de Guise, and grandson of the Balafré.

[42] An inedited Memoir upon the Regency.

[43] Mad. de Motteville.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

THE DUCHESS DE LONGUEVILLE AND THE DUKE DE LA
ROCHEFOUCAULD.

That Madame de Longueville witnessed the duel on the Place Royale
seems to rest on no reliable authority. Such a trait is so utterly at variance
with her character that its attribution would impute to her the manners of a
semi-Italianised princess of the Valois race. There are besides no sufficient
grounds for believing that her affections had for a moment been given to
Coligny, though doubtless her innate tenderness must have been touched by
his chivalrous love and devotion. Miossens, afterwards better known as
Marshal d’Albret, next tried in vain to win a heart which had hitherto
appeared insensible to the master-passion, but after an obstinate persistence
was ultimately constrained to relinquish all hope. When, in 1645, M. de
Longueville went as minister-plenipotentiary to the Congress of Münster,
the young Duchess remained in Paris, her element being still the social
sphere of the Court solely—a taste for political life not having yet been
developed through the impulse of her affections. Let us here add that,
notwithstanding the almost unanimous assertion of contemporaries at this
period that even women could not behold Madame de Longueville without
admiration, the heart of this preeminently gifted creature seems amidst the
universal homage to have been proof against all and every repeated assault.
Anne of Austria loved her but little, partly through a jealous feeling created

by her singular beauty, partly from her great reputation for wit, and also
from her perpetual wranglings for precedence with other princesses of the
blood. In fact, in order to lose no tittle of the prerogatives derived from her
birth, Madame de Longueville had obtained a royal brevet from the king
which maintained her in the rank which she would have otherwise lost by
her marriage. A pride so exacting does not appear to agree with the peculiar
nonchalance that was one of her striking characteristics; but, later in life,
when she had become devout and penitent, she took care to explain that
seeming contradiction. “I have been defined,” said she, “as having, as it
were, two individualities of opposite nature in me, and that I could
interchange them at any moment; but that arose from the different situations
in which I was placed, for I was dead, like unto the dead, to aught which
slightly affected me, and keenly alive to the smallest things which interested
me.” Reading and study were never among the things which stirred her into
animation. Entirely occupied with her fascinations and individual
sentiments, at no period of her life did she ever think of repairing the early
neglect of her education. In this respect she was inferior, on the authority
even of her apologists, to many ladies of the Court and city. Intoxicated as
she had been by the fumes of the incense which flattery had wafted around
her in the circle of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, she probably had no
perception of her failings on that essential point. The spontaneity of her wit,
her natural aptitude to comprehend and decide upon all sorts of questions,
made up for her deficiency in that kind of information which is acquired
from books and other modes of study, and often stood her in good stead,
both on the part of her detractors and of her partisans, of the lofty
characteristics of “great genius.” M. Cousin, who is by no means severe as
regards the errors or demerits of the Duchess, says that “she did not know
how to write.” Mademoiselle de Montpensier and Madame de Motteville,
however, both express the very opposite opinion. The first remarks,
speaking of the Countess de Maure:—“The precision and the polish of her

style would be incomparable if Madame de Longueville had never written.”
The second declares that “this lady has ever written as well as any one
living.” The fact is, so far as may be judged from those of her letters which
have come down to us, that Madame de Longueville’s style bore the reflex
of her conversation: there are some passages very remarkable in their force,
some phrases altogether trite and insignificant. This opinion is quite beside
the consideration of her diction in a grammatical point of view. In her
written as in her spoken language, she seems to have been impassive or to
have kindled into animation according as her thoughts were “dead or
living,” to use her own phrase. Speaking and writing, however, are two very
different things, both requiring an especial cultivation; and as Madame de
Longueville was defective in anything like what is termed “regular
education“ or “sound instruction,” that fact became apparent so soon as she
took her pen in hand. Her great natural endowments shone on paper with
difficulty, through faults of every kind which escaped her notice. It is really
no small gift to be able to express one’s sentiments and ideas in their natural
order, and with all their true and various shades, in terms neither too homely
nor far-fetched, or which neither enfeeble nor exaggerate them. It is by no
means rare to meet with men in society remarkable for intelligence, nerve,
and grace when they speak, but who become unintelligible when they
commit their thoughts to writing. The fact is, that writing is an art—a very
difficult art, and one which must be carefully learned. Madame de
Longueville was ignorant of this, as were some of the most eminent women
of her time. There exists unquestionable evidence to prove that the Princess
Palatine was a person of large intelligence, who was able to hold her own
with men of the greatest capacity. De Retz and Bossuet tell us so. Some
letters of the Palatine, however, are extant in which, whilst there is no lack
of solidity, refinement, and ingenuity of thought, it will be seen that they
often abound with errors, obscure phraseology, and not unfrequently
outrageously violate even the commonest rules of orthography. It must not,

however, by any means be inferred from this that the Palatine had not a
mind of the first order, but only that she had not been trained to render
clearly and fittingly her ideas and sentiments in writing. Madame de
Longueville had been no better taught. Therefore all that has been said
about her on this score must be restricted, alike as to the defects of her
education and the brilliancy of her genius. With those Frenchwomen who
have written at once largely and loosely, it is pleasant to contrast their
contemporaries, Madame de Sévigné and Madame la Fayette, both of
whom always wrote well.

In the first place, these two admirable ladies had received quite another
sort of education to that of Madame de Longueville. They had had the
advantage of being instructed by men of letters skilled in the art of teaching.
Ménage was the chief instructor both of Mademoiselle de Rabutin and
Mademoiselle de Lavergne—to call those accomplished letter-writers by
their maiden names. Ménage trained them carefully in composition,
correcting rigidly their themes, pointing out their errors, cultivating their
happy instincts, and modelling and polishing their vein and style. That
talented tutor appears also to have been their platonic adorer—more
platonic indeed than he desired. In his verses he celebrated by turns la
formosissima Laverna and la bellissima Marchesa di Sevigni, and his
lessons were doubtless given con amore.

Nature had been lavish indeed in all her gifts to the latter, giving her a
precision and solidity allied to an inexhaustible playfulness and sparkling
vivacity. Art, in her, wedded to genius, resulted in that incomparable
epistolary style which left Balzac and Voiture far away behind her, and
which Voltaire himself even has not surpassed.

We must now speak of him who was destined to bias, sway, and finally
determine the future course of Madame de Longueville’s life through the

conquest of her heart and mind—La Rochefoucauld—the man who induced
her to embark with him on the stormy sea of politics, whose irresistible tide
swept her past the landmarks of loyalty and reputability to make shipwreck,
amongst the rocks and shoals of civil war, of fame, fortune, and domestic
happiness.

Up to the moment of her appearance on the scene of party strife in
connection with La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Longueville had not
achieved much political notoriety. Neither had her fair fame been
compromised by the very insignificant gallantry of a long train of court
danglers, nor through her involuntary participation in the affair of the letters
with Madame de Montbazon. She could scarcely fail to be touched by the
devotion of Coligny, who had shed his blood to avenge her of the outrage of
that vindictive woman. For a moment, it is true, she had listened carelessly
and harmlessly to the attention of the brave and intellectual Miossens. Still
later she compromised herself somewhat with the Duke de Nemours; but
the only man she truly loved with heart and soul was La Rochefoucauld. To
him she devoted herself wholly; for him she sacrificed everything—duty,
interest, repose, reputation. For him she staked her fortune and her life.
Through him she exhibited the most equivocal and most contradictory
conduct. It was La Rochefoucauld who caused her to take part in the
Fronde; who, as he willed, made her advance or recede; who united her to,
or separated her from, her family; who governed her absolutely. In a word,
she consented to be in his hand merely an heroic instrument. Pride and
passion had doubtless something to do with this life of adventure and that
contempt of peril. But of what stamp must have been that soul which could
find consolation in all this? And, as often happens, the man to whom she
thus devoted herself was not wholly worthy of her. He had infinite spirit;
but he was coldly calculating, profoundly selfish, meanly ambitious. He
measured others by himself. He was naturally as subtle in evil, as she was
disposed spontaneously to virtue. Full of finesse in his self-love and in the

pursuit of his own interest, he was, in reality, the least chivalrous of his sex,
although he affected all the appearance of the loftiest chivalry. In his liaison
with Madame de Longueville he made love the slave of ambition.

It will be necessary to touch only slightly upon his career antecedent to
this period. Francis, the sixth seigneur and second Duke de la
Rochefoucauld, was born 15th December 1613. Little is recorded of his
early years, he himself having given no details about them. We only know
that he was very imperfectly educated, his father being desirous that he
should early adopt the profession of arms. Himself enjoying royal favour in
the highest degree, his eldest son, the young Prince de Marsillac, profitably
felt its influence; for, as early as 1626, he commanded as mestre-de-camp
the Auvergne regiment of cavalry at the siege of Casal. He took an active
part in the Day of Dupes, the period at which his memoirs commence. Two
years previously, in 1628, he had married at Mirebeau a rich and beautiful
heiress of Burgundy, Andrée de Vivonne, only daughter of André de
Vivonne, Baron of Berandière and Chasteigneraye, Grand Falconer of
France, Captain in the Guards of the Queen-Mother, Marie de’ Medici,
Councillor of State, and one of the most trusty followers of Henry IV. The
Prince de Marsillac was at first in great favour at Court, notwithstanding his
father’s misconduct, but he suddenly compromised himself in a very
imprudent way. Closely intimate with that virtuous maid-of-honour, Marie
de Hautefort, whom the saturnine Louis XIII. loved as passionately as his
peculiar temperament permitted, and also with Mademoiselle de
Chémerault, as lovely as she was witty, he was by them hurried into a blind
devotion to the cause of their unhappy mistress and queen, Anne of Austria,
“the only party,” says he, with unusual candour, “that I ever honestly
followed.” And very soon his confidential relations with the persecuted
princess became so marked as necessarily to excite Richelieu’s suspicions,
the more so that he ventured to speak of the Cardinal’s administration in the
boldest terms. His friends advised him to retire from Court, at least

temporarily; but, as he wished to employ his time usefully, he joined as a
volunteer the army of Marshal de Chastillon, who, with Marshal de la
Meilleraye, beat Prince Thomas of Savoy at Avein. After behaving with
distinction there, he returned, when the campaign was over, to Court,
exhibiting a conduct still more independent, and which resulted in forcing
him to rejoin his father at Blois.

It was through the proximity of his father’s château of Verteuil to
Poitiers, where the Duchess de Chevreuse was then living in banishment
from Court, that the Prince de Marsillac first came to ally himself with the
illustrious political adventuress. At the time when La Rochefoucauld
obtained political notoriety, a crisis occurred in France in national manners,
sentiments, and feelings. The nobles, long kept under by the strong hand of
Richelieu, were again rising into faction, and a spirit of intrigue had seized
upon everyone.

Although still young, Rochefoucauld had renounced enterprises in which
the heart is alone concerned. No longer engrossed with love, he was wholly
given up to ambition; and in order to avenge himself of the Queen and
Mazarin, who had not in his opinion evinced sufficient generosity towards
him to satisfy this later passion, he did not hesitate to fling himself
headlong into partisan intrigue and strife which ended in civil war. To
render himself the more formidable, he was above all desirous of securing
to his party the master-mind of Condé; and as Madame de Longueville
enjoyed the entire confidence of her favourite brother, and had great
influence with him, the natural result was that in due course La
Rochefoucauld made persistent love to the lovely Duchess. Seduced by the
chivalrous manners and romantic antecedents of his youth, and yielding
partly to the occasion, partly to the obstinate persistence of the suit, and
some little perhaps to the maternal blood in her veins, Madame de
Longueville at length surrendered her heart to the daring aspirant. She could

no longer plead early youth as an excuse, for she had already numbered
twenty-nine summers, and was only distant by a very small span from that
formidable epoch in woman’s life which a discriminating writer of the
present day has happily termed the crisis. That turning point in the
Duchess’s career was destined to prove fatal to her, and the crisis was
exactly such as that of which, in the case of another celebrated woman, M.
Feillet has given a lucid analysis—the crisis brought about by an irresistible
passion. Let us beware of hastily applying to Madame de Longueville that
maxim of her cynical lover: “Women often think they still love him whom
they no longer really love. The opportunity of an intrigue, the mental
emotion to which gallantry gives birth, natural inclination to the pleasure of
being beloved, and the pain of refusing the lover, together persuade them
that they cherish a genuine passion when it is nothing more than mere
coquetry.” Better had it been both for herself and for us to believe that she
had only so loved.

The beauty and intelligence of the Duchess de Longueville formed
certainly, at the commencement, a large share in the calculating lover’s
determination to seek a liaison with the Duke d’Enghien’s sister. The crowd
of admirers was great around her, and that spectacle of itself served to
inflame the ambition of M. de Marsillac: subsequent reflection, doubtless,
must have redoubled his ardour to achieve the twofold conquest, in love and
party. The Count de Miossens was then paying the most assiduous court to
Madame de Longueville; he was very intimately connected with Marsillac,
to whom indeed he was nearly related, and whom he kept well acquainted
with the course of his amours. His suit to the lovely Duchess proving, as
has been said, entirely unsuccessful, Miossens eventually left the field clear
to Marsillac, the brave and simple soldier giving place to the self-seeking
man of the world.

CHAPTER II.

THE DUCHESS DE LONGUEVILLE DRAWN INTO THE VORTEX OF
POLITICS AND CIVIL WAR BY HER LOVE FOR LA
ROCHEFOUCAULD.

We have glanced rapidly over the fairest period of Madame de
Longueville’s youth, over those years wherein the splendour of her success
in the ranks of fashion was not obtained at the expense of her virtue. The
time approaches in which she is about to yield to the manners of her age,
and to the long-combatted wants of her heart. The love which she inspired
in others, she is, in turn, about to feel herself, and it is to engage her, at the
age of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, in a fatal connection, which will make
her unmindful of all her conjugal duties, and turn her most brilliant qualities
against herself, against her family, and against France.

Let us now relate briefly what we know of Madame de Longueville from
the moment of our last mention of her up to the commencement of 1648.
There is nothing recorded which can authorise the supposition that before
the close of 1647 Madame de Longueville had ever passed the limits of that
noble and graceful gallantry which she saw everywhere held in honour, the
praises of which she heard celebrated at the Hôtel de Rambouillet as well as
at the Hôtel de Condé, in the great verse of Corneille and in the turgid
effusions of Voiture. At the time of the duel between Guise and Coligny, in

1644, she had seen her twenty-fifth summer. Each succeeding year seemed
only to enhance the power of her charms, and that power she delighted in
exhibiting. A thousand adorers pressed around her. Coligny was, perhaps,
nearest to her heart, but had not, however, touched it. But one cannot, with
impunity, trifle with love. That tragic adventure of the eldest of the
Châtillons perishing, in the flower of his youth, by the hand of the eldest of
the Guises was quickly echoed by song and romance through every salon,
and cast a gloom upon the destiny of Madame de Longueville, and gave her,
at an early period, a fame at once aristocratic and popular, which prepared
her wonderfully to play a great part in that other tragi-comedy, heroic and
gallant, called the Fronde. The glory of her brother was reflected upon her,
and she responded to it somewhat by her own success at Court and in the
salons. She acquired more and more the manners of the times. Coquetry
and witty talk formed her sole occupation. Her delicate condition not
permitting her to accompany M. de Longueville to Münster, in June, 1645,
she remained in Paris. It was the place above all others in which she
delighted, and whether her heart had received some slight wound, or
whether it was still entirely whole, it is clear that she was not very glad nor
greatly charmed to find herself, after her accouchement in the spring of
1646, under the cold, grey sky of Westphalia, again beside a husband who
was not, as Retz says, the most agreeable man to her in the world. It is not
difficult to divine the feelings with which that petted beauty of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet must have left Corneille, Voiture, and all the elegancies and
refinements of life, to take up her abode at Munster amongst a set of foreign
diplomatists only speaking German or Latin. To her it was doubly an exile,
for her native soil was not merely France—but Paris, the Court, the Hôtel
de Condé, Chantilly, the Place Royale, the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre.[44]
However, there was nothing for it but to obey the marital summons, and to
set off with her step-daughter, Mademoiselle de Longueville, who was
already more than twenty years of age. The Duchess quitted Paris on the

20th of June, 1646, with a numerous escort under the command of
Montigny, lieutenant of M. de Longueville’s guards. The entire journey
from Paris to Munster was a continual ovation. The Duke went as far as
Wesel to meet her. Turenne, who then commanded on the Rhine, treated her
to the spectacle of an army drawn up in order of battle, and which he
manœuvred for her amusement. Was it on that occasion that the great
captain, well known to have been always impressionable to female beauty,
received the ardent impulse which was renewed at Stenay in 1650, and
which, graciously but prudently acknowledged by Madame de Longueville,
always remained a close and tender tie between them? On the 22nd of July
she made her triumphal entry into Munster. During the entire autumn of
1646 and the winter of 1647 she was really the Queen of the Congress. Her
beauty and grace of manner won homage equally from the grave
diplomatists as from the great commanders who were there assembled.

Although the Duchess dissembled her ennui with that politeness and
gentleness peculiar to herself, after the lapse of a few months she had had
enough of her brilliant exile. In the winter of 1647 there were two reasons
for her return to France. Her father, the Prince de Condé, had died towards
the close of December, 1646, to the great loss of his family and France, the
consequences of which were somewhat later vividly felt. Moreover,
Madame de Longueville had become enceinte, at Münster for the third time,
and it being her mother’s wish that her accouchement should take place
near her, M. de Longueville was compelled to consent to his wife’s
departure for Paris.

Her return to France, at first to Chantilly, and next to Paris, in the month
of May, 1647, was quite another sort of triumph to that of her journey to the
Rhine and Holland, and her sojourn at Münster. She found the crowd of her
adorers more numerous and attentive than ever, and in the foremost rank her

younger brother, the Prince de Conti, just fresh from college, was taking his
first lessons of life in the wider range of the great world.

Shortly after her accouchement, the Duchess, who during her sojourn
amongst the plenipotentiaries charged with negotiating the treaty of
Westphalia, had acquired a taste, there seems little doubt, for political
discussions and speculations, first began to manifest an inclination to mix
herself up with state affairs. There was little difficulty in her doing so. The
mission which the Duke de Longueville continued to fulfil in Germany, the
continued favour enjoyed by the Princess de Condé, the ever-increasing
influence which the Duke d’Enghien—recently through his father’s death
become Prince de Condé—had acquired by his repeated victories, all these
advantages, joined to the prestige of the personal charms of Madame de
Longueville, placed this latter in a position to take the foremost part in the
civil war about to break out.

The Court and Paris were then occupied with festivals and diversions,
which all were eager to share with Madame de Longueville. To please the
Queen, Mazarin multiplied balls and operas. At a great expense he sent to
Italy for artists, singers, male and female, who represented the opera of
Orpheus, the machinery and decorations of which are said to have cost
more than 400,000 livres. The Queen delighted in these spectacles. France
also, as though inspired by its increasing grandeur, took pleasure in the
magnificence of its government, and seconded it by redoubling its own
luxury and magnificence. The pleasures of wit occupied the first rank. The
Hôtel de Rambouillet, near its decline, was shedding its last rays. Madame
de Longueville reigned there as well as in all the best circles of Paris; and it
must be confessed, with her good qualities she had also some of the defects
of the best précieuses. The following is the picture which Madame de
Motteville has traced of her person, of the turn of her mind, of her
occupation, of her reputation, and of that of the whole house of Condé, at

this period, which may be considered as the most felicitous of her life:
“This princess, who during her absence reigned in her family, and whose
approbation was sought as though she were a real sovereign, did not fail, on
her return to Paris, to appear in greater splendour than when she left it. The
friendship entertained for her by the Prince, her brother, authorizing her
actions and her manners, the greatness of her beauty and of her mind
increased so much the cabal of her family, that she was not long at Court
without almost entirely engrossing it. She became the object of all desires:
her clique was the centre of all intrigues, and those whom she loved became
also the favourites of fortune.... Her intelligence, her wit, and the high
opinion entertained for her discernment, won for her the admiration of all
good people, who were persuaded that her esteem alone was enough to give
them reputation. If, in this way, she governed people’s minds, she was not
less successful by means of her beauty; for although she had suffered from
the small-pox since the Regency, and although she had lost somewhat of the
perfection of her complexion, the splendour of her charms excited a
powerful influence upon those who saw her; and she possessed especially,
in the highest degree, what in the Spanish language is expressed by those
words, donayre, brio, y bizarrie (gallant air). She had an admirable form,
and her person possessed a charm whose power extended over our own sex.
It was impossible to see her without loving her, and without desiring to
please her.” Some shadows, however, slightly tone down this otherwise
brilliant portraiture. “She was then too much engrossed with her own
sentiments, which passed for infallible rules while they were not always so,
and there was too much affectation in her manner of speaking and acting,
whose greatest beauty was attributable to delicacy of thought and
correctness of reasoning. She appeared constrained, and the keen raillery
exercised by herself and her courtiers often fell upon those who, while
rendering her their homage, felt, to their mortification, that honest sincerity,
which ought to be observed in polite society, was apparently banished from

hers. The virtues and qualities of the most excellent creatures are mingled
with things opposed to them: all men partake of this clay from which they
derive their origin, and God alone is perfect.... In short it may be said that at
this time all greatness, all glory, and all gallantry were concentrated in the
family of Bourbon, of which the Prince de Condé was the illustrious head,
and that fortune was not considered a desirable thing if it did not emanate
from their hands.”

But, unhappily, frivolous pastimes, of a nature both innocent and
dangerous, now wholly engrossed Madame de Longueville. She was
surrounded by all the prosperities and all the felicities of this life.
Everything conspired in her favour, or rather against her—the triumphs of
mind as well as those of beauty, the continually increasing glory of her
paternal house, the intoxication of her vanity, the secret promptings of her
heart. The trial was too much for her, and she succumbed to it. In the
enchanted circle in which she moved, more than one adorer attracted her
attention; and one of them succeeded in winning her affections, according
to all appearances, at the close of 1647, or at the commencement of 1648.
She was then about twenty-nine.

François, Prince de Marsillac, without being very handsome, was well
formed and very agreeable. As De Retz says, he was not a warrior, although
he was a very good soldier. What distinguished him especially was his wit.
Of this he possessed an infinite fund, of the finest and most delicate. His
conversation was gentle, easy, insinuating; and his manners were at once
the most natural and most polished. He had a lofty air. In him vanity
supplied the place of ambition. At an early age he showed a fondness for
distinction and for intrigues. Profoundly selfish, and having succeeded in
acquiring a knowledge of himself, and in reducing to theory his nature, his
character, and his tastes, he set out with very contrary appearances, and
those chivalrous manners affected by the Importants. One of his first

connections, as we have seen, was with Madame de Chevreuse, who
secured him to Queen Anne. When the death of Louis XIII. had placed the
supreme authority in her hands, he imagined that his fortune was made. He
sought successively various important offices which the Queen could not
grant, whatever liking she might have entertained for him. Having tried
several schemes and failed in all, the Queen applied herself to soothing his
disappointments, by behaviour so tender as to retain him, as would now be
said, in a moderate opposition, and keep him from taking part in the
violence of Beaufort. He was not then covered with the disgrace of the
Importants, though he shared it to a certain extent; and he did not cease to
be, or seem to be, very much attached, not to the government, but to the
person of the Queen. He looked continually for some great favour at her
hands. These favours not arriving, he determined to procure through
intimidation what his self-seeking fidelity had not been able to secure for
him.

It was during this state of his feelings that he met Madame de
Longueville, on her return from Munster, surrounded by the most earnest
admirers. The Count de Miossens, afterwards Marshal d’Albret—
handsome, brave, full of wit and talent, as enterprising in love as in war—
was paying her a very zealous court. La Rochefoucauld persuaded
Miossens, who was one of his friends, that, after all, if he should overcome
the resistance of Madame de Longueville, it would only be a victory
flattering to his vanity, whilst that he, La Rochefoucauld, would be able to
turn it to a very good account. This was certainly a very convincing and
heroic reason for falling in love! We, however, do no more than transfer,
with the utmost exactness, a statement made by Rochefoucauld himself,
which we will now quote word for word: “So much unprofitable labour and
so much weariness, finally gave me other thoughts, and led me to attempt
dangerous ways in order to testify my hostility to the Queen and Cardinal
Mazarin. The beauty of Madame de Longueville, her wit, and the charms of

her person, attached to her all who could hope for her favour. Many men
and women of quality strove to please her; and besides all this, Madame de
Longueville was then upon such good terms with all her house, and so
tenderly beloved by the Duke d’Enghien, her brother, that the esteem and
friendship of this prince might be counted upon by any one who enjoyed the
favour of his sister. Many persons vainly attempted this game, mingling
other sentiments with those of ambition. Miossens, who afterwards became
Marshal of France, persisted in it longest, but with similar success. I was
one of his intimate friends, and he told me his designs. They soon fell to the
ground of themselves. He saw this, and told me several times that he was
about to renounce them; but vanity, which was the strongest of his passions,
prevented him from telling me the truth, and he professed to entertain hopes
which he had not, and which I knew that he could not have. Some time
passed in this way; and, finally, I had reason to believe that I could make a
more considerable use than Miossens of the friendship and confidence of
Madame de Longueville. I made him believe it himself. He knew my
position at Court; I told him my views, declaring that my consideration for
him would always restrain me, and that I would not attempt to form a
connection with Madame de Longueville without his permission. I will
even confess that I irritated him against her in order to obtain it, without,
however, saying anything untrue. He delivered her over entirely to me, but
he repented when he saw the result of that connection.”[45]

When, subdued at length by the passion shown for her by La
Rochefoucauld, Madame de Longueville had determined to respond to it,
she gave herself up to him wholly—devoting herself in everything to the
man whom she dared to love. She made it a point of honour, as doubtless it
was a secret happiness, to share his destiny and to follow him without
casting one backward glance—sacrificing to him all her private interests,

the evident interest of her family, and the strongest sentiment of her soul,
her tenderness for her brother Condé.

The truthful Madame de Motteville, after noting the principal motive
which urged La Rochefoucauld in his pursuit of Madame de Longueville,
adds: “In all that she has since done, it is clearly seen that ambition was not
the only thing that occupied her soul, and that the interests of the Prince de
Marsillac there held a prominent place. For him she became ambitious, for
him she ceased to love repose; and in order to show herself alive to this
affection, she became too insensible to her own fame.... The declarations of
the Prince de Marsillac, as I have already said, had not been displeasing to
her; and this nobleman, who was perhaps more selfish than tender, wishing
through her to promote his own interests, believed that he should inspire her
with a desire of ruling the princes her brothers.”[46]

Such being the sordid motives of her wooer, the oft-repeated lines,
therefore, which he wrote with his own hand behind a portrait of the
Duchess must be construed with a considerable abatement of their poetic
ardour:—
“Pour meriter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,
J’ai fait la guerre aux rois, Je l’aurais faite aux dieux.”[47]

Such a dissembler then was the coldly ambitious, egotistical, clever Duke
de la Rochefoucauld—a man capable of sacrificing everybody to his own
interests. Madame de Longueville, such as we have depicted her, could not
help being the instrument of a man of like character. M. Cousin seems to
have arrived at that conclusion, since, in designating that princess as the
soul of the Fronde, he acknowledges “that she troubled the state and her
own family by an extravagant passion for one of the chiefs of the
Importants, become one of the chiefs of the Fronde.” But M. Cousin is very
nearly silent touching the Prince de Conti, of whom the Duchess was the

sole motive-power on all occasions, and he merely says that this young
prince submitted to be led by his sister in order to stand upon an equal
footing with his elder brother whilst waiting for a cardinal’s hat.

Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, born in 1629, was eighteen years
of age in 1647. He had good intellect and a not unpleasant countenance; but
a slight deformity and a certain feebleness of constitution rendering him
unfit for the army, he was early destined for the church. He had studied
among the Jesuits at the college of Clermont with Molière, and his father
had obtained for him the richest benefices, and demanded a cardinal’s hat.
While waiting for this hat dignity, Armand de Bourbon was living at the
Hôtel de Condé, partly an ecclesiastic, partly a man of the world, passing
his days with wits and men of fashion, and greedy of every species of
success. The glory of his brother filled him with emulation, and he dreamed
himself of warlike exploits. When his sister returned from Germany, he
went to meet her, and, dazzled by her beauty, her grace, and her fame, he
began to love her rather as a gallant than as a brother. He followed her
blindly in all her adventures, in which he exhibited as much courage as
volatility. When he had made his peace with the Court—thanks to his
marriage with a niece of Mazarin, the beautiful and virtuous Anne-Marie
Martinozzi—he obtained the command-in-chiefship of the army of
Catalonia, in which capacity he acquitted himself with great honour. He was
much less successful in Italy. On the whole, he was far from injuring his
name, and he gave to France, in the person of his young son, a true warrior,
one of the best pupils of Condé, one of the last eminent generals of the
seventeenth century. Constrained, through ill-health, to betake himself again
to religion, the Prince de Conti finished, where he had begun, with
theology. He composed several meritorious and learned works on various
religious subjects.

In 1647, he was entirely devoted to vanity and pleasure. He adored his
sister, and she exercised over him a somewhat ridiculous empire, which
continued during several years.

FOOTNOTES:

[44] In which the Hôtel de Rambouillet was situate.

[45] Petitot Collection, vol. li. p. 393.

[46] Mad. de Motteville, vol. ii. p. 17.

[47] At a later period, after he had lost his sight from a pistol-shot received at
the combat of the Porte St. Antoine during the Fronde, and had quarrelled with
the Duchess, he parodied his own distich,—

“Pour ce cœur inconstant, qu’enfin Je connais mieux,
J’ai fait la guerre au roi; J’en ai perdu les yeux.”

CHAPTER III.

THE DUCHESS DE CHEVREUSE DRIVEN INTO EXILE FOR THE
THIRD TIME.

When in the summer of 1644, the Queen of England, the fugitive consort
of Charles I., sought an asylum in France from the fury of the English
parliamentarians, and went to drink the Bourbon waters, Madame de
Chevreuse eagerly desired to see once more that illustrious princess, who
had so warmly welcomed her when herself an exile, at the Court of St.
James’s. Queen Henrietta, too, who like her mother, Marie de’ Medici, as
well as the Duchess, was of the Spanish and Catholic party, would have
been delighted to have mingled her tears with those of so old and faithful a
friend. But the royal exile did not deem it right to give way to her
inclination without Queen Anne’s permission, who at that moment was
according her such noble hospitality. Anne of Austria politely replied that
the Queen, her sister, was perfectly free to act as she chose; but it was
intimated to her, through the Chevalier de Jars, that it was inexpedient to
receive the visit of a person who, through misguided conduct, had forfeited
Her Majesty’s favour. This fresh disgrace, added to so many others,
increased the Duchess’s irritation to the highest pitch. She redoubled her
efforts to break the yoke that oppressed her. Mazarin watched and was
made acquainted with all her manœuvres. He had the comptroller of her
household arrested in Paris, and shortly afterwards even her physician,

whilst accompanying Madame de Chevreuse’s daughter in her carriage for
an airing. The Duchess complained bitterly of this latter proceeding in a
letter which she contrived to have handed to the Queen. She asserted that
Mademoiselle de Chevreuse was forced to quit the vehicle, two archers
levelling their pistols at her breast, and shouting all the while—“Fire! fire!”
and they threatened, after the same fashion, the female attendants who were
with her. At the same time that she protested her own innocence, she did not
fail to challenge Anne’s sense of justice, with a view to neutralize the
enmity of Mazarin. But the physician whom he had had arrested, on being
flung into the Bastile, made avowals which opened up traces of very grave
matters; and an exempt of the King’s guards was despatched to Madame de
Chevreuse with an order commanding her to retire to Angoulême, and the
officer was even charged to convey her thither. At Angoulême was that
strong fortress used as a state prison, in which her friend Châteauneuf had
been confined on her account for ten long years. This reminiscence, ever
present to the Duchess’s imagination, terrified her sorely. She dreaded lest it
should be the same sort of retreat which they now intended for her; and the
active-minded woman, preferring every kind of extremity to being
imprisoned, decided upon renewing the career of a wanderer and an
adventurer, as in 1637, and to tread for the third time the wearisome paths
of exile.

But how greatly were circumstances then changed around her, and how
changed was she also herself! Her first exile from France in 1626, had
proved one continuous triumph. Young, lovely, and adored by every one,
she had quitted Nancy, leaving the Duke de Lorraine a slave henceforward
to the sway of her charms, only to return to Paris and trouble the mind of
the stony, impassive Richelieu. In 1637 her flight into Spain had, on the
contrary, proved a most severe trial to her. She had been forced to traverse
the whole of France disguised in male attire, brave more than one danger,
endure much suffering and privation, only to struggle in the sequel with five

consecutive years of fruitless agitation. But, at any rate, she then had youth
to back her, and the consciousness of the power of that irresistible
fascination which procured her adorers and suitors wherever she wandered,
even among the occupants of thrones. She had faith likewise in the Queen’s
friendship, and a firm reliance that the time would come when that
friendship would repay her for all her devotedness. But now age she felt
was creeping upon her; her beauty, verging towards its decline, promised
her henceforward conquests only few and far between. She perceived that
in losing her power over Anne of Austria’s heart, she had lost the greater
portion of her prestige both in France and Europe. The flight of the Duke de
Vendôme, shortly about to be followed by that of the Duke de Bouillon, left
the Importants without any chief of note. The Duchess had found Mazarin
to be quite as skilful and formidable an enemy as Richelieu. Victory seemed
to have entered into a compact with him. De Bouillon’s own brother,
Turenne, solicited the honour of serving him, and the young Duke
d’Enghien won battle after battle for him. She knew also that the Cardinal
had that in his hands wherewith he could condemn and sentence her to
incarceration for the rest of her days. When, however, almost every one
forsook her, this extraordinary woman did not give way to self-
abandonment. As soon as the exempt Riquetti had signified to her the order
of which he was the bearer, she adopted measures with her accustomed
promptitude, and, accompanied by her daughter Charlotte, who had
hastened to her mother and refused to quit her, she succeeded in reaching by
cross-roads the thickets of La Vendée and the solitudes of Brittany; until,
approaching within a few leagues of St.-Malo, she solicited an asylum at
the hands of the Marquis de Coetquen. That noble and generous Breton
gave her the hospitality which was due to such a woman struggling against
such adversity. Marie de Rohan did not abuse it; and after placing her
jewels in his hands for safety, as she had formerly done in those of La
Rochefoucauld,[48] she embarked with her daughter in the depth of winter at

St.-Malo, on board a small vessel bound for Dartmouth, whence she
purposed crossing over to Dunkirk and entering Flanders. But the English
parliamentarian men-of-war were cruising in the Channel. They fell in with
and captured the wretched little bark, and carried her into the Isle of Wight.
There Madame de Chevreuse was recognised; and as she was known to be a
friend of the Queen of England, the Roundheads were not loth to subject
her to sufficiently rough treatment; and afterwards hand her over to
Mazarin. Fortunately, in the Governor of the Isle of Wight, she met with the
Earl of Pembroke, whom she had formerly known. The Duchess appealed
to his courtesy,[49] and thanks to his good offices, she obtained—but with
no little difficulty—passports which permitted her to gain Dunkirk, and
thence the Spanish Low Countries.

The adventurous exile took up her abode for a short time at Liège, and
applied herself to maintain and consolidate to the utmost degree possible
between Spain, Austria, and the Duke de Lorraine, an alliance, which was
the final resource of the Importants, and the last basis of her own political
reputation and high standing. Mazarin, however, having got the upper hand,
resumed all Richelieu’s designs, and, like him, made strenuous efforts to
detach Lorraine from his two allies. The gay Duke was then madly
enamoured of the fair Beatrice de Cusance, Princess of Cantecroix. Mazarin
laboured to gain over the lady, and he proposed to the ambitious and
enterprising Charles IV. to break with Spain and march into Franche-Comté
with the aid of France, promising to leave him in possession of all he might
conquer. The Cardinal succeeded in winning over to his interest Duke
Charles’s own sister (the former mistress of Puylaurens), the Princess de
Phalzbourg, then greatly fallen from her former “high estate,” and who gave
him secret and faithful account of all that passed in her brother’s immediate
circle. Mazarin required of her especially to keep him apprised of Madame
de Chevreuse’s slightest movement. He knew that she was in

correspondence with the Duke de Bouillon, that she disposed of the
Imperial general Piccolomini by means of her friend Madame de’ Strozzi,
and even that she had preserved intact her sway over the Duke de Lorraine,
in spite of the charms of the fair Beatrice. By the help of the Princess de
Phalzbourg he watched every step, and disputed with her, foot to foot,
possession of the fickle Charles IV., sometimes the victor, but very often the
vanquished in this mysterious struggle.

The advantage remained with Madame de Chevreuse. Her ascendancy
over Charles IV.—the offspring of love, surviving that passion, but more
potent than all the later loves of that inconstant Prince—retained him in
alliance with Spain, and frustrated Mazarin’s projects. By degrees she
became once more the soul of every intrigue planned against the French
Government. She did not always attack it from without, but fostered
internal difficulties, which, like the heads of the hydra, were unceasingly
springing forth. Surrounded by a knot of ardent and obstinate emigrants,
among others by the Count de Saint-Ybar, one of the most resolute men of
the party, she kept up the spirits of the remnant of the Importants left in
France, and everywhere added fuel to the fire of sedition. Actuated by
strong passion, yet mistress of herself, she preserved a calm brow amidst
the wrack of the tempest, at the same time that she displayed an
indefatigable activity in surprising the enemy on his weak side. Making use
alike of the Catholic and the Protestant party, at times she meditated a revolt
in Languedoc, or a descent upon Brittany; at others, on the slightest
symptom of discontent betrayed by some person of importance, she
laboured to drive out Mazarin.

FOOTNOTES:

[48] Subsequently, she requested the Marquis de Coetquen to hand over her
jewels to Montrésor, who transferred them to a messenger of the Duchess. But
Mazarin was informed of everything from first to last. He was aware of every

tittle of the Duchess’s correspondence, and tried to seize with the strong hand the
famous gems which had formerly belonged to Marie de’ Medicis’ favourite
foster-sister, Leonora Galligaï, created Marchioness d’Ancre. On the murder of
the Marshal d’Ancre, these diamonds and parures, valued at two hundred
thousand crowns, with a vast amount of other property confiscated by an edict of
Louis XIII., were bestowed by the king on his lucky favourite, De Luynes, the
first husband of Marie de Rohan. Failing in his attempt to possess himself of
these costly gems, Mazarin arrested Montrésor, and kept him upwards of a year
in prison. See “Memoirs of Montrésor.”

[49] See her letter to the Earl of Pembroke, dated Isle of Wight, 29th April,
1645, in “Archives des Affaires Étrangères, France,” t. cvi. p. 162.

CHAPTER IV.

FATAL INFLUENCE OF MADAME DE LONGUEVILLE’S PASSION
FOR LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.—THE FRONDE.

We do not propose to enter into the labyrinth of intrigues which preceded
the outbreak of the Fronde, but confine ourselves to an endeavour to trace
the motives which led Madame de Longueville to throw herself into the
centre of the malcontents and to figure as the chief heroine in the varied
scenes of that tragi-comedy of civil war.

The first Fronde was formed out of the débris of the Importants. It was
composed of all the malcontents who made common cause with those
members of the parliament who were irritated by the frequent bursal edicts,
notably that which, in 1648, created twelve new appointments of maîtres de
requêtes.

And now what gave birth to the Fronde, or what sustained it? What
roused up the old party of the Importants, stifled for some years, it would
seem, under the laurels of Rocroy? What separated the princes of the blood
from the Crown? What turned against the throne that illustrious house of
Condé, which, until then, had been its sword and shield? There were
doubtless many general causes for all this; but it is impossible for us to
conceal one—private, it is true, but which exercised a powerful and
deplorable influence—the unexpected love of Madame de Longueville for

one of the chiefs of the Importants, who had become one of the chiefs of
the Fronde. Yes—sad to say—it was Madame de Longueville, who, joining
the party of the malcontents, attracted thereto, at first, a part of her family,
then her entire family, and thus precipitated it from the pinnacle of honour
and glory to which so many services had elevated it.

Scarcely had the treaty of Münster suspended the scourge of foreign war
for France, than internal dissensions began to trouble the realm. The hatred
which the Parliament bore to Mazarin, through his repression of its
functions, primarily gave birth to civil war. The Duchess de Longueville
became in the faction of the Fronde what the Duchess de Montpensier had
been in that of the League. The former, however, did not at first attach so
great an importance to the cause she espoused. Characteristically careless,
she was by nature little inclined to agitation and intrigue. We have already
shown that before her liaison with La Rochefoucauld, Madame de
Longueville had been a stranger to politics. Occupied solely with innocent
gallantry and the homage of the most refined society of the day, she allowed
herself in all else to be led by her father and her elder brother. But no sooner
was La Rochefoucauld master of her heart, than she gave herself wholly up
to him, and became a mere instrument in his hands. Having been by him
inspired with ambition, she made it a point of honour, and doubtless a secret
happiness, to share his destiny.

It seems not improbable that the Duchess might have caught a liking for
politics and negotiation during the conference of Munster. Certain it is that
once plunged into the eddying tide of the Fronde, she loftily announced the
project of remedying the general disorder of affairs. But she especially
desired to employ therein the means which confer celebrity, and it is
difficult to deny that ambition, although without determinate aim, and the
desire of establishing a high opinion of her intellect, may have had some
share in the reasons which induced her to embrace the party opposed to

Mazarin. With herself she drew her husband into it, as well as the Prince de
Conti, her younger brother. As for the elder, the victorious Condé, he at first
declared for the King and the Queen-Regent, which greatly incensed his
sister against him, and caused her to enter into close compact, amongst
others, with the Coadjutor, afterwards Cardinal de Retz—that mischievous
man who figured so conspicuously as the evil genius of the Fronde.

The Gondis, who were the chief advisers of the St. Bartholomew, owed
to that terrible exploit the result of being very nearly the hereditary
possessors of the Archbishopric of Paris. But this last Gondi—John Francis
Paul—owed something more: to be at the same time governor of Paris, and
to unite both powers. With such purpose, he artfully worked upon the city
through the curates who, distributing bread, soup, and every other kind of
alms, carried along with them the famished masses. This young ecclesiastic
of the de Retz family had risen into great favour with the serious and
religious sections of the Parisian community. He was nephew of the
Archbishop of Paris, and was himself Archbishop of Corinth; but as his
flock in that metropolitan city were schismatic (except those who had
turned Turks), he had leisure to assist his uncle in his high office, and was
appointed his Coadjutor and successor. He preached at all the churches,
held visitations at the convents, catechised the young, and consulted with
the senior clergy on the management of the diocese. When he rode through
the streets he was saluted with cheers and blessings, and the orators of the
Fronde held him up as the pattern of all the Christian virtues. At night he
put off his episcopal robes, disguised himself as a trooper or tradesman, and
attended the meetings of the discontented. In a short time he had distributed
seven or eight thousand pounds in stirring up the passions of the people,
and was daily in expectation of being summoned by his patroness the
Queen to exert his influence in quelling them. The populace, with an
Archbishop-governor of Paris at their head, imagined that they were going
to rule there as in the time of the League. This made them both blind and

deaf to the morals and manners of the little prelate. A braggart, a duellist,
and more than a gallant—though having swarthy, ugly features, turned-up
nose, and short, bandy legs—yet his expressive eyes carried off every fault,
sparkling as they were with intelligence, audacity, and libertinage. Few
withstood this subtle knave, for he was wont to waive all ceremonial and
spare everybody prefatory speeches. The ladies of gallantry—especially
those whose lover he was—were his most indefatigable political agents.
The Queen, at length, suspecting that the worthy Archbishop was not quite
the simple and self-denying individual he appeared, had him watched and
followed. Whilst he flattered himself with the anticipation that his
assistance would be solicited at the Palais Royal, the Queen was making a
jest of him, and Mazarin determined to strike the blow.

On the 27th of August, 1648, a vast assemblage crowded the spacious
precincts of Notre Dame, to celebrate a Te Deum for the great victory of
Lens, of which the youthful Condé had just sent home the news. When the
multitude were dispersing, a dash was made upon two or three of the
obnoxious councillors who had inflamed the discussions of the Fronde—for
that civil war was fairly on foot ere Anne of Austria and Mazarin knew of
its existence. Two of the intended prisoners escaped, but a surly, burly
demagogue, named Broussel, was tracked to his house in the mechanics’
quarter of Paris, and arrested by an armed force. Thereupon the populace
rose and armed against the Court. They made an extraordinary stand in the
streets, having raised twelve hundred barricades in the course of twelve
hours. They had no further need of De Retz. It was, however, one of his
mistresses, the sister of a president and wife of a city captain, who having in
her house the drum belonging to the citizen guard of that quarter, gave the
first impulse by causing it to be beaten. The train was thus fired and the
flame of civil war kindled. This was called the Day of the Barricades.

Thus, the royal power which, as wielded by Richelieu, had come to be
considered as absolute, was attacked by three parties simultaneously—the
great nobles, the parliamentarians, and the bourgeoisie; but,
notwithstanding the dread of the common enemy, which united them, those
parties were of different origin and conditions of existence, and
consequently had different interests also. The great nobles wished to
exercise power by placing themselves above the law; the parliament to
increase its own through the law; the citizens to establish theirs at the
expense of the law: for in their eyes the law was full of abuses and the royal
power cruelly oppressive. All three parties, in order to arrive at their several
ends, had, therefore, recourse to violence, or derived aid from it.

On the return of Madame de Longueville from Münster, there was
already a ferment in the minds of the Parisians, of which the Regent took
little heed. The Fronde cabal was then brooding in the dark. When the
rebellion, formed by Gondi, broke out at last under the circumstances just
narrated, Madame de Longueville, alone of all the princesses of the blood,
did not accompany Anne of Austria in her flight to Rueil. The Duchess
strove her utmost to strengthen, by the concurrence of her entire family, the
faction whose fortunes she had embraced through devotion to Marsillac.
She did not, however, then succeed in detaching Condé from the Regent’s
party. The battle of the barricades followed close upon that of Lens,
Condé’s last victory. On his return, that victorious young soldier found
royalty humiliated, the Parliament triumphing and dictating laws to the
Crown; the Duke de Beaufort, with whom he once thought of measuring
swords in defence of the honour of his sister, freed from his prison in
Vincennes, and master of Paris by aid of the populace who idolized him; the
vain and fickle Abbé de Retz transformed into a tribune of the people; the
Prince de Conti into a generalissimo; M. de Longueville under the guidance
of his wife and La Rochefoucauld; and the feeble Duke d’Orléans fancying
himself almost a King, because he saw the Queen humiliated, and because

the Frondeurs, cunningly flattering his self-love, were treating him like a
sovereign. Condé, at a glance, saw the situation of affairs and his duty also;
and without any hesitation he offered his sword to the Queen.

Brother and sister were, therefore, about to be arrayed against each other
in the strife of civil war, and a stormy explanation took place between them.
It is asserted that for some time back their reciprocal tenderness had
suffered more than one interruption; that, in 1645, Madame de Longueville
had crossed the loves of her brother and Mademoiselle du Vigean; that, in
1646, Condé, seeing her too intimate with La Rochefoucauld, had caused
her to be summoned to Münster by her husband. But for this we have only
the authority of the Duchess de Nemours, her step-daughter and unsparing
censor, and nothing is less probable. The passion of Condé for
Mademoiselle de Vigean extinguished itself, as all contemporaries affirm.
The attentions of La Rochefoucauld to Madame de Longueville may have
preceded the embassy of Münster, but they were not observed until 1647,
and it is at the close of this year that Madame de Motteville places them,
while attributing them especially to the desire of La Rochefoucauld to share
the confidence of the sister with the brother. But it is very certain that as
soon as the latter remarked this connection, he disapproved of it entirely;
and not succeeding in his effort to rouse his sister from the intoxication of a
first passion, he passed from the most ardent affection to a bitter discontent.
In the autumn of 1648, on his return from Lens, this connection had
acquired its greatest strength, and become almost notorious. Madame de
Longueville, directed by La Rochefoucauld, did then everything possible to
gain over her brother. She brought all her allurements to bear upon him, all
her fondlings. She put into play everything which she thought might
influence his fickle and passionate disposition—but failed. Neither did he
succeed in gaining over her his accustomed ascendency. They quarrelled
and separated openly. Madame de Longueville plunged more deeply into

the Fronde, and Condé applied himself to giving the new Importants a harsh
lesson.

The Queen had retired to Saint-Germain with the young King and all the
government. Paris was under the absolute control of the Fronde. It stirred
up the Parliament by the aid of a few ambitious councillors and by seditious
and mischievous inquests. It disposed of a great part of the Parisian clergy
through the Coadjutor of the Archbishop De Retz, who possessed and
exercised all the authority of his uncle. It had continually at its head the two
great houses of Vendôme and Lorraine, with two princes of the blood, the
Prince de Conti and the Duke de Longueville, followed by a very great
number of illustrious families, including the Dukes d’Elbeuf, de Bouillon,
and de Beaufort, and other powerful nobles. It gave law in the salons,
thanks to a brilliant bevy of pretty women, who drew after them the flower
of the young nobility. In short, the army itself was divided. Turenne, with
his troops, who were stationed near the Rhine until the perfect conclusion of
the treaty of Westphalia, obedient to the suggestions of his elder brother, the
Duke de Bouillon, who wished to recover his principality of Sedan, had just
raised the standard of revolt, and was threatening to place the Court
between his own army and that of Paris. The parliament of the capital had
sent deputies to all the parliaments of the kingdom, and was thus forming a
sort of formidable parliamentary league in the face of monarchy. Condé
took command of all the troops that remained faithful, and everywhere
opposed the insurrection. He wrote himself to the army of the Rhine, which
well knew him, and which after the rout sustained by Turenne at Mariendal,
had been led back by him to victory: these letters, supported by the
proceedings of the government, succeeded in arresting the revolt; and
Turenne, abandoned by his own soldiers, was obliged to fly to Holland.[50]
At ease on this head, Condé marched upon Paris, and placed it under siege.
Instead of disputing the ground, as he might have done, foot by foot, with

the sedition, he allowed it the freest course, in the certainty that the
spectacle of licentiousness which could not fail to appear would, little by
little, restore to royalty those who had for a moment gone astray. He began
by summoning, in the Queen’s name and through his mother, all his family
to Saint-Germain. The Prince de Conti and M. de Longueville did not dare
disobey; but La Rochefoucauld, seeing that the Fronde was in the greatest
peril, hastened after these two princes. Having brought them back to Paris,
he made the Prince de Conti generalissimo—placing under him the Dukes
d’Elbeuf and de Bouillon—and who shared authority with the Marshal de la
Mothe Houdancourt, governor of Paris. Madame de Longueville excused
herself to the Queen and to her mother on the grounds of her delicate
condition, which would not permit her to undertake the least fatigue. In fact,
Madame de Longueville, it may be noted, was enceinte for the last time in
1648, when, it must be confessed, her connection with La Rochefoucauld
was well known. It was in this condition that, willing to share the perils of
her friends, proud also of playing a part and of filling all the trumpets of
fame, she enacted Pallas as well as she was able. It is at least certain that
she shared all the fatigues of the siege, that she was present at the reviews
of the troops, at the parades of the citizen soldiery, and that all the civil and
military plans were discussed before her. In this disorder and confusion,
amidst the tumult of arms and vociferations of the insurrection, she
appeared as if in her natural element. She encouraged, counselled, acted,
and the most energetic resolutions emanated from her. The memoirs of the
times are full, in regard to this, of the most curious details. The Hôtel de
Longueville was continually filled with officers and generals; nothing was
seen there but plumes, helmets, and swords.

Notwithstanding all this, the democratic spirit which had originated the
Fronde was not satisfied. It beheld with displeasure all the forces of Paris in
the hands of the brother, of the brother-in-law, and of the sister of him who
commanded the siege. Believing very little, and with reason, in the

patriotism of the princes, the citizens demanded some sureties from the
chiefs who might at any time betray them, and make peace, at their
expense, with Saint-Germain. No one seemed to know how to appease this
clamorous multitude, without which nothing further could be done. It was
then that Madame de Longueville showed that, if she had forgotten her true
duties, she had retained the energy of her race and the intrepidity of the
Condés. Under the advice of De Retz, she induced her husband to present
himself to the Parliament and inform them that he had come to offer his
services, as well as the towns of Rouen, Caen, Dieppe, and the whole of
Normandy, of which he was governor; and he begged the Parliament to
consent that his wife and two children should be lodged at the Hôtel de
Ville as a guarantee for the execution of his word. His speech was received
with acclamations; and while the deliberations were still going on, De Retz
proceeded to seek the Duchess de Longueville and the Duchess de
Bouillon, both prepared to act a part in the scene he proposed to display. He
had already caused the proposal of the Duke de Longueville to be spread
amongst the populace; and hurrying the two princesses into a carriage,
dressed with studied and artful negligence, but surrounded by a splendid
suite, and followed by an immense crowd to the principal quarter of the
insurrection—the Hôtel de Ville—those lovely and interesting women were
placed in the hands of the people as hostages with all that was most dear to
them. “Imagine,” says De Retz, “these two beautiful persons upon the
balcony of the Hôtel de Ville; more beautiful because they appeared
neglected, although they were not. Each held in her arms one of her
children, who were as beautiful as their mothers.” La Grève was full of
people, even to the house tops; the men all raised cries of joy, and the
women wept with emotion. De Retz, meanwhile, threw handfuls of money
from the windows of the Hôtel de Ville amongst the populace, and then,
leaving the princesses under the protection of the city, he returned to the

Palais de Justice, followed by an immense multitude, whose acclamations
rent the skies.

On the night of the 28th of January, 1649, Madame de Longueville gave
birth to her last child, a son, who was baptized by De Retz, having for its
godfather the Provost, for its godmother the Duchess de Bouillon, and who
received the name of Charles de Paris; the child of the Fronde, handsome,
talented, and brave; who during his life was the troublesome hope, the
melancholy joy of his mother, and the cause of her greatest grief in 1672,
when he perished, at the passage of the Rhine, by the side of his uncle,
Condé.

The Prince de Conti being declared generalissimo of the army of the
King, under the parliament, and the Dukes de Bouillon and Elbeuf, with the
Marshal de la Mothe, generals under him, De Retz saw the full fruition of
his intrigues. A civil war was now inevitable. The great and the little, the
wise and the foolish, the rash and the prudent, the cowardly and the brave,
were all engaged and jumbled up pell-mell on both sides; and the mixture
was so strange, so heterogeneous, and so incomprehensible, that a sentiment
of the ridiculous was irresistibly paramount, and the war began amongst fits
of laughter on all sides. That same day Condé’s cavaliers came galloping
into the faubourgs to fire their pistols at the Parisians, whilst the Marquis de
Noirmoutier went forth with the cavalry of the Fronde to skirmish with
them, and returning to the Hôtel de Ville, entered the circle of the Duchess
de Longueville, followed by his officers, each wearing his cuirass, as he
came from the field. The hall was filled with ladies preparing to dance, the
troops were drawn up in the square, and this mixture of blue scarves and
ladies, cuirasses and violins and trumpets, formed, says De Retz, a spectacle
much more common in romances than anywhere else.

The serio-grotesque drama of the Fronde was thus initiated.

FOOTNOTES:

[50] “History of Turenne,” by Ramsay, vol. ii.

CHAPTER V.

MADAME DE LONGUEVILLE WINS HER BROTHER CONDÉ OVER
TO THE FRONDE.

This first raising of bucklers by the Frondeurs was not of long duration.
At the conclusion of a peace between Mazarin and the Parliament, a perfect
understanding prevailed amongst all the members of the Condé family. The
civil dissensions, however, were sufficiently prolonged to exhibit the errors
of all parties—even those who had entered therein with virtuous
inclinations and intentions, ashamed of the stains which had tarnished them
in the struggle, almost invariably ended by confining themselves to the
narrow circle of individual interests, and completed their degradation by no
longer recognizing any other motive for their conduct than that of sordid
selfishness. All care for the public weal became extinct; men’s hearts were
insensible to all generous sympathy; their minds dead to every elevating
impulse—like to those aromatics which, after diffusing both glow and
perfume from their ardent brazier, lose by combustion all power of further
rekindling, and present nothing else than vile ashes, without heat, light, or
odour.

The peace concluded between the Minister and the Fronde was destined
to be of short duration. It was, properly speaking, nothing but a suspension
of arms, and in no degree a suspension of intrigues and cabals. That

suspension of arms, however, had been accompanied by an amnesty,
including all persons except the Coadjutor. The other chief personages who
had played a part in the insurrection of Paris, and who now proceeded to
visit the Court, were by no means warmly received by the Queen, though
Mazarin himself displayed nothing but mildness and humility. The Duke
d’Orleans and the Prince de Condé visited the city; and the first was
received with much enthusiasm by the populace, who attributed to his
counsels the truce of which all parties had stood so much in need. The
Prince de Condé, whose warlike spirit had not only aided in stirring up the
strife at first, but would have protracted it still further had his advice been
listened to, was not looked upon with the same favour by the Parisians; but
the Parliament sent deputations to them both on their arrival in the city, to
compliment them on their efforts for the restoration of peace.

During Condé’s visit to Paris, a reconciliation took place between him
and his fair sister, the Duchess de Longueville. The violent language he had
used to her on various occasions, the imputations he had cast upon her
character, and the harsh nature of the advice which he had given to her
husband concerning her, were all forgotten, and she resumed her
ascendancy over his mind so completely as in a very short time to detach
him entirely from the side of Mazarin, and to lead him, before he quitted
Paris, to speak publicly of the Minister in the scornful and contemptuous
manner in which he was usually treated by the leaders of the Fronde.

The Duchess de Longueville herself remained as strongly opposed to the
Cardinal as ever. But though she still retained towards Anne of Austria that
dislike which she had always felt, and which the sense of an inferiority of
station greatly augmented in a woman of a haughty and ambitious character,
she found herself obliged, in common propriety, to appear at Court on the
conclusion of the Siege of Paris. The first visits of her husband and herself,
after the insurrection, were rendered remarkable by the extraordinary

degree of embarrassment and timidity shown by two such bold and fearless
persons. The Duke de Longueville arrived first, coming from Normandy;
and was followed by a very numerous and splendid train, as though he
rested for mental support upon the number of his retainers. The Queen
received him in the midst of her Court, with Mazarin standing beside her;
and every one crowded round to hear what excuses the Duke would offer
for abandoning the royal family at the moment of their greatest need.
Longueville, however, approached the Regent with a troubled and
embarrassed air, attempted to speak, became first deadly pale, and then as
red as fire, but could not utter a word. He then turned and bowed to
Mazarin, who came forward, spoke to him, and led him to a window, where
they conversed for some time together in private; after which they visited
each other frequently, and became apparent friends.

The reception of the proud and beautiful Duchess at St. Germain, though
not so public, was not less embarrassing. The Queen had lain down on her
bed when the Duchess was announced, and, as was customary in those
days, received her in that situation. Madame de Longueville was naturally
very apt to blush, and the frequent variation of her complexion added
greatly, we are told, to the dazzling character of her beauty. Her blushes,
however, on approaching the Queen, became painful; all that she could utter
was a few confused sentences, of which the Queen could not understand a
word, and those were pronounced in so low a tone that Madame de
Motteville, who listened attentively, could distinguish nothing but the word
Madame.

As there was no sincerity in these reconciliations, it is not surprising to
find that ere long the conduct of the Prince de Condé gave no slight
uneasiness to Mazarin. The Prince had, however, brought back the Court to
Paris; but from that very day he had shown a great change in his attitude,
and it is to the influence of La Rochefoucauld that such change must be

attributed. At that moment, in fact, the Sieur Condé had become reconciled
with every member of his family, and even with his sister’s lover. He drew
closer also the links between himself and the Duke d’Orleans, for whom he
shewed great deference, say his contemporaries, and he began to treat
Mazarin with much indifference, rallying him publicly, and declaring aloud
that he regretted to have maintained him in a post of which he was so little
worthy. Enjoying a great military reputation, feared and esteemed by the
bulk of his countrymen, he chafed at seeing himself compromised by the
unpopularity of the Cardinal. He thought that by drawing closer to the
Frondeurs, he should rid himself of the feeling that oppressed him. In the
outset, he had no idea of actively joining that faction, but his sister did the
rest, and hurried him on to become the enemy of that party of which he had
just been the saviour.

It is true that, for the memorable service which he had recently rendered,
Condé reaped scarcely any benefit; but his noble conduct increased the
splendour of his last campaign of 1648. It added to his military titles those
of defender and saviour of the throne, of pacificator of the realm, of arbiter
and enlightened conciliator of parties. It gave the climax to his credit and to
his glory. Nevertheless, he did not lose sight of the jealous feeling to which
such claims gave birth, whether on the part of the Duke d’Orleans or the
Prime Minister; and he well knew that he was exposed to one of those
coups d’état, the necessity of which the Chancellor as well as himself had
urged at Rueil. He considered himself as the head of the nobility, and that
important body seemed to constitute all the military power of the State. But
the French nobility was just beginning to lose its former independence of
character in becoming more courtierlike. Instead of deriving from its
strongholds and vassals the feeling of its strength and equality, it showed
itself ambitious of such distinctions as the monarch could confer. In the
indulgence of its vanity it lost sight of its proper pride; and if that new
emulation which the Bourbons had excited was more easy for the sovereign

to satisfy, it was more difficult for the chief of a party to direct. Moreover,
Condé, as the Duchess de Nemours remarks, knew better how to win battles
than hearts.[51] He found a dangerous pleasure, as did his sister the Duchess
de Longueville, in braving malevolence. “In matters of consequence, they
delighted to thwart people, and in ordinary life they were so impracticable
that there was no getting on with them. They had such a habit of ridiculing
one, and of saying offensive things, that nobody could put up with them.
When visits were paid to them, they allowed such a scornful ennui to be
visible, and showed so openly that their visitors bored them, that it was not
difficult to understand that they did everything in their power to get rid of
their company. Whatsoever might be the rank or quality of the visitors,
people were made to wait any length of time in the Prince’s antechamber;
and very often, after having long waited, everybody was sent away without
getting an interview, however short. When they were displeased they
pushed people to the utmost extremity, and they were incapable of showing
any gratitude for services done them. Thus they were alike hated by the
Court, by the Fronde, and by the populace, and nobody could live with
them long. All France impatiently suffered their irritating conduct, and
especially their pride, which was excessive.”[52]

In looking at the faulty side of Condé’s character, we must not forget to
observe the disinterested firmness with which, without considering either
his family or his friends, he had hitherto acted in the interests of the King.
Happy would it have been, if, after having thus terminated this sad civil
war, he had quitted the Court and its intrigues to seek other battlefields, and
to finish another war somewhat more useful and glorious to France—that
which still remained with Spain! Happy, also for Madame de Longueville,
if, taught by her own conscience, in her last interview with the Queen, and
by the shameful dénouement of the miserable intrigues of which she had the
secret, instead of still serving as their instrument, she had shown her

courage in resisting them. Happy too, if, after all the proofs of devotion
which she had just given to La Rochefoucauld, she had firmly represented
to him that, even for his own interest, a different course was necessary; that
it would be better to look for fortune and honours by rendering himself
esteemed than by trying to make himself feared; that ambition as well as
duty showed his place to be by the side of Condé, in the service of the State
and of the King; that it was easy for him to obtain in the army some post
where he would simply have to march forward and do his duty, trusting to
his courage and his other merits!

But even if Anne de Bourbon had been wise enough to speak thus to La
Rochefoucauld, she would not have succeeded in gaining his ear. His
restless spirit, his ever-discontented vanity, pursuing by turns the most
dissimilar objects, because it selected none within its reach—that
undefinable something which, as De Retz says, was in La Rochefoucauld,
made him abandon the high and direct roads, and led him into by-paths full
of pitfalls and precipices. Through such perilous ways we shall see the
infatuated woman following and aiding him in his extravagant and guilty
designs. Receiving the law instead of giving it, she strives to promote the
passion of another by devoting to his service all her coquetry as well as
greatness of soul, her penetration and intrepidity, her attractive sweetness
and indomitable energy. She undertakes to mislead Condé, to rob France of
the conqueror of Rocroy and of Lens, and to give him to Spain.

FOOTNOTES:

[51] Duchesse de Nemours, tom., xxxiv. p. 437.

[52] The Duchess de Nemours was a daughter of the Duke de Longueville, by
his first wife, and as she lived with her step-mother, the Duchess de Longueville,
on very indifferent terms, her unsparing censure must by no means be implicitly
received.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CAUSES WHICH LED TO THE COUP D’ÉTAT—THE ARREST OF
THE PRINCES.

In the first scenes of the shifting drama, the Court had supported Condé
in compassing the destruction of the Frondeurs; and Mazarin, with keen
policy, instigated the Prince to every act that could widen the breach
between him and the faction. Whichever succeeded, the party that
succumbed would be inimical to the Minister; and in their divisions was his
strength. But the pride and impetuosity of Condé were about this time
excited to such a degree by opposition and irritation, that it approached to
frenzy, and, unable to overpower at once the leaders of the Fronde, the
vehemence of his nature spent itself upon those who were in reality
supporting him. He still scoffed at, and openly insulted, Mazarin; he
accused the Government of not giving him sincere assistance against the
Fronde. He every day made enemies amongst the nobility by his
overbearing conduct and his rash, and often illegal, acts; and at length the
disgust and indignation of the whole Court was roused to put a stop to a
tyranny which could no longer be borne.

Anne of Austria long hesitated as to what she should do to deliver herself
from the domination of a man whom she feared without loving: but at
length an aggravated insult to herself, and the counsels of a woman of a

bold and daring character, removed her irresolution. The Duchess de
Chevreuse had been exiled from France, as we have seen, during the greater
part of that period in which Condé had principally distinguished himself,
and she did not share in the awe in which the Parisians held him. She still
kept up what De Retz calls an incomprehensible union with the Queen,
notwithstanding all her intrigues; nor did she scruple to hold out to Anne of
Austria a direct prospect of gaining the support of the Fronde itself in
favour of her Government, if that Government would aid in avenging the
Fronde upon the Prince de Condé.

Anne of Austria was unwilling to take a step which appeared to border
upon ingratitude, although the late conduct of the Prince might well be
supposed to cancel the obligation of his former services. It seems here
necessary to say a few words upon the connection of a series of sudden
political changes, in order that the reader may understand how such
startling results as those we are about to narrate were brought about.

The hollow treaty of peace of the 11th March, 1649, had scarcely been
signed ere the Prince de Condé showed himself day by day more strongly
attached to the faction which opposed the Court. Feeling his own
importance, determined to rule; quick, harsh, and impetuous in his manners,
he took a pleasure in insulting the Minister and embarrassing the Queen.
There were some personal grounds for this in the strong dislike manifested
towards his sister by Anne of Austria. That feeling was signally shown on
the occasion of Louis XIV. completing his eleventh year; when a grand ball
was given at the Hôtel de Ville, at which the young King, with all the
principal members of the royal family and the Court, were present. The
Queen’s orders were received with regard to all the arrangements, every
person of distinction being invited by her command, except the Duchess de
Longueville. That princess, influenced by discontent, it is supposed, at the
reception of the royal family in Paris, had remained at Chantilly, on the

pretence of drinking some mineral waters in the neighbourhood. The Queen
seized the same pretext not to invite her, replying to those who pressed her
to do so, that she would not withdraw her from the pursuit of health; but at
length the Prince de Condé himself, demanded that she should receive a
summons; and his support was of too much consequence, and the bonds
which attached him to the Court too slight, for the Queen to trifle with his
request.

To the surprise and dissatisfaction of most persons, however, Anne of
Austria commanded that the ball should take place in daylight;
acknowledging, in her own immediate circle, that it was in order to mortify
the ladies attached to the Fronde, the principal part of whom employed
methods of enhancing their beauty and heightening their complexion to
which the searching eye of day was very inimical. Human malice, of
course, took care that the Queen’s motive should be communicated to all
the higher circles of Paris; and as vanity is not only a more pugnacious
passion, but a much more pertinacious adversary than any other, the words
of Anne of Austria rendered many opponents irreconcilable, who might
otherwise have been gained to her cause: the family of the Prince de Condé
naturally being among the number.

France was then able to count the cost of having created a hero—
expendere Hannibalem—a prince à la Corneille, who carried his gaze to the
stars, and only spoke to mortals from the summit of his trophies. His sister,
Madame de Longueville, had also in the same fashion soared into the
sphere of a goddess. The one and the other, in the empyrean, no longer
distinguished their fellow mortals from such a height save with a smile of
disdain. Great folks, as a contemporary tells us, kicked their heels in their
antechambers for hours, and, when granted an audience, were received with
yawning and gaping.

The reconciliation effected during the preceding year was rather, as has
been said, a truce between the parties than a solid peace. The Parliament
had retained the right of assembling and deliberating upon affairs of state,
which the Court had sought to prevent: and Mazarin remained Minister,
although the Parliament, the people, and even the princes, had desired that
he should cease to hold that office. It rarely happens to states in like
unfortunate emergencies that among the men who show themselves most
active and skilful in overthrowing a government there are found those
capable of conducting one; and when such do appear, the chances almost
always are that circumstances hinder them from placing themselves in the
front rank. It was to Gaston, the King’s uncle, Lieutenant-General of the
kingdom, that belonged, in concert with the Regent, the chief direction of
affairs; but Gaston felt himself too weak and too incapable to pretend to
charge himself with such a burden. He could never arrive at any decision,
and took offence when any matter was decided without him. Jealous of
Mazarin’s influence, more jealous still of that of Condé, neither of the two
could attempt to govern along with him; and nevertheless Gaston was
powerful enough to command a party, and to hinder any one from
governing without him: ready to offer opposition to everything, but
impotent to carry anything into execution. If Anne of Austria had even
consented to dismiss her favourite Minister, and overcome her repugnance
to the Fronde and the Frondeurs, she could not have formed a government
with the chiefs of that party. The Duke de Beaufort, its nominal head,
lacked both instruction and intelligence. De Retz, its veritable chief—an
eloquent, witty, and bold man, skilful in the conduct of business, in the art
of making partisans; brave, generous, even loyal when he followed the
impulses of his own mind and natural inclination—was without faith,
scruple, reticence, or foresight when he abandoned himself to his passions,
which urged him unceasingly to the indulgence of an excessive and
irrational libertinage. Such a man could not have replaced him who for so

long a period had informed himself of the affairs of France under a master
such as Richelieu; who, deeply versed in dissimulation, was inaccessible to
any sentiment that might possibly derange the calculations of his ambition.
Besides, he, as well as Mazarin, would have had the Princes against him,
and could not have resisted successfully their numerous partisans. De Retz
had, through the ascendancy of his talents, great influence with the Parisian
Parliament, but it mistrusted him; and that body, in its heterogeneous
composition, offered rather the means for an opposition than strength to the
Government. Condé, to whom the state owed its glory, and the Sovereign
his safety, was therefore the sole prop upon which Anne of Austria might
have rested; but that young hero had no capacity for business. He could not
then have filled up the void which Mazarin’s retirement would have
created. Condé, whose natural pride was still further exalted by the flattery
of the young nobles who formed his train, and who obtained the nickname
of petits maîtres, only used the influence which his position gave him to
wring from Mazarin the places and good things at his disposal, and of these
he and his adherents showed themselves insatiable. Thus, Condé rendered
himself formidable and odious to Mazarin, and made himself detested by
the people as Mazarin’s supporter, at the same time that by his arrogance he
shocked the Parliament, already unfavourably disposed towards him on
account of his rapacity and his ambition.[53]

Such was the state of things, when the singular circumstances which
attended the murder of one of Condé’s domestics made that prince believe
that the chiefs of the Fronde had conspired to assassinate him. He thought,
by such a crime, to have found an opportunity for crushing that faction in
the persons of its chiefs, and he instituted a process in parliament against
the contrivers of that murder. Public report particularly pointed to two
persons, De Retz and Beaufort; and Condé, by his accusation, hoped to
force them to quit Paris, where they found their principal means of

influence in the populace. But in attacking thus, as it were, face to face, the
two most popular men of the moment, Condé showed no better tact than in
dealing with the Prime Minister. He conducted himself with so much
haughtiness and arrogance, that the young nobles who surrounded the
soldier prince, when they wished to flatter him, spoke of Mazarin as his
slave.[54]

The process went on nevertheless. Almost all the judges were convinced
of the innocence of the accused, but Condé pretended that they could not be
absolved without giving a deadly affront to himself. He demanded that at
the very least the Coadjutor and Beaufort should be made to quit Paris
under some honourable pretext, and the Princess-Dowager de Condé
declared that it was the height of insolence in them to remain in the capital
when it was her son’s wish that they should leave it. The Queen, who
equally detested the Prince de Condé and the Frondeurs, could scarcely
conceal her joy at seeing them at daggers drawn with each other; feeling
certain that the moment was at hand when their dissensions would restore
her supremacy.

Under such circumstances Condé had need of all his friends, but he
considered that he was set at defiance, and he gave way all the more to his
wonted pride and overbearing obstinacy. He seemed to take pleasure in
offending Anne of Austria and Mazarin. The young Duke de Richelieu had
been declared heir to an immense fortune, of which his aunt and guardian,
the Duchess d’Aiguillon, was the depositary. The stronghold of Havre de
Grâce, which the Cardinal de Richelieu had formerly held as a place of
retreat, was by such title in the possession of the Duchess d’Aiguillon.
Condé desired to be master of it, either for himself or for his brother-in-law,
the Duke de Longueville. The young Duke de Richelieu was engaged to be
married to Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, but the Prince having remarked that
he had some liking for Madame de Pons, a sister of his own first love,

managed to marry him clandestinely to her in the Château de Trye, lent him
two thousand pistoles until he should be of age to enter upon possession of
his property, and made him take possession of Havre de Grâce. The Queen
was mortally offended at such a proceeding on the part of Condé, who had
moreover threatened to throw into the sea those she might send to Havre to
seize the fortress; but the Duchess d’Aiguillon’s resentment was still deeper
and more active. She was the first to tell Anne of Austria, that she would
never be queen again until she had had the Prince de Condé arrested,
assuring her that all the Frondeurs would lend their hands to aid her in
carrying out such a resolution.

Almost at this moment, a gentleman named Jarzé, attached to Condé,
foolishly took it into his head that the Queen entertained a liking for him,
and it reached her ears that Condé and his friends had amused themselves
whilst at table over their wine with Jarzé’s revelations of his amour with
her, and that he had begun to feel certain of getting rid of Mazarin by that
means. Mazarin himself probably became somewhat alarmed, as he spoke
pointedly to the Queen on the subject, who pretended only to have
contemplated the ridiculous side of her new adorer’s gallantries. But when
Jarzé next made his appearance in her cabinet, she rated him roundly before
the whole Court upon his absurd fatuity, and forbade him ever to enter her
presence again. The Prince de Condé, pretending to feel hurt at the affront
put upon Jarzé, early next morning paid the Prime Minister a visit, and
insolently demanded that Jarzé should be received that very evening by the
Queen. Anne of Austria submitted to his dictation, but could not endure
such humiliation without seeking to avenge herself. In a woman’s heart
every other species of resentment yields to that of wounded pride. A few
lines addressed to the Coadjutor in the Queen’s own handwriting, and
carried by Madame de Chevreuse, brought to her side that wily priest and
formidable tribune, disguised en cavalier. Certain negotiations, however,
which had preceded this interview, had reached the ears of Condé, who

went to Mazarin to denounce the treachery. The Cardinal, glowing with a
hatred which would have stopped at nothing for its gratification, laughed
and jested, or flattered and soothed the object of his concealed wrath. He
turned the Archbishop of Corinth into ridicule when Condé blamed him for
his duplicity. “If I catch him,” said the Cardinal, “in the disguise you speak
of—in his feathered hat, and cloak, and military boots—I will get a sight of
him for your Highness;” and they roared at the idea of discovering the
intriguer in so unfitting an apparel. But shortly afterwards in the wintry
gloom of a January midnight (1650), disguised beyond the reach of
detection, and guarded by a passport from the Cardinal himself, De Retz
was admitted at midnight by a secret door into the Regent’s room at the
Palais Royal, and deep conference was held between the two. The
conditions of agreement were readily stipulated. The Coadjutor with an
inconceivable address and most extraordinary success handled the threads
of the intrigues consequent upon such agreement. He succeeded in making
himself the confidant of Gaston; he made him renounce his favourite, the
Abbé de la Rivière; he engaged him in the coalition which had been just set
on foot between the Court and the Fronde, and he obtained his assent to the
arrest of the Princes. Everything succeeded that was agreed upon. The
Queen-Regent, at the moment of a council being held at the Palais-Royal,
gave the fatal order, and then withdrew into her oratory. There she made the
young King kneel down beside her in order to invoke Heaven in concert
with herself to obtain the happy achievement of an act of tyranny which
was destined to produce fresh woes to the realm, and to rekindle in it the
flames of civil war.

On the morrow of the 18th of January, 1650, all Paris was electrified at
the news of the arrest of the three Princes—Condé, Conti, and Longueville.
That bold coup d’état was effected very easily and unceremoniously. The
Princes went voluntarily, as it were, into the mouse-trap, by attending a
great council at the Palais Royal. Anne had obtained from Condé an order

for the seizure and detention of three or four persons whose names were left
in blank; and on the authority of his own signature, the hero of Rocroy and
the other two princes, were led quietly down a back stair, given over to the
custody of a small escort of twenty men under the command of Guitaut and
Comminges, and by them conducted during the night to Vincennes.

FOOTNOTES:

[53] Talon, mém. t. lxii. pp. 65-105.—Montpensier.

[54] Motteville, mém. t. xxxix. p. 4.—Guy-Joly.

CHAPTER VII.

MADAME DE LONGUEVILLE’S ADVENTURES IN NORMANDY.
THE WOMEN’S WAR.

The heroes having thus suddenly disappeared from the scene, the
political stage was left clear for the performance of the heroines. We are
now about to see the women, almost by themselves, carry on the civil war,
govern, intrigue, fight. A great experience for human nature, a fine
historical opportunity for observing that gallant transfer of all power from
the one sex to the other—the men lagging behind, led, directed, in the
second or third ranks. But those women of rank, young, beautiful, brilliant,
and for the most part gallant, were doubtless more formidable to the
minister at this juncture than the men. The two lovely duchesses, De
Longueville and De Bouillon, having shown during the preceding year of
what they were capable; the Queen therefore gave orders for their arrest.
The wary lover of the fascinating politician who had lately begun to scatter
her blandishments equally upon all—La Rochefoucauld—having been
apprised by the captain of his quarter that some blow was meditated by
Mazarin, had sent twice to warn the Princes through the Marquis de la
Moussaye, but who, as it appears, failed to acquit himself of that important
mission. But if La Rochefoucauld’s warning failed to reach the ears of the
Princes, he was more fortunate in effecting the escape of Madame de
Longueville. Whilst they were seeking to arrest him as well as La

Moussaye, the Queen despatched a note to the Duchess by the Secretary of
State, La Vrillière, begging her to come to the Palais Royal. Instead of
going thither she went direct to the Hôtel of the Princess Palatine—like
herself beautiful, gallant, and intriguing, but endowed with a superior
intellect. This lady speedily became the head and mainspring of the princes’
party—or of the second Fronde, and the Coadjutor, who directed the Old
Fronde, was fain to recognise in her a worthy rival, and his equal in
political sagacity. Fearing to be discovered if she remained under the roof of
the princess, a carriage was procured, and the duchess driven in it by La
Rochefoucauld himself to an obscure house in the Faubourg St. Germain,
where they remained until nightfall in a cellar. Thence the Duchess and her
lover set out for Normandy on horseback under the escort of forty
determined men provided by the Princess Palatine. Brave and resolute as
her brother, the sister of Condé rode northwards through that entire winter’s
night and the following day, and sought no shelter until worn out with
excessive fatigue she reached Rouen. But the commandant, the Marquis de
Beuvron, although an old friend of the duke, declared he could not serve
her, and refused to raise the banner of revolt in that stronghold of her
husband’s government. Her attempt at Rouen thus receiving a complete
check, she had some hope of being received into the citadel of Havre, but
the Duchess de Richelieu, though her friend, was not so much mistress
there as the Duchess d’Aiguillon, who, on the contrary, was full of
resentment against her. Discouraged and repulsed on all hands, the fugitive
Duchess next made her way to Dieppe, where she thought herself in
sufficient safety to part with La Rochefoucauld, who left her to assist the
Duke de Bouillon to raise troops in Angoumois. In the fortress of Dieppe,
commanded by a faithful officer of her husband, Madame de Longueville
found the rest she so much needed. In a brief space, with spirits recruited,
she resolved to make a stand to the uttermost against the Queen and
Mazarin, and having replaced the royal standard by that of Condé set about

putting the citadel in a state of defence to resist a siege. The Queen,
however, having resolved not to give the Duchess time to raise her
husband’s government of Normandy into revolt, on the 1st of February
quitted Paris for Rouen. The band of gentlemen who had gathered round the
beautiful Frondeuse thereupon melted away, and Mademoiselle de
Longueville, her step-daughter, afterwards Duchess de Nemours, quitted her
to take refuge in a convent. As Montigny, the commandant at Dieppe,
declared that it was impossible to hold the fortress, the Duchess left the
place by a secret portal, followed by her women and some few gentlemen.
She held her way for two leagues on foot along the coast to the little port of
Tourville, in order to reach a small vessel which she had prudently hired in
case of need. On reaching the point of embarkation the sea was breaking so
furiously in surf on shore, the tide being so strong and the wind so high, that
Madame de Longueville’s followers entreated her not to attempt to reach
the vessel. But the Duchess, dreading less the angry waves than the chance
of falling into the Regent’s power, persisted in going to sea. As the state of
the tide and weather rendered it impossible for a boat to get near the shore,
a sailor took her in his arms to carry her on board, but had not waded above
twenty paces when a huge roller carried him off his feet, and he fell with his
fair burden. For an instant the poor lady believed that she was lost, as in
falling the sailor lost his hold of her and she sank into deep water. On being
rescued, however, she expressed her resolve to reach the vessel, but the
sailors refusing to make another attempt, she found herself compelled to
resort to some other means of escape. Horses being luckily procured, the
Duchess mounted en croupe behind one of the gentlemen of her suite, and
riding all night and part of the following day, the fugitives met with a
hospitable reception from a nobleman of Caux, in whose little manor-house
they found rest, refection, and concealment for the space of a week.

The Duchess’s tumble into the sea, though a disagreeable, turned out to
have been a lucky accident, for she now learnt that the master of the vessel

she had been so anxious to reach was in the interest of Mazarin, and had she
gone on board she would have been arrested. At length Madame de
Longueville found herself once more in Havre, and having won over the
captain of an English ship to whom she introduced herself—like Madame
de Chevreuse—in male attire, as a nobleman who had just been engaged in
a duel, and was obliged to leave France, she succeeded in obtaining a
passage to Rotterdam. Thence, passing through Flanders, she reached the
stronghold of Stenay,[55] where the Viscomte de Turenne, already
compromised with the Court for having openly espoused the Condé party,
had shortly before the Duchess’s arrival also taken refuge.

It was then that the Duchess, who, under the sway of La Rochefoucauld,
had been one of the instruments of the first Fronde war, became the motive
power of the second and far more serious one—well named by the witty
Parisians “the women’s war.” From the citadel of Stenay, of which she took
the command, she directed the wills and actions of the men of her party,
into which she thoroughly won over Turenne. Her importunities, aided by
her charms, prevailed so powerfully over his valiant though fallible heart,
that the illustrious captain, after having struggled painfully for some time
with his conscience, allied himself with the Spaniards by a treaty which
placed him, as well as the sister of the great Condé, in the pay of the
enemies of his king and country. The treaty effectively stipulated “that there
should be a junction of the two armies, and that the war should be carried
on by the assistance of the King of Spain until a peace should be concluded
between the two kings and the princes liberated. That the King of Spain
should engage to pay over to Madame de Longueville and to Monsieur de
Turenne two hundred thousand crowns wherewith to raise and equip troops;
that he should furnish them with forty thousand crowns per month for the
payment of such troops, and sixty thousand crowns per annum in three
payments for the table and equipages of Madame de Longueville and

Monsieur de Turenne.” This treaty duly signed, Madame de Longueville
issued, in the form of a letter to his Majesty the King of France, a manifesto
very skilfully drawn up and filled with artful complaints and accusations
against Mazarin, with the design of soliciting through the one and the other
an apology for her own conduct, as though it were possible to justify herself
for having entered into a compact with the enemies of her country.

It was during her sojourn at Stenay that she lost her mother (2nd
December, 1650). “My dear friend,” said the Princess de Condé to Madame
de Brienne, who was with her during her last moments, “tell that ‘pauvre
miserable’ who is now at Stenay the condition in which you have seen me,
that she may learn how to die.”

During the whole of this period, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld gave
constant proof of a rare fidelity. M. Cousin speaks very precisely on this
head. “Whilst Madame de Longueville was pledging her diamonds in
Holland for the defence of Stenay, La Rochefoucauld expended his fortune
in Guienne. It was the most grievous and, at the same time, the most
touching moment of their lives and their adventures. They were far away
from each other, but they still fondly loved; they served with equal ardour
the same cause, they fought and suffered equally and at the same time.”
Abundant proofs might be instanced of this love and devotion on their part.
La Rochefoucauld wrote unceasingly to Stenay, and gave an account of
everything he did. “The sole aim, then, of all the Duke’s exertions,” says
Lenet, “was to please that beautiful princess, and he took endless care and
pleasure to acquaint her with all he did for her, and to deliver the princess
her sister-in-law (Condé’s wife), by despatching couriers to her on the
subject.” He informs us moreover that, “in every juncture, he forwarded
expresses to render account to the Duchess of all that respect for her made
him undertake. At this moment, in fact, having just succeeded to his
patrimonial estates through the death of his father, La Rochefoucauld

recognised no obstacle in his path, but bravely went forward in the cause he
had espoused and generously sacrificed his property in Angoumois and
Saintonge. His ancestral château of Verteuil was even razed to the ground
by Mazarin’s orders, and when the tidings of it reached him, he received
them with such great firmness,” says Lenet, “that he seemed as though he
were delighted, through a feeling that it would inspire confidence in the
minds of the Bordelais. It was further said that what gave him the liveliest
pleasure was to let the Duchess de Longueville see that he hazarded
everything in her service.” It cannot be denied, in fine, that the Duke at that
time yielded himself up to a sentiment as deep as it was sincere, and which
contradicts very happily and without any possible doubt the assertion so
often hazarded that he had never loved the woman whom he had seduced
and dragged into the vortex of politics. Madame de Longueville and he
adored each other at this period, says M. Cousin, and it is pleasant to be
able to cite the opinion of that eminent historian upon such fact; although
separated by the entire length of France, they suffered and struggled each
for the other: they had the same aim, the same faith, the same hope. They
wrote incessantly to communicate their thoughts and projects, and thus
sought to diminish in imagination the enormous distance which is between
Stenay and Bordeaux.

FOOTNOTES:

[55] Stenay, taken from the Spaniards in 1641, had been given to the Prince de
Condé in 1646.

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER I.

THE PRINCESS PALATINE.

The arrest of the Princes had singularly complicated events on the
political stage. It had displaced all interests, and, instead of re-uniting
parties and consolidating them, it had the effect of increasing their number.
No fewer than five might be counted, represented by as many principal
leaders, around which were grouped every species of interest and every
shade of ambition.

In the first place there was the party of Mazarin, alone against all the rest.
This party had for support the ability of its chief, the invincible predilection,
the unshakeable firmness of Anne of Austria, and the name of the King.
Herein lay its whole strength, but that strength was immense. It was that
which ensured the obedience of the enlightened and conscientious men who
had great influence over the army and the magistrature. These men adhered
to the Prime Minister through a sentiment of honour, and in consequence of
their monarchical principles. Amidst the disruption of parties, they
recognised no other legitimate authority than that of the Queen Regent; but
they desired as strongly, perhaps, as those of the opposite parties, that
Mazarin should be got rid of. That odious foreigner exposed them all to the
public animosity which pursued himself. Anne of Austria frequently

employed the artifices of her sex to avert their opposition in council, and
calm their discontent.

The party of the Princes, which the success of the enemies of France,
during their captivity, rendered from day to day more popular and
interesting, was composed of all the young nobility. Of its apparent chiefs,
the one alone capable of directing it was the Duke de Bouillon. But to lead
a party it is necessary to identify oneself with it, and devote oneself to it
wholly; and the Duke de Bouillon had views peculiar, foreign, and even
adverse to the interests of his party; and before such interest he placed that
of the maintenance, or rather elevation, of his own house. The Duchess de
Longueville, the Princess de Condé, La Rochefoucauld, and Turenne had
neither sufficient finesse nor skill in intrigue to be able to direct that party
and struggle successfully against Mazarin; but they were seconded by three
men who, although obscure, displayed in these circumstances extraordinary
talent. Lenet,[56] who never quitted the Princess de Condé throughout these
troubles, but served her faithfully with his pen and advice. Montreuil, who,
although he had never published anything, was a member of the French
Academy and secretary to the Prince de Condé. He managed, with infinite
address, and incessantly devising new means, to correspond with the
Princes, and bring the vigilance of their keepers in default. And it was
Gourville especially, who, after having worn the livery of the Duke de la
Rochefoucauld as his valet, had become his man of business, his confidant,
and friend. It was Gourville who, under a heavy expression of countenance,
concealed a most subtle, most acute, and fertile intelligence. Persuasive,
energetic, prompt, reflective; knowing how to gain an end by the direct
road; or, under the eyes of those opposing, attaining it unperceived, by
covert and tortuous ways. A man who never found himself in any situation,
however desperate it might be, without having the confidence that he could
extricate himself from it. Did the cleverest consider a position as lost?

Gourville intervened, infused hope, promised to lend a hand to it, and
success was immediately certain and defeat impossible.

Still Gourville was not, even on the score of ability, the foremost spirit of
his party. The person who deserved that title was a woman—the celebrated
Anne de Gonzagua, widow of Edward Prince Palatine. Through her
proneness to gallantry, she did not escape the weakness of her sex; but
through her imperturbable calmness in the midst of the most violent
commotions, her elevated views, the depth of her designs, the accuracy and
rapidity of her resolutions, and her skill in making everything conduce to a
given end, she combined in its entire vigour the peculiar character of the
statesman with the soul of a conspirator. She had been through life the
intimate friend of the mother of Condé, and she now laboured with skill,
wisdom, and perseverance for the liberation of the Princes. And such is the
ascendency obtained by talent backed by an energetic will, that it was to her
advice all the partisans of the Princes deferred; her hand that held the
threads of their various intrigues. With her De Retz treated directly, and in
the whole course of the negotiations she displayed a degree of penetration
which baffled all the subtlety of the Coadjutor; and while she foiled his
devices against herself, she directed them aright against their mutual
opponents. By her activity and energy five or six separate treaties were
drawn up and signed between the different personages whose interests were
concerned, each in general ignorant of his comrade’s participation.

It would be presumptuous in any way to attempt, after Bossuet, a perfect
portraiture of this lady, but it may be interesting to glance at the antecedents
of her life up to this period.

Charles de Gonzagua-Cleves, Duke of Mantua and Nevers, had, by his
marriage with Catherine of Lorraine, three daughters: the oldest, Maria,
whom he preferred to the others, or rather that his pride sought to elevate

her alone to the highest destiny possible, was married successively to two
Kings of Poland, Ladislas Sigismond and Jean Casimir. The second, Anne,
who, as the Princess Palatine, became the political opponent of Mazarin;
and the third, Benedicte, who took the veil and died whilst yet very young
at the steps of the altar. It is the romantic, agitated, and changeful existence
of the second with which we are concerned: passed in tumult and ended in
silence. In it may be found the invaluable lesson of that admirable antithesis
afforded by error and repentance. Bossuet, in his eloquent, fervent oration
upon the life of that princess, was enabled to derive from a contemplation
of it the highest instruction. He has therein retraced, with an imposing
authority, the errors of a woman exclusively engrossed, during many years,
with worldly interests and earthly vanities, and also made the emphatic
denial that, in their last hours, such awakened minds but rarely give
themselves up without profound anguish, fitful emotion, and mortal
struggle to the contemplation of imperishable joys. Anne de Gonzagua
experienced those extremes. She passed from incredulity and an irregular
life to the most lively faith and exemplary conduct. Captivated in turn by
earth and heaven, worldly and scorning the world, sceptical and fervent, she
had long centred her pride and happiness in the political affairs of her
epoch, until the day came when, wearied with ephemeral pleasures and
touched by grace, she finally renounced the things of this life and gave
herself wholly up to celestial meditation.

In her earliest youth she had been placed in the convent of Faremoustier,
where nothing was neglected that could tend to inspire her with a desire for
cloister life. Her father, the Duke of Mantua, had determined that his two
younger daughters, Anne and Benedicte, should help, by taking the veil, to
augment the fortune of their elder sister. Benedicte submitted to her fate,
but Anne soon perceived what her father’s plan was, and in her indignation
she resolved to defeat it. Unlike her younger sister, she had an adventurous
spirit, an ardent imagination, a strong desire to play an active part in life.

Even to withdraw from a mode of existence that was hateful to her, she
made her escape from Faremoustier, and went to confide to her sister’s
bosom, in the convent of Avenai, her wrath, her ennui, and her hopes. For
awhile it seemed as though conventual life was about to exercise a strange
fascination over her. The discourse and example of her sister touched
deeply the youthful heart which had proved rebellious to a parent’s will. It
seemed not improbable that she would yield to persuasion that which she
had refused to compulsion. But her destiny determined otherwise. Events
cast her upon another course; her imperfect vocation yielded quickly to
their influence. She had been worked upon, in the solitude of the cloister, by
that mysterious yearning for an encounter with those struggles which
human passions involve, the experience of which can alone extinguish such
yearning in certain souls. It was necessary that she should see the world,
undergo its deceptions, and be wearied of it, in order to desire repose and be
capable of appreciating the inestimable blessings of peace and silence and
tranquillity.

The Duke of Mantua dying in 1637, Anne was obliged to leave the
cloister on business connected with the paternal succession, and appeared at
Court with Marie, her elder sister. The turmoil of the world and its sensuous
enjoyments speedily engrossed the young and lovely princess, involved her
in their trammels, and only restored her to tranquillity and solitude after a
lapse of many years; for at this time she also lost her sister, the youthful
abbess of Avenai, and the last link which attached Anne to cloister life was
severed by that death. An absorbing passion, too, was destined to confirm
her relinquishment of such vocation. The youthful Henri de Guise was then
one of the most brilliant gentlemen at the French Court. Grandson of the
Balafré, his high birth fixed the eyes of all upon him, at the same time that
his impetuous imagination, his profession, all the aristocratic follies of the
day—remarkable duels, romantic loves, eccentricities, the adventures and
elegant habits of the grand seigneur—had constituted him an oracle of

fashion and the hero of every festival. He was fascinated by the grace and
beauty of Anne de Gonzagua, and she herself, in the midst of that gallant
Court which masked a real depravation under the thin varnish of an
ingenious subtlety of expression,—she herself, a disciple of the Hôtel de
Rambouillet, where questions of sentiment were discussed, studied, and
analysed incessantly, knew not how to resist the gilded accents of a young,
handsome, and impassioned lover. She let him see that she loved him. He
made her a promise of marriage, signed, it is said, with his blood; and the
affair seemed to promise a happy conclusion. But their mutual inclination
was thwarted by Madame de Guise. The Duchess thought that the high
dignities of the Church would procure greater wealth, honour, and power
for her son than he could obtain in any other career: Henri was then
Archbishop of Rheims. Nevertheless, he persisted in his love for
Mademoiselle de Gonzagua, and in his design of espousing her. The
overtures which he made to the Vatican were not in vain. He received from
the Pope, with the authorisation to again become a layman, a dispensation
which his kinship to Anne rendered necessary for the celebration of their
nuptials. But the lovers did not hasten to avail themselves of such privilege,
apparently through dread of Richelieu, who was also opposed to their
union. Perhaps that minister, from whom nothing secret was hidden—not
even the unshaped designs of the ambitious,—already suspected Henri de
Guise of being favourably disposed to the interests of Spain, as well as
contrary to those of France. Anne and Henri, therefore, contented
themselves with the possibility which the complaisance of the Holy Father
had given them of contracting an indissoluble bond, and with the oath by
which they reciprocally pledged their faith. Confiding in the honour of the
Prince whom she so ardently loved, Anne consented to follow him, when he
quitted France in order to escape from the espionage of Richelieu.
Disguising herself in male attire, Anne rejoined her lover at Besançon,
according to Mademoiselle de Montpensier, at Cologne according to other

writers; where, as elsewhere, she caused herself to be called “Madame de
Guise”—writing and speaking of her husband, and defying the assurances
which were constantly advanced of the illegality of a marriage secretly
performed by a canon of Rheims in the private chapel of the Hôtel de
Nevers. But what are promises, marriage vows, or even bonds written in
blood?

Henri not long after became unfaithful to the confiding Anne by eloping
with a fair widow, the Countess de Bossut, whom he carried off to Brussels
and ultimately married. Implicated in the conspiracy of the Count de
Soissons, the turbulent churchman was present at the battle of Marfée, and
consequently declared guilty of high treason. He therefore took up his
abode in the Low Countries, where he quietly awaited the death of Louis
XIII. and his minister, then both moribund, to resume his career at the Court
of France.

Thus abandoned by her volatile lover, and extremely compromised,
Mademoiselle de Gonzagua returned to Paris, where she reassumed the
appellation of the Princess Anne. Her grief for awhile at her abandonment
was great, but happily for Anne de Gonzagua, she was possessed of youth,
and, as Madame de Motteville tells us, “of beauty and great mental
attractions.” She had moreover sufficient address to obtain a great amount
of esteem, in spite of her errors. In a few years’ time, during which she took
care to avoid fresh scandal, whatever she might have done “under the rose,”
she made a tolerably good marriage. Her husband, her senior by two years
only, was Prince Edward, Count Palatine of the Rhine, son of a king
without a kingdom,—the elector Frederick,[57] chosen King of Bohemia in
1619, but who lost his crown in 1620, at the battle of Prague. Prince
Edward, therefore, having no sovereignty, lived at the French Court. In
1645, then, Anne de Gonzagua found herself definitively settled at Paris,
and it must be owned did not give Henri de Guise much cause to regret his

faithlessness. The irregularities of the Princess Palatine became notorious,
and assuredly Bossuet, in the funeral oration which he pronounced many
years later, in the presence of one of her daughters and other relatives,
whilst displaying a prodigal eloquence, and a mastery over all oratorical
resource, made use of every artifice of speech, and all the elasticity of
vague terms, in speaking of that period of her life without a violation of
propriety, without disguising truths known to all, without exceeding either
in blame or praise the limits imposed by good taste upon the reverend orator
when he pronounces a panegyric upon those who not unfrequently have
very little merited it.

During those stormy years of the civil wars, through her diplomatic
talents, Anne de Gonzagua shone conspicuously in the front rank of female
politicians. One can readily imagine what must have been, not in the first
Fronde, all parliamentary as it was, but in the second, entirely aristocratic,
in the Fronde of the Princes, the influence of a woman’s mind at once so
subtle and brilliant. It was then that Madame de Chevreuse, Madame de
Montbazon, Madame de Longueville, and Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
displayed upon the political stage the resources of their finesse, their
dissimulation, or their courage. The Palatine did not fall below the level of
those adventurous heroines. In the midst of those intrigues, of that puerile
ambition, of those turnings and windings, perfidy, seduction, manœuvring
promises, of those negotiations in which Mazarin infused all his Italian
cunning, the Queen her feminine impatience and her Spanish dissimulation,
De Retz his genius of artist-conspirator, Condé his pride of the prince and
the conqueror, Anne de Gonzagua handled political matters with a rare
suppleness, humouring offended self-love, impatient ambition, haughty
rivalries, acting as mediatrix with a wonderful amount of conciliatory tact,
the friend of divers chiefs of parties, and meriting the confidence of all.

It would be tedious to relate here her various negotiations, to go over her
discourses, conversations, and numerous letters: it would involve a history
of the Fronde, and that is not our subject. It will suffice to say that she
obtained the esteem of all parties at a time when parties not only hated but
strangely defied each other, and that she manifested a skill, a tact which
Cardinal de Retz—a good judge of such matters—does not hesitate to
praise with enthusiasm. “I do not think,” says he, “that Queen Elizabeth of
England had more capacity for governing a state. I have seen her in faction,
I have seen her in the cabinet, and I have found her in every respect equally
sincere.” This eulogium may be perhaps a little over-coloured. But Madame
de Motteville, who also greatly admired the Palatine, probably approaches
nearer to the truth. “This princess,” she says, “like many other ladies, did
not despise the conquests of her eyes, which were in truth very beautiful;
but, besides that advantage, she had that which was of more value, I mean
wit, address, capacity for conducting an intrigue, and a singular facility in
finding expedients for succeeding in what she undertook.” Thus spoke the
Coadjutor and the Court of her. The parliamentary party, by the organ of the
councillor Joly, confirms such panegyric: “She had so much intelligence,
and a talent so peculiar for business, that no one in the world ever
succeeded better than she did.” The Princess Palatine’s political dexterity
cannot therefore be contested: the testimony of the most opposite camps are
thereupon agreed, and it is certain that, without the least exaggeration, it
may be said that no one at that epoch, save Mazarin, better understood the
resources of diplomacy.

It was especially after the arrest of the Princes that her zeal and
intelligence found occasion to manifest themselves. Madame de
Longueville, as has been said, instantly sought the aid of Anne de Gonzagua
when she learned that her two brothers and her husband were prisoners. The
news made her swoon, and her despair was afterwards pitiable. The
Princess Palatine was touched by it, and promised to operate on behalf of

the Princes. From that moment she became, without entering into faction
and especially without failing in her duties towards a sovereign whom she
loved, one of the most active friends of the prisoners. Meetings were held
under her roof to deliberate upon that important affair, and, to compass her
ends, she contrived to bring into play the most varied resources. She began
by interesting in the Princes’ destiny those even who might have been
thought the most irreconcileable enemies to them. However difficult this
work was of accomplishment, she reunited, as in a fasces, in a single will,
personages widely separated upon other points, and surprised to find that
they were pursuing the same object, for none of them knew the motives
which influenced the actions of the rest. On this head, Bossuet says, with
somewhat excessive laudation, she declared to the chiefs of parties how far
she would bind herself, and she was believed to be incapable of either
deceiving or being deceived. That is rather a hazardous assertion, for if she
indeed aided in the liberation of the Princes, none of the promises she made
—in all sincerity doubtless—became realised. But, says Bossuet further,
and this time with more precision, “her peculiar characteristic was to
conciliate opposite interests, and, in raising herself above them, to discover
the secret point of junction and knot, as it were, by which they might be
united.” She had resolved to win over the Duke d’Orleans, Madame de
Chevreuse, De Retz, and the keeper of the seals, Chateauneuf. She therefore
signed with them four different treaties. With the Duke d’Orleans she
promised the hand of the young Duke d’Enghien in marriage to one of the
Prince’s daughters; to Madame de Chevreuse that of Mademoiselle de
Chevreuse to the Prince de Conti; to De Retz, the cardinal’s hat; to
Chateauneuf, the post of prime minister. All consented to favour the
princess’s designs, and Mazarin, whom she could not convince, found
himself surrounded by enemies whose union was formidable. That minister
made allusion to the dread with which he was inspired when he remarked
some years afterwards to Don Louis de Haro: “The most turbulent among

the men does not give us so much trouble to keep him in check as the
intrigues of a Duchess de Chevreuse or a Princess Palatine.” In vain,
according to his wont, did he again attempt to temporise. Anne de
Gonzagua, who was ready to open fire with all her batteries, sought to
terrify him by the perspective of a menacing future. “She caused him to be
informed that he was lost if he did not determine upon giving the Princes
their liberty, assuring him that if he did not do it promptly he would see, in
a few days, the whole Court and every cabal banded against him, and that
all aid would fail him.” Mazarin, obstinate in his determination, and
unwilling to believe that she had so thoroughly played her game as to hold
in hand the threads of so many intrigues, begged her to defer the matter,
asked time for reflection, and conducted himself in such a way in short that
the princess saw clearly that he only wanted to gain time. She therefore
hesitated no longer, but allowed those who were agitating impatiently
around her to commence action.

The party of the Princes had been dubbed by the name of the New
Fronde. The old, although it had lost its energy by its union with the Court,
preserved nevertheless its hatred to the prime minister. It was not in De
Retz’s power to neutralise wholly these hostile dispositions; but he could
hinder them from being brought into dangerous activity. The Coadjutor at
first with that view acted in good faith, and remained faithful in the first
moments of the agreement which he had entered into with the Queen.
Probably it might then have been possible to attach him finally to the Court
party; but Mazarin could not believe that the Coadjutor, so fertile in tricks,
so full of finesse, was capable of anything like frankness and generosity. In
the practical experience of life, mistrust has its perils as well as blind
confidence, and failure as often happens to us through our unwillingness to
believe in virtue, as through our inability to suspect vice. Mazarin judged
after himself a man who resembled him in many respects, but not in all.
Moreover, he feared lest he might seek to win the Queen’s affection from

him; and that fear was not groundless. De Retz saw himself the object of the
suspicions and afterwards of the machinations of a power which laboured at
his destruction, whilst for that power he was compromising his influence
and his popularity. To reacquire it, he hastened, therefore, to throw himself
with all his adherents on the side of the Princes, and saw no safety but in
their deliverance. This alliance of the two camps, so long enemies, was
concluded between the Coadjutor and the Princess Palatine, and rendered so
firm and secret by the confidence with which these two party chiefs
inspired each other, that Mazarin, who unceasingly dreaded such a union,
and who always suspected it, did not know it for certain until it revealed
itself by its effects.[58]

The parliament formed a fourth party. Not that that body was unanimous;
but it had within itself an honourable majority which was alike inimical to
the Frondeurs, the seditious, and the minister. The parliament therefore
would have been disposed to unite itself to the Princes’ party, and to lend it
support; but to do so it would have been necessary that the chiefs of that
party should renounce all alliance with the foreigner. Turenne and Madame
de Longueville had joined with the Spaniards to fight against France. The
young Princess de Condé, with the Dukes de Bouillon and de la
Rochefoucauld, who had shut themselves up in Bordeaux, had entered into
an alliance with them, and had received from them succour in the shape of
money. The Spanish envoys in Paris conferred daily with the chiefs of the
old as of the new Fronde.

Gaston, who might have been the moderator of all these parties, formed
by himself a fifth among them. His irresolution prevented him giving
strength to any other of the factions, but he constituted a formidable
obstacle to all the rest. His inclination, as well as his interest, should never
have made him deviate from the Court party; yet he was always opposed to
it. Impelled by his jealousy of Condé and of the prime minister, he acted in

a manner contrary to his own wishes. He was, however, neither wanting in
intelligence nor finesse, nor even a certain kind of eloquence; and the
master-stroke of De Retz’s address was to have contrived, in furtherance of
the object of his designs, to set Gaston with the Fronde against the Princes,
and afterwards for the Princes against Mazarin.

The complication and the multiplicity of parties was as nothing in
comparison to that of private interests, which so crossed each other and in
so many different ways, which turned with such mobility, that, in the
ignorance which prevailed of the secret motives of the principal actors in
that drama so vivid, motley, and turbulent, nothing could be predicated of
what they would do, and a looker-on might have been disposed at times to
have pronounced them as insensates, who were rather their own enemies
than those of their antagonists.

If the libels of those times are to be credited, and especially the satire in
verse for which the poet Marlet was sentenced to be hanged, the obstinacy
with which the Queen exposed to danger her son’s crown, by retaining a
minister detested by all, would be naturally explained by a reason other than
that of a reason of state. The advocate-general Talon, Madame de
Motteville, and the Duchess de Nemours exculpate Anne of Austria on this
head. They are three respectable and trustworthy witnesses; and, without
any doubt, that which they said they thought. But the Duchess d’Orleans,
Elizabeth-Charlotte, affirms in her correspondence[59] that Anne of Austria
had secretly married Cardinal Mazarin, who was not a priest. She says that
all the details of the marriage were known, and that, in her time, the back
staircase in the Palais Royal was pointed out by which at night Mazarin
reached the Queen’s apartments. She observes that such clandestine
marriages were common at that period, and cites that of the widow of our
Charles the First, who secretly espoused her equerry, Jermyn. One might be
disposed to think that the Duchess Elizabeth-Charlotte could have only

followed some tradition, and that her assertions cannot counterbalance the
statements of the contemporary personages above mentioned. But certain
species of facts are often better known long after the death of the persons to
whom they relate, than during their lifetime, or at a time close upon their
decease; they are not entirely unveiled until there no longer exists any
motive to keep them secret. Of the Queen’s sentiments towards Mazarin
there can be no doubt after reading a letter which she addressed to him
under date of June 30, 1660, which is extant in autograph,[60] the avowal
she made to Madame de Brienne in her oratory,[61] the confidences of
Madame de Chevreuse to Cardinal de Retz.[62] Moreover, whatever may
have been the motives of Anne of Austria’s attachment to Mazarin, it is
certain that they were all-powerful over her. She lent herself to every
project formed by her minister for the increase of his power and fortune.
The war in Bordeaux was kindled because Mazarin desired that one of his
nieces should be united to the Duke de Candale, son of the Duke
d’Epernon; and, in order not to let the Swiss soldiers march thither without
their pay, when their aid was most necessary, Anne of Austria put her
diamonds in pledge, and would not allow Mazarin to be answerable for the
sum required to be disbursed.

FOOTNOTES:

[56] His memoirs give reliable details of all that relates to the Condés at this
period.

[57] This unfortunate Prince had married, in 1613, Elizabeth, daughter of
James I. of England. The celebrated Prince Rupert and Sophia, Electress of
Hanover, were among the other children.

[58] Motteville—Joly—Lenet.

[59] Mém. sur la Cour de Louis XIV. et de la Régence, d’Elizabeth-Charlotte
Duchesse d’Orléans, Mère du Regent. 1823, p. 319.

[60] MS. Bibliothèque Nationale.

[61] Loménie de Brienne, Memoirs, 1828.

[62] Retz, Memoirs, edition 1836.

CHAPTER II

THE YOUNG PRINCESS DE CONDÉ CONDUCTS THE WAR IN THE
SOUTH.

To generous and feeling hearts, Condé’s misfortune presented all the
characteristics of a real romance. The majority of the women therefore who
meddled with politics were, through sympathy, of his party. The glory of
France under lock and key! The young hero arrested for treason, and
prisoner to whom? The foreign Cardinal Mazarin. All the spoils of the
Condés distributed amongst the sbires of the favourite,—Normandy to
Harcourt, Champagne to L’Hospital, &c. A monstrous alliance between
King and people. The Queen keeping the Bastille in the hands of Broussel’s
son—the highest posts bestowed upon the magistrates—a reversal, in fact,
of everything. Did not the French nobility rise to a man against such a state
of things?

No, everything was at a standstill. Neither Condé’s military clients, nor
his numerous seigniories, nor his governments took any active part
whatsoever. Far from it, Madame de Longueville, as we have seen, who
thought to raise Normandy, everywhere met with a repulse in that province.
Neither Turenne nor she could do anything save by accepting aid from
Spain, for which Madame de Bouillon was also doing her best in Paris.

But whilst that lovely amazon, Condé’s sister, was occupied in her
endeavours to lure the hero of Stenay into the party of revolt by intoxicating
him with love, and wasting time in negotiation and parade, a succour more
direct and much more energetic was given to Condé from a quarter he had
the least expected—from his own chateau of Chantilly. He had there left his
aged mother, his young wife, and a son seven years old. Mazarin hesitated
to have these ladies arrested, fearing the force of public opinion. The
mother went to hide herself in Paris, and one morning appeared before the
Parliament, suppliant, weeping sorely, stooping so far as to kneel in prayer,
to flattery, and even to falsehood. All being unavailing, she went home to
die.

But most astonishing was the unexpected courage of Condé’s young
wife, Claire Clemence de Maillé, that despised niece of Richelieu, whom
the victorious soldier had married under compulsion, and whose heir was
the son of the minister’s absolute will. On the arrest of her husband she had
been confided to the care of a man of capacity—Lenet, from whose
“Memoirs” we have already cited. He at first conducted her and her son in
safety from Chantilly to Montrond, a stronghold of the Condés, but fearing
to be besieged in it, straightway to Bordeaux. The Parliament of Guienne
had had a deadly quarrel with Mazarin for imposing upon them Epernon, a
governor they detested, and whom the Cardinal was bent upon allying by
marriage with his own family. Great therefore was the emotion of this city
and parliament at seeing that young lady of two-and-twenty in deep
mourning, with her innocent boy, who caught the brave Bordelais by their
beards with his little hands, and besought their help towards the liberation
of his father. The Princess’s retinue enhanced not a little this favourable
impression, formed as it was of high-born women, for the most part young
and charming.

The popular explosion was lively, as always happens among the people
of the south. But even the narrative of Lenet shows clearly the slender
foundation upon which this semblance of popular insurrection rested. The
lower orders, then living in great misery, hoped to obtain through the
Princess some opening for their foreign trade, which would better enable
them to dispose of their wines and help them to live. Mazarin kept down the
local Parliament, and carried everything through sheer terror. Bouillon and
La Rochefoucauld, the Princess’s advisers, recommended that a royal envoy
should be cut to pieces. Lenet dreaded lest such an act, somewhat over-
energetic, might render his mistress less popular. Twice or thrice the
populace were very nearly putting the Parliament to the sword, the majority
of which was kept under through sheer terror of the knife. Spain promised
money, and they had the simplicity to believe her. She hardly gave them a
pitiful alms. Meanwhile, however, Mazarin, having quietly occupied
Normandy and Burgundy, made his way towards Guienne with the royal
army. The Bordelais showed an intrepid front, though somewhat disquieted
to see the soldiery about to gather the fruits of the vintage instead of
themselves. The Princess only maintained herself in the place through the
aid of the rabble va-nu-pieds, who feasted and danced all night at her
expense, and who shouted in her ears a hundred ribald jests against
Mazarin, compelling both herself and her son to repeat them. This
abasement into which she had fallen made her desire peace for herself, and
permission to leave the city, which was granted to her, with vague promises
of liberating Condé (3rd October, 1650).

The Duchess de Bouillon had been quite as ardent in politics during the
burlesque activity of the Fronde as Madame de Longueville; and although,
perhaps, equally beautiful, happily she was entirely devoted to her domestic
duties. Her husband on taking flight had been constrained to leave her
behind in Paris, she being near her accouchement, which circumstance
however did not prevent the Queen from giving an order for her arrest.

Although the royal guards were already in the house, the Duchess contrived
to effect the escape of her sons, and during that same day gave birth to her
babe. Shortly afterwards she found a means of eluding the guard set over
her, and would have rejoined her husband, had her daughter not been
attacked with small-pox, but having returned home to nurse her, was
arrested at her bedside and carried to the Bastille. The Duchess de
Chevreuse, always gallant, in spite of waning beauty, constituted herself the
mediatrix between the Queen and the Frondeurs; and although her daughter
had openly become the mistress of the Coadjutor, it was already
contemplated to make her the wife of the Prince de Conti, as a condition of
the arrangement by which he should be set free. Beaufort still continued to
be the obsequious lover of Madame de Montbazon, and, through her,
Mazarin was kept well acquainted with all his secrets.

No other power than that of female influence could have attached the
French nobility to the Prince de Condé, and determined it to take up arms
for his release. In fact, his hauteur, his brusquerie, his brutality even, had, in
repeated instances, offended that body, and the Queen imagined that the
bulk of the French gentry would witness his arrest with as much pleasure as
the citizens. But the women had been fascinated by the éclat of his four
victories; they agreed to call him the champion, the hero of France, and it
seemed to them that they shared his heroism in devoting themselves to his
cause. As for the higher nobility, they were not bound by any political
principle; they were very indifferent to the grandeur of France; very
ignorant of its pretensions in foreign affairs, or to what it had been pledged
with other nations. They loved war in the first place for its dangers, and in
the second for the honours and wealth they got by fighting; but even in the
army, far from making fidelity and obedience a rule of conduct, they
cherished a spirit of independence and resistance to the Crown, and would
only allow themselves to be influenced by their chivalric usages. They
gloried in showing themselves reckless of the future, caring more about the

glitter of the present than steady progressive advancement; equally prodigal
of fortune as of life, they were prone to follow impulse rather than
calculation; so that what we should perhaps call a reckless frivolity was
looked upon by them as a sentiment invested with all the charm of brilliant
gallantry. Those even whom neither their affection nor their interest
summoned to the standards of the captive Princes, rushed gaily from the
midst of their ease and festivity into civil war at the first prompting of their
mistresses.

Gaston d’Orleans, after having consented to the imprisonment of the
Princes, only decided upon entering into the project for their deliverance
under promise of a marriage of his daughter, the Duchess d’Alençon, with
the boy-Duke d’Enghien, Condé’s son. Turenne and La Rochefoucauld, too,
often thought less of their glory or the success of their party, than of what
might be agreeable to the Duchess de Longueville, of whose love they were
so envious. More obscure liaisons, which have even escaped the anecdotic
abundance of the memoir-writers of those days, appear also to have
exercised their influence over the conduct of the highest personages. In a
letter which De Retz wrote to Turenne, and which he frankly characterises
as being remarkably silly, the Coadjutor does not disguise that amongst
many serious motives which he gives that great warrior for inducing him to
determine upon peace, he does not forget to hold out a hope of his seeing
once more a little grisette of the Rue des Petits-Champs, whom Turenne
loved with all his heart. The feeblest motives had influence over such men,
all young and ardent as they were—the followers of different factions,
though without prejudices, principles, convictions, without hatred and
without affection. The women therefore naturally played important parts in
all these events, to whom the species of gallantry and worship of beauty
held in honour by the Hôtel de Rambouillet was quite familiar. Thus
nothing could be expected of the Duke de Beaufort, even in that which
concerned him closest, if not assured previously of the consent of the

Duchess de Montbazon, who exercised plenary power over him. Nemours,
enamoured of the Duchess de Chatillon, loved likewise by the Prince de
Condé, warmly embraced the cause of that Prince, because his mistress
prompted him thereto; and the Duchess de Nemours had moved heaven and
earth to obtain Condé’s deliverance, in the hope that he would keep sharp
watch over the Duchess de Chatillon, and put a stop to her husband’s
infidelity.

De Retz too, notwithstanding the superiority of his intellect, allowed
himself to give way, through his inclination for the fair sex, to the
commission of indiscretions and imprudences which often placed his life in
danger, and caused his best-concerted measures to prove abortive. To
appease the jealousy of Mademoiselle de Chevreuse he permitted himself to
make use of a contemptuous expression concerning the Queen, which was
repeated, and which became the cause of the violent hatred she ever
afterwards bore him. The Princess de Guémenée, furious at having been
abandoned, offered the Queen, if she would consent to it, to procure the
disappearance of the Coadjutor by sending him an invitation, and then
having him confined in a cellar of her hotel. De Retz learned that a design
to assassinate him had been formed, and whenever he repaired to the Hôtel
de Chevreuse, by way of precaution placed sentinels outside the gate of that
mansion, and quite close to the Queen’s sentries who guarded the Palais-
Royal, without heeding the effect such an excess of insolence and scandal
produced. With every kind of talent fitting to dominate party spirit, he failed
to acquire the confidence of anyone. He regarded all alliance with the
foreigner as odious and impolitic; and notwithstanding, when his
embarrassments increased, he lent an ear to the Archduke’s envoy, and even
to that of Cromwell. At the same time, full of admiration for the Marquis of
Montrose, whom he called a hero worthy of Plutarch, he contracted the
closest friendship with the Scottish royalist, and aided him to the utmost of
his ability in the efforts he was making to restore to the throne the

legitimate King of Great Britain. De Retz, in few words, appeared anxious
to show himself as taking pleasure in exhausting every kind of contrast.
When the intricate plot of the drama in which he was engaged had become
so complicated by his intrigues, that he no longer saw the possibility of
unravelling it, he sought means to retire from the situation with the greatest
advantage practicable for himself and friends, and to obtain the Cardinal’s
hat. The marriage of Mademoiselle de Chevreuse with the Prince de Conti
became the essential condition of all the negotiations which he carried on,
whether with the Court or with the Duchess de Chevreuse. The
remembrance of an old and close friendship, the habit of a familiarity
contracted in youth, gave the Duchess de Chevreuse a means of influence
over that Queen, so fixed in her hatred, so inconstant in her friendships.
Anne of Austria, who then, moreover, found herself very miserable through
the obstacles which so many factions created, had partially restored the
Duchess to her confidence. Madame de Chevreuse appeared also to have
the same interests as De Retz, since, like him, she desired intensely the
union of her daughter with a Prince of the blood. But she had large sums of
money to recover from the Government, and the success of her claims
depended on the decision of the prime minister. She therefore used her
utmost tact with Mazarin, negotiating at the same time with him, as well as
with the Old and the New Fronde. She turned to her own profit the
influence that her connections at Court, with the Coadjutor, and with the
Princes gave her in all the several factions. She was assisted in her intrigues
by the Marquis de Laignes, a man of courage but little intellect, who, from
the time of her exile at Brussels, had declared himself her lover in order to
gain importance in the faction of the Fronde, which he had embraced. As
little more of the attractions of her youth were left to Madame de
Chevreuse, save their pristine celebrity, she had not always to congratulate
herself upon the good humour and behaviour of De Laignes. The latter had
been until then wholly devoted to the Coadjutor; but De Retz soon

perceived that De Laignes entered into projects different from his own. At
length, to have some one who could be responsible to him for Madame de
Chevreuse, he endeavoured to substitute Hacqueville as a go-between in the
place of De Laignes. Hacqueville was the intimate friend of De Retz and
also of Madame de Sevigné; and seconded by Madame de Chevreuse and
Madame de Rhodes, De Retz might have succeeded in the expulsion of
Laignes, if Hacqueville would have consented to that project. No man could
be more obliging than Hacqueville; but, notwithstanding the disposition he
showed to be useful to his friends, he shrank from such continual
immolation of himself. Probably also he was too honest a man to lend
himself to such a procedure.

Madame de Sevigné,—in every way qualified to play a distinguished part
in the exciting game of politics,—was so entirely devoted to her husband
and children as to be a stranger to all these intrigues; but she was more or
less connected with the persons who seconded the Coadjutor’s projects, and
consequently with the Duchess de Chevreuse. An article in the “Muse
Historique” of Loret shows how intimate was the connection of Madame de
Sevigné with that Duchess. In the month of July, 1850, on returning from a
promenade in the Cours, then the fashionable drive among the highest
society, the Marquis and Marchioness de Sevigné gave a splendid supper to
the Duchess de Chevreuse. The noisy manner in which the Frondeurs
expressed their delight made this nocturnal repast almost assume the
character of an orgie; and, for that reason, it became for awhile the talk of
the capital. The rhyming gazetteer thus expresses himself on the subject:
On fait ici grand’ mention
D’une belle collation
Qu’à la Duchesse de Chevreuse
Sevigné, de race frondeuse,
Donna depuis quatre ou cinq jours,
Quand on fut revenue du Cours.
On y vit briller aux chandelles

Des gorges passablement belles;
On y vit nombre de galants;
On y mangea des ortolans;
On chanta des chansons à boire;
On dit cent fois non—oui—non, voire.
La Fronde, dit-on, y claqua;
Un plat d’argent on escroqua;
On repandit quelque potage,
Et je n’en sais pas davantage.[63]

It will be seen from these details, that already the manners and customs
of the great world reflected the licence of the civil wars, and that they no
longer resembled those of which the Hôtel de Rambouillet still presented a
purer model. It may be possible also that there was some exaggeration in
Loret’s description: he belonged to the Court party, received a pension of
two hundred crowns from Mazarin, and detested the Fronde. His rhyming
gazette was addressed to his protectress, Mademoiselle de Longueville, so
much the more opposed to the Fronde that her stepmother was the heroine
of that faction. Mademoiselle de Longueville, whose harsh strictures upon
the Condé family have been cited, and who subsequently became the wife
of the Duke de Nemours, is often mentioned in the writings of her time,
although she was never mixed up in any political intrigue, nor took part in
any event. Her immense fortune, the clearness of her judgment, the
elevation of her sentiments, her grand airs, the severe dignity of her
manners, and the energy of her character, constituted her during the
Regency and the long reign of Louis XIV. a personage quite apart; who
submitted herself to no influence whatever, social or political, and who no
more permitted that absolute monarch to induce her to vary in her
determinations, than to change the fashion of her external habiliments.

FOOTNOTES:

[63] Loret, Muse Historique, liv. i., p. 28, Letter 10.

CHAPTER III.

STATE OF PARTIES ON THE LIBERATION OF THE PRINCES—THE
CARDS AGAIN SHUFFLED, AND THE FACE OF THE SITUATION
CHANGED.

At the commencement of 1651 all France clamoured for Condé’s
liberation. During the autumn Mazarin had led the Queen and the young
King against Bordeaux, then held by the Princess de Condé, carrying—as
usual when forced to use both means—a sword in one hand and a roll of
parchment in the other. Failing to carry the place with the first, the Cardinal
began to negotiate a treaty of peace, the principal item of which was full
pardon to the citizens, and by others an agreement that the Princess and her
son should retire to Montrond: on these terms the city yielded to its
sovereign. The Cardinal also obtained a victory in the field against Turenne,
who had entered the service of Spain and fired upon the fleur-de-lis. But
with this momentary success of Mazarin’s cause rose his pretensions and
demands; and the Fronde, alarmed at his recovered authority, changed its
tactics as its Protean genius De Retz frequently did his clothes—his cassock
for a plumed hat and military cloak. It demanded the trial or liberation of
the prisoners it had helped to send to Vincennes, without delay, and Mazarin
removed them for safe custody to Havre. It then pronounced sentence of
banishment on the obnoxious minister, and ordered him to quit the kingdom
within fifteen days. The town militia kept watch and ward over the Queen,

by the command of the Coadjutor, and hindered her flight to join the
favourite. She could offer no further resistance to those who now called
themselves the friends of Condé, but who were the very same persons who
had fought him in the field a few months before. Orders were given to set
the captives at liberty. Mazarin himself went to Havre to communicate the
news of their freedom, and was received by them with the contempt that he
might have expected. Condé took leave of the Cardinal with a ringing peal
of laughter, and with joyous acclamations, and bonfires, and firing of guns,
made his triumphal entry into Paris.

Condé was now master of the situation. He found himself equally courted
by the two other chief parties into which the State was divided—the
Queen’s, supported by the Duke de Bouillon, and the now repentant and
pardoned Turenne—and the Fronde, which had fallen into the guidance of
the Duke d’Orleans, the Coadjutor, and the Duchess de Chevreuse. His own
was called “the Prince’s,” and comprised Rochefoucauld and other personal
friends and military admirers. The Duke d’Orleans had gone on before to
meet Condé as far as the plain of St. Denis, accompanied by the two most
conspicuous representatives of the Fronde, the Duke de Beaufort and Retz,
with the Coadjutor of Paris, and there they all warmly embraced. The Duke,
having taken the Prince into his carriage, brought him in great pomp to the
Palais Royal to salute the Queen Regent and the young King, and thence to
the Palais d’Orleans, where he was feasted magnificently. Some days
afterwards (February 25th) a royal ordonnance recognised the innocence of
the Princes Condé, Conti, and the Duke de Longueville, and reinstated them
in all their posts and governments. On the 27th this ordonnance was
confirmed in Parliament amidst loud cheers. Condé thus found himself at
the highest degree of power to which a subject could reach. Misfortune had
enhanced his military glory; a long captivity, endured with an unalterable
serenity and high-hearted gaiety, had carried his popularity to the highest
pitch. He was the victor, and, as it were, the designated heir, of Mazarin,

who had fled before him, and with difficulty found a refuge without the
kingdom, on the banks of the Rhine.

Thus, Anne of Austria in some sort a prisoner, and Mazarin proscribed,
the nobility showed itself entirely devoted to the young hero whom it
recognized as its chief. Some among them at once proposed that the Queen
Mother should be confined in the Val-de-Grace, and that the Prince should
himself assume the Regency, others talked even of raising him to the
throne, but Condé did not fail to perceive that his newly acquired power
was not so solid as it was sought to make him believe.

Meanwhile, Mazarin having quitted Havre, and the inhabitants of
Abbeville refusing him passage through their town, he found an asylum for
a few days at Dourlens; but he was soon driven thence by the proceedings
of the Parliament against him. He then retired to Sedan, where he took
counsel with his friend Fabert, whom he had appointed Commandant there.
He next proceeded to Cologne, being treated with the utmost distinction and
hospitality in all the foreign towns through which he passed.

Even in banishment, however, the old influence began to work. The
Cardinal from his place of retirement governed the Queen with as absolute
a sway as ever, and recommended her, as a keen stroke of policy which
would neutralize all parties, to take the young King to a Bed of Justice, and
cause him to declare his majority. Couriers were going daily between Paris
and Cologne; treaties between the Fronde and Mazarin were intercepted or
forged, and published in the capital; the post of Prime Minister remained
unfilled, and the Duke de Mercœur, notwithstanding all the thunders of
Parliament, set out for Bruhl, with the purpose of marrying Mazarin’s niece.
Everything announced that the exile of that hated minister was but
temporary, and Condé, perceiving the object of all these moves, prepared
for war, and silently took his measures accordingly.

The nobility, who, from the beginning of February, had begun to
assemble in order to take part in the expulsion of Mazarin, now held their
meetings in the monastery hall of the Cordeliers, where might be seen
collected together as many as eight hundred princes, dukes, and noblemen,
heads of the most considerable houses in France, all partisans of Condé. As
this numerical strength of the ennobled classes, together with the
multiplicity of titles among them, is somewhat startling to a youthful
English student, it may be well to remark that France had, in fact, three
aristocracies in the course of her annals from the Crusades to the reign of
Louis XIV. After the time of Louis XI., the representatives of the first, or
old feudal aristocracy, the descendants of the men who were in reality the
King’s peers, and not his actual subjects, were few and far between. These
were the holders of vast principalities, who maintained a kind of royal state
in their own possessions, and kept high courts of judicature over life and
limb in the whole extent of their hereditary fiefs. In the long English wars,
from Crécy to Agincourt, the great body of them disappeared, and only here
and there a great vassal was to be seen, distinguished in nothing from the
other nobles, except in the loftiness of his titles and the reverence that still
clung to the sound of his historic name. The second aristocracy arose
among the descendants of the survivors of the English and Italian wars.
They claimed their rank, not as coming down to them from the tenure of
almost independent counties and dukedoms, but as proprietors of ancestral
lands, to which originally subordinate rights and duties had been attached.
Mixed with those, we saw the Noblesse of the Robe, as the great law
officers were called, who constituted a parallel but not identical nobility
with their lay competitors. The third aristocracy was now about to make its
appearance, the creation of Court favour, and badge of personal or official
service—possessors of a nominal rank without any corresponding duty—a
body selected for ornament, and not for use—and incorporating with itself,

not only the marquis and viscount, fresh from the mint of the minister or
favourite, but the highest names in France.

The aristocracy of the sword, and of ancient birth, had itself to blame for
this degradation. Great alterations in manners or government—such as give
a new character to human affairs—always seem brought about by some
strange relaxation of morals, or atrocity of conduct, which makes society
anxious for the change. The unfortunate custom in France which gave every
male member of a noble family a title equivalent to that of its chief, so that
a simple viscount with ten stalwart and penniless sons gave ten stalwart and
penniless viscounts to the aristocracy of his country, had filled the whole
land with a race of men proud of their origin, filled with reckless courage,
careless of life, and despising all honest means of employment by which
their fortunes might have been improved. Mounted on a sorry steed and
begirt with a sword of good steel, the young cavalier took his way from the
miserable castle on a rock, where his noble father tried in vain to keep up
the appearance of daily dinners, and wondered how in the world all his
remaining sons and daughters were to be clothed and fed, and made his way
to Paris. There he pushed his fortune—fighting, bullying, gambling, and
was probably stabbed by some drunken companion and flung into the
Seine. If he was lucky or adroit enough, he stabbed his drunken friend and
pushed him into the stream; and, after a few months of suing and
importunity, obtained a saddle in the King’s Guards, or a pair of boots in the
Musqueteers. At this time it came out that in twenty years of the reign of
Louis XIII. there had been eight thousand fatal duels in different parts of the
realm. Out of the duels which were daily carried on, four hundred in each
year had ended in the death of one of the combatants. When the fiercest of
English wars is shaking every heart in the kingdom, there would be wailing
and misery in every house if it were reported that four hundred officers had
been killed in a year. Yet these young desperadoes were all of officer’s rank,
and the quarrel in which they fell was probably either dishonourable or

contemptible. Men fought and killed each other for a word or a look, or a
fashion of dress, or the mere sake of killing. Where morality is loosened to
the extent of a disregard of life, we may be sure the general behaviour in
other respects is equally to be deplored. There was great and almost
universal depravity in the conduct of high and low. Vice and sensuality
found refuge and protection even in the presence of princesses and queens.
People residing in remote places heard only of the gorgeous licence in
which the great and powerful lived. They knew them only during their visits
to their ancestral homes as worn-out debauchees from the great city, who
brought the profligacy of the purlieus of the Louvre into the peaceful
cottages of the peasantry on their estates. It was, indeed, so much the
fashion to be wicked, that a gentleman was hindered from the practice of
his Christian or social duties by the fear of ridicule. The life of man,
therefore, and the honour of woman were held equally cheap; and the
blinded, rash, and self-indulgent nobility laid the foundation, in contempt of
the feelings of its inferiors and neglect of their interests, for the terrible
retribution which even now at intervals might be seen ready to take its
course.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DUCHESSES DE LONGUEVILLE AND DE CHEVREUSE AND
THE PRINCESS PALATINE IN THE LAST FRONDE.—RESULTS OF
THE RUPTURE OF THE MARRIAGE PROJECTED BETWEEN THE
PRINCE DE CONTI AND MADEMOISELLE DE CHEVREUSE.

We must now revert to Condé’s heroic sister. Having glanced somewhat
hastily at the brilliant part played by Madame de Longueville in the two
first epochs of the Fronde, the war of Paris and that which illuminated the
prison of Condé, we are now about to follow her through the third and last
period, which commences from the deliverance of the Princes, in February,
1651, and only ends with the war of Guienne, in August, 1653;—the
longest, the most disastrous, and at the same time most obscure epoch of the
civil war. It will be necessary to strip the mask from more than one
illustrious actor in it, exhibit the reverse of the most showy medals, and the
shadows which everywhere mingle with glory, genius, and even virtue
itself. The character of the Duchess de Longueville has its charming, its
sublime aspects; but, alas! it is far from being irreproachable. In dwelling
upon the least favourable portion of her life, we shall often do well to
remember that the errors of great minds sometimes subserve their
perfection, by the beneficent virtue of the remorse to which they give rise,
and that the sister of the Great Condé must probably have felt in all its
fulness the vanity of ambition and of false grandeur, all the bitterness of

guilty passions, in taking an early farewell of them, to resume the austere
path of duty, to return, in fine, to Carmel and ascend to Port Royal.

Madame de Longueville had remained at Stenay with Turenne for some
time after her brother’s and husband’s liberation, both occupied in
disengaging themselves from the engagements which they had contracted
with Spain for the deliverance of the Princes, and with negotiating a truce
calculated to clear the way for the much-desired general peace. Recalled by
the pressing instances of her family, she had quitted Stenay on the 7th of
March, before the completion of her work. On arriving in Paris “universal
applause greeted her heroic deeds.” Monsieur had hastened to pay her a
visit with Mademoiselle Montpensier, and a train of ladies of the highest
distinction. She went afterwards that same day to present her homage to
their Majesties, from whom she met with the most gracious reception. That
moment was, unquestionably, the most brilliant of her whole career. In
1647, after the embassy to Munster, her return to France and its Court had
been also a veritable triumph, as we have attempted to show; but the power
of her house and the glory of her brother constituted nearly all the merits of
it. She only contributed thereto the influence of her wit and beauty. After
Stenay, the éclat which surrounded her was in some sort more personal. She
had just displayed eminent qualities which raised her almost to the level of
Condé. In Normandy she had exhibited herself as an intrepid adventuress,
and a skilful politician in the Low Countries. When, during the
imprisonment of her two brothers and her husband, her sister-in-law, the
Princess de Condé, had been forced at Bordeaux to recognize the royal
authority, she discovered that the destinies of her house had devolved upon
her. She had become the head of a great party. She had treated as from
power to power with Spain; her word had appeared a sufficient guarantee to
the Archduke Leopold and to the Count de Fuensaldagne. She had held in
hand such commanders as Turenne, La Moussaye, Bouteville; and when,
after the battle of Rethel, she seemed to be on the very verge of destruction,

she had succeeded in recovering the advantage, and in contributing more
than any one else to the deliverance of the Princes, thanks to the profound
negotiations carried on in her name by the Princess Palatine. Whilst
statesmen estimated her capacity, the multitude admired her courage and
constancy. She was, in short, in possession of that political rôle with which
La Rochefoucauld had dazzled her gaze in order to conceal his own
designs:—a glittering chimera which, mingling itself with that of love, had
seduced that ardent and haughty soul of hers. She was then the idol of
Spain, the terror of the Court, one of the grandeurs of her family. We shall
soon see whether she can better sustain this new ordeal than she did the
first, at the close of the year 1647.

The Fronde gathered the fruit of its skilful conduct during the month of
January, 1651. It was that faction which, silencing its old animosities and
promptly extending its hand to the partisans of Condé, had extricated him
from prison, in order to acquire and place at its head, together with the
King’s uncle, the lieutenant-general of the Kingdom, the first prince of the
blood, the victor of Rocroi and Lens, the hero of the age. It carried
everything before it—at Court, in parliament, upon the public places; it had
proscribed and put to flight Mazarin; it held Anne of Austria a captive in her
palace; already even it had penetrated into the cabinet in the person of the
aged Chateauneuf, in whom ambition cherished beneath the snows of
winter the vigour of youth, and whose capacity was scarcely inferior to his
ambition. The moment had arrived for accomplishing the work already
begun, and for putting into execution the plan determined upon between the
Princess Palatine and Madame de Chevreuse.

Those two strong-minded women had conceived the idea of a grand
aristocratic league which should seat the Fronde upon an union of all the
interests which it comprised, close the avenues of France and the Court to
Mazarin, and under the auspices of the Duke d’Orleans and the Prince de

Condé form a government into which the friends of both should enter, the
most accredited representatives of every fraction of a party. Further, the
basis of this plan was that of a double marriage: on the one side between the
young Duke d’Enghien and one of the Duke d’Orleans’ daughters, on the
other between the Prince de Conti and the daughter of Madame de
Chevreuse.[64] This latter marriage might be accomplished immediately.
Condé had accepted the proposition without any difficulty. Madame de
Longueville, far from opposing it at Stenay, had embraced the idea of it
with so much ardour that, in a letter to the Palatine of the 26th of
November, 1650, after having weighed the different resolutions to be taken,
she stops at this latter, and concludes thus: “this, therefore, is what we must
stick to.” That marriage was, in short, of a supreme importance: it gave the
house of Condé to the Fronde for ever, and the Fronde to the house of
Condé; for the Fronde was then Madame de Chevreuse. She disposed, by
her daughter, of the Coadjutor, who in his turn disposed of the Duke
d’Orleans, and by him of the parliament. It was Madame de Chevreuse
who, in 1650, had emboldened Mazarin to lay his hand upon Condé, in
making him see that he might strike that bold stroke with impunity, since
she answered to him for the secret connivance of the Duke d’Orleans and
the parliament, who were alone able to oppose it. Here, Mazarin had
committed an immense blunder: seeing himself delivered from Condé, by
the aid of the Fronde, having nothing more hostile to cope with than the
latter, he had imagined himself able to turn round upon it, and had treated
Madame de Chevreuse very cavalierly, who, growing cold towards the
Cardinal, and no longer finding it to her account to serve him, had lent an
ear to the propositions of Condé’s friends, and had procured his release
from prison, reconciling to him the Duke d’Orleans and the parliament,
which at first she had stirred up against him. She brought, moreover, to the
house of Condé the most politic mind of the Fronde, an audacity towering
to the height of his designs, a consummate experience, with the support of

her three powerful families, the houses of de Rohan, de Luynes, and
Lorraine. She rendered sure the alliance of the Duke d’Orleans and the
Prince de Condé, and completed the ruin of Mazarin by constructing a
strong government which probably might have succeeded ultimately in
triumphing over the affection of the Queen. She held in hand a statesman
bred in the school of Richelieu, and whom she judged capable of replacing
Mazarin, the former Keeper of the Seals—Châteauneuf, already a member
of the Cabinet. She believed herself certain of acquiring De Retz by means
of the Cardinal’s hat. She had not the least objection to make to the
elevation of the friends of Condé, and she was ready to favour the ambition
of La Rochefoucauld, for whom formerly, in 1643, she had so greatly
importuned the Queen and Mazarin. Add to all this, that on quitting the
citadel of Havre, the young Prince de Conti had not beheld the lovely
Charlotte de Lorraine without being smitten with her charms, and he
himself strongly desired that marriage. Who, then, prevented it? Who broke
off the contracted engagement? Who struck at and wounded by the self-
same blow the Palatine and Madame de Chevreuse? Who restored them
both and for ever to the Queen and Mazarin? Who destroyed the Fronde by
dividing it? We shall find out by-and-by, but let us merely say just now that
it was the rupture of that marriage which again shuffled the cards and
changed the face of the situation. In pitting against himself those who had
so powerfully succoured him in his misfortune, Condé ought at least to have
drawn closer to the Court and had a serious understanding with the Queen;
but he tergiversated, and at the end of some months of that wavering policy,
he found himself standing unmasked between the Court and the Fronde,
both equally discontented with him, repeating and exaggerating the blunder
committed by Mazarin. The greatest error during the course of a revolution
is to believe that the support of either of the parties who are in actual
collision may be dispensed with. At the close of a revolution the attempt to
dominate may be tried; during the crisis a choice must be made. Mazarin

had fallen through having tried to dominate the Fronde and Condé at one
and the same time; Condé lost himself in thinking to dominate the Fronde
and the Court.

It is an historical problem very difficult to solve, as to who was the
author of the rupture of the marriage projected between the Prince de Conti
and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse. We are well inclined to believe that that
individual at any rate was the chief author of the rupture to whom it was the
most profitable. The Queen and Mazarin, who from his place of retirement
governed her with as absolute a sway as ever, saw from the first the danger
which threatened them from such an alliance, entirely unexpected as it was
by both. The negotiations between Madame de Chevreuse, while Condé
was prisoner, and Madame de Longueville at Stenay, had been conducted
by the Palatine with such consummate skill and perfect secrecy that neither
the Queen nor Mazarin had the slightest suspicion of them. When the
rumour reached the ears of the Cardinal in his retreat at Bruhl, near
Cologne, he broke out against Madame de Chevreuse with a violence the
coarseness of which even was an involuntary homage rendered to the
profound ability of Marie de Rohan. The Queen showed herself warmly
opposed to it, and the ministers were ordered to thwart in every way the
projected alliance. They began, therefore, to negotiate with Condé. As a
result of these negotiations he obtained in exchange for his government of
Burgundy that of Guienne, one of far greater importance; he was even led to
indulge a hope that Provence would be given to the Prince de Conti instead
of Champagne and La Brie, and the port and fortress of Blaye to La
Rochefoucauld in augmentation of his government of Poitou, although there
was not the slightest intention of fulfilling that hope. So states the Duchess
de Nemours, the enemy of the Fronde and the Condés, and who, having
given herself to the Court party, must have well known its intentions. De
Retz likewise doubts not that the Queen combated an alliance so evidently
opposed to her interests. Madame de Motteville, the Queen’s close friend,

avows it. In short, it is certain, and we have hereupon the irrefragable
testimony of Madame de Motteville, that when the Queen had succeeded in
gaining over Condé, she caused Madame de Chevreuse to be informed “that
she desired that such marriage should not take place, because it had been
concerted for objects inimical to the royal interests. This command was the
cause of all these propositions falling through and that they were no more
spoken of.”

But how did the Queen gain over Condé, and what part did Madame de
Longueville play in the affair? That is certainly what neither De Retz could
know, who was only aware of what passed in parliament, in the Palais
d’Orléans, and the Hôtel de Chevreuse; nor the Duchess de Nemours and
Madame de Motteville, who were not in the confidence of the Hôtel de
Condé: they could only repeat hereupon what they had heard said in the
Court circle, and they must be considered solely as the echoes of reports
which it suited the Queen to spread. That is so probable that the one and the
other, differing so widely as they did both in intention and feeling, tell
exactly the same tale. Madame de Motteville states positively that Madame
de Longueville, as soon as she returned from Stenay, advised Condé to
break with the Chevreuses, and that La Rochefoucauld supported her in
such design; and these are the motives which she attributes to her:
—“Madame de Longueville, who had been long jealous of the beauty and
graces of Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, could little bear to contemplate the
probability of her being raised to a rank even more elevated than her own,
and still less, that she should obtain the great influence which such a person
was likely to acquire over both her princely brothers. She had, therefore,
exerted all her influence over Condé, and with him had been quite
successful. But Conti was still in the height of his passion for the beautiful
and fascinating girl who had been promised to him during his
imprisonment; he supped every evening at the Hôtel de Chevreuse, and his

affections, as well as his honour, were fully engaged.” The Duchess de
Nemours says the same thing in the same terms.

Confidant and adviser of Madame de Longueville and of Condé, La
Rochefoucauld alone knew the whole truth, and could have told it to
posterity; but it was not to tell the truth that his memoirs were penned, only
too frequently to conceal it, to set in strong relief that which had been well
done, and slur over that which had been badly done, or to cast the blame of
it upon others. Attentive to the study of his part, and to never accept a bad
one, La Rochefoucauld says truly that the Frondeurs, eagerly pressing
forwards the marriage of the Prince de Conti with Mademoiselle de
Chevreuse, and seeing it retarded, “suspected Madame de Longueville and
the Duke de la Rochefoucauld of a design to break it off, for fear that the
Prince de Conti should escape from their hands only to fall into those of
Madame de Chevreuse and of the Coadjutor;” but he endeavours to give a
reason for these suspicions, and to inform us whether they were well or ill
founded. Instead of defending himself, and Madame de Longueville, he
accuses Condé of having “adroitly increased the suspicions of the
Frondeurs against his sister and La Rochefoucauld, firmly believing that so
long as they held that belief, they would never discover the true cause of the
postponement of the marriage.” And what was that true cause? Here it is,
according to La Rochefoucauld: it was that the Prince de Condé “not having
as yet either concluded or broken off his treaty with the Queen, and having
been informed that the keeper of the seals—Châteauneuf—was about to be
dismissed, wished to await that event to conclude the marriage, if Cardinal
Mazarin were ruined by M. de Châteauneuf, or to break it off and make
through that his court to the Queen, should M. de Châteauneuf be driven
away by the Cardinal.”

This interpretation of Condé’s conduct does not do him great honour, but
it is a very probable one. In the first place, if La Rochefoucauld knew how

to glide so cleverly over all the ticklish points in which he could not appear
to advantage, he did not, strictly speaking, tell lies; he retires rather than
attacks, unless hurried away by passion, and he was never in a passion with
Condé. And, further, the conduct which he attributes to Condé springs quite
naturally out of the false position in which Condé had, by degrees, suffered
himself to be placed.

Altogether, we are persuaded that Condé was then sincere. His sole error,
and it is that which marked his entire conduct during the Fronde, was the
not having had, either on this occasion or any other, a fixed and unalterable
object. On the 13th of April the Queen took the seals from Madame de
Chevreuse’s friend, Châteauneuf, the representative of the Fronde in the
Cabinet, to give them to the gravest person of his time, the first president,
Mathieu Molé, a worthy servant of the State, very little friendly to the
Fronde, and who then was sufficiently favourable towards the Prince de
Condé. That same day she recalled to the Council as Secretary of State the
Count de Chavigny, who had been formerly minister for Foreign Affairs
under Richelieu. Formed in the school of the great Cardinal, as well as
Mazarin, ousted from place, crafty and resolute, feeling himself capable of
bearing the weight of a ministry, Chavigny had beheld with a sufficiently
ominous countenance, after the death of their common master, the sudden
elevation of a colleague who had even begun by being his dependent. Since
1643, vanity had turned him aside from the high road of ambition, and he
had entangled himself in the brakes of very complicated intrigues. In 1651,
he passed as the friend of Condé. It was then only, if we can believe La
Rochefoucauld, that Condé declared himself opposed to the marriage of his
youthful brother with Mademoiselle de Chevreuse; and it was time that he
opposed it, for that marriage was on the eve of accomplishment. Conti gave
proof of the most ardent passion for Mademoiselle de Chevreuse; he paid
her a thousand attentions which he hid from his friends, and particularly
from his sister, for whom he ever professed to entertain an undivided

adoration. He held long conferences with the Marquis de Laigues and other
intimate friends of Mademoiselle de Chevreuse; it was even feared lest he
should marry her without the necessary dispensations and without the
participation of the head of his family. Condé, therefore, decided to act at
once, and the reputation of the fair lady afforded him a means of attack
which he employed with success upon his brother. He seems to have had no
great difficulty in attaining his object. The Prince de Conti soon received
proof that she was not by any means so immaculate as he had believed: her
scarcely doubtful connection with the Coadjutor was placed in its true light,
and, convinced that the object of his passion was unworthy the love of a
man of honour, he began to look upon her with horror. He even blamed
Madame de Longueville and the Duke de la Rochefoucauld for not having
warned him sooner of what was said of her in society. From that moment
means of breaking off the affair without acrimony were sought; but the
interests involved were too great, and the circumstances too piquant not to
renew and augment still more the old hatred of Madame de Chevreuse and
the Frondeurs against the Prince de Condé, and against those whom they
suspected of taking part in that which had just been done.[65]

This testimony would justify Madame de Longueville and La
Rochefoucauld himself for having urged Condé upon that disloyal and
impolitic rupture, if one could believe it to be entirely sincere; but it is very
difficult to admit that Madame de Longueville and her all-powerful adviser
could have remained strangers to a determination so important, and there
are many doubts and obscurities resting upon this delicate point. De Retz,
whose introspect was so penetrating, and who does not pride himself on any
great reserve in his judgments, knew not what opinion to form—Condé,
Madame de Longueville, and La Rochefoucauld having afterwards assured
him that they had had nothing to do with the rupture of the marriage.

But whose soever was the hand that broke off the projected alliance of
the Condés with Madame de Chevreuse, it is beyond doubt that that had lost
Condé and saved Mazarin. All the errors which followed were derived from
that cardinal one. In it must be discerned the first link of that chain of
disastrous events which ended by dragging Condé into civil war.

The resentment of Madame de Chevreuse may well be imagined, when
she discovered that she had been tricked, that she had separated herself
from Mazarin and the Queen, and had drawn Condé out of prison only to
receive in exchange such an unpardonable outrage! Already, even a short
time before, when the Queen ousted Châteauneuf without consulting the
Duke d’Orleans, the wrath of the Frondeurs had been such, that at a council
held at the Palais d’Orleans of the whole party, it was proposed to go, on the
part of the lieutenant-general, and demand back the seals from Mathieu
Molé. The most violent expedients were suggested, and some among the
more hot-headed spoke of seizing their arms and descending into the
streets. Condé, who had not yet entirely broken with the Frondeurs, and was
present at this council with a few of his friends, threw cold water upon
every proposal that was made, and energetically opposed the appeal to
arms, declaring that he did not understand waging “a war of paving-stones
and pots de chambre,” and that he felt himself too much of a coward for
such a campaign as that.

After some time passed in sharp discussion, the Duke retired into the
apartments of his wife with De Retz, and there a brief consultation ensued,
in which the Duchess d’Orleans, Madame de Chevreuse, and the Coadjutor
endeavoured to persuade him to arrest the leaders of the opposite party, and
rouse the people to insurrection. The Duke d’Orleans was in some degree
moved; Condé, Conti, and the Duke de Beaufort and others, had retired into
the library, and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, springing towards the door,

exclaimed, “Nothing is wanting but a turn of the key! It would be a fine
thing indeed for a girl to arrest a winner of battles!”

The impetuosity of Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, however, alarmed the
timid Duke d’Orleans. Had he been brought to it by degrees, he might have
consented to the act; but her movement towards the door startled him, and
he began to whistle,—which, as De Retz observes, was never a good sign.
Then declaring that he would consider of the matter till the next morning,
he walked quietly into the library, and suffered the guests to depart in peace
whom he had been so sorely tempted to make prisoners.

At the same time in the parliament all the violent measures taken against
Mazarin were renewed: he was banished and rebanished, with confiscation
of his possessions, and even his books and pictures were ordered to be sold.
A decree had already been passed declaring all foreign cardinals incapable
of serving in France, and of entering into the ministry. They did not stop
there, and certain councillors who were not in the secrets of the party, and
obeying only their passion, proposed to exclude from the ministry even the
French cardinals as being still too dependent upon Rome. This sweeping
motion was carried amid loud cheers, which resounded through all parts of
the hall. Whereupon Condé laughingly remarked: “There’s a fine echo.”
That same echo was the ruin of De Retz’s hopes, who only so passionately
desired to become a cardinal in order to succeed to Mazarin. Shortly
afterwards the division between Condé and the Old Fronde was declared,
and Condé applied himself to form an intermediate party, a new Fronde,
which became sufficiently powerful to disquiet Madame de Chevreuse and
the Coadjutor.[66] “Imagine,” says the latter, “what the royal authority
purged of Mazarinism would have been, and the party of the Prince de
Condé purged of faction! More than all, what surety was there in M. the
Duke d’Orleans!”

But De Retz was not the only politician who terrified himself with the
idea of such a future looming thus darkly for France. Mazarin dreaded it as
much as he. His authority was almost universally thought to be for ever
annihilated; but a small number of courtiers who could read the Queen’s
heart, judged otherwise, and owed to the skilful line of conduct to which
they adhered under these circumstances the high fortune to which they
attained in the sequel.

There is little doubt that, in the first instance, Condé might have carried
off the Regency from the Queen, deprived as she was of her prime minister,
and by her own acknowledgment incapable of governing by herself; but
then the direction of affairs belonged by right to the Duke d’Orleans, of
whom Condé was jealous. Condé, however, preferred to keep the Regency
in the Queen’s hands, and by rendering himself formidable to the
Government, forcing it to reckon with him. If that union of the Princes
between themselves and the Fronde faction had subsisted, the re-
establishment of the royal authority would have been impossible: and the
commencement of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, who, although he had
only completed his thirteenth year, was about, by the force of an
exceptional law, to be declared of age, would have offered the spectacle, so
frequent in French annals,[68] of a state a prey to the divulsion of factions
and the horrors of anarchy.

But for the happiness of France and the Queen-Regent, Condé was as
unskilful in politics as he was great in war. He kept none of the promises he
had made to the chiefs of the Fronde, the authors of his deliverance. The
marriage of the Prince de Conti and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, which had
been the base of the treaty, and involved other engagements, was, as we
have seen, remorselessly broken off. The Queen Regent, in order to succeed
in bringing back her favourite minister to power, had the tact to conceal his
advances, and therefore chose in the first instance to replace him by

Chavigny, who was his personal enemy. Then she negotiated with all
parties, and skilfully opposed the Fronde to the Prince de Condé, the latter
to the Duke d’Orleans, the parliament to the assembly of the nobles, the
aversion to Mazarin to the fear which the Coadjutor inspired. Her ministers,
whom she abused, had only the semblance of power; all that was real was
possessed by Mazarin. From Bruhl, his place of exile, he governed France;
the Queen adopted no resolution without its having been inspired by him, or
met with his approval. Thus hidden by the Regent’s mantle, the Cardinal
followed with vigilant eye the quarrels of the Prince de Condé and the
Frondeurs, fomenting them and inflaming them by every means at his
disposal, prodigalising to Condé promises which must in the highest degree
have alarmed the Fronde, and entangling him daily more and more in the
meshes of intricate, tortuous negotiations, until he had seen the separation,
for which he manœuvred, irremediably consummated. Then he stopped, and
began insensibly even to fall back. The placing of Provence in the Prince de
Conti’s hands was deferred; and in fact it was held in reserve for the Duke
de Mercœur, the eldest son of the Duke de Vendôme, who was seeking the
hand of one of Mazarin’s nieces; and it was also found inexpedient to
deprive the Duke de Saint-Simon of Blaye to give it to La Rochefoucauld;
and a thousand other difficulties of a like nature were raised, which both
astonished and irritated Condé. Since he broke with the Fronde, it was
apparently to unite himself with the Queen, and the higher his ambition
soared, the more necessary it was to cover it with respect and deference, in
order to hasten and secure the treaty on foot, and to enchain the monarchy
with his own fate. But the fiery Condé was incapable of such a line of
conduct. Finding unexpected obstacles where previously he had met with
facilities and hopeful anticipations, he lost his temper, and resumed the
imperious tone which already, in 1649, had embroiled him with the Queen
and Mazarin.

It appears also that Madame de Longueville shared in the soaring
illusions of her brother, and that she bore but indifferently well her newly
blown prosperity. Madame de Motteville gives us to understand so with her
usual moderation, and the Duchess de Nemours rejoices to say so with all
the acrimony and doubtless also the exaggeration of hatred.[69] It must,
indeed, be owned, with the heroic instincts of Condé, Madame de
Longueville shared also his haughty spirit. All her contemporaries ascribe to
her an innate majesty which did not show itself on ordinary occasions; far
from it, she was simple, amiable, adding thereto, when desirous of pleasing,
a caressing and irresistible gentleness; but, with people whom she disliked,
she intrenched herself in a frigid dignity, and Anne of Austria and she had
never loved one another. A misplaced haughtiness towards the Queen is
attributed to her. One day, says Madame de Nemours, she kept her waiting
for two or three hours. It is very doubtful whether Madame de Longueville
could have so far forgotten herself; but it is not impossible that she may
have imagined, as well as her brother, that the fortunes of their house,
having emerged more brilliant than ever from so rude a tempest, had no
longer to dread the recurrence of further ill-omened shocks.

They deceived themselves: an immense peril was hanging over their
heads.

Immediately that Madame de Chevreuse had seen that the Queen was
growing colder towards Condé, and did not seem disposed to keep the
promises that had been made him, her keen-sighted animosity instantly
determined her course of action, and being for ever separated from Condé,
she again drew towards the Queen with an offer of her services and those of
her entire party against the common enemy. Mazarin, recognising the error
he had committed in giving himself two enemies at the same time, and that
at that moment the redoubtable individual, the man who at any cost must be
destroyed, was Condé, very quickly forgot his grudges against Madame de

Chevreuse, and advised the acceptance of her propositions. The Queen, it
appears, was very averse to receive De Retz, or avail herself of his services;
she detested him almost as much as she did Condé, well knowing that they
were the two most dangerous enemies of him without whom she did not
believe that she could really reign. Mazarin exhorted her himself to flatter
De Retz’s ambition, and, marvellously understanding each other at a
distance—almost as well as when in each other’s presence,—they
composed and played out in the most perfect manner a comedy of which De
Retz himself seems to have been the dupe, and of which Condé was very
nearly being the victim.

Madame de Chevreuse has already been depicted both in good and evil,
in her natural intelligence, quickness, keen introspection, and political
genius, in her indomitable courage and audacity, and all that she was
capable of undertaking in order to attain her objects. It will now be
necessary to thoroughly understand De Retz’s character, in order to perceive
clearly the peril with which Condé was menaced.

By nature yet more restless than ambitious, a bad priest, impatient of his
condition and having long struggled to emancipate himself from it, Paul de
Gondi had prepared himself for cabals by composing or translating the life
of a celebrated conspirator. Then, passing quickly from theory to practice,
he had entered into one of the most sinister plots framed against Richelieu,
and for his first experiment he had accepted the task, he, a young abbé, of
assassinating the Cardinal at the altar during the ceremony of Mademoiselle
de Montpensier’s baptism. In 1643, he had not hesitated to throw himself
into the arms of the Importants; but the title of Coadjutor of Paris, which
had just been conferred upon him as a recompense for the virtues and
services of his father, arrested him. The Fronde seemed created altogether
expressly for him. He shared the parentage of it along with La
Rochefoucauld. In vain in his Memoirs does he studiedly put forward

general considerations: like La Rochefoucauld, he was only working for
himself, and at least had the candour to own it. Compelled to remain in the
Church, De Retz desired to rise in it as high as possible. He aspired to a
cardinal’s hat, and soon obtained it, thanks to his inscrutable manœuvring;
but his supreme object was the post of prime minister, and to reach it, he
played that double game which he so craftily concerted and so skilfully
played out. Seeing that Mazarin and Condé were not heads of a government
which would leave to others acting with them any great share of
importance, he undertook to overthrow them, the one by the other, to carve
out his way between them by them, and to raise upon their ruin the Duke
d’Orleans, under whose name he would govern. To effect this he incessantly
urged alike the Duke, the parliament, and the people, to demand, as the first
condition of any reconciliation with the Court, the dismissal of Mazarin,
and at the same time he, under a mask, exhibited himself as a benevolent
conciliator between royalty and the Fronde, promising the Queen, the
indispensable sacrifice accomplished, to smooth all difficulties, and to bring
over to her the Duke d’Orleans by separating him from Condé. Such was
the real mainspring of all De Retz’s movements—even those seemingly the
most contrary: first the cardinalate, then the premiership under the auspices
of the Duke d’Orleans, associated in some sort with royalty, without
Mazarin or Condé. He was fain to hide his secret under the guise of the
public weal, but that secret revealed itself by the very efforts he made to
conceal it, and it did not escape the penetration of La Rochefoucauld, his
accomplice at the outset of the Fronde, afterwards his adversary, who had a
perfect knowledge of his character, and who had sketched it with a masterly
hand, as De Retz also thoroughly comprehended and admirably depicted La
Rochefoucauld. De Retz was indeed the evil genius of the Fronde. He
always hindered it from progressing whether led by Mazarin or Condé,
because he merely desired to have a weak government which he could
dominate. To arrive at that end, he was capable of anything—tortuous

intrigues, anonymous pamphlets, hypocritical sermons from the pulpit,
studied orations in parliament, popular insurrections and desperate coups de
main. Such was the man who, towards the end of May, 1651, was admitted,
much against her will, into the secret councils of Anne of Austria.

Anything was to be tried, however, which might deliver her from the
exactions of Condé. It was absolutely necessary that she should either grant
his demands, or find some support to enable her to resist them. She
accordingly despatched Marshal du Plessis to speak with De Retz, at the
archbishopric, towards one o’clock in the morning, at which hour he
generally returned from his nocturnal visits to Mademoiselle de Chevreuse.
De Retz was willing to seize the opportunity of avenging himself upon
Condé, and probably judged he might do so without bringing about the
return of Mazarin. He accepted, then, at once the Queen’s invitation, and
flung the letter of safe-conduct which she had sent him into the fire, in order
to show his confidence in her promises. The following night, at twelve
o’clock, he was brought into the Queen’s Oratory by a back staircase, and a
long conversation ensued between them. Anne of Austria was very
caressing in her manner towards the Coadjutor, and sought, after winning
her way to his confidence, to embroil him with Châteauneuf, by informing
him that it was that friend of Madame de Chevreuse who was the most
opposed to his cardinalate, because he wanted the hat for himself. It must be
remembered that France at that moment had the appointment of a cardinal
at its disposition, and it had been long promised to the Prince de Conti.
Anne of Austria now offered it to De Retz who, in reply, at the end of a long
harangue, during which the Queen interrupted him impatiently more than
once, assured her that he had not come there to receive favours, but to merit
them.

“What will you do for me, then?” asked the Queen. “What will you do?”

“Madam,” replied he, “I will oblige the Prince de Condé to quit Paris ere
eight days are over, and will carry off the Duke d’Orleans from him before
to-morrow night.”

The Queen, transported with joy, extended her hand to him saying
—“Give me your hand on that, and the day after to-morrow you are a
cardinal, and moreover the second amongst my friends.”

A few days afterwards, De Retz and Madame de Chevreuse had raised
the entire Fronde against the Prince de Condé. The worthy archbishop had
announced his approach to the enemy he was about to attack by a cloud of
the same kind of libels, satires, and epigrams, which he had always found
so efficacious in prejudicing the people of Paris against any one whom he
thought fit to hold forth to popular odium. At the same time a multitude of
criers and hawkers were sent through the town, spreading, at the very
lowest price, all the sarcasms which had been composed at the
archbishopric in the morning, to render the conduct of Condé ridiculous,
contemptible, and hateful in the eyes of the multitude.

At length, when the Coadjutor believed that everything had been
sufficiently prepared, he made the Palatine write to inform the Queen that
he was about to go to the parliament. Mademoiselle de Chevreuse was with
the Regent at the time she received this intimation; and the delight which it
occasioned was so great that the virtuous and pious Anne of Austria caught
the archbishop’s mistress in her arms, and kissed her more than once,
exclaiming, with no very great regard for decorum, “You rogue! you are
now doing me as much good as you have hitherto done me harm.”

De Retz kept his word, and went to the parliament, but the progress
against Condé was so slow that Mazarin, the Queen, and De Retz, began to
revolve more summary measures, and, towards the latter part of June, their

deliberations ended in a sinister project of again arresting or of
assassinating Condé.

This obscure affair, as yet only partially unveiled, and which probably
will never be so entirely, is not so dark and impenetrable, however, as to
prevent us from seeing, within the shadow thereof, fearful and criminal
purposes, to which even the more open vices of the age are comparatively
light. We are told by De Retz that the Marshal de Hocquincourt, with more
frankness than the rest, proposed in direct terms to assassinate Condé. The
Coadjutor himself, however, Madame de Chevreuse, and other leaders of
the Fronde, but above all Senneterre, who had about this time obtained a
great share of the Queen’s confidence, opposed not only the bold crime
proposed at first by Hocquincourt, but also all the schemes which he and
others afterwards suggested, and which, though apparently more mild, were
all likely to end in the same event.

Rumours of what was meditated soon reached the Prince’s ears, who then
saw clearly the nature of his position. He perceived that he had quarrelled
thoroughly and for ever with the Frondeurs and with the Queen, and that
henceforth he was placed between imprisonment and assassination. He felt
certain that this time, should he fall into the hands of his enemies, he would
be treated far more harshly than in 1650, and that probably he might never
see the light again. He despised death, but the idea of perpetual
incarceration was insupportable to him, and that idea fastening itself by
degrees on his mind caused projects to enter into it which until then had
only momentarily crossed it.

Too high-minded to quit Paris as though he were terrified, Condé
exhibited no change in his conduct; merely confining himself to no longer
visiting the Palais-Royal or the Palais d’Orléans, and never going abroad
without a numerous escort of officers and retainers. Already for some time

past foreseeing the storm that was gathering against him, he had taken
serious measures to confront it: he had strengthened all the fortresses that
were in his hands. He had despatched to Flanders the Marquis de Sillery, La
Rochefoucauld’s brother-in-law, under pretext of finally disengaging
Madame de Longueville and Turenne from the treaties they had made with
the Spaniards in 1650, with secret instructions to renew them, and to
ascertain how far he might reckon on the assistance of Spain if he were
compelled to draw the sword. The Count de Fuensaldagne did not fail,
agreeable to the policy of his court, to promise much more than was asked
of him, and he omitted nothing calculated to stir up Condé to have recourse
to arms.

Chance had a share in urging Condé to take a further and almost decisive
step in the dangerous path that was opening before him. One evening, just
as he had lain down on his bed and was chatting with Vineuil, one of his
trusty friends, the latter received a note which directed him to warn the
Prince that two companies of guards were advancing on the side of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was thought that those troops were about to
invest the hôtel. Condé jumped out of bed, dressed himself, mounted his
horse instantly, and, accompanied by a few attendants, took his way through
the faubourg Saint-Michel. On gaining the high road, he heard the clatter of
a somewhat strong body of horsemen approaching, and thinking that it was
the squadron in search of him, he fell back at first in the direction of
Meudon; then, instead of re-entering Paris, when day broke he sought an
asylum in his château of Saint-Maur. He reached it on the morning of the
6th of July; and it may readily be guessed what the effect, in Paris and
throughout the kingdom, of such a retreat was, and for such motives. The
Princess de Condé, the Prince de Conti, Madame de Longueville, La
Rochefoucauld, the Duke de Nemours, the Duke de Richelieu, the Prince’s
most intimate friends, and more than one illustrious personage, such as the
Duke de Bouillon and Turenne, repaired immediately to Saint-Maur. In a

day or two, Condé saw himself surrounded by a court as brilliant and as
numerous as that of the King, and there he kept up a right royal festivity.
After a while he sent a considerable number of officers disguised into Paris,
who bestirred themselves in every quarter in his favour; and when he
considered himself in a position to hold his own against both the Queen and
the Frondeurs together, he quitted Saint-Maur and returned to his hôtel near
the Palais d’Orléans, desiring to put a good complexion on the aspect of his
affairs and to impose upon his enemies by that bold and high-minded
conduct.[70] He appeared again also in the parliament, now once more
become the battle-field of parties. De Retz, full of his own individual
hatred, augmented by that of Madame de Chevreuse, seconded at once by
the friends of the Duke d’Orleans and by those of the Queen, burning to tear
from the Court and win, by serving it, the cardinal’s hat, the object of his
ardent desires, the necessary stepping-stone to his ambition, brought all his
courage and vanity towards enacting the part of the Prince’s enemy. And
there, during the months of July and August, in that pretended sanctuary of
law and justice, passed all those deplorable scenes which De Retz and La
Rochefoucauld have related, and in which Mazarin, from his retreat on the
banks of the Rhine, rejoiced to see his two enemies waste their strength, and
work unwittingly but surely their common ruin and his approaching
triumph.

A crisis was clearly inevitable. Condé could no longer perceive any sign
of a pacific issue from the position in which he had been placed, or rather in
which he had placed himself, and at his right hand stood Madame de
Longueville and the Prince de Conti, who held no opinions contrary to
those of his sister, urging him to cut the knot which he knew not how to
untie. La Rochefoucauld stopped him for a moment on the threshold of war,
entreating Condé to allow him to undertake fresh negotiations. The Prince
consented willingly thereto. Madame de Longueville was opposed to it. La

Rochefoucauld, speaking to her with that authority which his long devotion
gave him, represented to her the terrible responsibility which she took upon
herself both towards Condé and the State, and he obtained from her a
promise that she would withdraw for a time from the arena of strife, and
accompany her sister-in-law, the Princess de Condé, to Berri, and allow him
to remain in Paris by the side of Condé in order to make a last essay
towards conjuring the tempest.

The fitting moment has now arrived to examine the conduct of Madame
de Longueville in these grave conjunctures, the different feelings which
animated her, and the true and lamentable motive which determined her
thus to hurry her brother into civil war, and herself with him.

Let us remember:—Anne de Bourbon exhibited extraordinary contrasts
in her character, entirely opposite qualities which, developing themselves in
turn according to circumstances, gave a particular impress to different
periods of her life. She derived from nature and the Christian education she
had received a delicate and susceptible conscience, a humility in her own
eyes and before God that would have made her an accomplished Carmelite;
and at the same time she was born with that ardour of soul which is termed
ambition, the instinct of glory and of grandeur. This instinct, which was also
that of her house and her age, soon obtained the mastery on emerging from
her pious adolescence, and when she despaired of overcoming her father’s
resistance to the serious desire she had manifested of burying herself, at
fifteen, in the convent of the Rue St. Jacques, with her already formidable
beauty and the nascent desire to shine and to please. That desire was at once
Madame de Longueville’s strength and weakness, the principle of her
coquetry amid the amusements of peace, as of her intrepidity in the midst of
war and danger. Once condemned to live in the world, she transferred the
dreams of glory which she dared not realise for herself, to gild her brother’s
wreath of laurel,—that Louis de Bourbon, almost of the same age as herself,

the cherished companion of her infancy, so witty, so generous, so bold, that
he was at once a friend and a master, and the idol of her heart, before
another object had usurped the place or after he had abandoned it. In the
first and the last portion of her life, which are incomparably the best, she
referred everything to Condé, and Condé had a confidence in her altogether
boundless. The suspicious and penetrating Mazarin had very early formed
that opinion of her, and in the carnets, to which he has confided his very
inmost feelings, he depicts her with the pen of an enemy, but of an enemy
who knew her well. “Madame de Longueville,” says he, “has entire power
over her brother. She desires to see Condé dominate and dispose of all
favours. If she is prone to gallantry, it is by no means that she thinks of
doing wrong, but in order to make friends and servitors for her brother. She
insinuates ambitious ideas into his mind to which he is already only too
much inclined.” If, in 1648, she became violently enraged against her
brother, it was that, fascinated and misled by La Rochefoucauld, she
thought that Condé, by serving the Court and Mazarin, was false to his own
fame. In 1649, she had only too far contributed to make him enter by
degrees upon that fatal path into which La Rochefoucauld had lured herself.
Here, pride nourished the hope of one day seeing the Condés replace the
D’Orleans. When, in 1850, a son was born to Gaston, the little Duke de
Valois, who did not live, she fretted at an event which threatened to
strengthen and perpetuate a house for which she had no affection, and in a
letter which has remained inedited up to the present day, she allows the
thoughts that had insinuated themselves into her heart to appear. “I think,”
she writes to Lenet on the 22nd August, 1650, “that the news of the birth of
M. d’Orleans’ son will no more rejoice my sister-in-law than it has
delighted me. It is to my nephew that we must offer our condolence.” In
1651, that ambition was carried to its highest pitch. Madame de Longueville
experienced the natural intoxication that the power and prosperity of her
house was calculated to give her; and when we think of what perils she had

just surmounted, by what homage she was surrounded on all sides, that she
was then thirty-two, that she was in all the splendour of her beauty, and also
under all the strength of her passions, we might well be disposed to pardon
her that fugitive intoxication, if it had not likewise drawn down disastrous
consequences upon herself, upon Condé, and upon her country.

And here again occurs the question we have just raised. Was it Madame
de Longueville who caused the rupture of the projected marriage between
the Prince de Conti and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse? If hers was the chief
fault, we look upon it with regret, that in the eye of posterity she should
bear the blame of such a fault. If she only yielded to the advice of La
Rochefoucauld, we have the more excuse for her, and assert that the fault
comes home to him. As we have seen, that affair is still involved in much
obscurity, and since De Retz himself hesitates, we ought to feel well
justified to hesitate in our turn. But it must be confessed, the suspicions of
the Frondeurs and the accusations of the Queen’s friends have such great
weight that it is scarcely possible to avoid attributing to Madame de
Longueville a sufficiently large share in the deplorable rupture whence so
many evils sprang. Her complaisant biographer, Villefore, is on this point in
accordance with Madame de Motteville. Without doubt the marriage of the
Prince de Conti with Mademoiselle de Chevreuse was far from meeting
with universal approval. The prudes of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and
Mademoiselle de Scuderi in particular, protested strongly against such an
alliance. The old outrage was remembered which, in 1643, Madame de
Montbazon, aided by Madame de Chevreuse, had dared to perpetrate upon
Madame de Longueville; the audacious manners of the mother also, which
seemed to have been inherited by the daughter; the equivocal reputation of
the latter, the suspected and almost public liaison which she carried on with
De Retz. Vain objections!—which Madame de Longueville could not
allege, for she perfectly well knew all that when at Stenay she had
authorised the Palatine to pledge her word for hers. Other reasons for her

conduct must therefore be sought, and the reasons can only be those which
her enemies have given, and in the foremost place the jealousy of influence,
the desire of retaining over her younger brother, the Prince de Conti, an
empire that Charlotte de Lorraine would, infallibly, have deprived her.

That irreparable error, in bringing about the perilous position in which
Condé speedily found himself, necessarily led Madame de Longueville to
the commission of another error, in some sort compulsory, and which was
the complement of the first; it is certain that more than anyone else she
incited her brother to take the resolution he ultimately determined upon
adopting. La Rochefoucauld says so, and all contemporary writers repeat
the same. We will merely make this essential remark: Madame de
Longueville had at first very readily entered into the reconciliatory plans of
Condé and La Rochefoucauld, and into their negotiations with the Court; it
was only when those designs had failed, when towards the month of June
negotiation had given place to violence, when she saw her brother
surrounded by assassins, liable at any moment to fall under the blows of
Hocquincourt, or to be flung again into the dungeons of Vincennes, it was
then that trembling with fear and indignation, and ill as she was in health,
she rushed to Saint-Maur; and that, finding there the flower of the
aristocracy and the army assembled, she felt her warlike ardour of 1649 and
1650 rekindle. She thought that nothing could resist on the field of battle
the victor of Rocroy and Lens, seconded by Turenne, who at Stenay had
shown such a lively and tender attachment for her, and the sentiment of
which she had never ceased to treat with all the exquisite tact of which she
was capable. She had also great confidence in Spain, which was at her feet,
and lavished upon her every kind of deference. She urged, therefore, Condé
to fling further perfidious and useless negotiations to the winds, and to
appeal to the fortune of arms.

But to these different motives, the force of which Madame de
Longueville summed up the value with the authority of her intelligence and
experience, was joined another still more potent over her heart, and which
had been the original mainspring of her resolutions and conduct. La
Rochefoucauld alone has no right to impute it to her as a crime. For
ourselves, we do not hesitate to make it known upon the evidence of
irrefragable testimony; for we are not composing a panegyric of Madame de
Longueville, but narrating certain passages of her life, in which that of the
seventeenth century, with its grandeurs and its miseries, is so completely
identified; and if we feel a sincere admiration for the sister of the great
Condé, that admiration does not close our eyes to her errors. It is not
unseemly to admire a heroine whose lofty qualities are mingled with
weaknesses which remind us of her sex. It is, moreover, the first duty of
history, such as we understand it, and desire to have it understood, not to
stop at the surface of events, but to seek for their causes in the depths of the
soul, in human passions and their inevitable consequences.

As has been already said, Madame de Longueville did not love her
husband. Not only was he greatly her senior, but there was nothing about
him that responded to the ideal which that illustrious disciple of the Hôtel
de Rambouillet had formed for herself, and which she pursued in vain
through guilty illusions, until that which she sought and found at its very
source—no longer in the school of Corneille and of Mademoiselle de
Scuderi, but in that of her Saviour, in the Carmelite convent and at Port
Royal. Never was woman less prone to gallantry by nature than Anne de
Bourbon; but, as we have just remarked, her heart and her imagination
created in her the necessity of pleasing and of being beloved; and it was that
want, early cultivated by poetry, romances, and the theatre, and somewhat
later corrupted by the example of the society in which she lived, which
lured her far from the domestic hearth, and hurried her into the brilliant and
adventurous career amidst which we find her in 1651. Then her greatest fear

was to fall again into her husband’s hands. M. de Longueville had very
willingly followed his wife in the Fronde; his own discontentments of
themselves drove him into it, as well as his uncertain and mobile character
which led him to embark in novel enterprises with as much facility as it
urged him to abandon them. In 1649 he had figured as one of the generals
of Paris, and had raised Normandy against Mazarin. One year of
imprisonment had cooled him, and in 1651, having recovered his
government of Normandy and tasted some few months of that peaceful
grandeur, he found it so much to his liking as to be not readily tempted to
re-embark upon a stormy course of life at the age of nearly fifty-seven.
Reports, only too true, had informed him of what until then he had only
surmised imperfectly—the declared liaison of his wife with La
Rochefoucauld. He had been greatly irritated at it, and Condé’s enemies,
with De Retz at their head, carefully fostered his ill humour, and his
daughter, Marie d’Orléans, afterwards Duchess de Nemours, seconded them
to the utmost of her power.

She detested her stepmother, whose faults her strong common-sense led
her easily to scan, without her own vulgar and commonplace mind being
capable of comprehending the Duchess’s great qualities. It was impossible
less to resemble each other. The one adored grandeur even to the romantic
and the chimerical, the other was entirely positive and matter-of-fact, and
absorbed with her own interest, especially in those relating to her property.
Alienated from the Fronde through the jealous hatred she bore towards her
stepmother, who in turn liked her almost as little, and probably also did not
take pains enough to manage her, Mademoiselle turned towards the Queen,
and strove to gain over her father to the same party. Therein she succeeded
by degrees. The Duke de Longueville could not overtly separate himself
from Condé, and at first promised him all he required; then he shut himself
up in Normandy, and there followed a dubious line of conduct which
neither compromised him with the Court party nor that of Condé. But he

recalled his wife peremptorily, and sent her a mandate to rejoin him. That
mandate was pressing and threatening, and it terrified Madame de
Longueville. She knew that her husband had been informed of everything,
and that he was wholly given up to the influence of his daughter. She feared
ill-treatment; she felt certain at least that once in Normandy she would no
more quit it, and that her time would be passed between an aged, irritated
husband, and an overruling step-daughter, who would apply themselves in
concert to retain her in the solitude of a province, and perhaps to make her
expiate in confinement her bygone triumphs. The idea of the sorrowful life
which awaited her in Normandy produced very nearly the same effect upon
her as the thought of a second imprisonment upon the mind of Condé. She
sought for a means of avoiding that which was to her the worst of all evils;
there was an assured though dangerous one—war, which would prevent her
from repairing to Normandy, under the pretext more or less specious that
she could not abandon her brother. Such was the design she formed within
herself and very soon resolved upon adopting, and the fresh negotiations
which La Rochefoucauld proposed thwarted her doubly. Should those
negotiations prove successful they would deprive her of the only pretext she
had for not rejoining her husband in Normandy, and she thought it strange
that it was La Rochefoucauld who would expose her to that peril. From that
moment doubtless angry explanations took place between them. She
perceived that La Rochefoucauld was wearied of his sacrifices, that he
wished to reconcile himself with the Court, repair his fortunes, and taste the
sweets of peace; whilst in the eyes of the superb princess the paramount
consideration with him, for whom she had done so much, ought to have
been never to forsake her, should they both together rush to certain ruin. But
La Rochefoucauld was no longer wound up to a tone so lofty, worthy of the
Great Cyrus and of their chivalrous love of 1648, and the haughty
Madame[71] was deeply wounded at the discovery. Nevertheless, she was
not insensible to what there was of reasonable in La Rochefoucauld’s

advice, and not to incur the entire responsibility of the part which her
brother might take, she consented to follow her sister-in-law, the Princess
de Condé, and her nephew, the Duke d’Enghien, into Berri, one of Condé’s
governments:—a journey which moreover had the advantage of separating
her from her husband. She set out, therefore, on the 18th of July for
Bourges, taking with her the elder of her two sons, the younger, Charles de
Paris, born in 1649, not being able to bear the fatigue of the journey. M. de
Longueville recalled her from Berri as he had from the capital, and he
insisted on the return of his son in terms so forcible that she was compelled
to comply, so far as the boy was concerned. Thenceforward, being alone
and exposing only herself, without breaking with M. de Longueville, and by
using all her wit to colour her disobedience, she eluded his orders, remained
in Berri, forming in the depth of her heart the most ardent desire for war,
but calm in appearance; sometimes accompanying the Princess de Condé to
Montrond, at others making somewhat lengthened visits to the Carmelite
convent at Bourges. And thus she awaited the issue of the negotiations,
counselled and carried on by La Rochefoucauld, which should decide her
destiny.

La Rochefoucauld must indeed have very earnestly longed to bring to a
close the life of fatigue and danger which he had for three years led, to have
been able to cherish any illusion as to the success of the steps he was about
again to take. Where was the hope of regaining the Fronde which had just
been outrageously deceived, after it had given itself to the Prince de Condé
in his misfortune, and had extricated him from it? If La Rochefoucauld
thought that the alliance of the Fronde was necessary, he ought to have set
about it sooner and at the proper time, persuaded Condé and his sister to
keep their word, and sealed the alliance agreed upon between the Prince de
Conti and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse. He had not done so; and now that
he had allowed a treacherous war to spring up between Condé and the
Fronde, by what charm did he think he could suspend it? With the Queen

also all negotiation was exhausted and superfluous. An understanding
should have been come to with her when she was so disposed, when Condé
was all-powerful, when he could either have more readily abased or exalted
the Crown: Tum decuit cum sceptra dabas. But at the end of August, Condé,
embroiled with the Court and with the Fronde, had nothing left save his
sword. That was sufficient, doubtless, to make everybody tremble, but was
it enough to inspire confidence in anyone? La Rochefoucauld obtained,
therefore, on all sides to his advances only very vague responses. The time
for negotiation was passed irrevocably, and whilst La Rochefoucauld
exhausted himself in useless efforts, the Queen and the Fronde concluded a
treaty together, with the common design of overwhelming Condé.

This treaty was the work of Mazarin, the masterpiece of his political
skill. It authorised the Frondeurs to speak against the Cardinal in parliament
for some time forward in order to cover their secret understanding. The hat
was assured to the Coadjutor, high posts and great advantages to the
principal friends of Madame de Chevreuse, the first rank in the cabinet
given to Châteauneuf, and a solid peace established between Mazarin and
the powerful Duchess, under the condition that his nephew Mancini,
provided for with the duchy of Nevers or that of Rethelois, should marry
Mademoiselle de Chevreuse. The draft of this projected treaty fell into the
hands of Condé through the bearer of the paquet in which it was enclosed
being in the service of the Marquis de Noirmoutier, and the Prince caused it
to be printed in order to ventilate and bring to light the alliance between the
Frondeurs, the Queen, and Mazarin. Madame de Motteville, so well
informed of everything relating to the Queen and the Cardinal, considers
that treaty as perfectly authentic, and she gives the different articles of it,
“as the best means for understanding the changes which were made by the
Queen immediately after the King’s majority.”

That majority had been declared on the 7th of September in a Bed of
Justice, with all the customary pomp. As the first Prince of the blood did
not think it possible to be present at it in safety, during that evening the
Queen in her indignation had whispered these significant words to De Retz:
“Either M. le Prince or I must perish.”[72]

FOOTNOTES:

[64] Retz himself has taken care to inform us of his sad liaison with
Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, throughout the whole of the second volume and
beginning of the third of his Memoirs. Amsterdam edition, 1731. That
unfortunate lady died suddenly of a fever, unmarried, in 1652. She was born in
1627.

[65] La Rochefoucauld, p. 69. Retz, tom, ii., p. 223.

[66] De Retz, tom, ii., p. 205.

[67] The same, p. 214.

[68] Retz—La Rochefoucauld—Joly.

[69] Madame de Motteville, tom. iv., p. 346; Madame de Nemours, p. 106.

[70] La Rochefoucauld, p. 83.

[71] The name she figures under in the Grand Cyrus.

[72] Retz, tom. ii. p. 291.

CHAPTER V.

CONDÉ, URGED BY HIS SISTER, GOES UNWILLINGLY INTO
REBELLION.

Anne of Austria now seriously prepared to make head against Condé,
and with that intent she rallied round her all the forces of the Fronde united
with those of the royal army. In fine, with the firm design of inspiring the
Fronde with perfect confidence, at the same time that the nomination of
France to the Cardinalate had devolved upon the Coadjutor, the Queen
again brought into the cabinet, as a sort of Prime Minister, the statesman of
the party, the friend and instrument of Madame de Chevreuse, the aged but
ambitious Châteauneuf, with the two-fold engagement to serve Mazarin in
secret and to contribute to the utmost of his power to destroy Condé. In
such arrangements, let it be thoroughly understood, no one was acting with
good faith: De Retz and Châteauneuf in nowise proposed to re-establish
Mazarin; Châteauneuf did not dream of making another man’s bed, but,
once having attained power, he intended to keep it for himself, and Mazarin
was firmly resolved to dismiss Châteauneuf as soon as he could. But if
these crafty politicians were ready to betray one another in everything else,
there was one point on which they were sincerely united—the destruction of
Condé. At that they laboured in concert, or rather vied with each other.
Queen Anne manifested therein a fervour, a constancy, a marvellous skill,
and succeeded in carrying off from Condé the chief supports of his great

strength. He saw that war was inevitable, and yet, says Sismondi, he only
yielded to it with repugnance. “You will have it so,” said Condé at last; “but
understand that if I do draw the sword, I shall be the last to return it to the
scabbard.” It was the women especially who hurried their admirers into the
mêlée.

Considering the nomination of the New Cabinet, with Châteauneuf at its
head, as a veritable declaration of war, Condé went to Chantilly, and, it is
said, had a very narrow escape from falling into an ambuscade which the
Court had prepared for him at Pontoise.

He remained for some few days at Chantilly, pensive and agitated in
presence of the great resolution he was on the eve of taking. The mediation
of the Duke d’Orleans, the only one he could accept, offered no security, the
Duke instead of governing the Coadjutor and Madame de Chevreuse, was
then governed by them. His individual inclination was to come to an
understanding with the Queen and even with Mazarin, as he had very
clearly shown. He had continually returned to it; but after so many lying
words and odious plots, the execution of which alone was wanting, he
thought he would be in a better position to treat solidly with the Court at the
head of a powerful and victorious army, than in the midst of wretched
intrigues, unworthy of his character, in which he momentarily staked his
honour and his life. He never permitted the idea of raising himself above
royalty to enter into his mind; he merely thought that to obtain better
conditions from it it was necessary to render himself imposing to it, and to
make himself feared. That is what was then passing in his mind. Civil war
inspired him with horror, and we may learn from La Rochefoucauld,[73]
who was then in his most intimate confidence, that he long weighed “the
consequences of so grave a determination.” Let us be chary, therefore, of
accusing Condé of levity; let us recognise that insensibly his position had

become such that he could neither remain in it nor quit it, in one way or
another, save with equal danger.

Among the different motives which rendered Condé averse to civil war,
the passion that he had just begun to feel for the Duchess de Châtillon must
not be forgotten. We shall return a little further on to this episode in Condé’s
life. It is sufficient to remark here that it was grievous to him to quit the
lovely Duchess, who then was residing very close to Chantilly, in the
charming château of Merlon or Mello, near Pontoise, the enjoyment of
which had been granted to her for life by the old Princess de Condé,
Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency, who expired in her arms at
Châtillon-sur-Loing, in December, 1650—a gracious grant, which the
Prince, her son, had hastened to ratify with a somewhat interested
generosity. Madame de Châtillon had her reasons of more than one kind for
being opposed to the war, and in the intimate counsels of the Prince she
urged him to an understanding with the Court. In that she made common
cause with La Rochefoucauld, and was in open quarrel with Madame de
Longueville. Sensible of Condé’s passion without sharing it, she managed
that lofty lover with infinite tact, at the same time that she was deeply
enamoured of the young, handsome, and brave Duke Charles Amadeus of
Savoy, Nemours,[74] who from his youth and adventurous instincts would
have longed for war, and whom she alone, seconded by La Rochefoucauld,
retained in the party of peace.

Everything, however, tended to precipitate Condé towards the fatal
resolution. Prudence did not permit him to remain any longer at Chantilly,
[75]
and it behoved him to place himself beyond the risk of a coup-de-main
by withdrawing to his government of Berri, whither he had already sent his
son, his wife, and his sister. It was, it is true, the road to Guienne, but he
might stop there. All the population was devoted to him, and the tower of
Bourges and the strong fortalice of Montrond offered him a safe asylum.

Condé, even after reaching Berri, still hesitated, not wishing to take any
step before again conferring with his sister, who was then at Montrond with
the Princess. There he held a final council, a supreme deliberation, at which
Madame de Longueville, Conti, and La Rochefoucauld were present. More
than one grave motive urged him to war: the well-founded dread of
assassination or of a fresh incarceration, the ardent hatred of his enemies, of
the Queen and the Fronde, the power of Châteauneuf which certainly had
not been given him in vain, the inutility of negotiations with people who
seemed decidedly to have taken their choice, the necessity of avoiding the
fate of Henri de Guise, the consciousness of his strength so soon as his foot
should tread the field of battle, the promises seemingly so sure of the
Bouillons and many others. At the same time, his good sense, his loyalty,
the scarcely stifled instincts of duty, and his innate aversion for anything
which resembled anarchy, restrained him; and in that prolonged and
dubious struggle between conflicting feelings, there were others which
hurried him onward. Madame de Longueville, the Prince de Conti, La
Rochefoucauld also urged him to declare himself against the Court, and
Madame de Longueville with more vivacity than anyone else.[76] Condé
still resisted, explaining to them all the strength of royalty, the ascendancy
of the King’s name, the weakness and treachery of factions, the bad faith of
Spain. Then concluding by yielding, he addressed them in these memorable
words: “You commit me to a strange line of action, of which you will tire
sooner than I, and in which you will abandon me.” He spoke truly as
regarded Conti, and perhaps also La Rochefoucauld; but it remains to be
seen whether Madame de Longueville, after having helped to drive her
heroic brother into civil war, did not follow him with an inviolable
constancy, whether she did not share, even to extremity, the dangers and
adversities of the Prince, and whether, during his long exile, she reappeared
for a single moment at Court or in those salons of the Louvre and the Palais

Royal, which had witnessed her early successes, and in which her wit and
beauty still promised her fresh triumphs.

FOOTNOTES:

[73] La Rochefoucauld, p. 76.

[74] Charles Amadeus had succeeded to the title and rank of his elder brother,
the Duke de Nemours, one of Condé’s intimate friends in youth, who had been
killed early in action, even before Rocroy. Condé had transferred to Charles
Amadeus the affection which he bore his brother. The young duke had married
the beautiful Madlle. de Vendôme, daughter of Duke Cæsar, and sister of the
Dukes de Mercœur and Beaufort, and by her he had two daughters who became,
one the Queen of Portugal, the other the Duchess of Savoy. At the death of the
Duke de Nemours, in 1652, his title passed to his younger brother Henri de
Nemours, Archbishop of Rheims, who then quitted the church, and espoused
Madlle. de Longueville, the authoress of the Memoirs.

[75] La Rochefoucauld, p. 96.

[76] Mad. de Motteville.

CHAPTER VI.

MADAME DE LONGUEVILLE COQUETS WITH THE DUKE DE
NEMOURS.

His determination to unsheath the sword once taken, Condé put his plans
into execution without throwing one glance behind him. Having collected
together in Berri his family and chief supporters, he distributed amongst
them the several parts they had to play in their common enterprise. After
this, accompanied by La Rochefoucauld, he went to take possession of his
new government of Guienne, and there raise the standard of insurrection,
leaving in Berri his wife and son, his sister, the Prince de Conti, the Duke
de Nemours, with the President Violé and others whom he nominated to
important functions. He had placed his brother at the head of affairs there,
and given the military command to the Duke de Nemours. But the result of
these arrangements was disappointing to him. The Duke de Nemours
undoubtedly possessed the most brilliant courage, but he had neither the
talents nor the steadiness of a general. Still absorbed with his passion for
Madame de Châtillon, who, as has been said, had long retained him in the
party of peace, he found in Berri a counter-attraction in Madame de
Longueville who drew him towards that of war; and it would seem that he
occupied himself more with paying court to the lovely lady than of raising
and arming soldiers and making Berri a focus of resistance, both political
and military; for very speedily the Prince de Conti and he were reduced to

defend themselves in Bourges instead of being able to operate in the open
and make any advance. The new Minister Châteauneuf showed himself
worthy of the confidence of Madame de Chevreuse and the Fronde. He
made the Queen understand that it was necessary to combat the revolt foot
to foot from its very first step, and he persuaded her to march herself with
the young King into Berri at the head of a strong army. He nobly
inaugurated the new ministry by that measure, which had two objects: the
one direct and immediate, to strangle the insurrection at its birth; the other
still more important, to set royalty at liberty far from Duke Gaston and the
Parliament. The city of Bourges, which had shown so much enthusiasm on
Condé’s arrival, opened its gates to the King and Châteauneuf. The strong
tower which defended the city, offering no resistance, was taken without a
blow being struck, and instantly demolished. The Princess de Condé, her
son, Madame de Longueville, Conti, and Nemours were forced to take
refuge hastily in the citadel of Montrond. On learning that Palluan was
advancing on that fortress, Conti and Nemours not wishing that the precious
pledges confided to their charge should incur any risk, left the Marquis de
Persan in Montrond, and with what remained to them of their faithful troops
escorted the Princess, her son, and Madame de Longueville as far as
Guienne, which they reached by the end of the month of October.

It was during that rapid journey and their very brief sojourn in Berri that
certain obscure relations, it would appear, were formed between the Duke
de Nemours and Madame de Longueville, the report of which reaching
Bordeaux, exaggerated probably by interested and malevolent underlings,
wounded La Rochefoucauld and drove him to a violent rupture. A loyal and
confiding explanation might have sufficed to disperse a cloud, such as at
times will obscure the most settled friendships. La Rochefoucauld brewed a
storm out of it which, thanks to his Memoirs, has sent its echoes down to
posterity. His separation from Madame de Longueville was marked by an

eagerness which excites the suspicion that he had longed for it.[77] He ought
at least to have stopped there, but hurried away by an implacable
resentment, he accused her, or caused her to be accused by Condé, of
having wished to betray his interests to serve those of the Duke de
Nemours, giving her even to understand that “if a like prepossession took
her for another, she was capable of going to the same extremities if that
person desired it.”[78] The accusation is yet more absurd than odious. The
Duke de Nemours was not the least in the world a party chief; he was a
friend of Condé, whose fidelity could only be shaken through his love for
Madame de Châtillon. To detach him from Madame de Châtillon was
therefore to give him wholly to Condé. Moreover, Madame de Châtillon,
like La Rochefoucauld, was for peace, she had won over the Duke de
Nemours to it, and both together urged Condé thereto. To carry off the Duke
de Nemours from such conspiracy and to seduce him to the war party, was
to serve the interests of Condé like as his sister intended. Thus the principal
and the dominant motive of Madame de Longueville’s conduct was just the
opposite of that which La Rochefoucauld imputed to her. Let us add further
that she had always had a rivalry of beauty with Madame de Châtillon, and
that her vanity was not sorry to humiliate a rival whom she did not tolerate
by depriving her for a few days of a lover of whose attachment the latter
fancied herself perfectly secure. Love and the senses had nothing to do with
it in this matter. The gratification of the senses, it has already been
remarked, did not ensnare her; she was proof against their surprises.
Previously the Duke de Nemours had addressed his ardent homage to her,
but all the attractions of his handsome person and his lofty bearing had
made no impression upon her, and she only bestowed a thought on the
amiable Duke when she had some interest to forward by reviving such
conquest. And this is not an opinion hazarded at a venture; it is furnished us
by a person thoroughly well informed, and who had no affection for
Madame de Longueville; the testimony therefore is the more valuable: “M.

de Nemours[79] previously had not much pleased her, and notwithstanding
the attachment he appeared to entertain for her, as well as all the good
qualities and grand airs of which he could boast, she had found nothing
charming about him save the pleasure he showed himself desirous of giving
her by abandoning Madame de Châtillon for herself, and that which she had
of depriving a woman whom she did not like of a friend of so much
consequence.” Now how far had this liaison of a few days gone? Bussy is
the only contemporary who offers any reply to this question in the cynical
light of his Histoire amoreuse des Gaules. But who would accept that satire
literally? It proves only one thing, the unfortunate notoriety which the
imprudence of Madame de Longueville derived from the Memoirs of La
Rochefoucauld published in 1662. Before those Memoirs saw the light, not
a word is anywhere to be found on a point as obscure as it is delicate. After,
Bussy was delighted to repeat La Rochefoucauld, and Madame de
Longueville has thus fallen into the scandalous chronicle.

Let us abstain from defending her; although even we should be
convinced that she knew where to stop in that dangerous game of coquetry,
she is not the less culpable in our eyes both towards La Rochefoucauld and
herself, and we do not hesitate to say that she went so far as to deserve the
calumny. Doubtless she was justly hurt by the incertitude of La
Rochefoucauld, who, after having plunged her into civil war in 1648 with
no other motive than that of his own interest, would have made her abandon
it in 1651 through the same motive still; which at one moment impelled her
towards the Fronde, at another brought her back to the Court, at the will of
his fickle hopes, and linked her with Madame de Châtillon for the purpose
of engaging Condé in negotiations the success of which involved their
separation and procured her a prison in Normandy. Yes—she had grave
cause of complaint against La Rochefoucauld. She might have quitted him,
it is true, but not for another. She had only one means of covering, of almost

condoning the single error of her life, which was to maintain faithful to it,
or to renounce it for virtue and Heaven. And it is just that which Madame
de Longueville appears to have done, if that sad and rapid episode had
remained unknown; but there is no favourable shade for those personages
who appear in the glaring front of the stage of this world; their slightest
actions do not escape the formidable light of history: the weakness of a
moment is recorded as an irredeemable error against them. That of Madame
de Longueville, fugitive as it may have been, dubious even as it was,
sufficed to tarnish a fidelity until then victorious over so many trials; it
needed to be atoned for by the sincere conversion which was speedily about
to follow it, and by five-and-twenty years of the severest penitence; and still
further it forces us to place Anne de Bourbon, in the record of great
sentiments and exalted loves, above Heloise and Mademoiselle de la
Vallière.

At any rate the assurance is consoling that this error, which we have
attempted neither to conceal nor extenuate, is the single one perceptible in
the private life of Madame de Longueville. But let us turn aside from these
wretched instances of feminine fragility in one of the loftiest minds, in
order to follow Condé and the march of events in Guienne.

We will first, however, by a brief retrospect, endeavour to render the
shifting phases of the two Fronde wars more capable of being easily
followed.

Dating from the arrest of Broussel, nothing could exceed the rapidity of
events; the wheel of fortune had turned with such terrific mobility for those
of her favourites who sought to attach themselves to it. The revolt had, in
fact, broken out on the 26th of August, 1648; in January, 1649, the Court
withdrew to Saint Germain, at the risk of never re-entering Paris; in April,
the sword of Condé imposed the treaty of Saint Germain, and the King

returned in October. Mazarin shortly afterwards believed himself strong
enough to arrest, in January, 1650, Condé, Conti, and Longueville. A year
after that bold coup d’état he was himself obliged to flee (February, 1651)
from his enemies, and quit France. At the end of eight months, Mazarin
returned with an army to the aid of royalty; but it required two years of
negotiations, intrigues, and patient waiting, it needed the errors which the
indecision of the Duke d’Orleans brought about, the rash violence of
Condé, urged onwards by his sister, it required, indeed, the entire ruin of
France ere the Cardinal could, after having led the young King by the hand
to the very gates of his capital, resume that place in the Louvre which he
had sagaciously abandoned.

It is difficult to narrate occurrences in their proper order during this
period: intrigues, broken promises, pledges given to two different parties at
the same time, such were the smallest misdeeds of all these princes and
prelates. As one step further in wrong-doing, they entered into negotiations
with the foreigner, and invited armies across the frontier which devastated
the provinces. And through what motives? Gondy wished to avenge his
former mistress, whom Conti had rejected, and whom an agent of Condé,
Maillard the shoemaker, had publicly insulted. Condé’s pretensions were
nothing less than dragging at his heels a squad of governors of towns and
provinces who, at his summons, would be ever ready to raise the standard
of revolt and to impose the will of their leader upon the head of the state,
whether Minister, Queen, or King. Orleans would not yield one jot to his
young cousin of the blood-royal, Condé; Madame de Longueville feared the
severity of an outraged husband. The civil war, in forcing her to flee from
one end of France to the other, or abroad, could alone delay her return to
Normandy, her re-establishment beneath the conjugal roof, towards which
she had conceived such an aversion.

Condé accused Gondy in the Parliament chamber of being author of a
factum condemning severely the Prince’s conduct. La Rochefoucauld,
getting Gondy between two doors, treacherously seized, and was about to
strangle him, had not the son of the first President, M. de Champlatreux,
come to the rescue, at the very moment that one of the bullies in Condé’s
pay had drawn his dagger to despatch him.

Two days afterwards (17th of September) the King had attained his
thirteenth year, and one day beyond; and by the ordonnance of Charles V.
became of age and capable of governing for himself.

A change of ministry—Châteauneuf being recalled to head the Council
and Molé to the Seals—deprived Condé of all hope of imposing the
conditions of a reconciliation; therefore, as has been said, at a Council held
at Chantilly with his chief adherents, Conti, and the Dukes de Nemours and
La Rochefoucauld, he determined to set out for Berri. The impartial student
who examines the conduct of the Prince de Condé is at this juncture
compelled to draw an indictment against him, under pain of belying his
conscience and the truth; he must concede that Condé rashly engaged in
civil war, and exerted himself to drag France into it, solely because he could
not endure any authority above his own. He was desirous of being first in
the State, of disposing at will among his creatures of honours, dignities,
strongholds, and governments. On such conditions, he would have
consented to let Mazarin, Orleans, De Retz, or any other, govern the realm,
for the administration of which he felt himself that he had neither the
slightest inclination nor the smallest capacity (October, 1651).

The Fronde is reputed, not without reason, to have been one of the most
interesting as well as diverting periods in French history; that in which the
volatile and frivolous vivacity of the national character shone with
irresistible comicality. How striking was the contrast between it in its main

features and the great Civil War waged at the same time in our own
country! Yet the Fronde had its serious—terrible aspect, too, in the wide-
spread misery it entailed upon France, as may be seen from the valuable
statistical researches of M. Feillet. That writer cites the following passage
from the record of an eye-witness of what he describes:[80]—“No tongue
can tell, no pen describe, no ear may hear that which we have seen (at
Rheims, Châlons, Rethel, &c). Famine and death on all sides, and bodies
unburied. Those remaining alive pick up from the fields the rotten oat-
straw, and make bread of it by mixing it with mud. Their faces are quite
black; they have no longer the semblance of human beings, but that of
phantoms.... War has placed every one on an equality; nobility lies upon
straw, dares not beg, and dies.... Even lizards are eaten, and dogs which
have been dead perhaps some eight days.... Moreover, in Picardy, a band of
five hundred children, orphans, and under seven years of age, was met with.
In Lorraine, the famished nuns quitted their convents and became
mendicants: the poor creatures gave themselves up to be dishonoured for
the sake of a morsel of bread. No pity, no remorse. An execrable and
sanguinary war upon the weak. In the heart of the city of Rheims, a
beautiful girl was chased from street to street for ten days by the licentious
soldiery; and as they could not catch her, they killed her by shooting her
down. In the vicinity of Angers, Alais, and Condom, upon all the highways
of Lorraine, women and children were indiscriminately outraged, and left to
die drenched in their blood.”

What could be more diverting? The Duke de Lorraine—that restless
knight-errant who preferred amusing himself with civil war to the quiet
enjoyment of his throne—amused the noble ladies of his acquaintance with
a recital of these pleasant incidents; his gallant army, he said, was quite a
providence for the old women....

After further pursuing his appalling statistics of the misery and horrors
inflicted by the Fronde at a later date, M. Feillet remarks:—“And yet,
notwithstanding all this suffering, which we have only cursorily sketched, at
Court nothing else was thought of but fêtes and diversions; for the young
and brilliant bevy of Mazarin’s nieces had come to increase the circle of
beauties whom the youthful King and his gay courtiers vied with each other
in paying homage to, and entertaining. The warm attachment of Louis for
more than one of his Minister’s nieces, and especially Marie de Mancini, is
well known. In imitation of their Sovereign, the youthful nobility and a
large portion of the city gallants plunged into unrestrained dissipation—
intervals of licentiousness ever succeeding like periods of turbulence and
anarchy. Such heartless indifference to the sufferings of the people on the
part of the King and his Court evoked the following couplet, which was put
into the mouth of Louis by a contemporary pamphleteer:—
“Si la France est en deuil, qu’elle pleure et soupire;
Pour moi, je veux chasser, galantiser et rire.”

But we are somewhat anticipating events, and therefore return to them in
the order of time.

FOOTNOTES:

[77] “La Rochefoucauld, depuis assez longtemps ayant envie de la quitter, prit
cette occasion avec joie.”—Mad. de Nemours, p. 150.

[78] La Rochefoucauld, edition 1662, p. 198.

[79] Mad. de Nemours, pp. 149, 150.

[80] La Misère dans la Fronde.

BOOK V.

CHAPTER I.

CONDÉ’S ADVENTUROUS EXPEDITION.

Condé passed several months in Guienne, occupied with strengthening
and extending the insurrection at the head of which he had placed himself,
and in repulsing as far as possible in the south the royal army, commanded
by the skilful and experienced Count d’Harcourt. Amidst very varied
successes, he learned from different quarters the bad turn which the
Fronde’s affairs was taking in the heart of the kingdom, the intrigues of De
Retz who held the key of Paris, and the deplorable state of the army on the
banks of the Loire.

On receiving these tidings at Bordeaux in the month of March, 1652,
Condé saw clearly the double danger which menaced him, and immediately
faced it in his wonted manner. Instead of awaiting events which were on the
eve of taking place at a distance, he determined on anticipating them, and
formed an extraordinary resolution, of a character very much resembling his
great military manœuvres, which at first sight appears extravagant, but
which the gravest reason justifies, and the temerity of which even is only
another form of high prudence. He formed the design of slipping out of
Bordeaux, traversing the lines of Count d’Harcourt, to get over in the best
way he might the hundred and fifty leagues which separated him from the

Loire and Paris, to appear there suddenly, and to place himself at the head
of his affairs.

He left behind him in Guienne a force sufficiently imposing to allow of it
there awaiting in security the successful results he was about to seek. In
possessing himself of Agen, Bergerac, Perigueux, Cognac, and even for a
moment of Saintes, and by pushing his conquests into Haute Guienne, on
the side of Mont-de-Marsan, Dax, and Pau, he had made Bordeaux the
capital of a small but rich and populous kingdom, surrounded on all sides
by a belt of strongholds, communicating with the sea by the Gironde, and
admirably placed for attack or defence. This kingdom, backed as it was by
Spain, was capable of receiving continuous succour from Santander and St.
Sebastian, and a Spanish fleet could approach by the Tour de Corduan,
bringing subsidies and troops, whilst Count de Dognon’s fleet, sailing from
the islands of Ré and Oléron to join it, might easily surround and even beat
the royal fleet, then forming at Brouage under the Duke de Vendôme. In
1650, during the imprisonment of the princes, Bordeaux had defended itself
for more than six months against a considerable army with the young king
at its head, and which was directed by Mazarin in person. Condé, and all his
family were adored there, by reason of the hatred felt for his predecessor,
the imperious Duke d’Epernon. The Bordeaux parliament was also equally
involved in the Fronde as was that of Paris, with which it had allied itself by
a solemn declaration. Under the parliament was a brave and ardent people,
which furnished a numerous militia.

Condé had named the Prince de Conti his lieutenant-general—a prince of
the blood giving lustre to authority, dominating all rivalries, an appointment
calculated to render obedience more easy. He was aware of Conti’s levity,
but he knew also that he was wanting neither in intelligence nor courage.
He believed in the ascendency which Madame de Longueville had always
exercised over her brother, and he hoped she would guide him still. He had