POLITICAL WOMEN.

POLITICAL WOMEN.

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

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.

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

[All rights reserved.]

CONTENTS OF VOLUME II.

BOOK V.
(Continued.)

POLITICAL WOMEN.

CHAPTER III.

THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN CONDÉ AND TURENNE AT PARIS—NOBLE CONDUCT OF MADEMOISELLE DE MONTPENSIER—FALL OF THE FRONDE.

The second-rate actors in this shifting drama presented no less diversity in the motives of their actions. Beaufort, who commanded the troops of Gaston, and Nemours those of Condé, although brothers-in-law, weakened by their dissentions an army which their concord would have rendered formidable. The necessity of military operations required their absence from Paris; but they preferred rather to there exhibit themselves to their mistresses, decked out in a general’s uniform, and grasping the truncheon of command. No greater harmony existed between the Prince de Conti and Madame de Longueville than when La Rochefoucauld severed them. At Bordeaux they favoured opposite parties, and contributed to augment the discord prevailing, and to weaken the party of the Princes by dividing it. The Duchess de Longueville, when no longer guided by La Rochefoucauld, did not fail to lose herself in aimless projects, and to compromise herself in intrigues without result. On Nemours being wounded, his wife repaired to the army to tend him, and the Duchess de Châtillon, under pretext of visiting one of her châteaux, accompanied her as far as Montargis; thence she went to the convent of Filles de Sainte-Marie, where, believing herself quite incognita, she went, under various disguises, to see him whom she had never ceased to love. These mysterious visits soon became no longer a secret to any one; and then Condé and his sister could convince themselves how different are the sentiments which love inspires and those which self-interest and vanity simulate. The great Condé, by his intelligence and bearing, had all the means of pleasing women; but obtained small success notwithstanding. Mademoiselle Vigean excepted, he appears to have been incapable of inspiring the tender passion, in the truest acceptation of the phrase. He went further than his sister, it seems, in the neglect of his person. It was his habit of life to be almost always badly dressed, and only appeared radiant on the field of battle. So that the Duke de Nemours was not the only rival with whom Condé had to contend for the favours of that beauty for whom Louis XIV. in his boyish amusements had shown a preference, and which has furnished a theme for some agreeable trifling to the sparkling muse of Benserade. An abbé, named Cambiac, in the service of the house of Condé, balanced for some time the passion to which Nemours had given birth in the bosom of the Duchess de Châtillon, and the jealousy of Nemours failed to expel Cambiac. The Duchess kept fair with him as the man who had obtained the greatest sway over her relation, the Princess-dowager de Condé. The condescension of the Duchess de Châtillon towards this intriguing and licentious priest procured her, on the part of the Princess-dowager, a legacy of more than a hundred thousand crowns in Bavaria, and the usufruct of an estate worth twenty thousand livres in rent per annum. Cambiac, however, retired, when he knew that Condé was his rival. But the victor of Rocroy had more address in winning battles than in conducting a love intrigue. He was clumsy enough to employ as a go-between in his courtship of his new mistress a certain gentleman named Vineuil, who was, it is true, one of his most skilful and attached followers, but whose good looks, agreeable and satirical wit, and enterprising character rendered him a very dangerous emissary among women. He had even acquired some celebrity through his successes in that way. Madame de Montbazon, Madame de Mouy, and the Princess of Wurtemberg had successively experienced the effects of his seductions. Vineuil made himself very agreeable to Madame de Châtillon, and if Condé were wronged by him in that quarter, he never knew of it; for Vineuil was always in great favour with him. Nemours excited his jealousy, and Nemours only dreaded Condé. However, shortly before, in the month of March, 1652, the Marquis de la Boulay and Count de Choisy, both enamoured of this Queen of Hearts, were bent on fighting a duel about her. A rumour of their intention got wind. The Duchess de Châtillon heard of it, and appeared unexpectedly on the spot fixed by the two adversaries for a rendezvous; and at the very instant they were about to unsheath their swords, she flung herself between them, seized each by the hand, and led them into the presence of the Duke d’Orleans, who charged Marshals l’Hospital, Schomberg, and d’Etampes, then in Paris, to arrange that affair and prevent a duel. In this they succeeded, but these rivalries and gallant intrigues very sensibly weakened Condé’s party, and hindered there being anything secret or combined in the execution of projects determined upon in the councils of its chief.

In the meantime, the siege of Etampes had been raised; and the army of Condé had issued forth, probably with the intention of attacking Turenne if he were found engaged with the Duke de Lorraine. On its approaching Paris, Condé took the command of it, and fixed his head-quarters at Saint-Cloud, in order to manœuvre on both banks of the Seine. The proximity of his camp to Paris did him far greater harm than even a defeat would have done. With but a scanty commissariat, Condé was of course obliged to permit every sort of licence. All the crops were ruined in the neighbouring fields; the peasantry were plundered, injured, and their domestic peace destroyed; and the country-houses of the rich Parisians were pillaged and burned in all directions. The evils of civil war now came home to the hearts of the people of the capital, and, forgetting how great a part they themselves had taken in producing the results they lamented, they cast the whole blame upon Condé, and regarded him thenceforth with a malevolent eye.

That prince was distracted with different passions and different feelings. He was himself desirous of peace, and willing to make sacrifices to obtain it. His fair mistress, the Duchess de Châtillon, linked with La Rochefoucauld and the Duke de Nemours, confirmed him in seeking it; but, on the other hand, his sister, who sought to break off his connection with Madame de Châtillon, joined with the Spaniards, to whom he had bound himself by so many ties, to lead him away from Paris, and to protract the war. Gaston’s daughter, too, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, mingled in all these intrigues, and took the same unwise means to force herself as a bride upon the young King, which De Retz took to force himself as minister upon his mother. But while these separate interests tore the capital, the peril of the army of Condé became imminent. Turenne having brought the Court to St. Denis, caused a number of boats to be drawn up from Pontoise, and commenced the construction of a bridge opposite Epinay.

Condé, betrayed on all sides, could at length perceive what an error he had committed in quitting the army only to lose himself amidst a series of impotent intrigues, and in having preferred the counsels of such a fickle mistress as Madame de Châtillon to those of a courageous and devoted sister such as Madame de Longueville. Towards the end of June, he got on horseback with a small number of intrepid friends, and rode forth to try for the last time the fate of arms.

It was too late. Marshal de la Ferté-Senneterre had brought from Lorraine powerful reinforcements to the royal army, which thereby amounted to twelve thousand men. That of the Fronde had scarcely the half of that number, and it was discouraged, divided, incapable of giving battle, and could only carry on a few days’ campaign around Paris, thanks to the manœuvres and energy everywhere exhibited by its chief. It was evident that no other alternative remained to Condé but to treat with the Court at any price, or to throw himself into the arms of Spain, and the famous combat of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, seriously considered, was only an act of despair, an heroic but vain protest of courage against fortune. Success would have remedied nothing, and a defeat might have been expected, in which Condé might have lost his glory and his life. It was no slight error of Turenne to risk a combat against such an adversary without a disposition of his entire force, for at that moment La Ferté-Senneterre was still with the artillery before the barrier Saint-Denis. Reunited, the Queen’s two generals might overwhelm Condé; separated, La Ferté-Senneterre remained useless, and Turenne left alone might purchase his victory very dearly. The latter therefore required that La Ferté should hasten to join him by forced marches, and that the attack should not be commenced before he arrived. But the orders of the Court admitted of no delay, and the Duke de Bouillon himself advised an immediate attack, in order to avoid having the appearance of manœuvring with Condé. Hence the fatal combat of the 2nd of July, 1652, in which so many valiant officers, of whom the army was proud, perished uselessly.

Historians in relating the details of that deplorable day have dwelt upon the courage and talent displayed by Condé within that narrow arena, that small space of ground which extended from the barrier du Trône, by the main street of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, in front of the Bastille. As usual, he had formed a picked squadron which he led on all points, himself leading the most desperate charges. He had posted himself in front of Turenne, disputing foot to foot with him the Grande Rue Saint Antoine, and during the intervals of relaxation of the enemy’s attacks, he rode off towards Picpus to encourage Tavannes, who was repelling with his customary vigour every attack made by Saint-Mégrin, or to hold in check, on the side of the Seine and Charenton Navailles, one of Turenne’s best lieutenants. It was in the Grande Rue where the rudest shocks were delivered. Turenne and Condé there rivalled each other in boldness and obstinacy, both charging at the head of their troops, both covered with blood, and unceasingly exposed to the fire of musketry. Turenne, far superior in numbers, was rapidly gaining ground, when Condé suddenly, sword in hand, at the head of his squadron of fifty brave gentlemen, forced him to fall back, and the affair remained undecided until Navailles, who had just received a reinforcement with artillery, overthrew all the barricades in his path, and in advancing, threatened to surround Condé. The latter, throwing himself quickly in that direction, saw on reaching the last barricade his two friends, Nemours and La Rochefoucauld, the one wounded in several places and unable to stand, the other blinded by a ball which had passed through his face just below the eyes, and both in immediate danger of being made prisoners. All exhausted as he was—for the fighting lasted from morning till evening,—Condé had still heart and energy to make a last charge for their rescue, and to place them in safety within the city. He felt the old flame of Rocroy and Nordlingen firing his blood, and he fought like the boldest of his dragoons. The citizens on the ramparts beheld with emotion the Prince, covered with blood and dust, enter a garden, throw off his casque and cuirass, and roll himself half-naked upon the grass to wipe off the sweat in which he was bathed. Meanwhile, La Ferté-Senneterre had come up. From that moment all gave way, and the Prince, feebly seconded by his disheartened soldiers, with the greatest difficulty reached the Place de la Bastille. There he found the gates of Paris shut. In vain did Beaufort urge the city militia to go to the assistance of that handful of brave men on the point of succumbing: wearied with three years of discord and manipulated by Mazarin, it no longer responded to the summons of its old chief. Splendidly dressed ladies waved signals to their champions and lovers below, and the streets became alive with the shouting of armed citizens, who desired to be let out to the aid of their defenders, and could not see with cold blood the slaughter of their friends. Thousands went to the Luxembourg to beseech Gaston to open the gates of the city for the reception of the wounded and the protection of the over-matched. Long trains of wounded and dying young men began to be carried in; the groans and blood were horrible to hear and see; and the women of all ranks and ages were frantic with sympathy and grief. De Retz and terror had so chilled the Duke d’Orleans into inaction that he would have let Condé perish, had not Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who was at that time smitten with Condé, wrung indignantly from her father, by dint of tears and entreaties, an order to open the gates to the outnumbered Prince.

Mazarin, from the heights of Charonne, where he had stationed himself with the young King, might well have thought that it was all over with his worst enemy; and, when startled to hear that Mademoiselle herself had even ordered the cannon of the Bastille to be fired upon the royal army, exclaimed, “With that cannon-shot she has slain her husband,” making allusion to the ambition which the Princess d’Orleans always had to espouse the youthful Louis XIV. True, on that same day, Mademoiselle destroyed with her own hand her dearest hopes; but that trait of generosity and greatness of soul has for ever honoured her memory, and shields it from many errors and much ridicule. After having solemnly pledged itself to Condé, it would have been the height of opprobrium for the House of Orleans to let Condé fall before their eyes: better to have perished with him, and at least saved its honour.

Mademoiselle has related in what condition she found Condé, when having placed herself at the window of a little dwelling near the Bastille, in order to see the troops pass as they entered the city, the Prince hurried for a moment from the gate to speak to her. He neither thought of himself, all covered with blood as he was, nor even of his cause, very nearly hopeless: he thought only of the friends he had lost. It did not occur to him that they were those who had embarked him in negotiations the results of which had proved so fatal: he thought only that they had died for him, and his anguish grew insupportable. “He was,” says Mademoiselle, “in a most pitiable state; he was not wounded himself, yet he was covered from head to foot with dust and blood, his hair all disordered, his face flushed with exertion, his cuirass battered with blows, and having lost the scabbard of his sword in the fight, he held the blade naked in his hand.” As he entered, the memory of all those he had seen fall around him seemed to rush suddenly upon Condé, and casting himself upon a seat, he burst into tears. “Forgive me,” said the great soldier, “I have lost all my friends—the gallant young hearts that loved me.” “No, they are only wounded,” said his cousin, “and many of them not dangerously; they will recover and love you still.” Condé sprang up at the good news, and rushed back into the fight. At the head of all his effective cavalry, he made one desperate, long-continued charge, and drove the enemy backward for a mile. In the meantime, the gates were opened wide, and, file after file, the weary soldiers marched into the city; and dashing homeward after his brilliant assault, Condé and his squadron galloped in the last: but when the ponderous bars were once more drawn across the portals, it was felt that the combatants indeed were saved, but that the Fronde was destroyed.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DUKE DE NEMOURS SLAIN IN A DUEL BY HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW, BEAUFORT.

Some few days after the fierce fight of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Condé had an interview with the Duke d’Orleans, “who embraced him with an air as gay as though he had failed him in nothing.”[1] Condé uttered no word of reproach out of respect to his daughter. He did not behave exactly in the same way towards Madame de Châtillon. She had addressed a note to him begging him to visit her. She showed this effusion to Mademoiselle, saying, “He will at least see from that the uneasiness which is felt for him.” But Condé’s mind was disabused, and when he met her who had been his ruin, “he cast upon her, we are told, the most terrible glances conceivable, showing by the expression of his countenance how much he despised her.”[2] Well would it have been if soon afterwards the grand-nephew of Henry IV. had not lent anew his ear to the song of the syren and resumed the slavery of her dishonouring fetters!

It is not to our purpose to retrace the melancholy scenes of which, after the combat of Saint Antoine, and during the remainder of the month of July, 1652, Paris was the theatre. It would be only to dwell upon the sad spectacle of the agony and supreme convulsions of a beaten party, struggling in vain to escape its fate, and seeking safety in excesses which only served to precipitate its destruction.

Condé left no violent extreme untried to determine Paris to make further sacrifices for his cause. Dissatisfied with the deliberations of the Hôtel de Ville, he caused it to be carried by assault by the populace, who killed several of the échevins. The Fronde, however, was approaching its last agony. Divided amongst themselves by selfish interests, and outwearied with endless intrigues, the majority of the Frondeurs only awaited a fitting opportunity of treating with Mazarin. An amnesty soon made its appearance, and the Cardinal took the step of quitting France once more in order to facilitate a reconciliation. But Condé, on his side, was very little disposed thereto, for he had gone very far indeed to retrace his steps. Furious at having failed to reach the object which he had thought to attain, exasperated by the abandonment of his partisans, by the sarcasms of pamphleteers, he demanded securities and large indemnifications; and proposed such hard conditions that all accord with him became impossible. Thereupon he collected some troops around his standard, a tolerably large number of gentlemen, and rejoined the Duke de Lorraine, who was advancing upon Paris. Their united forces amounted to eighty squadrons and eight thousand infantry. Turenne had scarcely half that strength; but he manœuvred so skilfully round Paris, that they failed to get any advantage over him. Condé withdrew; and when the King, on his return to the Louvre, published a second amnesty (October, 1652), the Prince had crossed the frontier, after having taken several strongholds in his line of march. Shortly afterwards, he became generalissimo of the Spanish armies, whilst a decree of the parliament declared him guilty of high treason and a traitor to the State.

Previous to Condé’s departure from Paris, intense indignation had been excited in every well-balanced mind by a shocking event—the Duke de Nemours having been slain by the hand of his brother-in-law, the Duke de Beaufort, in an abominable duel. From De Nemours the provocation had come, and all the wrong was on his part; but as the victim, he was deplored by all those who were ignorant of what had contributed to bring about the affair, and for some time the new governor of Paris (Beaufort) could not show himself in public.

In the Dukes de Nemours and La Rochefoucauld, Condé had lost his two pacific advisers. In vain had he offered to La Rochefoucauld the post of Nemours, the command under him, and thus to be the second authority in his army. La Rochefoucauld had excused himself on account of his wound, and Condé gave the vacant command to the Prince de Tarente. Henceforward, Madame de Châtillon quite alone was unable to counterbalance the counsels and influence of Madame de Longueville, and Condé plunged deeper than ever into the Spanish alliance and the war waged by that nation against France.

Whilst all these events were happening, Bordeaux had become the theatre of continued troubles. Madame de Longueville no longer agreed with her younger brother; the inhabitants of the city, who had only entered half-heartedly and been almost forced into rebellion, became impatient to extricate themselves from the constrained position in which they were held. As the sequel to negotiations which the city carried on with the Duke de Vendôme, who blockaded it, there was a general amnesty.

When Condé retired to the Netherlands, it was not long before it became known, to the national humiliation, that the best soldier of France, a prince of the blood and protector of the people, had followed the recent example of his conqueror, and sold his services to Spain. The young King made his triumphal entry into Paris, accompanied by his mother and Turenne. He convoked the Courts, and received them into favour, “provided they returned within the limits of their duties, and abstained from interfering with the government.” Gaston was sent into honourable exile, to his castle in the beautiful town of Blois, and the Cardinal-Archbishop, the evil spirit of the Fronde, was received with apparent cordiality, and began to entertain hopes of supplanting his rival; but when he had fallen into disrepute with the citizens, he was quietly carried off to Vincennes, and left to meditate on his plots and schemings within the bars of his solitary apartment. The Parisians were now so changed from what they had been, that they received their old enemy, the Cardinal Mazarin, with demonstrations of delight, when he made his solemn entry into the repentant city with young Louis as an attendant at his side.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mademoiselle de Montpensier, tom. ii. p. 148.

[2] The same.

CHAPTER V.

THE TRIUMPH OF MAZARIN.

Mazarin might well have claimed the right of accompanying to Paris, on the 21st October, 1652, Louis the Fourteenth and Anne of Austria, and to share the joy of their victory over the Fronde, for he was the true achiever of it. It was he who, by retiring so opportunely, by leaving the Fronde to itself, had allowed it to exhibit at its entire ease its fury and impotence; it was he who, from the depth of his exile, disquieted by the success of Châteauneuf, had collected troops, rallied round him experienced generals, raised the banner of the monarchy, and from one vantage ground to another had carried it forwards even to Paris. But by reappearing there prematurely, Mazarin might have risked the rekindling of animosities scarcely yet extinguished. It was his own advice he followed—to second the effect of the amnesty, by a momentary absence, in order to leave no pretext to those who had so often promised to yield if he quitted the kingdom. Sure of the young King, surer still of his mother, leaving with them his instructions and approved advisers, Mazarin had disappeared, withdrawing at first to Bouillon, across the frontier; then, as by degrees the King’s government became consolidated at Paris, he drew nearer and moved to Sedan; next, he went openly to join the royal army, taking with him powerful reinforcements, munitions, provisions, and money. Admirably commanded by Turenne and La Ferté-Senneterre, it had forced the little army of Condé and the Duke de Lorraine to slowly beat a retreat in the direction of the Netherlands. Active, resolute, indefatigable, he did not hesitate to prolong the campaign beyond its ordinary limits, until the end of December, and even up to January, 1653. He had only quitted the army on beholding the enemy abandon French territory, and after having made the frontier of Champagne and Picardy secure from any chance of a return of offensive operations. It was then that he put his troops into winter quarters, and that he himself, heralded and sustained by these solid successes, had taken the road to Paris.

On the 3rd of February, 1653, he therein made a truly triumphal entry. The young King, accompanied by his brother the Duke d’Anjou, went out for more than a league to meet him, received him with the greatest apparent affection, took him into his carriage, and two hours afterwards they entered by the Porte Saint-Denis, in great pomp, amidst the joyous shouts of that same populace which, two years previously, had pursued him with imprecations. The Cardinal was thus enthusiastically conducted to the Louvre, where Anne of Austria awaited him.

He there beheld once more that courageous Queen, whom history, misled by the impostors of the Fronde, has too much misconceived, that stanch friend, an example among all queens, and almost among all women, of a constancy equal to either fortune; who, in the early days of 1643, had discerned the great abilities of Mazarin, and seen in him the only man capable of properly conducting the affairs of France; who, after having owed to him five long years of glory, had in 1648 and 1649 defended him against the aristocracy, the parliament, and the people united; who later had only consented to his retirement because he himself had judged it necessary; who during his absence had alike resisted every species of seduction, every kind of menace, and had never ceased to be governed by his counsels; who, at Gien, learning the rout of her troops at Bleneau whilst at her toilet, went on with it calmly, when everyone else spoke of flight, rivalling Mazarin himself in courage and coolness. On finding themselves once more together under the roof of royalty after so many long and sorrowful separations, after seeing each other so often on the very verge of ruin, they might well be proud of their mutual constancy, which had deserved and brought about the halo of prosperity surrounding that auspicious day, and together look forward for the rest of their lives with the solid hope of sharing a glorious repose.

Around the Queen, the Cardinal was welcomed by a brilliant array of great nobles and fair ladies, formerly the bitter enemies Of Richelieu’s successor, but who were there assembled to compliment him upon his happy return.

Amongst those ladies foremost in their congratulations was the Princess Palatine, with whom we have already made some acquaintance—Anne de Gonzagua, one of the most eminent personages of the seventeenth century. Of an admirable beauty, which served in some sort as a setting to an intellect the most solid, she was as capable of taking part in the deliberations of statesmen as in the assemblies of wits or in gallant intrigues, seeking, it is true, her advantages, but not by the betrayal of any one; who, without treason to royalty, had given advice the most judicious to the Fronde, and would have saved it, if the Fronde could have been saved. As she had never ceased to keep up the best understanding with Mazarin, she could very well associate herself with his triumph.

She was there also, that other famous female politician, of a grade still higher, as beautiful and as gallant, of a less gracious, perhaps, but yet stronger disposition, more capable still of grand enterprises, and never suffering herself to be stayed by any danger or any scruple—the widow of the Constable de Luynes, Marie de Rohan, Duchess de Chevreuse, who formerly had lent a hand to every plot concocted against Mazarin, and in concert with the Palatine had proposed, as we have seen, the sole measure which could bring together all the Cardinal’s enemies, and form a great aristocratical party strong enough to make head against royalty:—the marriage of Condé’s son with a daughter of the Duke d’Orleans, and that of her own daughter with the Prince de Conti. This latter match having been broken off in a manner the most outrageous to her feelings, Madame de Chevreuse had separated from Condé with éclat; and, too experienced to ally herself with the sort of tiers-parti which Retz had proposed, but allowing herself to be gently and skilfully guided by the Marquis de Laignes, whom Mazarin with his usual adroitness had known how to win over, she had returned to the side of her early friend, Anne of Austria, and became resigned to the power of a man who at any rate knew his own mind, and whose robust ambition never wavered at the breath of vanity or the gust of momentary passion. The fame and honour that she might expect from the Fronde had been offered to her by Mazarin, and in return Madame de Chevreuse had brought to royalty the declared support of the three illustrious families, the Rohans, De Luynes, and the Lorraines. It was she who, ever puissant over the Duke de Lorraine, had negotiated a secret treaty between him and the Cardinal, and who by turns had made him act in such contrary directions. Restored entirely to the Queen’s favour, Madame de Chevreuse was at her side in the Louvre, to welcome warmly the return of the prosperous Cardinal.

After Madame de Chevreuse, Mazarin had had no adversaries more dangerous than the Vendômes and Bouillons. And yet on that memorable day of February 3rd, 1653, he could consider the heads of those two powerful families as the firmest supporters of his greatness.

Cæsar, Duke de Vendôme, natural son of Henry the Fourth, was much more formidable by his intelligence, his valour, and his craft than by his birth. There was nothing—even to the virtues of his wife, a reputed saint,—which was not put to the profit of his ambition. His daughter, the beautiful Mademoiselle de Vendôme, had married that brilliant Duke de Nemours, who had come to such a miserable end. His eldest son, the Duke de Mercœur, was a sagacious and estimable prince, and the Duke de Beaufort, his youngest, was the idol of the populace of Paris. It was Beaufort who, in 1643, urged by the two duchesses De Montbazon and De Chevreuse, had formed the design of assassinating Mazarin. The Duke de Vendôme had been suspected of being implicated in that affair; he had at least given shelter in his château at Anet to all the accomplices of his son; and, forced to quit France to avoid the arrest with which he was threatened, he had wandered for several years through Italy and England, everywhere stirring up enemies against the Cardinal. The latter saw clearly that it was better to acquire a son of Henry the Fourth at a given price, than to prosecute him without the slightest advantage. After all, what did the Duke desire, and what were his demands when Mazarin became prime minister? Either that the government of Brittany, which his father, Henry the Fourth, had destined for him, and that his father-in-law, Philibert Emmanuel of Lorraine, held; or that the Admiralty, one of the highest posts in the state, should be given him. Mazarin had repulsed these pretensions in 1643, but looked upon them favourably in 1652; he therefore made the Duke High-Admiral, even conferred upon him the title of State Minister, with a seat at the council-board, after being assured that Vendôme, having secured that which he had always sought to attain, would serve him as firmly as he had formerly opposed him. He had an infallible pledge for his fidelity. The Duke’s eldest son, the loyal and pious Duke de Mer[co]eur, had married one of the Cardinal’s nieces, the amiable and virtuous Laura Mancini, so that the house of Vendôme was interested in and inseparably united to Mazarin’s fortunes. Therefore, on the 3rd of February, 1653, the High-Admiral Cæsar de Vendôme, engaged in pursuing the Spanish fleet in the sea of Gascony, entered the Gironde, and threatened the relics of the Fronde at Bordeaux. On his part, the Duke de Mercœur, named governor of Provence, watched over that important province for the King and Mazarin, whilst the Duke de Beaufort, who earlier had been desirous of laying violent hands on the Cardinal, and who yet quite recently had shown himself as his implacable enemy, covered and protected by the services of his father and brother, retired to Anet, without being the least in the world disquieted; satisfied with beholding Madame de Montbazon satisfied because plenty of money had been given her, and awaited quietly the moment at which he should succeed his father in the command of the fleet, and shed his blood in the service of his King.

The Bouillons were of little less importance than the Vendômes. The Duke was a politician and a soldier of the first class, capable of conducting a government or leading an army, and who had only one sentiment or thought in heart and head—the aggrandisement of his house. Already sovereign prince of Sedan, urged by his wife, still more ambitious than himself, he had in 1641, in the hope of securing fresh territorial acquisitions, treated with Spain, taken part in the revolt of the Count de Soissons, and won the battle of La Marfée against the royal army. In 1642, he had entered into the conspiracy of the Duke d’Orleans and Cinq Mars, and, arrested, thrown into chains at Pierre-Encise, he had only saved his head from the scaffold by abandoning his principality. Ever since, he had not ceased to agitate for the recovery of that which by treason he had lost. He had again demanded Sedan from Mazarin in 1643, and not being able to obtain it at the hands of that great servant of the Crown, that, in order to satisfy a private interest, France should renounce one of its best strongholds on the frontier of the Netherlands, he had ranked himself among the Cardinal’s enemies, and forced at first to flee, like the Duke de Vendôme, had scarcely returned to France ere he embraced with ardour the Fronde, though without the slightest conviction, be it understood, and in the sole hope of easily obtaining from it what he could not snatch from royalty. He had enlisted with him in the Fronde his brother Turenne, of whom he disposed absolutely, and who was equally ambitious, and equally covetous of the grandeur of their family, but after his own fashion, and the mould of his frigid, reflective, and profoundly dissembling character. At the peace of Ruel, in 1649, the Duke de Bouillon had demanded “his re-establishment in Sedan, or if the Queen preferred to reimburse him for it at an estimated price, with the possessions promised and due to his house; for himself, the government of Auvergne; for his brother that of Haute and Basse Alsace, with that of Philipsbourg and the command of all the armies of Germany.” Mazarin had then committed the error of not satisfying this ambitious and powerful house; hence, in 1650, the conduct of the Duke in Guienne and that of Turenne at Stenay and in Flanders. In 1651, the Queen treated seriously with the Duke, and on his return Mazarin succeeded in entirely gaining him over. Not desiring at any price to restore Sedan to him, he granted the equivalent demanded—a great domain at Château-Thierry, much richer than that of Sedan, and, without effective sovereignty, that title of Prince, so dear to the vanity of the Bouillons, which the head of the family could not only transmit to his children, but which could descend also to his brother Turenne. The Duke de Bouillon having once taken the part of abandoning Condé, in spite of all his engagements, and of serving royalty, did it with the same energy which he had displayed at Paris and Bordeaux. He never afterwards forsook Mazarin, but assisted him with his advice, and suffered even more than once in person, by acting with his customary vigour, and the obstinate ardour of his country and race. It was he who, on the night of the battle of Bleneau, brought reinforcements to Turenne, and enabled him to stop Condé. It was he, again, who, on the 2nd of July, 1652, to let Mazarin see that he had gained him for good and all, joined with the Cardinal in pressing Turenne, against all the rules of war, not to wait the coming up of the troops of La Ferte-Senneterre. A truthful witness, and one of the principal actors in that sanguinary drama, Navailles, even affirms that the Duke de Bouillon took part in the affair, and that he was at the attack in which Saint-Megrin perished. If Bouillon had lived, with his immeasurable ambition and his capacity equalling his ambition, would he have been contented with the second rank, and would he always have remained the devoted servant of the Cardinal?

None can say: for the Duke de Bouillon was cut short in his ambitious career; he died on the 9th of August, 1652, without having enjoyed those possessions and those honours which he had so greatly coveted; but ere closing his eyes he saw them pass to his children. Turenne, carefully conciliated and caressed, was made, on his brother’s death, governor of Auvergne, and the viscounty of Turenne erected into a principalty. Very shortly afterwards he also received the post of minister of state. Mazarin went even still further: desirous of heaping up benefits upon the illustrious soldier whose honesty and ambition he had so long known, desirous at the same time to attach in his person all the Protestant party by decisive acts, which would show in a conspicuous manner that whosoever should serve him well would be faithfully recompensed, without distinction of religion, the skilful and politic Cardinal made the Duke de la Force, a Protestant and the father-in-law of Turenne, Marshal of France, as his father had been. Thus, on the 3rd of February, 1653, Turenne was likewise at the Louvre at Mazarin’s side, as the representative of all his family, and already occupied with preparation for the campaign that was about to open in the spring in the Netherlands, and where he was to take command of the French army.

But if Mazarin had taken care to win over successively those chiefs of the Importants and the Frondeurs in whom his experienced eye had recognised as sincerely disposed to a loyal submission, he had this time taken care not to allow himself to be betrayed by false appearances, and did not fail to strike at, or at least banish from Paris, those whom he despaired of acquiring. He had lent himself with good grace to the reconciliation sought by the Duke d’Orleans; as it was not his wish to give to France and Europe the appearance of ill-treating the King’s uncle, and constrain him perhaps once more to go in search of a foreign asylum; but by conciliating him in the most suitable way, he had taken surety of him, and being convinced that too much lenity would only embolden him to mix himself up in fresh intrigues, he did not permit him to remain in Paris, when the King returned thither, for fear lest in his palace of the Luxembourg, surrounded by perfidious advisers, whilst lavishing great marks of deference upon the Queen and the young King, he might cherish and rekindle on occasion the hopes of the Fronde. Therefore, it was arranged that the Duke d’Orleans should quit Paris on the day previous to that of the King’s entry, and consequently he retired at first to Limours, then to Blois, the ordinary refuge of his treason and faint-heartedness, where, in nowise persecuted, but watched and kept within bounds, he passed amidst general indifference the remainder of his contemptible career. Mademoiselle remained also for some time in disgrace at St. Fargeau, and consoled herself by degrees for the ruin of her divers pretensions with her large fortune and small court. The Cardinal de Retz putting a good face upon a losing game, and especially desirous of receiving from the King’s own hand the cardinal’s hat granted him by the Pope, in order to claim the right of wearing the dress and of enjoying the honours and privileges attached to that high dignity, had been among the first to meet the King at Compiègne at the head of the clergy of Paris, and had addressed him in a bold and artful speech, in the style of that of Cæsar in the affair of Cataline, skilfully covering the defeat of his party, recommending the policy of moderation, referring more than once to the conduct of Henry the Great towards the Leaguers, and through fear lest it should not be sufficiently understood that he was speaking about himself, citing the pacific words of Henry to his great uncle, the Cardinal de Gondi. In that oration he had also insinuated some high compliments to the Queen, as though he had resumed his former hopes. The next day, at mass, the King placed the red hat upon his head, and henceforward De Retz assumed and wore the dress of cardinal. After the King’s return, he had carried his audacity so far as to present himself at the Louvre to pay, as a faithful subject, his homage to their Majesties. On the 1st of December, he preached with great effect at Notre Dame, and recommenced his old course of life of 1648, making pious sermons in the intervals of his gallant rendezvous, devoting the morning to preaching at church, the evening to bonnes fortunes, and reknitting in the dark the meshes of his old intrigues. But Mazarin knew him thoroughly: he was persuaded that De Retz was incapable of confining himself to his ecclesiastical functions, incompatible as they were with his dissipated and licentious habits, with his restless and factious disposition, and so under his minister’s advice on some slight suspicion arising, the King had him arrested even in the very Louvre, on the 19th of December, 1652, and conducted to the donjon of Vincennes.

Mazarin was too cautious to treat La Rochefoucauld after the same fashion. He knew marvellously well that, separated from Condé and Madame de Longueville, who constituted all his importance, La Rochefoucauld was no longer to be dreaded, and that he was not of a humour to make himself the champion and martyr of a vanquished party. The serious wound which he had received in the combat of Saint Antoine turned him, so to speak, to advantage. Struck by a ball which had traversed both cheeks and temporarily deprived him of sight, it was impossible for him to continue in active service and to follow the army. He did not therefore play false to Condé in not accepting the command of such troops as remained to the Fronde—a command which, on his retirement, was offered to the Prince de Tarent. It was absolutely essential that he should be speedily cured of his wound; and that real motive covering his weariness and long-felt disgust, he did not, like Persan, Bouteville, and Vauban, join the Prince in Flanders. On the other hand, he had not objected to the amnesty, and therefore could not be included in the royal declaration issued on the 13th of November against Condé, Conti, Madame de Longueville, and their chief adherents. But Mazarin took good care not to pursue him, and La Rochefoucauld, after allowing the first outburst of the storm to pass over, retired to his estates to bury himself in obscurity for a few years, and to taste that repose of which he had so great need. Then he quitted his retreat and reappeared at Paris. It must have been necessary for him to go very far in conciliation to be received again into favour. He succeeded in it, however, by saving appearances, to use a modern phrase, and in skilfully managing the transition. He made his peace with the politic and gracious Cardinal, rode in his carriage, saying with as much reason as wit, “Everything happens in France!” He managed to get his son into intimacy with the young King, and, wonderful to relate, he obtained from Mazarin, in indemnification for the losses he had experienced in carrying on war against him, a thumping pension of eight thousand livres.

If space permitted us thus to run over successively the list of all the great nobles who had previously had a hand in the Fronde, it would be easy to show that on the 3rd of February, 1653, the most ardent and the most illustrious of those we have cited, and many others, such as the Duke d’Elbeuf and Marshal Houdancourt, both generals of the Fronde at Paris in 1648 and 1649, the Duke de Guise, so strongly bound to Condé, almost all, in short, were ranged round Mazarin, and fought with him and for him, and that for one sole but very sufficient reason—which was that the clever Cardinal knew how to make them understand wherein lay their true interests.

Self-interest, self-interest, such was, with very few exceptions, the unique mainspring of the aristocracy in the Fronde, and La Rochefoucauld has only erected into a maxim and even generalised into excess the principle which he had seen practised everywhere around him.

It may thus be judged whether, as some writers have asserted without the slightest knowledge of the facts, the Fronde was a great and generous cause which failed of obtaining success. On the contrary, it was simply a powerful coalition of individual interests, and if considered under the aspect of an abortive anticipation of the French revolution, and some general design sought for therein in one way or another, it would be rather that of stifling in its cradle the principles of that revolution.

Is it true that the Fronde, as has been asserted, was a counterpart, a sort of miserable imitation, of the revolution which was then convulsing England? Not the least in the world. That other error, still stranger than the preceding, rests upon a false and deceitful analogy—that common shoal of historical considerations and comparisons. At bottom, the earlier part of the English revolution was almost entirely of a religious character, whilst in the Fronde the religious element did not intervene at all, thanks to the enlightened protection enjoyed by the Protestants. It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our British troubles at that moment. No sternness, no reality; love-letters and witty verses supplying the place of the Biblical language and awful earnestness of the words and deeds of the Covenanters and Independents; the gentlemen of France utterly debased and frivolised; religion ridiculed; nothing left of the old landmarks; and no Cromwell possible. All sense of honour disappears when conduct is regulated by the shifting motives of party politics. The dissensions of the Fronde accordingly produced no champion to whom either side could look with unmingled respect. The great Condé and the famous Turenne showed military talent of the highest order, but a want of principle and a flighty frivolity of character counterbalanced all their virtues. The scenes of those five or six years are like a series of dissolving views, or the changing combinations of a kaleidoscope; Condé and Turenne always on opposite sides—for each changed his party as often as the other; battles prepared for by masquerades and theatricals, and celebrated on both sides with epigrams and songs; the wildest excesses of debauchery and vice practised by both sexes and all ranks in the State; archbishops fighting like gladiators, and intriguing like the vulgarest conspirators; princes imprisoned with a jest, and executions attended with cheers and laughter; the highest in the land caballing, cheating, and lying, but keeping a firm grasp of power:—no country was ever so split into faction, or so denuded of great men.

But, while all these elements of confusion were heaving and tumbling in what seemed an inextricable chaos, the monarchical principle, strange to say, still burned brightly in the hearts of all the French. Even in their fights and quarrelings there was a deep reverence entertained for the ideal of the throne. The King’s name was a tower of strength; and when the nation, in the course of the miserable years from 1610 to 1661, saw the extinction of nobility, religion, law, and almost of civilised society, it caught the first sound that told it it still had a King, as an echo from the past assuring it of its future. It forgot Louis the Thirteenth, the Regency, and the Fronde, and only remembered that its monarch was the grandson of Henry the Fourth, when it witnessed in his reign the culmination of the French monarchy, and the splendid intellectual development with which it was simultaneous.

And that brilliant day of Mazarin’s triumph was shadowed by no eclipse. It was not one of those lucky freaks of fate often followed by long disgrace: no, that Minister’s triumph rested on solid foundations. Not only he saw at his feet, in the Louvre, all his former enemies vanquished, but not one of them able to rise again in enmity, for all their strength was exhausted. The wearied citizens wanted repose, and placed all their hopes in royalty. The parliaments, ashamed of having allowed their ancient loyalty to be surprised by the deceitful caresses of the discontented nobles, returned voluntarily within the prudent limits of their institution, satisfied with having seen the government recognise all their legitimate complaints, and bind itself to respect their just and necessary independence. The aristocracy thought itself still more fortunate at having thus been extricated from this last defeat. It left, it is true, upon the field of battle some few of its feudal pretensions, but in exchange, titles, honours, and wealth were lavished upon it, and its vanity could at any rate console its ambition. The good fortune of Mazarin opened the eyes of everyone to his merit. No one could refrain from applauding his firmness and his capacity. Had he proved unsuccessful, he would only have been looked upon as a second Concini; victorious, he was another Richelieu to whom it was necessary to succumb, but who might be served without loss of honour, because, after having shown that he was as firm in his principle of government as his imperious predecessor, he did not play the tyrant; and, far from making the weight of his power felt, he forced himself rather to disguise it under flattering words, did not show the least resentment for former injuries, extended a hand to everyone who came to him, listened to every complaint that had anything legitimate in it, entertained every pretension that was at all reasonable, and seemed disposed to base his government upon skilful concessions and not upon useless rigour. His star was believed in, his moderation inspired confidence, and people grew eager to participate in his triumph. Already at Vendôme, a grandson of Henry the Great had espoused one of his nieces; the proudest among the French nobility were soon about to contend for the hands of the others; and the man whom the Fronde had so persecuted was about to place his family upon the steps of the throne. The solemn reception which the King and Queen gave Mazarin at the Louvre on the 3rd February, 1653, was not therefore an idle pageant or empty ceremony. That same day, Mazarin could understand that a new era had arisen for him, more brilliant and more secure than that of 1643, after the defeat of the Importants, and that that sterile and sanguinary halt upon the road of reform and the civilising march of monarchy known in history under the name of the Fronde was at last and for ever terminated.

BOOK VI.

CLOSING SCENES.

CHAPTER I.

THE DUCHESS DE LONGUEVILLE.

Having rapidly summarised the fate and fortunes of the leading male actors who figured in the Fronde, we will now glance briefly at the closing scenes in the careers of the fair politicians whom we have seen playing such brilliant and prominent parts in that curious tragi-comedy.

To high-born French women—princesses and duchesses—the revolt of the Fronde especially belonged. They were at once its main-springs, its chief instruments, its most interested agents; and among them Madame de Longueville, who enacted the most conspicuous part, was by its events the most ill-treated of all.

We have seen her the heroine—or, perhaps the adventuress—of the civil war, rushing into dangers and mixing herself up in intrigues of every kind, in order to serve the interests of another. She was not a consummate politician like the Palatine, for she had no real business tact. Her true character and the unity of her life should be sought where they were really shown—in her devotion to him whom she loved. It is there—in that devotion wholly and always the same, at once consistent, yet absurd, and very touching even in its downright follies.

All her eccentric movements were attributable to the restless and fickle spirit of La Rochefoucauld. Solely occupied with his own interests, it was he who drew her into the vortex of party politics and civil war, with a view to his own self-aggrandisement. It was for love of him that she sacrificed domestic peace, repose, and reputation.

At Bordeaux Madame de Longueville had at first enjoyed the same popularity as that which she had acquired in Paris at the commencement of the first Fronde. Upon that section of the second Fronde which had its head-quarters in the South, the Duchess, after its chief, the Prince de Conti, was the most likely person to exercise a decisive influence alike by the clearness of her intellect, the firmness of her character, and the great confidence with which she had inspired the entire party. In 1650 she had covered herself with glory at Stenay, and the eyes of not only France, but the whole of Europe, were fixed upon her. She was unable to play the same part at Bordeaux. Invested at Stenay with supreme authority, she had been compelled, as it were, to display all the intelligence and energy she possessed: at Bordeaux she was only an adviser indifferently well listened to. And moreover, in 1650, her frame of mind was widely different. With a sincere attachment to the interests of her party and her house, another and more intimate sentiment animated and sustained her: she loved and was beloved. A reciprocal devotedness justified in some measure that passion which had already passed through three long and trying years, and found its aliment and its strength in common sacrifices. In fact, if Madame de Longueville had braved in Normandy all kinds of danger and even death to cross the sea in order to reach the Netherlands and unfurl at Stenay the banner of the Princes, La Rochefoucauld, too, it must be remembered, had been continually in arms. That interval was the golden era of their lives. They suffered and combated for each other. They had the same cause, the same faith, the same hopes. Their hearts were never more united than during that cruel year when, separated by civil war, they could scarcely, from the furthest extremities of France, address each other, amid risks innumerable, in a few apparently insignificant lines, but through which, nevertheless, there breathed a tenderness and confidence proof against everything. Now all was changed. As we have said, La Rochefoucauld had grown wearied of the Fronde, into which he had hopefully flung himself in 1648. In 1651 he became desirous of reconciling himself with the Court, and making a pact which would have infallibly separated them, since M. de Longueville, irritated with all that had at length reached his ears, had summoned his wife in a menacing tone to join him in Normandy. It was she who then, in her turn, was compelled to draw over La Rochefoucauld. He continued to follow in her footsteps through the sentiment of devotedness that still lingered in his heart, but without conviction, and with a lukewarmness which deeply wounded Condé’s high-souled sister. She felt that she was no longer loved commensurately with the heroic and tender ideal of which she had dreamed, and that a struggle with fortune, too long continued, had cast down his inconstant and wavering spirit. Hence also arose that momentary error which we have neither disguised nor excused. Love enfeebled and discouraged had delivered her up once more to her natural coquetry, and coquetry stimulated by politics had made her brave the semblance of an infidelity towards La Rochefoucauld and herself. Without being hurried away in the slightest degree by the senses or the heart, in her endeavour to carry off the Duke de Nemours from Madame de Châtillon and the peace party, and engage him more deeply in that of the war and Condé, she had slightly compromised herself; and La Rochefoucauld, influenced by an implacable resentment, instead of breaking with her openly, had, at Paris, entered into a shameful league with Madame de Châtillon and his pretended rival, the Duke de Nemours, in order that they might rob the poor Duchess of her last consolation, the esteem and affection of Condé. Left in Guienne, without any great or engrossing occupation, with a vacant mind, discontented both with others and herself, Madame de Longueville was no longer the brilliant Bellona of Stenay, but her pride and dignity, which she could not lose, never failed to sustain her. She therefore resolved to remain even unto the end faithful to that brother whose heart was sought to be steeled against her by the whispers of calumny: to remain in Bordeaux as long as possible, without recoiling from any means which necessity might prescribe. Not for a single day, not for an hour, did she dream of separating her fate from that of Condé, and of bending the knee before his victorious enemies.

At length, however, it was her inevitable fate to yield to the star of Mazarin and Louis XIV., who having obtained the mastery over the South as elsewhere, she was compelled to quit the factious city, and repair, by command of the Court, to Montreuil-Bellay, a domain belonging to her husband in Anjou. Shortly afterwards she obtained permission to go to Moulins, where her aunt, the inconsolable widow De Montmorency, was superior of the convent (Filles de Sainte-Marie). From that visit to Moulins may be dated the conversion of the beautiful and adventurous princess. On emerging from such a chaos of turmoil and commotion, in that calm and holy retreat, her thoughts reverted to the pure and innocent period of her youth, to the brilliant and tumultuous past, to the sorrowful and disenchanted present. Embroiled with the Court and her brothers, abandoned by La Rochefoucauld, in the decline of her beauty, upon the eve of maturity, she saw in Heaven alone a refuge against others and herself. But the Divine grace had to be awaited as well as prayed for, the prickings of conscience were succeeded by relapses—the ties to be broken were still so strong! At length, one day when engaged in reading, “a veil, as it were, was drawn from before the eyes of my mind,” she wrote, in that somewhat hyperbolical style of which she was fond; “all the charms of truth, concentrated upon one sole object, presented themselves before me. Faith, which had remained dead and buried beneath my passions, became renewed. I felt like a person who, after a long sleep in which he has dreamed of being great, happy, esteemed, and honoured by everybody, awakens all on a sudden to find himself loaded with chains, pierced with wounds, weighed down with heaviness, and pent up in some dark prison.” To that conviction she remained faithful until death, and expiated her six years of deviation by a penitence which lasted for five-and-twenty, and continued ever on the increase.

The first act of the Duchess, after her conversion, was to implore pardon of her husband. M. de Longueville behaved generously, and went to meet her at Moulins, and took her back with him to Rouen with every mark of delicacy and distinction. Reverting to the aspirations of her youth, Madame de Longueville placed herself in active communication with the good Carmelites, whom she had never entirely forgotten. She was constantly writing to Mademoiselle du Vigean, the sous-prieure, for guidance in her new way of life; for she had need of spiritual advice, and cried out for help, and help came through the good offices of the Marquise de Sablé, who had herself withdrawn from the world to Port-Royal, and supplied the want felt by her illustrious friend by placing her in the hands of one of the great spiritual guides of that day, M. Singlin. Between the ghostly adviser and the fair penitent there ensued frequent conversations curiously flavoured with a spice of romance. Persecution had already attacked Port-Royal, and M. Singlin, in order not to be recognised, went to the Hôtel de Longueville disguised as a doctor, his features being concealed by an ample wig. M. Singlin strove to fix limits to the ardour by which Madame de Longueville was carried away, he counselled her to remain in the outer world, to which her husband and children bound her, and in which her salvation, he said, might be as surely accomplished by exacting more vigilance than it would be found necessary to exercise in the retirement of the cloister.

Madame de Longueville’s piety had been generally subordinated to the vicissitudes of a very agitated existence. Her primitive tendency to devotion was rekindled on every occasion that she experienced a trouble, a disenchantment, or any failure of courage. In 1651, when she had been somewhat compromised by the homage of the Duke de Nemours, she had retired to the Carmelite convent at Bourges; then towards the end of her sojourn in Guienne she had sought refuge among the Benedictines at Bordeaux. But all these gleams of repentance vanished so soon as some caprice of fortune came to reawaken, by the hope of fresh success, her natural inclination for political intrigue and pleasure. On accompanying her husband to Normandy she appeared wholly resolved not to allow herself to be engrossed by anything save her eternal welfare. However, it appears that her desire to abstain henceforward from all political intrigue was looked upon incredulously for several years; since, in 1659, at the time of the Treaty of the Pyrenees being signed, Mazarin, replying to Don Louis de Haro, who required that the French Minister should restore Condé “to all his birthrights,” still placed, as we have noticed, Madame de Longueville among the feminine trio, who, said he, “would be capable of governing or of overturning three great kingdoms.” Yet Mazarin yielded, and Condé returned to France.

The long and rigid penitence which she imposed upon herself, and which Madame de Motteville characterised by the expressive term—“very august,” restored to her somewhat of that importance which she was desirous of renouncing through humility. But the world is ever distrustful on the score of a repentance which has some tinge of ostentation about it. One historian remarks that “the Duchess de Longueville being unable to dispense with intrigues, after she had renounced those of love and politics, found sufficient to satisfy her in devotion.” This sentence, read aright, would mean that the schisms of Catholicism gave her an opportunity of playing a considerable part in taking under her protection the persecuted party of the Jansenists. Madame de Longueville, on whom was bestowed the designation of “Mother of the Church,” and who in that quality recovered some reputation at the Court of France, and acquired a very great one at the Court of Rome, rendered an eminent service to the Jansenists by obtaining for them from the Pope, in 1668, that theological transaction which was called “The Peace of Clement the Ninth.” It would, however, be unjust to tax her with hypocrisy. All that was extreme in the pious practices to which she devoted herself must be attributed to her exalted nature, which mingled passion with every sentiment of her soul.

When the Duke de Longueville died in 1663, the Duchess availed herself of the state of independence in which her widowhood placed her to give herself up wholly to exercises of piety and penitence, and the education and care of her children. The latter occupation caused her much grief—the Count de Dunois, by his bad conduct and imbecility, and the Count de Saint Paul himself, the son so dearly beloved, by his precocious debaucheries and fiery impatience of character. Then, as by degrees they had less need of her care, she devoted herself deeper and deeper to expiation, lavishing her fortune to repair in the provinces ruined by civil war the evils she had helped to inflict, weeping and humbling herself in her efforts to subdue that pride which was the characteristic of her race, receiving outrages and insults uncomplainingly, accepting them as the just chastisement of her sins, and forgiving those who dealt her the most cruel wounds. And so, in austerities and self-mortification she ended her days, sharing them between the Carmelites, in whose convent she had an apartment, and Port-Royal des Champs, where she had built a wing—having a preference for Port-Royal. She was always naturally disposed to favour the rebellious, and these rebels, it must be remembered, were the persecuted for conscience’ sake. Madame de Longueville’s protection was extended to the principal Jansenists, whom she sheltered in her chateau, and her influence at length brought about that peace in the Church, which, so long as she lived, gave calm and security to the sacred community. Notwithstanding her predilection for Port-Royal, she continued to inhabit her hôtel, which she did not quit until after the death of the Count de Saint-Paul (1672), killed so unfortunately by the side of the Great Condé at the passage of the Rhine.

That blow was the last of Madame de Longueville’s earthly troubles—it overwhelmed her. Madame de Sevigné has depicted in a few touching sentences the scene which was witnessed when the fatal tidings reached the wretched mother: “Mademoiselle des Vertus returned two days since to Port-Royal, where she is constantly staying. They sent M. Arnauld to fetch her, that she might break the terrible news. Mademoiselle des Vertus had only to show herself; her hurried return was the certain signal that something sad had happened. In fact, as soon as she appeared, she was greeted with: ‘Ah! mademoiselle, how is my brother?’ Her thoughts dare not venture further question. ‘Madame, his wound is going on favourably.’ ‘There has been a battle! and my son?’ No answer. ‘Ah! mademoiselle, my son, my dear boy, answer me, is he dead?’ ‘Madame, I cannot find words to reply to you.’ ‘Ah! my dear son! did he die upon the spot? Was not one single moment given him? Ah! Mon Dieu! what a sacrifice!’ And thereupon she sank down in bed, and of all that the most poignant anguish could exhibit in convulsions and swooning, and in dead silence and stifled groans, by bitter tears and appeals to Heaven, and by tender and pitiful plaints, she went through them all. She sees certain persons, she takes broths, because it is the will of God; but she gets no rest; and her health, already very bad, is visibly shaken. For myself, I wish she may die, not believing that she can survive such a loss.” Some few days afterwards Madame de Sevigné writes: “There exists in the world one man not less touched by this blow: it has occurred to me that if they had both met each other in the first burst of grief and no one else had been present, all other feelings would have given place to tears and moans re-echoed from the depths of both their hearts.”

With this young Duke de Longueville disappeared the last witness to bygone errors. The last link was broken, and, from that day, Madame de Longueville belonged no more to this world. She died on the 15th April, 1679, at the Carmelites, where her remains were interred; her heart being taken to Port-Royal. A year afterwards, in the same convent of Carmelites, the Bishop of Autun, Roquette, whom Molière had in view when drawing the character of Tartuffe, pronounced her funeral oration. Madame de Sevigné, who was present at the ceremony, says of the orator: “It was not a Tartuffe, it was not a Pantaloon: it was a prelate of distinction, preaching with dignity, and going over the entire life of that Princess with an incredible address; passing by all the delicate passages, mentioning, or leaving unmentioned, all the points that he ought to speak or be silent upon. His text was “Fallax pulchritudo, mulier timens Deum laudabitur.” Assuredly many delicate points must have presented themselves in the life of a princess who had been a politician and a Frondeuse, a gallant woman, and a Jansenist. Yet Father Talon, a Jesuit, who was present at her death, was fond of repeating on fitting occasions: “Jansenist as much as you will, she died the death of a saint.”

There were three well-defined periods in the agitated life of the Duchess de Longueville—and happily the end was conformable to the beginning, to neutralise, as it were, the censurable middle part. But admitting such condonation, does not that same mezza camin constitute the seduction which that brilliant period exercises over almost every writer who seeks to portray it, over those even who indulge in ecstacies on the score of her penitence? So the prestige of beauty and the charms of mind traverse centuries to win unceasingly posthumous admiration! These are the qualities which give a more undying interest to the career of Madame de Longueville even than the grandeur of her soul; for that is an incontestable feature which all must recognise, whether partisans or adversaries:—in spite of her errors and deviations, she certainly possessed greatness of soul. If a terse judgment then were summed up of her character, it might be said without flattery that, take her all in all, she was not unworthy of being the sister of the great Condé.

With the opinions of such astute statesmen as Cardinal Mazarin and Don Louis de Haro upon the mischievous tendencies of political women, it may be well, in the instance of Madame de Longueville to couple the sentiments of an acute and highly intellectual writer of our own day, who showed herself a subtle analyst of character. Mrs. Jameson, discoursing upon the characteristics of Shakespere’s women (in the form of a dialogue between Alda and Medon) calls them “affectionate, thinking beings, and moral agents; and then witty, as if by accident, or as the Duchess de Chaulnes said of herself ‘Par la grace de Dieu.’

“Or,” retorts Medon, the male interlocutor, “politicians to vary the excitement! How I hate political women!

“Alda. Why do you hate them?

“Medon. Because they are mischievous.

“Alda. But why are they mischievous?

“Medon. Why?—why are they mischievous? Nay, ask them, or ask the father of all mischief, who has not a more efficient instrument to further his designs in this world than a woman run mad with politics. The number of political, intriguing women of this time, whose boudoirs and drawing-rooms are the foyers of party spirit, is another trait of resemblance between the state of society now and that which existed at Paris before the Revolution.”

In another place, however, the same judicious and usually discriminating writer is betrayed into giving—more from conjecture, it would seem, than close acquaintance with the facts of her life—an historically false and singularly unjust estimate of Madame de Longueville’s character.

“Alda. Women are illustrious in history, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused. * * * Of those which have been handed down to us by many different authorities under different aspects, we cannot judge without prejudice; in others there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to supply; and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling, though doubtless they might be reconciled if we knew the whole, instead of a part.

“Medon. But instance—instance!

“Alda. Do you remember that Duchess de Longueville, whose beautiful picture we were looking at yesterday?—the heroine of the Fronde?—think of that woman—bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious!—who made rebels with a smile; or if that were not enough, the lady was not scrupulous,—apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was too much! And then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous philosopher Arnauld,[3] when he was denounced and condemned, and from motives which her worst enemies could not malign, secreting him in her house, unknown even to her servants—preparing his food herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence not only defied danger (that were little to a woman of her temper), but endured a lengthened trial, all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continued self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. Now, if Shakespere had drawn the character of the Duchess de Longueville, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both situations:—for the same being, with the same faculties and passions and powers, it surely was: whereas in history, we see in one case a fury of discord, a woman without modesty or pity; and in the other an angel of benevolence, and a worshipper of goodness; and nothing to connect the two extremes in our fancy.

“Medon. But these are contradictions which we meet on every page of history, which make us giddy with doubt or sick with belief; and are the proper objects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher.”

With a true eye for the refined and the beautiful, and that honestly sympathetic nature without which it is impossible to discriminate between what is noble and what is mediocre, still Mrs. Jameson, in the above reflections upon the character of Madame de Longueville, was obviously led to draw hasty and erroneous conclusions either from a superficial glance at detached passages in the Duchess’s extraordinary career with regard to the dates of which she is widely in error, or others during which her conduct and actions were but too easily susceptible of misrepresention and distortion at the hands of partisan writers. Such unjust judgment would most probably be formed by accepting anecdotes, like those contained in Tallemant’s scandalous chronicle or Bussy Rabutin’s “Letters,” as historic truths; or by placing implicit faith in every statement made by De Retz or La Rochefoucauld, given as both were to exaggeration and over-colouring, and whose object, moreover, was not so much to tell the truth as always to exalt themselves, sometimes by its suppression, at others by downright falsification.

Without attempting to extenuate the errors of Madame de Longueville, moral or political, it has been the author’s endeavour to reconcile the apparent contradictions in her character, imputed in the passage above cited, by assigning the different incidents, which have doubtless caused an intelligent woman to falter in her judgment, to their proper place in the order of time. For as, during the Olympian contests, swift-footed Spartan boys, to typify the transmission of Truth, ran with a lighted torch, and, as each fell breathless, another took up the flambeau and bore it on, bright and rapid, to the goal, so should the light of History be passed steadily and carefully from hand to hand, and its sacred flame—the Truth—be kept ever burning clearly onward in the course of time.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] The Jansenist.

CHAPTER II.

THE DUCHESS DE CHEVREUSE.

Side by side with the two great statesmen, Richelieu and Mazarin, the clever, daring, vivacious, charming Marie de Rohan occupied a more elevated position, and certainly played a more extended part, than any other of the political women who were her contemporaries during the stirring times of the first half of the seventeenth century.

Seductive, with irresistible fascination of manner, singular grace and animation; of pregnant wit, though quite uneducated; devoted to gallantry, and too high-spirited to heed propriety; obeying no control save that of honour; despising, for those she loved, danger, fortune, and opinion; rather restless than ambitious; risking willingly her own life as well as that of others; and after having passed the best part of her existence in intrigue of every kind—thwarted more than one plot—left more than one victim on her path—traversed nearly the whole of Europe, by turns an exile and a conqueress who not unfrequently dazzled even crowned heads; after having seen Chalais lay his head on the block, Châteauneuf turned out of the ministry and imprisoned, the Duke de Lorraine well-nigh despoiled of his territories, Buckingham assassinated, the King of Spain embroiled in a war of ever-recurring disasters, Anne of Austria humiliated and overcome, and Richelieu triumphant; sustaining the struggle, nevertheless, even to its bitter end; ever ready, in that desperate game of politics—become to her a craving and a passion—to descend to the darkest cabals or adopt the rashest resolves; with an incomparable faculty of discerning the actual state of affairs or the predominant evil of the moment, and of strength of mind and boldness of heart enough to grapple with and destroy it at any cost; a devoted friend and an implacable enemy; and, finally, the most formidable foe that Richelieu and Mazarin, in their turn, encountered:—such was the celebrated Duchess de Chevreuse whom we have seen alternately courted and dreaded by the two great political master-spirits of her time, the founders of monarchical unity in France.

When the Fronde broke out, that ardent factionist rushed once more to Brussels, and there brought over to her party the support of Spain, together with her own long experience. She was then nearly fifty years old. Age and sorrow, it is true, had dimmed the lustre of her beauty; but she was still abounding in attraction, and her firm glance, her decision, her quick and accurate perception, her dauntless courage and genius, were yet entire. She had there also found a last friend in the Marquis de Laigues, captain of the Duke d’Orleans’ guards, a man of sense and resolution, whom she loved to the end, and whom, after the decease of the Duke de Chevreuse in 1657, she linked probably with her own destiny by one of those “marriages of conscience”[4] then somewhat fashionable. It was not our purpose to follow her step by step through the last civil war, and so plunge the reader into the labyrinth of the Fronde intrigues. Suffice it to say, therefore, that she played therein one of the most prominent parts. Attached, heart and soul, to that faction and its essential interests, she steered it through all the shoals and quicksands which encircled it with incomparable skill and vigour. After having so long enlisted the support of Spain, she knew the proper moment to effect a timely separation from it. She always preserved her great influence over the Duke de Lorraine, and it is not difficult to recognize her hidden hand behind the different and often contrary movements of Charles IV. She had a principal share in the three great movements which mark and link together the entire history of the Fronde between the war in Paris and the peace of Ruel. In 1650 she was inclined to prefer Mazarin to Condé, and she ventured to advise laying hands on the victor of Rocroy and Lens. In 1651—an interval of incertitude for Mazarin, who very nearly ensnared himself in the meshes of his own craftiness and a too-complicated line of conduct—a great interest, the well-founded hope of marrying her daughter Charlotte to the Prince de Conti, brought her back once more to the Condé party, and hence the deliverance of the imprisoned Princes. In 1652, the accumulated blunders of Condé brought her back again and for ever to Anne of Austria and Mazarin. She did not endorse De Retz’s foolish idea of constructing a third party during the revolt, nor dream of a government shared between Condé and Mazarin, with a worn-out parliament and the fickle Duke d’Orléans. Her politic instinct told her that, after an intestine struggle so long sustained, a solid and durable power was the greatest necessity of France. Mazarin, who, like Richelieu, had never opposed her but with regret, sought for, and was very glad to follow her advice. She passed over, therefore, with flying colours to the side of royalty, served it, and in return received its services. After Mazarin, she predicted the talent in Colbert, before he was appointed to office; she laboured at his elevation and the ruin of Fouquet: and the proud but judicious Marie de Rohan gave her grandson, the Duke de Chevreuse, the friend of Beauvilliers and Fenelon, to the daughter of a talented burgess—the greatest financial administrator France ever had. Thenceforward she readily obtained all she could desire for herself and for her family; and thus having reached the summit of renown and consideration, like her two illustrious sister-politicians, Madame de Longueville and the Princess Palatine, she finished in profound peace one of the most agitated careers of that stormiest of epochs—the seventeenth century.

It is said that the Duchess also, towards the close of her earthly pilgrimage, felt the influence of divine grace, and turned heavenwards her gaze, wearied with the changefulness of all sublunary things. She had seen successively fall around her all whom she had either loved or hated—Richelieu and Mazarin, Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria, the Queen of England, Henrietta Maria, and her amiable daughter the Duchess d’Orléans, Châteauneuf, and the Duke of Lorraine. Her fondly loved daughter had expired in her arms, of fever, during the miserable war of the Fronde. He who had been the first to lure her from the path of duty—the handsome but frivolous Holland—had ascended the scaffold with Charles I.; and her last friend, much younger than herself, the Marquis de Laigues, had preceded her to the tomb.

Arrived at length but too clearly at the conviction that she had given up her mind to chimeras and illusions, and seeking self-mortification through the same sentiment which had brought about her ruin, the once-haughty Duchess became the humblest of women. Renouncing all worldly grandeur, she quitted her splendid mansion in the Faubourg St. Germain, built by Le Muet, and retired into the country—not to Dampierre, which would have only too vividly recalled to her remembrance the brilliant days of her past existence—but to a modest dwelling at Gagny, near Chelles. There she awaited her last hour, far from the world’s observation, and ere long expired in tranquillity at the age of seventy-nine, the same year as Cardinal de Retz and Madame de Longueville. She desired to have neither solemn obsequies nor funeral oration, and forbade that any of those lofty titles which she had borne through life and had learned to despise should accompany her to the grave. It was her wish to be buried obscurely in the small and ancient church of Gagny; and there, in the southern aisle, near the chapel of the Virgin, some faithful but unknown hand has placed upon a slab of black marble the following epitaph:—

“Here lies Marie de Rohan, Duchess de Chevreuse, daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Duke de Montbazon. She espoused, first, Charles d’Albert, Duke de Luynes, peer and constable of France, and secondly, Claude de Lorraine, Duke de Chevreuse.”

FOOTNOTES:

[4] See “Memoirs of Brienne the Younger,” tom. ii. chap. xix., p. 178. “Le Marquis de Laigues qui certainement étoit mari de conscience de la Duchesse.”

CHAPTER III.

THE PRINCESS PALATINE.

The political importance of the Princess Palatine dates from 1650, when the arrest of Condé, Conti, and the Duke de Longueville urged her, as we have seen, to take part in the struggles of the Fronde. The Duchesses de Chevreuse, De Montbazon, De Guéméné, and other famous feminine factionists of that time, became, in the hands of Anne de Gonzagua, as so many wires with which she moved at her will the men whom these women governed; for the Princess exercised alike over all those men and women that superiority which disinterestedness, good faith, and firmness of decision confer. De Retz, when he discovered her characteristics, was immediately struck with the above-named qualities, especially the two latter. “To have stability of purpose,” said he, when speaking of his first interview with Anne, “is a rare quality, which indicates an enlightened mind far above the ordinary class.” And further on, “I do not think,” he remarks, “that Queen Elizabeth had more capacity to govern a state.” Mazarin, too, somewhat later, in alluding to the dread in which he held the famous trio of political women for their capacity to work mischief, remarked to Don Louis de Haro:—“The most turbulent of the male politicians do not give us half so much trouble to keep them within bounds as the intrigues of a Duchess de Chevreuse or a Princess Palatine.”

Anne de Gonzagua, the Princess Palatine, lived long after the Fronde in the midst of all sorts of political troubles and diplomatic intrigues: conferences innumerable were held beneath her roof, and in that tortuous labyrinth she wandered and manœuvred to her heart’s delight. Sometimes she laboured to reconcile Condé with Anne of Austria, sometimes to reunite Gaston and Condé, or perhaps the Queen and Madame de Longueville. She often failed, it is true, in these attempts, and meanwhile Mazarin, with more address, setting in motion in his retreat beyond the frontier the most powerful machinery, and making magnificent promises, again appeared above the political horizon—winning over his enemies one after another through his secret agents; at one time it was Châteauneuf, at another Gondi, whom he made for good and all a cardinal; at another it was Madame de Chevreuse. He had passed his word to the Princess Palatine that he would some day give her the post of superintendent of the young Queen’s household: he did so, in fact, but on condition that she should relinquish it two months later to the Countess de Soissons, which she did in all good faith. Then she withdrew from court, somewhat undeceived no doubt touching men and things therein, if it really were the case that she ever had indulged in great illusions concerning court life.

Years rolled away, however: Mazarin died. Court intrigue with her was at an end. The personages who had been mixed up in the Fronde hurly-burly, so menacing in reality, so puerile in aspect, so insignificant as an isolated fact, and so formidable as a symptom, appeared affected by that decay which change of circumstances more than lapse of time imposes upon men and ideas. All that sort of thing was out of fashion. The reign of the Grand Monarque was in all its heyday. Besides, the Palatine was no longer young; she had married her daughters, and dwelt in seclusion. And it was when living thus tranquilly that a rapid, unforeseen, enthusiastic conversion came upon her like a surprise. For all relating thereto, we must listen to Bossuet, who dwells upon it in his funeral oration upon the Princess. His eloquence revels in relating the miracles suddenly wrought in such a soul as hers. He expatiates on that sudden change with an apostolic joy and an incomparable majesty: it was a subject worthy of him, the brilliant narrator of solemn events. It was exoteric to that life upon which it was so difficult to pronounce an eulogium; he was not trammelled in the flow of his diction by those oratorical precautions which are so distressingly hampering to an impetuous genius like his. He celebrated a victory of grace, and that in accents the most touching and expressions the most powerful. It was the hymn of an illustrious conversion, chanted by the noblest mortal voice ever heard.

Bossuet relates with inimitable art the Princess’s two dreams; the simple anecdotes are dramatised, poetised—one might almost say sanctified—in proceeding from his lips. But, in short, whether Anne de Gonzagua saw or thought that she saw that mystical mendicant, and those symbolical animals, in her slumbers, the truth is that in soul she was touched, agitated, shaken, overcome. An ardent faith, an invincible longing for prayer and penitence, had obtained the mastery over that rebellious soul. She felt once more the enthusiasm of her early youth; she felt beating once more, at the Divine Master’s name, that heart which had too often throbbed for His creatures only. Her scepticism vanished; she had no other ambition left save that of gaining heaven, and holy tears were seen to dim those eyes wherein it once seemed as though the source of such emotion was dried up for ever. It was done. A great thing was accomplished, whatsoever had been the cause. A soul which incredulity had frozen into apathy became fervent before its Creator. Anne de Gonzagua did not fear to let her repentance be seen; she desired that the publicity of her penitence might obliterate, if it were possible, the scandal of her past life. Her conscience became tender, even scrupulous. “Plus elle était clairvoyante,” says Bossuet; “plus elle était tourmentée.” Henceforward she devoted herself wholly to charity and prayer. She became as humble as she had hitherto been proud. She cherished a life of seclusion as much as she had once loved mundane notoriety. She became as sincerely a Christian as she had formerly been an infidel. During the lapse of twelve years this startling confession of faith did not belie itself for a single day. “Everything became poor about her house and person,” says her illustrious panegyrist. “She saw with sensible delight the relics of the pomps of this world disappear one after another, and alms-giving taught her to retrench daily something fresh.... A person so delicate and sensible had suffered for twelve entire years, and almost without an interval, either the most vivid anguish or languor exhausting alike to mind and body; and notwithstanding, during the whole of that time, and in the unheard-of torments of her last illness, in which her sufferings were increased to the utmost excess, she had not to repent of having once wished for an easier death. Again and again did she suppress that weak wish by uttering, so soon as she felt it arising, with the Saviour, the prayer of the Sacred Mystery of the Garden, ‘Father, thy will, not mine, be done!’”

Such a sight must have moved the least susceptible—to have beheld the Palatine thus redeem her past errors. She was anxious to write with her own hand the account of her conversion, and addressed it to the celebrated Rancé, the Abbé of La Trappe. It was from that narrative that Bossuet drew the source of his own. Some few years previously, with that polished and elegant vein which intercourse with so many superior minds tends to create, she had written, as though she had foreseen that she would not despair of her spiritual future, a short but charming panegyric upon Hope. Bussy-Rabutin has preserved this relic in one of his letters. “I have never in my life,” he says, with no doubt a little too much enthusiasm, “seen anything better or more delicately written.” There is to be found in it, it is true, a happy inspiration and a passage capable of pleasing minds struggling with difficulties. “It is permitted to us,” she says, “to measure our hope by our courage, it is noble to sustain it amidst trials; but it is not less glorious to suffer the entire ruin of it with the same high-heartedness which had dared to conceive it.” Those are noble sentiments, and revealing a vigorous mental power. The end of the Princess Palatine (1681) showed clearly that she had not, for the mere pleasure of expressing herself elegantly, vaunted the delights of a saint-like hope. “Ready to render up her soul,” says Bossuet, “she was heard to utter in dying accents, ‘I am about to see how God will treat me, but I hope for His mercy.’” Such was the close of that life, the piety of which illuminated its latter years; such was the death of that Princess who, after having been remarkable among the women of her time for her beauty, her errors, and, at last, by her penitence, had the rare good fortune to be praised by the most illustrious of historians, priests, and authors of the great century.

Our notice of this celebrated woman would be incomplete without a passing glance at the singular fortunes of Henri de Guise, subsequent to his desertion of his first love, Anne de Gonzagua.

The Duke de Guise, after playing a conspicuous part in the first dissensions of the Regency, and after having killed Coligny, had married at Brussels the widow of the Count de Bossut, with whom he became quickly disgusted, and whose fortune he squandered. A violent passion next possessed him for the charming and witty Mademoiselle de Pons, maid of honour to the Queen. He took it into his head to espouse her, and “the marriage was spoken of as though he had never been married before.” That phantasy, however, did not hinder him from taking part, as a volunteer, in the campaigns of 1644 and 1645. Whilst at Rome in 1647, endeavouring to obtain a dispensation to enable him to secure the hand of Mademoiselle de Pons, the Neapolitans, having revolted against the Spaniards under Masaniello, elected him as their leader, and gave him the title of generalissimo of their army. Brave, enterprising, and born for adventure, able, moreover, to render available ancient pretensions to that kingdom, through René d’Anjou, who in 1420 had espoused Isabelle de Lorraine, encouraged in short, if not supported, by the French Court, where it was deemed politic to keep at a distance from it a man bearing the great name of Guise, so formidable some sixty years before, the young prince embarked in a simple felucca, sailed boldly through the naval armament of Don Juan, seized the reins of government, defeated the Spanish troops, and made himself master of the country. He won all hearts by his address, his gentleness, and his affability. But want of circumspection in his gallantries, the objects of which were not always of a rank equal to his own, caused jealousies and discontent among the nobles. His enemies, profiting by a sortie which he made for the purpose of getting a convoy into Naples, delivered up the city to the Spaniards. His repeated efforts to re-enter the place proved futile. After having defended himself like a lion, he was nevertheless carried prisoner to Madrid. The great Condé, who was then serving the enemies of his country, demanded that Guise should be set at liberty, in the hope that he might foment troubles in France. But the ill-treatment which the Duke had experienced at the hands of the Spaniards left impressions upon his mind which made him regardless of a promise that had been extorted from him. He attempted again in 1654 to reconquer the kingdom of Naples, with the aid of a French fleet, but failed of success. He then went back to Paris to seek indemnity for the loss of his crown. In 1655 he was appointed to the post of grand-chamberlain of France. He figured in the famous carrousel of 1663, at the head of a quadrille of American savages, whilst the great Condé appeared as chief of the Turks. On seeing those two personages so pitted, some wit observed, “There go the heroes of history and fable.” The Duke de Guise might indeed be very aptly compared to a mythological entity, or to a knight errant of the age of chivalry. His duels, his romantic amours, his profusion, the varied adventures of his life, rendered him exceptionable in everything. He died in 1664, leaving no issue.

CHAPTER IV.

MADAME DE MONTBAZON.

Amongst the celebrated women of the first half of the seventeenth century, many were, says Bussy Rabutin, “pitiable,” whilst some were “brazen.” We must assert unhesitatingly that Madame de Montbazon belonged to the latter class. She was “one of those personages, however, who made the most noise” at the courts of Louis the Thirteenth and Anne of Austria, as we are told by Madame de Motteville, and as we have already seen by the prominent political part she played in the factions of the Importants and the Fronde. In summing up her character, we shall be silent upon the subject of many of her faults, though it is not our wish to excuse one of them.

“She was not wanting in wit,” remarks Tallemant; “for she had been acquainted with so many witty people!” There is a spice of flattery in this, for we must agree with Madame de Motteville and M. Cousin that the wit of the dazzling rival of Madame de Longueville was far from being as delicate and attractive as was her handsome person, though we cannot at the same time look upon Tallemant’s phrase as a calumny. Both space and courage would alike fail us, should we attempt to produce a list of all the lovers, titled and untitled, who had peculiar opportunities of sharpening the wit of Madame de Montbazon.

Among the first of her adorers, beside the name of Gaston d’Orléans, must be cited that of the Duke de Chevreuse, her husband’s kinsman. Their liaison furnished matter for a ballad, and was very nearly the cause of a duel at the door of the king’s apartments, between the Duke de Montmorency and the Duke de Chevreuse; but that did not hinder Madame de Montbazon from becoming the friend of her step-daughter, who, older and more experienced in the political world than she was, often used her as an instrument. The young Duchess was a more dangerous rival to Madame de Guéméné, her other step-daughter, from whom she carried off, not her husband, but the Count de Soissons. And it was not enough that she obtained an easy conquest over her, for she instigated the Count to add outrage to desertion, and he docilely compromised his forsaken mistress by a gross and shameful perfidy.

But, passing rapidly over the errors of her youth, it is the close of Madame de Montbazon’s political career with which we are now concerned. The influence which the gay and gallant Duchess long exercised over the Duke de Beaufort had sometimes proved useful to the interests of the Court, and during the early troubles of the Fronde the Queen and Mazarin took care to keep her favourably disposed towards them. But the importance which Beaufort’s infatuated passion gave or seemed to give her, speedily made the Duchess one of the heroines of the Fronde—though, it must be owned, one of the secondary heroines. Her allies were careful not to allow her to take upon herself a part she was unable to sustain. Violent, unreflecting, accessible to the most contradictory suggestions, ready for any turn, and the sport of every caprice, she was wanting in all the better qualities of a political woman. Her indiscretion became formidable on all occasions when secresy was necessary, and more than once the Duke de Beaufort was obliged to be excluded from the assemblages at which the chiefs of the Fronde took counsel together. It was well known that he dare not keep anything from his mistress, and it might chance that a royalist might turn to account the confidence which she wormed out of her lover, for conformity in political sentiments was not one of the conditions which she imposed upon the adorers whose homage she welcomed. Her correspondence with Marshal d’Albret exposed her moreover to be subject to, without being aware of it, the influences of the Court, and her intimacy with Vineuil tended to make her an ally, in spite of herself, of the Prince de Condé. Hence it is easy to explain the mistrust with which she inspired the Coadjutor of Paris, the future Cardinal de Retz. She herself did not fail to perceive the surveillance which he exercised around her; and she was irritated to see with what facility he modified in his own fashion the line of conduct which she had just previously dictated to the Duke de Beaufort. She was forced to confess that his authority prevailed over her own. One evening, disheartened by the incapacity of the grandson of the great Henry, and terrified by the dangers to which their imprudence exposed the Frondeurs, and esteeming the political talent of Gondi to be more truly worthy of her own, she opened her heart to him, and proposed that they should enter into a treaty of alliance. The gallant Coadjutor would only consent to accept one portion of the treaty, and, happily for the Duke de Beaufort, who was busily occupied with a game at chess during that strange conversation, he stipulated to eliminate from the proposed association everything that related to politics. But the Duchess would not consent to those terms.

In love, Madame de Montbazon was very mercenary; we say it once for all, and beg to be excused from citing proof of the assertion. In politics, she also surrendered herself very willingly to any representation the eloquence of which was aided by crowns or pistoles. It was thus that in the month of August, 1649, she promised that the Duke de Beaufort should not oppose the return of the Court, at the same moment that she opened her hand to receive a considerable sum. It was thus that, the same year, she accepted two thousand pistoles from the Spanish envoys, who, desirous of rendering her favourable, promised besides that the sum of twenty thousand crowns and a pension of six thousand livres if she would secure to them the concurrence of the Duke de Beaufort. But she did not always meet with debtors so honest as Mazarin and the Spanish ambassadors. In 1650, whilst the treaty was preparing which sought to unite the Frondeurs with the Princes, then prisoners at Havre, a negotiation was entered into with Madame de Montbazon in which the Prince de Conti was offered to her as a husband for her daughter. The proposition was not accepted. The proposers were not discouraged, and a sum of a hundred thousand crowns was offered to her. This time the Duchess could not resist, and the treaty was signed in all due form. Unfortunately, when the Princes were liberated, she was imprudent enough to confide her voucher to the Princess Palatine, who, with perfidious haste, had promised to take care of her interests. She never saw the precious contract again, and the Prince de Condé only answered her demands by cruel and cutting jeers. In that adventure, it was not Madame de Montbazon who played the shabbiest part.

The aid which the Duchess had often lent the Court amidst intrigues the most contradictory, did not preserve her from exile when the King made his entry into Paris, on its definite pacification in October, 1652. She did not return thither till 1657. “She was still beautiful, and as much carried away by vanity as though she had been only in her twenty-fifth year,” says Madame de Motteville, when noting her reappearance. “She relied all the same upon her charms,” she adds with a somewhat malicious finesse, “for she returned with the same desire of pleasing; and those who saw her assured me that the mourning garb which she wore as a widow, and to which she added everything in the shape of ornament that self-love could suggest, rendered her so charming, that in her case it might be said that the course of nature was changed, since so many years and so much beauty could meet together.”[5] Thus, by dint of care and art, did Madame de Montbazon succeed in preserving her beauty much longer than she could have hoped for, since, in the pride of her eighteen summers, she declared that old age commenced at thirty, and requested it as a favour that she might be flung into the river and drowned so soon as she reached the dreaded period. Who would have dared to remind her of that imprudent proposal in 1640? And who could have refused her a respite even in the latter moments of her existence?

Permission had scarcely been given her to appear at Court, when she was attacked by an illness which seemed nothing more than a common cold, but which turned out to be the measles. In the course of a few days the malady proved fatal. Three hours only were accorded to this earthly-minded woman to prepare for death. She made confession and received the sacrament with every indication of the most lively piety and the most sincere repentance, saying to her daughter, the Abbess of Caen, “that she regretted not having always lived in a cloister as she had, and that she looked with horror upon her past life.” Up to those last three hours, she had refused to believe that there were degrees in the morality of women, and to admit that they were not all equally virtuous.

“She was little regretted by the Queen,” Madame de Motteville tells us, “as she had frequently forsaken her interests to follow her own caprices. The minister heard of her death with the feeling one entertains for one’s deceased enemy. Her former lovers looked upon her with contempt; and those who admired her still, were but little touched at her loss, because each, jealous of his rival, left tears and grief as the share of the Duke de Beaufort, who was at that moment the most beloved.”

On that point Madame de Motteville was in error. Which of the two—M. de Beaufort or M. de Rancé—was most beloved it would be difficult to determine. But this is so far certain, that M. de Rancé, the future founder of La Trappe, was the lover who regretted her the most sincerely. He had hastened to her sick couch so soon as he heard of her illness; and he had arrived, not too late, and only to find himself the spectator of a most horrible sight, as has frequently been related with much romantic and dramatic detail, but soon enough to pass within her chamber the last hours left to her of life. “Already balancing and wrestling between heaven and this world,” says Saint Simon, who was in his confidence, “the sight of that so sudden death achieved in him the determination of withdrawing from the world which he had for some time meditated.”

Among the different versions of this catastrophe, Laroque asserts that, after an absence on a long journey, on De Rancé’s return, he called at the Hôtel Montbazon, and then learned, for the first time, the death of the Duchess; that he was shown into her room, where, to his horror, the headless body lay in its coffin. The head had been cut off, either because the lead coffin was not made long enough or for the purpose of an anatomical study. Some assert that De Rancé took the head, and that the skull of the woman he loved so well was found in his cell at La Trappe. History, however, will not accept this romantic incident.

Touching the fate of De Rancé’s rival—when Louis XIV. returned to Paris in 1652, the Duke de Beaufort submitted to the royal authority, and took no further part in the civil war, which the Prince de Condé carried on for several years longer. Later, the Duke obtained the command of the royal fleet. In 1664 and 1665, he was at the head of several expeditions against the African corsairs. In 1666 he commanded the French men-of-war ordered to join those of Holland against England. Finally, in 1669, he went to the aid of the Venetians, attacked by the Turks in the island of Candia. The galleys and vessels, newly constructed in the port of Toulon, disembarked seven thousand men under Beaufort—a contingent too weak for such a dangerous undertaking. That aid only served to retard the taking of Candia for a few days, and was the means of useless bloodshed. In a sortie, the rash and impetuous grandson of Henry the Great was cut to pieces in the most merciless way; and as his body could not be found after the fight, his death gave rise to fables sought to be rendered probable by the remembrance of the eccentric part he had previously played.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] The same sentiments were thus versified by Loret, when announcing that the Duchess had obtained permission to return to Court:

“Montbazon, la belle douairière,
Dont les appas et la lumière
Sous de lugubres vêtements
Paraissent encore plus charmants....”

CHAPTER V.

MADEMOISELLE DE MONTPENSIER.

Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchess de Montpensier, whom history distinguishes by the epithet of La Grande Mademoiselle, after telling us in her memoirs, at least twenty times, in order to make herself better known, that she was fond of glory, adds—“The Bourbons are folks very much addicted to trifles, with very little solidity about them; perhaps I myself as well as the rest may inherit the same qualities from father and mother.”[6] With this hint, whoever scans her portrait may readily read the character her features reveal:—a mind false to the service of a noble and generous heart; an honest but frivolous mind, too often swayed, by a bombastic heroism; a précieuse of the Hôtel Rambouillet, whom Nicolas Poilly very happily painted as Pallas, with her helmet proudly perched upon the summit of her fair tresses; an amazon, who bordered upon the adventuress, and, notwithstanding, remained the princess; in short, a personage at whom one cannot help laughing heartily, nor at the same time help admiring.

Passing by the subject of her numerous matrimonial projects, we hasten on to the commencement of her political—and perhaps we may add her military[7]—career, when, in January, 1652, a treaty had been concluded between Monsieur her father, Condé, and the Duke de Lorraine, the Duchess d’Orléans had signed in her brother’s name, and the Count de Fiesque in the name of Condé. On her part, Mademoiselle, somewhat fantastic but loyal and courageous, had joined her mother-in-law, and declared for the Fronde, partly through her liking for éclat and the notoriety of parading at the head of the troops, with her two ladies of honour, the Countesses of Fiesque and Frontenac, transformed into aides-de-camp; partly by the secret hope that by Mazarin’s defeat and her father’s triumph she might succeed in espousing the young King, and so exchange the helmet of the Fronde for the crown of France.

It would be a great mistake to attribute to this fair Frondeuse a liberalism of ideas to which she was most assuredly a stranger. “It must be,” she somewhere remarks, “that the intentions of the great are like the mysteries of the Faith: it does not belong to mankind to penetrate within them; men ought to revere them, and to believe that they are never otherwise than for the welfare and salvation of their country.” But, however that may be, it did not prevent the civil war from being a very amusing thing for Mademoiselle. To hear the drums beating to arms one fine morning, to see men running through the streets to defend the barricades as well as their untrained hands could wield musket and sabre, to lie upon the floor in a large chamber at Saint-Germain, and to find on awaking that chamber filled with soldiers in great buff jerkins,—those were pleasures not to be always found at will, and were to be made the most of when met with. Such pleasures, moreover, savouring of the unforeseen, the adventurous, and the grotesque, solely determined Mademoiselle’s conduct in the outset. But on the second Fronde breaking out, when the struggle of the Parliament with royalty had become a quarrel between princes and ministers, Mademoiselle felt that the honour of her house was at stake. Gaston, after having pledged himself to the Prince de Condé, so far as a man who does not know his own mind can give a pledge, contented himself with whistling, as he was wont to do, or to dissertating cleverly without acting. But his daughter wrested from him an authority to go herself and defend Orleans against the troops of Louis XIV.; his daughter, on seeing the unfortunate adherents of Condé engaged with her in rebellion overpowered at the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, secured their retreat by ordering the guns of the Bastille to cannonade the royal forces, although that cannonade should slay the husband of whom she still dreamed; that daughter, too, when she heard of the disgraceful scenes of the 4th of July, 1652, boldly did what no one else dare do,—she flew to the assistance of the victims of the Hôtel de Ville, without bestowing a thought of the imminent danger she thereby ran.

But it is in the Princess’s own Memoirs that the curious epopee must be read; and to which a dry abridgment does injustice. Whether she hold council of war with her fair Maréchales de Camp, without allowing the men folks to give her their ready cut-and-dried advice,—whether she be thrust into Orleans through the gap of an old gateway, and, covered with mud, be seen carried along its streets in an old arm-chair, laughing heartily,—or when hastening to arrest the massacre at the Hôtel de Ville, she stops to look at Madame Riche, the ribbon-vendor, talking in her chemise to her gossip, the beadle of St. Jacques, who has nothing on but his drawers,—the reader is always reminded that he sees and hears the granddaughter of Henry IV.—a Parisian with a touch of the princess in all she says and does, and he cannot help asking himself momentarily whether it be all incorrigible frivolity, or some quaint species of natural heroism which speaks and acts thus strangely.

Heroic or frivolous, Mademoiselle expiated her pranks by an exile of four years in her manor of Saint-Fargeau. The rupture with her father, who drove her out of doors, and denied her permission to take refuge under any other roof he owned, her consequent wanderings, at times not a little affecting, and at others comical, when directing her steps towards her place of banishment, her arrival at the ruinous château which has neither doors nor windows, and which is haunted by ghosts, and the attempts to embellish the tumble-down place, and people it with gaiety, animation, and life, are so many scenes to which the piquant style of Mademoiselle gives singular attractiveness. Whilst avenues were being planted and a theatre built, matrimonial negotiations went on as briskly as ever, and pretenders to her hand abounded—the Elector of Bavaria, the Duke of Savoy, the nephew of the Duke of Lorraine, the Duke de Neuborg. The reception of M. de Neuborg’s envoy, an honest Jesuit, who draws out of his pocket victoriously two portraits of his good lord, ogles Mademoiselle as long as he could, and talks “goguette” to her for a whole hour, is one of the most amusing farces anywhere to be met with. Unluckily, the farce was not worth the candle in the opinion of certain judges, and all the diversions of Saint-Fargeau did not prevent our princess from regretting with all her heart that pompous Court of Versailles in which the young Louis was giving such graceful ballets, brilliant carousals, and piquant masquerades. The masquerades of 1657 carried the day over the political aims of 1652, and the fair exile experienced a vivid longing to be once more received into favour at the court of her royal cousin.

To take up sword or pen and fall foul of the government was almost always an easy thing to do in France; the difficulty lay in proposing peace after the war, to hit upon profitable reconciliations or lucrative treaties. Mademoiselle did her best; and at length, in that same year of 1657, she made her appearance in the royal camp near Sedan, having at her carriage-door the silly and complaisant Mazarin, who believed all she wished him to believe, and who presented the princess with a little Boulogne bitch, in token of good friendship; she made her excuses to the King for having been naughty, and promised to be wise in future. Louis behaved more graciously towards the fair rebel than did his mother, and said that everything should be buried in oblivion; but he did not forget the cannonade of the Bastille. After five years’ seclusion, she again looked forward to resume her position at Court, to keep one of her own, to enthrone herself at the Luxembourg, and doubtless contract some sovereign alliance. Vain illusions! Conflicts of the heart were about to succeed to those political storms from whose effects she had just recovered. The most vainglorious of the daughters of France was destined to extinguish with the wet blanket of vile prose the brilliancy of a long and romantic career.

History, justly severe upon the Fronde, ought not, we think, to treat too harshly the Frondeuse of the blood-royal. Upon one delicate point of her private life the biographer cannot, unfortunately, show the same indulgence. The supreme criterion for the appreciation of certain women, and the irresistible argument, is the man whom they have loved. Assuredly we may pardon many things recorded of the Grande Mademoiselle, even her shrewish relations with her step-mother, even her haughty contempt for her half-sisters, but we cannot pardon her M. de Lauzun. We are all well acquainted with that individual, with his cunning and supercilious cast of countenance, servile or arrogant, according to circumstances and interests, adroit in concealing a merciless egotism, a revolting brutality, under the guise of a theatrical liberality; brave so far as was necessary to be insolent with impunity, intelligent no further than to the extent at which selfishness blinds the judgment, and delighting in mischief when there was nothing to dread from it. To all this may be added an incisive tone of voice, and language keenly sarcastic or servilely obsequious, an insatiable and inordinate sensuality, innumerable conquests among the fair sex, and extraordinary adventures. At first sight, at a Court masquerade, in 1659, the bully made an impression upon the précieuse, and she noticed him for his exquisite elegance during the marriage fêtes of Louis XIV. When she met him in the Queen’s apartments, she remarked that he had more wit than anyone else, and found a particular pleasure in talking with him. The charm operated so effectually that the princess of forty-three was at length fain to own that she passionately loved the Gascon cadet, who was then in his thirty-eighth year. Determined as she was naturally, that discovery overwhelmed her. “I resolved,” she says, “never to speak to M. Lauzun again save in hearing of a third person, and I was anxious to avoid opportunities of seeing him in order to drive him out of my head. I entered upon such a line of conduct; I only exchanged a few trivial words with him. I found that I did not know what I was saying, that I could not put three words of good sense together; and the more I sought to shun him, the more desirous I was of seeing him.” At her wits’ end, the poor Princess cast herself at the foot of the altar, on one occasion when she took the sacrament, and ardently besought Heaven to enlighten her as to the course she ought to pursue. The inspiration is by no means difficult to anticipate. “Heaven’s grace determined me not to struggle longer to drive out of my mind that which was so strongly established in it, but to marry M. de Lauzun.”

Two things, however, were necessary to accomplish this: firstly, that M. de Lauzun should thoroughly understand that he was beloved, and that he would deign to espouse Mademoiselle’s twenty-two millions; and next that King Louis should consent to a marriage, the strangest certainly ever resolved upon. Strange, indeed, that she, the grand-daughter of Henry the Great, Mademoiselle d’Eu, Mademoiselle de Dombes, Mademoiselle d’Orléans, Mademoiselle the King’s first cousin, the Mademoiselle destined to the throne, should ask the King’s permission to marry a Gascon cadet. Louis, as the sequel to an overture made to him by several nobles collectively, friends of Lauzun, with M. de Montausier at their head, granted his permission. But when the question arose, thanks to the blind vanity of Lauzun, of their union being celebrated at the Louvre and in the face of all France, like an alliance “of crown to crown;” when a feeling which was shared by every member of the royal house was on the point of communicating itself to all the sovereign families of Europe, Louis, with great reason, began to take account of the political interests which this whim of the Princess brought into play, and retracted, as King, the authority which he had given as head of a family. Contemporary writers seem never tired of dwelling upon the manifestations of Mademoiselle’s grief, at times as laughable as at others it was touching; receiving the condolence of all the Court as though she had been a lone widow, Madame de Sévigné tells us, and exclaiming excitedly in her despair to every fresh visitor, as she pointed to the vacant place in her bed, “He should be there! he should be there!”

This took place on the 18th of December, 1670. On the 25th of November, 1671, M. de Lauzun was arrested, thrown into the Bastille, and taken thence to Pignerol, where he was subjected to a captivity of ten years. What passed in that interval has proved a great subject of controversy amongst ingenious writers. The most probable explanation seems to be that, notwithstanding the King’s refusal, the marriage between Lauzun and Mademoiselle had been accomplished. The evidence of twenty different persons might be cited in support of the fact, but one may suffice. An historian of the last century, M. Anquetil, relates that at the Château d’Eu, in 1774, an apartment was still pointed out which had been occupied by Lauzun, situated above that of the princess, and communicating by a secret staircase with her alcove. At the same period, Anquetil saw at Treport a tall person resembling Mademoiselle not only in her figure, but strikingly like her portraits. She seemed to be about seventy or seventy-five. She was called, throughout that part of the country, the Princess’s daughter. She seemed to believe so herself, and was in receipt of a pension of fifteen hundred francs paid punctually, without knowing from what quarter they came. She occupied a handsome house for which she paid no rent, although for it she held no proprietary deed. All this, coupled with the age of the lady, who stated that she was born in 1671, would seem decisive as to the clandestine marriage which probably occasioned the arrest of Lauzun.

Ten years of anguish and poignant regrets passed over poor Mademoiselle’s head—ten years employed in imploring and bargaining for the restoration of her dearly beloved captive. “Consider what you have it in your power to do to please the King, in order that he may grant you that which you have so much at heart,” was the artful suggestion daily repeated in her ear by Madame de Montespan. And to render the discovery more easy, she took care to bring with her, and to send to her very frequently, that charming little Duke du Maine to whom the county of Eu, the duchy of Aumale, and the principality of Dombes would have been a fitting appanage. To despoil herself for the deliverance of the man she loved with such an infatuated affection, the Princess would not have hesitated a moment. The difficulty was to despoil the man himself, already in possession of a portion of what was required, and very keen-witted indeed to keep what he had acquired. The negotiation, for a long while brought to a dead-lock by the resistance of Lauzun, was at length concluded. M. de Lauzun, emerged from Pignerol, but restricted at first to a residence in Touraine or Anjou, received at length permission to revisit Paris and behold once more the benefactress who could still secure to him the enjoyment of an income of forty thousand livres. “I did not know him,” exclaimed the woebegone Princess, shortly after his release, “and my sole consolation is that the King, who is more clear-sighted than I am, did not know him either.” Tardy clear-sightedness! M. de Lauzun had then made himself known unmistakably—by beating her. But, if the truth must be told, she had first scratched his face.

Thus ended, in vulgar squabbles, more and more stormy, a connection so romantically begun. Lauzun, disappointed in his hope of a magnificent alliance, considered himself despoiled by the Princess’s donation, and, finding himself after ten years’ captivity the husband of a woman of fifty-four, showed her neither tenderness nor respect. It was, therefore, a relief to her when he took his departure for England in 1685. The ill-assorted couple never met again. Lauzun more than once endeavoured to obtain an interview with the Princess, but she would not forgive him, and died without consenting to his urgent appeals. It was in her latter years only, and under the perceptibly increasing sway of religious influences, that her miserably tormented mind recovered peace and repose. Mademoiselle, who had only given up dancing in 1674, withdrew gradually from Court when she found that she had become an object of pity, if not of mockery, therein. The Grande Mademoiselle expired on the 5th of April, 1693, in her palace of the Luxembourg, aged sixty-six. That singularity, which had so remarkably characterised her life, pursued her even beyond it. At her obsequies, celebrated with much magnificence, her entrails, imperfectly embalmed, fermented, and the urn which contained them burst with a loud explosion during the ceremonies. All present fled in the extremity of terror.

Was it from the singularity of her existence, from the essentially French tone of her character, from the grandeur of an epoch during which no one passed unnoticed, that the species of popularity half-indulgent, half-sportive, which attached to her name must be attributed? To all these doubtless, but likewise to another cause more decisive still. Mademoiselle does not take her place only in the sufficiently extensive catalogue of princely eccentricities; she holds a creditable position upon the list of French writers. Nor should it be forgotten that the gates of the Luxembourg were by her thrown open to all the beaux esprits of her time, “qui y trouvaient leur place comme chez Mécænas;” and that she fostered both by encouragement and example La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, and that it is no slight claim to remembrance that she led France to appreciate the Maxims of the one and the Characters of the other. May such considerations serve as extenuating circumstances when we bring her up for judgment for the flagrant crime of—M. de Lauzun.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] The daughter of Gaston d’Orléans and the charming Marie de Bourbon, she was born in 1627, the same year as Bossuet and Mad. de Sévigné. Her mother died five days after her birth.

[7] Her father, writing to her companions in arms the Countesses of Fiesque and Frontenac shortly after their entrance into Orleans, complimented them upon their courage, and addressed his letter to the Countesses Adjutant-Generals in the Army of my Daughter against Mazarin.

CHAPTER VI.

THE WIFE OF THE GREAT CONDÉ.

Among so many heroines of beauty, glory, and gallantry, who achieved celebrity at this stirring epoch of French history, there is one whose name ought not to be effaced from, nor placed lowest on the list, although a humble—we were going to say, a humiliated, disdained, and sacrificed wife; a martyr to conjugal faith, but who, perhaps, can scarcely be called a “political” woman.

Mademoiselle de Brézé, as already intimated, had entered into the Condé family through the detestable influence of authority and politics. The Duke d’Enghien, therefore, unhappily held his wife in aversion; her mother-in-law, Charlotte de Montmorency, despised her; Madame de Longueville, her sister-in-law, did not esteem her; Mademoiselle de Montpensier declares that “she felt pity for her,” and that was the gentlest phrase she could find to apply to a person who had so signally crossed her views and inclination.

Married at thirteen to the future hero of Rocroy and Lens, both before marriage and again more strongly after, the young Duke had protested by a formal act that he yielded only to compulsion and his respect for paternal authority in giving her his hand. Henry (II.), Prince de Condé, who thus exacted his son’s compliance, merely followed his usual instincts as a greedy and ambitious courtier in seeking an alliance with Cardinal Richelieu, whose niece Mademoiselle de Brézé was, through her mother, Nicole du Plessis. Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who thought that she had more reason than any one else to be indignant at the match, tells us plainly that the Prince threw himself at the feet of his eminence to solicit from him both Mademoiselle de Brézé for the Duke d’Enghien, and M. de Brézé, her brother, for Mademoiselle de Bourbon, and that he only escaped from the disgrace of a double mésalliance through the Cardinal’s clemency, who, in reply, told him that “he was quite willing to give untitled young ladies to princes, but not princesses to untitled young gentlemen.”

Did the young Duchess personally merit that aversion and contempt? Mademoiselle has told us, indeed, that she was awkward, and that, “on the score of wit and beauty, she had nothing above the common run.” But Madame de Motteville, less passionate and more disinterested in her judgments, recognises certain advantages possessed by her. “She was not plain,” she tells us, “but had fine eyes, a good complexion, and a pretty figure. She spoke well when she was in the humour to talk.” The discerning court lady adds that, “if Madame de Condé did not always display a talent for pleasing in the ball-room or in conversation, the fidelity with which she clung to her husband during adversity, and the zeal she showed for his interests and for those of her son during the Guienne campaign, ought to compensate for the misfortune of not having been able to merit, by more eminent virtues, a more brilliant and widely celebrated reputation.”

Here, then, it seems incumbent upon us to divine, from the façon de parler of that day, what were the eminent virtues which the Princess de Condé needed to deserve the esteem of her husband; or to ask whether tried fidelity, courage, devotedness, were not then ranked among the eminent virtues. They were so, no doubt; and it is probable that what Madame de Motteville understands by those words, was the eminence of qualities peculiar to the women, who more than ever in her day derived from them a species of celebrity which closely resembled glory—the éclat of beauty, wit, grace, intrepidity, and power of charming; in a word, that which was possessed in so high a degree by a Madame de Longueville, a Madame de Chevreuse, a Marie de Hautefort, and a Mademoiselle du Vigean.

Whatever might have been the personal merit of the wife of the great Condé, did the little she had justify the wretchedness of her destiny? No: some beauty, wit, virtue, courage, a timid disposition perhaps, an unpretending virtue, a courage even mediocre, easily overthrown, and which needed the pressure of circumstances and danger for its development,—in all this there was nothing to invoke the ire of the implacable sisters.

In contemplating her truly deplorable existence, afflicted from its beginning to its end by every kind of grief and humiliation, one can scarcely resist the idea of the ascendency of an invincible fatality, making her a victim of the irresistible force of events and destiny. The woes of Claire de Brézé commenced in her earliest childhood. At the time of her marriage to the Duke d’Enghien she had lost her mother some six years, that parent having died in 1635. What befell her infancy, abandoned to the neglect of a fantastic and libertine father, ruled even before his widowhood by a mistress, the wife of one of his lacqueys, whom he killed one day during a hunting match in order to get him out of the way; of a father who, Tallemant tells us, carelessly remarked, when his daughter’s marriage was agreed upon—as though she belonged to some one else—“They are going to make a princess of that little girl!”

She was destined, nevertheless, to have her hour of fame and distinction, and that hour dawned amidst disasters of every sort, and upon the captivity of her husband. At the moment of the arrest of the Prince, whilst the Princess-dowager was conferring with her adherents upon the best measures to be adopted for the deliverance of the Princes and for the safety of her little grandson, the young Princess, overcoming her timidity, interrupted Lenet, who was proposing a plan for their flight, and another for a campaign, and, after the humblest tokens of respect and deference for her mother-in-law, entreated her not to separate her from her son, protesting that she would follow him everywhere joyfully, whatsoever might be the peril, and that she would expose herself to any risk to aid her husband.[8]

From that moment, we trace, almost from day to day as it were, in the Mémoires of Lenet proofs of the zeal and constancy of the Princess de Condé. She escapes from Chantilly on foot, with her son and a small band of faithful followers, traverses Paris, whence she reaches, in three days and by devious roads, Montrond, the place pointed out by Lenet as the safest retreat and the most advantageous to defend. Her letters to the Queen and ministers, to the magistrates, to her relatives, are stamped with nobility and firmness. Threatened in Montrond by La Meilleraye, who was advancing in force, she again made her escape under cover of a hunting party, after having provided for the safety of the place and others which depended on it, and went in search of, amid a host of difficulties, sometimes on horseback, at others in a litter or by boat, the Dukes de Bouillon and La Rochefoucauld, who escorted her to Bordeaux. One must turn to Lenet for all the details of that toilsome journey and of the insurrection at Bordeaux, which he has related with all the minutiæ and animation of an eye-witness and an actor who more than once figured in the front rank. No longer timid, no longer awkward, in presence of danger the daughter of Marshal de Brézé became the amazon and almost the heroine. She held reviews, councils of war, negotiated, and issued orders. Scarcely had she reached Bordeaux, her entry into which was quite an ovation, than she besieged the Parliament chamber to procure the registration of her requests and protestations against the unjust detention of her husband. “She solicited the judges on their way out of court, representing to them with tears in her eyes the unhappy condition of all her oppressed house.... The young Duke, whom a gentleman (Vialas) carried in his arms, caught the counsellors round the neck as they passed, and weepingly besought at their hands the liberation of his father, in so tender a manner that those gentlemen wept also as bitterly as he and his mother, and gave them both good hopes.” She harangued the magistrates, supplicated them, urged them; she even protected them, on one occasion that the populace of Bordeaux, finding them not so bold as they could have wished, endeavoured by clamour to obtain a decree contrary to the views of the party of the Princes. She repaired to the palace, and from the top of the steps conjured the furious rabble and made them lay down their arms. “And it must be owned,” says Lenet, “that she had a particular talent for speaking in public, and that nothing could be better, more appropriate, nor more conformable to her position than what she said.” On that day, the Princess de Condé, upon the steps of the Hôtel de Ville of Bordeaux, appeared no longer unworthy of being ranked with Madame de Longueville at the town-hall at Paris, or with Mademoiselle d’Orléans at the Porte St. Antoine. Brienne adds that she worked, with her own hands, with the ladies of the city, at the fortifications, and that she was anxious herself to embroider, upon the banners of her army, the emblem and device of the revolt—a grenade exploding, with the word coacta!

We have already seen the result of that three months’ resistance—the peace concluded at Bordeaux, the amnesty accorded to all those who had taken up arms in Guienne, in a word, all the conditions proposed by the Princess and the Dukes conceded, with the exception of one only—the principal, that which had been the prime cause of all that insurrection—the deliverance of the Prince de Condé, whom Mazarin persisted in retaining prisoner, whilst at the same time promising to do everything towards abridging his captivity.

The Princess was sent back to Montrond with her son, vexed no doubt at not having conquered, but proud of having dared so much, and satisfied at having deserved for that once to share his imprisonment. That day came, however,—the day of gratitude and justice. On one occasion already, whilst yet at Vincennes, the Prince, as he watered the tulips celebrated by Mademoiselle de Scudéry in song, remarked to some one, “Who would have thought that I should be watering tulips whilst Madame la Princesse was making war in the south!”

But later, when the campaign at Bordeaux had ended, the Prince still a prisoner at Havre, forwarding a communication in cypher to Lenet, added thereto a short note for the Princess, couched in terms so tender that Lenet, fearing lest in the exuberance of her delight the Princess might betray the secret of that correspondence, hesitated for some moments to communicate it to her. That note, the first and sole recompense of her devotion, courage, and constancy, we must here transcribe, as the tardy and begrudging compensation for such long-continued ingratitude, such long-continued disdain, for so many cruel and unmerited outrages.

“Il me tard, Madame, que je sois en état de vous embrasser mil fois pour toute l’amitié que vous m’avez temoigné, qui m’est d’autant plus sensible que ma conduite envers vous l’avoit peu méritée; mais je sçauray si bien vivre avec vous à l’advenir, que vous ne vous repentirés pas de tout ce que vous avés faict to me pour moy, qui fera que je seray toute ma vie tout à vous et de tout mon cœur.”

Poor Clémence de Maillé! how, at that first testimony of an affection which she had despaired of ever gaining, did her heart, so long pent up, burst forth with ecstatic delight! And how must Lenet, on witnessing that touching effusion of irrepressible rapture, have congratulated himself at not having persevered in his diplomatic prudence! She took the letter, shed tears over it, kissed it, read it over and over again, and tried to get it by heart—for she might lose it. Then she selected from her toilette her finest ribbon (a bright flame-coloured one), and sewed that precious missive to it, in order to carry it always upon her person, beneath her dress—upon her chemise, Lenet bluntly tells us, and who adds that that gush of delirious delight lasted until the morrow.

Alas! that warm ray was the only one that Condé, in his glory, let fall upon her, and it was but evanescent. The danger over, the prison opened, Condé restored to his honours and his power, she became once more the despised, alienated, humiliated wife. Mademoiselle, on meeting her again, asked whether it were true that she had taken part in that which was done in her name? On her return from Montrond (after the letter), she found her, it is true, plus habile; but she was shocked at the delight manifested by the Princess on seeing all the great world flock to visit her, so wholly forsaken as she had previously been, and she concluded that, being carried out of her normal condition, she thought too much of herself.

Then came humiliations the most cutting, and the deepest grief. Twice was she attacked by dangerous illness, from which it was asserted she could not recover. And each time that report was welcomed at Court as the joyous announcement of a marriage or a succession. Everybody busied themselves with finding another wife for the Prince; and some thought once more of Mademoiselle: “that rumour reached my ears,” says she, “and I mused upon it.” Unfortunately for her, the poor Princess recovered, and Mademoiselle had to wait for Lauzun. In another place she remarks somewhat spitefully, “Madame la Princesse arrived in better health than could have been anticipated; no one could have imagined that she would so soon recover.”

At length a tragic event, the consequences of which exhibit in a sinister light the perseverance of ill-feeling that had always been shown towards her in the family of which she had become a member, came to add itself to that almost unbroken chain of tribulations, outrages, and troubles amid which no sort of calamity seemed wanting. Two officers of her household took it into their heads to quarrel and draw swords upon each other. The Princess (she was then in her forty-third year—1671) placed herself between the angry combatants with the intention of separating them, and by so doing received a stab in her side. The individual who inflicted the wound was brought to trial. As for her,

“When she was cured, the Prince had her conducted to Châteauroux, one of his country-houses. She has been there kept for a long time imprisoned, and at present permission is only given her to walk in the court-yard, always strictly watched by the people whom the Prince always keeps about her. The Duke is accused of having suggested to the Prince the treatment to which his mother is subjected: he was very glad, it is said, to find a pretext for putting her in a place where she would spend less than in society.”[9]

Was it the hereditary avarice of the house of Condé which thus revealed itself in the odious sentiment of that unworthy son? Poor woman! Her only crime was that of being too liberal. She had, it is true, foolishly placed her diamonds in pledge at Bordeaux to support the cost of the war. But had she not, as a set-off to her prodigality, brought to the Duke d’Enghien and his father her share of Richelieu’s wealth? That prudent advice of the excellent son was followed: the Princess was still a prisoner at Châteauroux, when the Prince her husband died, in 1686; and by way of a precaution—which cannot be thought of without a shudder, giving as it does the measure of an implacable hatred—he recommended that she should be so kept after his decease. This once, Mademoiselle did find a word of pity for the persecuted wife and mother. “I could have wished,” says she, when speaking of the last moments of the Prince, “that he had not prayed the King to let his wife always be kept at Châteauroux, and I was very sorry for it....”

And it was there, doubtless, that she died in 1694, at the age of sixty-six. The collections of funeral orations and sermons of celebrated preachers of that day will be searched in vain for any funeral tribute to her memory. And a feeling of disappointment arises that Bossuet, in his panegyric of the hero, could not find a word of praise, of consolation, or even of pity for the ill-fated shadow he left sorrowful and abandoned by all, to bear his name in pitiless obscurity to the grave.

Mysterious destiny! strange fatality! which neither personal demerits, wrongs, nor faults justified, which neither love, devotedness, nor unfailing virtue, approved and respected even by the calumnious, could avert.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Lenet.

[9] Mémoires of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, 4th part.

PART II.

THE DUCHESS OF PORTSMOUTH.

Very little is known for certain concerning the antecedents of Louise Querouaille before she figured at the Court of France as one of the maids of honour to the unfortunate Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, sister of Charles the Second of England. The contemporaries of the merry monarch, witnesses and censors of his political errors, in tracing them to their source, have attributed them primarily to the foreign favourite, who was, more than any other of the many mistresses of that Prince, odious in the eyes of the English people.

At the commencement of 1670, the splendour and corruption of the French Court had reached their acme. The seraglio of the great King recalled to mind that of Solomon, whilst his brother, enslaved by effeminacy and debauchery, had only to hold up his finger and the most important personages of the state were suitably provided with mistresses to such an extent that at length it became necessary to transfer occasionally to foreign courts those attractive creatures who, by antiphrasis doubtless, were always called “maids of honour.” It was in the household of his sister-in-law, Henrietta of England, that Louis had first met the two mistresses of his predilection; and when he wished to assure himself by a new tie of his royal vassal on the other side of the channel, it was still the domestic circle of the Duchess of Orleans which supplied him with the diplomatist in petticoats he wanted.

When Mademoiselle Querouaille’s mission to the Court of St. James’s became thoroughly understood, and her position as Duchess of Portsmouth assured in it, her previous history was hunted up, the details of which no one knew—not even the royal family of France, who had used her as an instrument without caring to trouble itself about her origin. Madame de Sévigné, in her letters to her daughter, speaks of the Duchess of Portsmouth in a very disrespectful fashion, so much so as to reveal, if not the certainty, at least the belief that the antecedents of the maid of honour, as she says, were not the most honourable. In 1690, five years after Charles’s death, a pamphlet was published in London in which the Duchess figures under the fictitious name of Francelie; Louis XIV. designated as Tirannides, and our English king as Prince des Iles. In the preface to the French translation of this pamphlet, which bears the title of Histoire secrète de la Duchesse de Portsmouth, it is stated that the author desired to give, by these changes of name, some additional piquancy to the revelations contained in his book. According to such chronicle, the father of Louise Querouaille was a wool merchant of Paris. After having realised a moderate fortune in trade, he retired into Brittany, his native country, with his two daughters; the youngest, Louise, being amiable and pretty; the eldest, plain and ungraceful. The dissimilarity of the two sisters, the one universally pleasing, the other displeasing everybody, created such misunderstanding between them that their father was obliged to separate them. He kept the plain daughter at home, and placed the younger and pretty one as a boarder in a neighbouring town to that in which he lived. Louise thereby acquired accomplishments which enhanced her natural charms. She was sharp, cunning, insinuating, and having gained the confidence and goodwill of the lady to whose care her father had entrusted her, the former introduced her amongst her relations and general society. In that circle Mademoiselle Querouaille ere long inspired passions, rumours of which reached the ears of the old wool-merchant. Fearing lest his daughter might but too thoughtlessly respond to the attentions of which she was the object, he withdrew her from the boarding-house, and took her to Paris, where he left her under the care of his sister-in-law, then a widow. Her husband had been a dependent of the Duke de Beaufort, and she herself lived, for the most part, upon the bounty of that nobleman, who, on reconciling himself with the Court after the Fronde, had obtained the post of high-admiral of France. Shortly after the arrival of Louise in Paris, in 1669, the Duke seeing her walking in the Tuileries gardens with her relative, and being struck with the young girl’s beauty, and moreover it is said with the effect which she produced upon the public, became suddenly enamoured of her. The author of the Histoire secrète relates the manœuvres resorted to by Beaufort and Louise to deceive the vigilance, more affected than real, as it would seem, of her old aunt. In short, the Duke’s passion made rapid progress; and the young girl, yielding to the wishes of a lover who adored her and heaped magnificent presents upon her, allowed herself to be carried off by him at the moment that he was about to enter upon his naval command. That expedition had for its object the succour of the Venetians, who for some twenty-four years had been blockaded by the Turks in Candia. Mademoiselle Querouaille, disguised as a page, embarked with the Duke, who, shortly after landing, was cut to pieces in action. An officer of the French force, whom the before-cited chronicle merely designates as a marquis, and to whom Beaufort had confided the secret of his love, offered to conduct Louise back to France. It appears that Mademoiselle Querouaille would have preferred to have been accompanied on her return by a certain smart page who had been in the Duke’s service, but the marquis did not give her the option of such a choice. Yet, though Louise could not withdraw herself from the protection of the latter, there is no reason to believe that he forced his love upon her. The anonymous chronicler concedes that much; but, in his opinion, the Marquis might have hoped that Louise would have acknowledged his care and respect by the same favours which she had accorded to “Beaufort, and,” he adds, “one may presume that a girl who previously, urged by love, had allowed the Duke to carry her off to Candia, could do no less for a man who showed her so much attention on the voyage back to France.” More or less just as these inductions may be, it appears quite certain that this same prank of Mademoiselle Querouaille was the foundation of her fortunes. In giving his friends an account of the expedition in which he had taken part, the Marquis did not omit the episode of the Duke de Beaufort’s pretended page. Henrietta of England, to whom this romantic tale was carried, became desirous of seeing the heroine of it, and Louise Querouaille was therefore duly introduced to the Duchess. The fictitious Cherubino was cunning enough to represent herself as being the victim of a forcible abduction. Henrietta listened to her story with the liveliest interest, took her into her household, and soon afterwards admitting her amongst the number of her maids of honour. Louise, at the age of nineteen, was thus at once introduced to all the pleasures and temptations of a magnificent and dissipated court. Her introduction took place at a critical moment (1669), and, in deciding her future, fate has made her destiny and character matter of history.

The conquest or the ruin of Holland had long been one of the favourite projects of Louis the Fourteenth. The Dutch, however, resisted his overgrown power, as their ancestors had formerly defied that of Philip the Second of Spain. In order to carry his plans into execution, Louis found it necessary to detach England from the interests of Holland. This was matter of some difficulty, for an alliance with France against Holland was so odious to all parties in England, so contrary to the national prejudices and interests, that though Louis did not despair of cajoling or bribing Charles into such a treaty, the utmost caution and secresy were necessary in conducting it.

The only person who was at first trusted with this negotiation was the Duchess of Orleans. She was at this time about five-and-twenty, “a singular mixture of discretion, or rather dissimulation, with rashness and petulance; of exceeding haughtiness, with a winning sweetness of manner and disposition which gained all hearts.” She was not, however, exactly pretty or well made, but had the dazzlingly fair complexion of an Englishwoman, “un teint de rose et de jasmin,” a profusion of light hair, with eyes blue and bright as those of Pallas. She had inherited some of the nobler qualities of her grandfather, Henri Quatre, and all the graces and intriguing spirit of her mother, Henrietta Maria. Early banished from England by the misfortunes of her family, she regarded the country of her birth with indifference, if not abhorrence, and was a Frenchwoman in education, manners, mind, and heart. She possessed unbounded power over the mind of Charles the Second, whose affection for her was said to exceed that of a brother for a sister; he had never been known to refuse her anything she had asked for herself or others, and Louis trusted that her fascinations would gain from the king of England what reason and principle and patriotism would have denied.

The shrewdness of mind and inclination for intrigue which characterised his sister-in-law’s maid-of-honour did not escape the observation of Louis. In her he found an apt as well as willing instrument in the secret negotiation of which he had constituted her mistress the plenipotentiary. For such compliance the manners of the time may, to a certain extent, furnish La Querouaille with an excuse. At Versailles, ideas of honour and morality had lost their ordinary signification: the men envied generally the lot of Amphitryon, and the women lost every instinct of modesty when it became a question about satisfying a caprice of Jupiter. Breathing such a vitiated atmosphere, and having so many lamentable examples before her eyes, Mademoiselle Querouaille saw only the dazzling side of the proposition made to her—the hope of reigning despotically over the heart of a great prince, and of becoming the equal of that La Vallière whose elevation was the object of so much envy and feminine ambition.

It was arranged, therefore, that the piquant Bas-Bretonne should be brought under the notice of the amorous Charles II. during a visit to him, arranged to take place at Dover. In order to give the interview between the royal brother and sister the appearance of an accidental or family meeting, the pretext of a progress to his recently acquired Flemish territories was resorted to by Louis, who set out with his queen, his two mistresses De Montespan and La Vallière, the Duchess of Orleans and Mademoiselle de Montpensier, with their respective retinues, and attended by the most beautiful women of the Court. The splendour exhibited on this occasion exceeded all that had been witnessed, even during the reign of this pomp-loving monarch. Thirty thousand men marched in the van and rear of the royal party; some of them destined to reinforce the garrisons of the conquered country, others to work upon the fortifications, and others again to level the roads. It was a continued series of fêtes, banquets, and triumphs, the ostensible honours being chiefly for Madame de Montespan; the real object of this famous journey, well-nigh unparalleled for its lavish and luxurious ostentation, was known only to Henrietta of England, who enjoyed in secret her own importance, and this gave a new zest to the pleasures with which she was surrounded.

On reaching Dunkirk, the Duchess of Orleans embarked for England with her maid-of-honour and a small but chosen retinue, and met Charles at Dover, where this secret negotiation was initiated. The result anticipated came to pass, and proved that Louis had not miscalculated the power of his sister-in-law over her easy-going and unscrupulous brother. Charles fell into the snare laid for him, and Henrietta carried most of the points of that disgraceful treaty, which rendered the King of England the pensioned tool of France, and his reign the most abject in the annals of her native country.

Aiming rather to stimulate than gratify the languid desires of her brother for fresh feminine novelty, the Duchess of Orleans, with finished finesse, appeared not to perceive the attention which the piquant charms and almost childish grace of her young maid-of-honour won from the captivated King. Nor did she, at her departure, leave Louise in England, as some historians have erroneously supposed. In order to render the impression which her fair attendant had made upon Charles more deep and lasting, it was sought by her absence to incite the desire felt by her royal brother to retain her in his Court. The secret negotiation with which Louis had entrusted his sister-in-law had not been, in fact, yet completed. To conduct it to a prosperous termination, to preserve perfect harmony between France and England, it was still needful to make use of another kind of female influence. It was necessary, moreover, that such influence should become permanent—a thing hitherto very difficult at courts wherein the fair sex disputed strenuously and shamelessly for the royal favour. But thus much seemed certain—that the key to the will of the sovereign of Great Britain had been found in Mademoiselle Louise Querouaille.

Charles had indeed written in reply to his sister, on the 8th July of the preceding year (1668), that “in every negotiation she shall have a share, which will prove how much I love her.” In August he told the French ambassador—“The Duchess of Orleans passionately desires an alliance between me and France; and as I love her tenderly, I shall be happy to let her see what power her entreaties have over me.” Henrietta, probably, did not consider that by thus bringing her brother into alliance with France she was betraying her native country. She no doubt thought rather of augmenting the greatness of Charles than of benefiting England. The sea should be given up to England; the territory of Continental Europe to France. Louis XIV. expressly declared, in opposition to the views of Colbert, “that he would leave commerce to the English—three-fourths of it at least—that all he cared for was conquest.” But that would have involved, as a first step, the conquest of England herself, and have cost torrents of blood. The fascinating Henrietta, doubtless, did not perceive this when she trod so far in the fatal footsteps of her ancestress, Mary Stuart. She had none of her rash violence, but not a little of her spirit of romantic intrigue, and that feminine delight of having in hand a tangled skein, of which she held securely the end of the thread.

The secret negotiation of the treaty, however, went on between the two kings. Louis had submitted to exorbitant conditions on the score of money, and to another, moreover, sufficiently weighty. It was that Charles, converted to the Romish faith, should share with him in the conquest of Holland, should send a considerable military force thither, and should keep for himself the Dutch islands opposite to England—an advantage so enormous to the latter power that it would have rendered national the odious alliance, and glorified the treason.

Two points still remained unsettled: first, to persuade Charles to commence the war before his conversion—a step considered easy to obtain; but that conversion terrified him when the moment came for carrying it out. Secondly—and which proved the most difficult—was to induce him to despatch very few troops—too few to take and afterwards hold the territory promised him. Louis XIV. stipulated to send 120,000 men there; Charles II. engaged to furnish 6000, which number his sister prevailed upon him to reduce to 4000.

Such was the sad, disgraceful, deplorable negotiation imposed by the great King upon his sister-in-law. She had always obeyed him (as she herself said), and she obeyed him in this matter, rendering her brother doubly a traitor by his abandonment of the latter condition, which lessened his treason.

Everybody had envied the Duchess her visit to England, none knew the bitterness it entailed. The King confided in her, and yet distrusted her. Otherwise he would not have had her accompanied by the pretty doll, with her baby face, whose office it was to ensnare the licentious Charles. Henrietta was compelled to take her over to England, and, in fact, to chaperone her. For such self-abasement the King had handsomely rewarded the compliant maid-of-honour, promising to give her an estate, and so much per head for each bastard she might have by Charles of England.

Henrietta endured all this shameful bargaining, hoping that her royal brother would obtain from the Pope the dissolution of her marriage with the worthless, stupid, profligate Duke of Orleans, on whom her wit and charms were equally thrown away. She might then remain at his court and be the virtual Queen of England, by governing him through female influence. Her brilliant hopes, however, were destined to be speedily dissipated, and her career cut short by a painful and treacherous death.

On her return from England, two surprises awaited her: not only did she find the Duke, her husband, exasperated against her, but what she had least of all expected, the King very cold in his demeanour towards her. Louis had got from her all he desired. His changed attitude emboldened a cabal in her own household to effect her destruction. Those who formed it were creatures of her husband’s detestable favourite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, whom they believed had been banished by the King through her entreaties. The poor Duchess wept bitterly on finding that she had now no support from any one about her. The Duke, in the exercise of his marital authority, took her from Court, not permitting her any longer to visit Versailles. The King might have insisted upon her attendance there but did not. In tears, she suffered herself to be carried off to St. Cloud. There she felt herself alone, with every hand against her.

The weather was excessively hot. On her arrival at St. Cloud, she took a bath, which made her ill, but she soon recovered from it, and during two days was tolerably well—eating and sleeping. On the 28th of June she asked for a cup of chicory, drank it, and at the same moment became red, then pale, and shrieked aloud. The poor Duchess, commonly so patient under pain, gave way under the excess of her anguish, her eyes filled with tears, and she exclaimed that she was dying.

Inquiries were made about the water the Duchess had drunk, and her waiting-woman said that she had not prepared it herself, but had ordered it to be made, and then asked that some of it might be given her, drank of it; but there is no evidence to show that the water had not been changed in the interval.

Was it an attack of cholera, as was said? The symptoms in no wise indicated that species of disorder. The Duchess’s health was very much shattered, and she was doubtless liable to be rapidly carried off. But the event had very plainly been hastened (as in the case of Don Carlos); nature had been assisted. The Duke’s valets—who were, as to fidelity, much more the servants of his banished favourite, the Chevalier de Lorraine—comprehended that, in the approaching alliance of the two kings, and the need they would have of each other’s confidence, the Duchess might in some moment of tenderness recover her absolute power over the King, who would in such event sweep his brother’s household clear of them all. They well knew the Court, and surmised that, if she were to die, the alliance would nevertheless be maintained, and the matter hushed up; that she would be lamented, but not avenged; that facts accomplished would be respected.

Good care was taken not to confide the secret to the wretched Duke, her husband; it was even thought that it might be possible to get him out of the way—to keep him in Paris, where by chance, indeed, he was detained. Philip of Orleans was really astonished when he beheld his agonised wife, and ordered an antidote to be given her; but time was lost in administering the poudre de vipère. The Duchess asked only for an emetic, and the doctors obstinately refused her one. Strange, too, the King, who, on his arrival, remonstrated with them, was equally unsuccessful in obtaining for the sufferer that which she craved. The medicos held steadily to their opinion: they had pronounced it to be cholera, and they would not swallow their own words.

Were they in the plot? That did not follow. For, besides the professional pride which forbade them to belie themselves, they might fear to discover more than they wished—to act in a very uncourtier-like manner by discovering traces but too evident of poisoning. In such case the alliance, perhaps, might have been broken off, and the projects of both King and clergy for the Dutch and English crusade have come to nothing. Such blundering fellows would never have been forgiven. So the physicians were prudent and politic. It was altogether a grievous spectacle. Here was a woman universally beloved, yet who inspired no one with any strong feeling. Everybody was interested—went and came; but no one would assume any responsibility, no one obeyed her last and constant prayer. She wanted to eject the poison by the aid of an emetic. No one dared to give it her. “Look,” she exclaimed, “my nose is gone—shrunk to nothing.” It was observed, in fact, that it was already like that of an eight days’ corpse. For all that, they stuck to the doctors’ opinion: “It is nothing.” With only one exception, nobody seemed uneasy about her; some even laughed. Mademoiselle de Montpensier alone showed indignation at all this heartless indifference, and had the courage to remark that “At any rate they should endeavour to save her soul,” and went in search of a confessor.

The people belonging to the household, one and all, recommended that the curé of St. Cloud should be sent for, certain that, as he was unknown to the Duchess, their mistress would confess nothing of moment to him. Mademoiselle, however, would not hear of him as confessor. “Fetch Bossuet,” she said, “and meanwhile call in the Canon Feuillet.”

Feuillet was a very wary ecclesiastic, and quite as prudent as the physicians. He persuaded Madame to offer herself up as a sacrifice to Heaven without accusing anyone. The Duchess said, in fact, to Marshal de Grammont, “They have poisoned me—but by mistake.” She exhibited throughout an admirable discretion and perfect gentleness. She embraced the Duke, her husband, whispering to him—in allusion to the outrageous arrest of the Chevalier de Lorraine—that she had “never been unfaithful to him.”

The English Ambassador having arrived, she spoke to him in English, telling him to conceal from her brother that she had been poisoned. The Abbé Feuillet, who had not quitted her, overhearing the word “poison,” stopped her, saying, “Madame, think only of God now!” Bossuet, who next came in, continues Feuillet, confirmed her in those thoughts of self-abnegation and discretion. For a long time back, she had looked to Bossuet to console her in that supreme moment. She desired that after her decease an emerald ring should be given to him which she had reserved for that purpose.

By degrees, however, the unfortunate Duchess found herself left almost alone. The King had taken his departure, after manifesting great emotion, and the Duke also in tears. All the Court had disappeared. Mademoiselle de Montpensier was too much affected to bid her farewell. She was sinking fast, felt an inclination to sleep, woke up suddenly, inquired for Bossuet, who placed a crucifix in her hand, and, whilst in the act of embracing it, she expired. The clock at that moment struck three, and the first faint light of dawn was visible (June 29th, 1670).

The English Ambassador expressed a desire to be present at the post-mortem examination, and the doctors did not fail to pronounce the cause of her death to be an attack of cholera morbus (so Mademoiselle de Montpensier states), and that mortification had for some time past set in. He was not the dupe of such opinion; neither was Charles II., who, at first, indignantly refused to receive the letter addressed to him by the Duke of Orleans. But to persevere in such a line of conduct would have been to bring about a rupture of the pending negotiation and the loss of the French subsidy. He calmed down, therefore, and pretended to believe the explanations that were offered him. It was, however, remembered that the Chevalier de Lorraine, the Duke’s unworthy favourite, had openly accused Madame as the instigator of his banishment; and Saint-Simon asserts that the King, before consenting to his brother marrying again, was resolved to know whether he had really had the Duchess poisoned, and with that view summoned Furnon, Henrietta’s master of the household. From him he learned that the poison had been sent from Italy by the Chevalier de Lorraine to Beauveau, equerry to the Duchess, and to D’Effiat, her captain of the guard, but without the knowledge of the Duke. “It was that maître-d’hôtel who himself related it,” says Saint-Simon, “to M. Joly de Fleury, from whom I had it.”

A story but too probable. But that which appears incredible, and which nevertheless is quite certain, was that the poisoners were perfectly successful, that shortly after the crime the King permitted the Chevalier de Lorraine to serve in the army, appointed him marshal-de-camp, and allowed him to return to Court. What explanation, what palliation, can there be for such an enormous outrage to our common humanity? It has truly been said that “the intrigues which led to the murder of the unfortunate Henrietta of England present such a scene of accumulated horrors and iniquity, that, for the honour of human nature, one could wish that the curtain had never been raised which hid them from our knowledge.”

The last political act of the Duchess of Orleans was one of decisive import, and calculated to secure for a long time the subjection of the English nation. Although seriously afflicted by the death of his sister, the thoughtless Charles seemed especially occupied with the design of bringing over to England the attractive maid-of-honour who had made such a lively impression upon him, as had been intended, during the short visit to Dover already mentioned. On the melancholy tidings of Henrietta’s death reaching England, the profligate Duke of Buckingham was despatched to Paris as envoy extraordinary, ostensibly to inquire into the particulars of that catastrophe but in reality, as Burnet says, to conclude the treaty. This he accomplished; France agreeing to give two millions of livres (£150,000) for Charles’s conversion to popery, and three millions a year for the Dutch war. Large sums of money were also distributed to Buckingham, Arlington, and Clifford.

Buckingham, that complaisant companion of “the merry monarch,” who, “everything by turns and nothing long,” having been the first to observe the impression the mignonne maid-of-honour had made on the King’s susceptible fancy, had little hesitation in attaching to his diplomatic office the very undignified one of Sir Pandarus, and therefore with a brave defiance of decorum bent all his efforts to overcome the scruples, if any there might be, lingering in the mind of Louise with regard to transferring herself to the service of the Queen of England, poor Catherine of Braganza. As she was then placed through the death of the Duchess of Orleans, a convent was the only retreat Mademoiselle Querouaille could look forward to in France; and as religious seclusion was not at all congenial to the lively nymph, she was not found impracticable to Buckingham’s overtures. Nor were the latter’s efforts entirely disinterested in the matter. He had lately had a fierce quarrel with “old Rowley’s” imperious mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland, and having sworn hatred and revenge against that profligate beauty, sought to turn the French maid-of-honour to his own advantage by raising up a rival in the King’s affections, who should be wholly governed by himself. He therefore represented seriously to Louis that the only way to secure Charles to French interests was to give him a French mistress; and he told Charles jestingly that he ought to take charge of his sister’s favourite attendant, if only out of “decent tenderness for her memory.”

The delicate affair, in short, was soon arranged; an invitation, so formally worded as to wear the semblance of propriety, was sent from the English Court, and Louise immediately departed for Dieppe, escorted by part of the Duke of Buckingham’s suite, and his grace’s promise to join her with all convenient speed. But, as usual with the man whose “ambition was frequently nothing more than a frolic, and whose best designs were for the foolishest ends,” who “could keep no secret nor execute any design without spoiling it,” he totally forgot both the lady and his promise, and, leaving the forsaken demoiselle at Dieppe to cross the Straits as she best might, sailed to England by way of Calais. Lord Montagu, then our Ambassador at Paris, hearing of the Duke’s escapade, immediately sent over for a yacht, and ordered some of his own attendants to convey her, with all honour, to Whitehall, where she was received by Lord Arlington with all respect, and forthwith appointed maid-of-honour to the Queen.

The intoxication of Charles was complete, and the man who had supported patiently the furious outbreaks of Barbara Palmer[10] and the saucy petulence of Nell Gwynne, was the more able to appreciate “les grâces décentes” of the foreign maid-of-honour, who, in the profaned walls of Whitehall, diffused the delicate odour of Versailles.

The purpose of her receiving an appointment at the Court of St. James’s was apparently foretold, for Madame de Sévigné thus writes to her daughter:—“Ne trouvez-vous pas bon de savoir que Querouaille dont l’étoile avait été devineé avant qu’elle partit, l’a suivie très-fidèlement? Le roi d’Angleterre l’a aimée, elle s’est trouvée avec une légère disposition à ne le pas haïr.”[11]

It is doubtful, however, whether Charles did immediately enjoy his conquest. If it be noted that the Duke of Richmond only came into the world in 1672, we may be led to suppose that Mademoiselle Querouaille did not yield without hesitation to the desires of her royal lover; and that supposition becomes almost a certitude, when one reads this passage of a letter which Saint-Evremond addressed to his fair countrywoman:—

“Suffer yourself rather to follow the bent of your temptation, instead of listening to your pride. Your pride would soon cause you to be sent back to France, and France would fling you, as has been the lot of many others, into some convent. But allowing that you should choose of your own free will that dismal kind of retreat, still it would be necessary beforehand to render yourself worthy of entering therein. What a figure you would cut there, if you had not the character of a penitent! True penitence is that which afflicts and mortifies us at the recollection of our faults. Of what has a good girl to be penitent who has done nothing wrong? You would appear ridiculous in the eyes of the other nuns, who, repenting from just motives, should discover that your repentance was only grimace.”

Louise committed the error of not only approving the advice of that equivocal monitor, but the greater error of following it. Experience came very soon to open her eyes.

In 1672, as has been said, the Querouaille having presented the King with a son, her favour increased considerably. In 1673 she was created Duchess of Portsmouth, and at the close of the same year Louis XIV., alike to flatter the King of England, and to confirm him in his alliance with himself against Holland, as to reward the good offices of Louise Querouaille, conferred upon the latter the domain of D’Aubigny, in Berry. This domain given, in 1422, by Charles VII. to John Stuart, “as a token of the great services which he had rendered in war to that King,” had reverted to the crown of France. In the letter of donation which Louis sent to Charles, it stated that “after the death of the Duchess of Portsmouth, the demesne of Aubigny shall pass to such of the natural children of the King of Great Britain as he shall nominate.” Charles II. nominated Charles Lennox (his son by Querouaille), and created him Duke of Richmond on the 19th of August, 1675.

Although maîtresse-en-titre, and favourite mistress as she became, she could not, however, prevent the unworthy and frequent resort of the debauched prince to rivals of a lower grade, and Madame de Sévigné penned some amusing lines on the subject of those duplicate amours:—“Querouaille has been in no way deceived; she had a mind to be the King’s mistress, she has her wish. He passes almost every evening in her company, in presence of the whole Court. She has a child which has just been acknowledged, and on whom two duchies have been bestowed. She amasses wealth, and makes herself feared and respected wherever she can; but she could not foresee finding a young actress in her path by whom the King is bewitched.... He shares his attentions, his time, and his health between them both. The actress is quite as proud as the Duchess of Portsmouth: she spites her, makes wry faces at her, assails her, and often carries the King off from her. She boasts of those points in which she is preferable—that she is young, silly, bold, debauched, and agreeable; that she can sing, dance, and play the part de bonne foi. She has a son by the King, and is determined that he shall be acknowledged. Here are her reasons:—‘This Duchess,’ she says, ‘acts the person of quality; she pretends that she is related to everybody in France. No sooner does any grandee die, than she puts on mourning. Ah well! if she is such a great lady, why did she condescend to become a catin? She ought to expire with shame: for myself, it is my profession; I don’t pique myself on anything else. The King keeps me; I am at present his solely. I have brought him a son, whom I intend he shall acknowledge, and I am assured that he will, for he loves me quite as well as he does his Portsmouth.’ This creature takes the top of the walk, and embarrasses and puts the Duchess out of countenance in a most extraordinary manner.”

In Mrs. Nelly, with all her good qualities, Charles had not found exactly a rose without thorns to stick in his button-hole. In her too wild fun, or spirit of mockery, she was apt, as most others, to give demonstration of all the variety of her woman’s nature and her woman’s wit, and to make her baffled and humbled sovereign wish in his inmost heart that he had never had anything to do with her.

Such were the annoyances—doubtless unforeseen by Mademoiselle Querouaille on quitting France, and to which La Vallière and Montespan were not exposed in the Court of the Grand Monarque, where vice itself put on airs of grandeur and majesty. It must be owned, however, that Madame de Sévigné exaggerates when she pretends to establish a sort of equilibrium between the position of the actress and that of the Duchess. The triumphs of Nell Gwynne were triumphs of the alcove; whilst her Grace of Portsmouth reigned without a rival over the realm of diplomacy. Charles II. was in the habit of passing a great portion of his time in her apartments, where often, in the midst of a joyous circle, he met Barillon, the French Ambassador, who, from his agreeable manners, was freely admitted to all the amusements of the indolent monarch. It was by means of these frequent conversations that, seizing the favourable moment, the Duchess and the Ambassador succeeded in obtaining an order which suddenly changed the face of Europe, by bringing about the signature of the Treaty of Niméguen, and more than once it fell to her lot to obtain a success of the same kind, to which neither her arrogant Grace of Cleveland nor the piquant Nelly could ever pretend. In political affairs the Querouaille held her own triumphantly over all her rivals, and obtained a dominion that ended only with the life of Charles. Too sensible to exact a strict fidelity from the King, the Duchess of Portsmouth was content to sigh in silence so long as her womanly feelings alone were sported with; but when it seemed likely that the influence which she strove to utilise to the profit of France might be trenched upon, her resentment broke forth in sudden and sweeping ebullitions which even the dread of a public scandal was impotent to repress. The correspondence of Bussy-Rabutin furnishes us with a scene of that description:—

“It is rumoured that Querouaille has been sermonising the King, crucifix in hand, as well both to wean him from other women as to bring him back to Christianity: in fact, it appears that she herself has been very near the point of death. However, three or four days afterwards, finding herself better, she rose from her bed, and dragged herself into the box where the King was seeing a play in company with Madame de Mazarin, and there she overwhelmed him with endless reproaches for his infidelity. Love and jealousy are strong passions.”

Hortensia Mancini, Duchess de Mazarin, who was commonly thought to be the finest woman in Europe, and more than that—a very great lady, aunt of the Duchess of York, might have easily supplanted the “baby-faced” Querouaille in the inconstant heart of Charles Stuart, but that the haughty Italian paid small attention to the predilections of that prince, whom she cut to the quick by receiving before his face the advances of the Prince de Monaco, and so Charles returned “à ses premières amours.” That phrase, somewhat vague in so far as it applies to the sensual instincts of a man who did not even believe in friendship, describes at least accurately that passionate feeling with which the Duchess of Portsmouth had inspired him. Under certain circumstances—very rare, it is true—she went so far as to sacrifice to him entirely her political rôle, and when the question of the famous “bill of exclusion” arose, she was seen to throw herself at the King’s feet, and implore her royal lover not to rush headlong to destruction;[12] entreating him to abandon, if it must be so, the interests of his brother and those of Catholicism, rather than compromise his crown and life. Such proceeding appears still more generous, if we reflect that, in spite of the irregular position which she had accepted, the Duchess had remained deeply attached to her religion and her native country, and that at that juncture no one was ignorant that an era of persecution was about to commence for the reformed Churches of France. Two years later, on the eve of the Niméguen treaty, the decline of the great reign was already foreshadowed; the influence of incapable though right-thinking men became daily more marked, and the star of the austere Frances d’Aubigny (Maintenon) arose slowly above the horizon. Conversions at any price were clamoured for, and no extent of sacrifice deterred the proselytisers from bringing back within the fold souls of quality, save leaving one day to Louvois’ dragoons the charge of enlightening the Protestant vulgar. The Duchess of Portsmouth was, together with the Duchess of York, at the head of the English propagandists, and, curious enough, a regular exchange of edifying letters took place between the future foundress of Saint-Cyr and the joyous sinner of the Court of St. James’s. Louis XIV., desirous of duly recompensing the services of the royal favourite, conferred upon her by letters-patent dated January, 1684, the French title of Duchess d’Aubigny.

Thus had Louise Querouaille reached the summit of her rapid prosperity; but a great turn of chance was at hand, and in a moment she was about to be hurled from that dizzy height.

Lord Macaulay has graphically sketched the memorable scene in which she figured so creditably when Charles was struck with his fatal seizure. On the 2nd of February, 1685, “scarcely had Charles risen from his bed when his attendants perceived that his utterance was indistinct, and that his thoughts seemed to be wandering. Several men of rank had, as usual, assembled to see their sovereign shaved and dressed. He made an effort to converse with them in his usual gay style; but his ghastly look surprised and alarmed them. Soon his face grew black; his eyes turned in his head; he uttered a cry, staggered, and fell into the arms of one of his lords. A physician, who had charge of the royal retorts and crucibles, happened to be present. He had no lancet; but he opened a vein with a penknife. The blood flowed freely; but the King was still insensible.

“He was laid on his bed, where, during a short time, the Duchess of Portsmouth hung over him with the familiarity of a wife. But the alarm had been given. The Queen and the Duchess of York were hastening to the room. The favourite concubine was forced to retire to her own apartments. Those apartments had been thrice pulled down and thrice rebuilt by her lover to gratify her caprice. The very furniture of the chimney was massive silver. Several fine paintings, which properly belonged to the Queen, had been transferred to the dwelling of the mistress. The sideboards were piled with richly wrought plate. In the niches stood cabinets, masterpieces of Japanese art. On the hangings, fresh from the looms of Paris, were depicted, in tints which no English tapestry could rival, birds of gorgeous plumage, landscapes, hunting matches, the lordly terrace of Saint-Germain’s, the statues and fountains of Versailles.[13] In the midst of this splendour, purchased by guilt and shame, the unhappy woman gave herself up to an agony of grief, which, to do her justice, was not wholly selfish.”

On the morning on which the King was taken ill, the Duchess of York had, at the request of the Queen, suggested the propriety of procuring spiritual assistance. “For such assistance,” continues Macaulay, “Charles was at last indebted to an agency very different from that of his pious wife and sister-in-law.” A life of frivolity and vice had not extinguished in the Duchess of Portsmouth all sentiments of religion, or all that kindness which is the glory of her sex. The French Ambassador, Barillon, who had come to the palace to inquire after the King, paid her a visit. He found her in an agony of sorrow. She took him into a secret room, and poured out her whole heart to him. “I have,” she said, “a thing of great moment to tell you. If it were known, my head would be in danger. The King is really and truly a Catholic; but he will die without being reconciled to the Church. His bedchamber is full of Protestant clergymen. I cannot enter it without giving scandal. The Duke is thinking only of himself. Speak to him. Remind him that there is a soul at stake. He is master now. He can clear the room. Go this instant, or it will be too late.”

Barillon hastened to the bedchamber, took the Duke aside, and delivered the message of the mistress. The conscience of James smote him. He started as if roused from sleep, and declared that nothing should prevent him discharging the sacred duty which had been so long delayed. Several schemes were discussed and rejected. At last the Duke commanded the crowd to stand aloof, went to the bed, stooped down, and whispered something which none of the spectators could hear, but which they supposed to be some question about affairs of state. Charles answered in an audible voice, “Yes, yes, with all my heart.” None of the bystanders, except the French Ambassador, guessed that the King was declaring his wish to be admitted into the bosom of the Church of Rome.

The difficulty was to find a priest at a moment’s notice; for, as the law then stood, the person who admitted a proselyte into the Roman Catholic Church was guilty of a capital crime. John Huddleston, a Benedictine monk, however, who had, with great risk to himself, saved the King’s life after the battle of Worcester, readily consented to put his life a second time in peril for his prince. Father Huddleston was admitted by the back door. A cloak had been thrown over his sacred vestments; and his shaven crown was concealed by a flowing wig. “Sir,” said the Duke, “this good man once saved your life. He now comes to save your soul.” Charles faintly answered, “He is welcome.” Huddleston went through his part better than had been expected, for he was so illiterate that he did not know what he ought to say on an occasion of so much importance, and had to be instructed on the spot by a Portuguese ecclesiastic, one Castel Melhor. The whole ceremony occupied about three-quarters of an hour; and, during that time, the courtiers who filled the outer room had communicated their suspicions to each other by whispers and significant glances. The door was at length thrown open, and the crowd again filled the chamber of death.

It was now late in the evening. The King seemed much relieved by what had passed. His natural children were brought to his bedside—the Dukes of Grafton, Southampton, and Northumberland, sons of the Duchess of Cleveland; the Duke of St. Albans, son of Eleanor Gwynne; and the Duke of Richmond, son of the Duchess of Portsmouth. Charles blessed them all, but spoke with peculiar tenderness to Richmond. One face, which should have been there, was wanting. The eldest and best beloved child was an exile and a wanderer. His name was not once mentioned by his father.

During the night Charles earnestly recommended the Duchess of Portsmouth and her boy to the care of James; “And do not,” he good-naturedly added, “let poor Nelly starve.” The Queen sent excuses for her absence by Halifax. She said she was too much disordered to resume her post by the couch, and implored pardon for any offence which she might unwittingly have given. “She asks my pardon, poor woman!” cried Charles; “I ask hers with all my heart.”

At noon of the next day (Friday, February 6th) he passed away without a struggle.

As it commonly happens in the sequel of such sudden and mournful events, the most absurd rumours did not fail to be circulated on the subject of Charles’s death. According to one, the Duchess of Portsmouth had poisoned the King with a cup of chocolate; another asserted that the Queen had poisoned him with a jar of preserved pears. Time has done justice to these ridiculous suspicions; but that which will probably never be discovered is the exact nature of the unfortunate monarch’s malady, whom a deplorable fatality caused to fall into the hands of ignorant physicians who, not being able to agree amongst themselves, tortured the patient haphazard for many hours together.

Hume, at the end of his dissertation upon the hypothesis of the poisoning of Charles, relates the following anecdote:—“Mr. Henley, of Hampshire, told me that the Duchess of Portsmouth having come to England in 1699, he learned that she had caused it to be understood that Charles II. had been poisoned, and that, being desirous of ascertaining the fact from the Duchess’s own mouth, she told him that she continually urged the King to place himself at his ease as well as his people, and to live in perfect understanding with his Parliament; that he had taken the resolution of sending his brother out of the kingdom, and to convoke a Parliament, which was to have been put in execution on the day after that upon which he was seized with his first access; that, above everything, the King recommended her to keep it secret, and that she had only revealed it to her confessor; but she believed that her confessor had revealed the secret to persons who made use of that evil means of preventing the coup d’état.”

If such, indeed, was the political attitude of the Duchess during the last months of Charles’s life, it may be conceived that the supreme recommendations of the dying monarch may have exercised little influence over the predetermined resolves of his ignoble successor, and it explains the sudden step she took to regain her native country. On her return to France she carried with her a large treasure in money and jewels. She had come to England poor, had lived there in splendour, but without much care for the future, and having proudly enjoyed a full-blown prosperity, was now about to endure adversity with courageous resolution. Having quarrelled with James II., the Duchess could not think of taking up her abode at Versailles, where her position would not have been tenable; she determined therefore to settle herself in Paris, where her house and surroundings became the object of a rigorous surveillance.

“It reached the King’s ears,” says Saint-Simon, “that great freedom of speech prevailed in her circle, and that she herself spoke very freely of him and Madame de Maintenon, upon which M. de Louvois was directed to prepare immediately a lettre de cachet to exile her far away. Courtin was an intimate friend of Louvois, who had a small house at Meudon, where the former was accustomed to enter his cabinet unceremoniously at all hours. On his entrance one evening, he found Louvois alone writing, and whilst the minister was absorbed in that occupation, Courtin perceived the lettre de cachet lying upon the bureau. When Louvois had finished writing, Courtin, with some emotion, asked him what that lettre de cachet was? Louvois told him its purpose. Courtin remarked that it was surely an ungracious act, for that, even if the report were true, the King might be content to go no further than advising her to be more circumspect. He begged and entreated him to tell the King so on his part before acting upon the lettre de cachet; and that, if the King would not believe his words, he should get him, before going further, to look at the despatches of his negotiations with England, especially those relating to the important results he had obtained through the Duchess of Portsmouth at the time of the Dutch war, and during the whole of his embassy; and that after such services rendered by her, it would be dishonour to himself to forget them. Louvois, who remembered it all very well, after Courtin had reminded him of several important facts, suspended the execution of the lettre de cachet, and gave the King an account of the interview, and of what Courtin had said; and upon such testimony, which recalled several facts to the King’s mind, he ordered the lettre de cachet to be thrown into the fire, and had the Duchess of Portsmouth admonished to be more reserved in future. She defended herself stoutly from what had been imputed to her, and, true or false, she took heed in future of the nature of the conversation which was held at her house.

Louis XIV., become a bigot and a persecutor, suffered none but silent and submissive slaves to surround him. The Duchess showed herself docile to Courtin’s advice, and passed in profound obscurity the many long years which, remained to her of existence. Saint-Simon and Dangeau say nothing more about her, save to enregister the meagre favours which the Court measured out with an avaricious hand, and that woman, to whom was owing the signature of the Treaty of Niméguen, was reduced in 1689 to solicit a pension of 20,000 livres, which was considerably diminished when the disasters soon afterwards happened which impoverished the French nation.

Such was the parsimony exercised by the great Monarch towards a woman who had laboured strenuously for French interests so long as her sway over Charles of England lasted, and which sway only ceased with his life. “Therein she employed unceasingly all her talent for politics, all her fascinations, all her wit,” says the English chronicler already cited, and whose object has been, according to his translator, anonymous like himself, to demonstrate that if Charles II. acted in a way so little conformable to the interests not only of several foreign states, but still more of his own kingdom, it was the Duchess of Portsmouth who urged him to it, through the passion with which she had inspired him, by her cunning, and the power she possessed over his mind. The same translator afterwards remarks, that “this lady obtained more easily from the King in a moment and with a coup de langue things the most unreasonable and the most contrary to true policy, than all the most judicious, the most voluble, the most insinuating persons could obtain from him in matters infinitely reasonable and just.” Without attributing to the Duchess of Portsmouth a power of action so prejudicial to the interests of the British nation as her anonymous biographer has done, who wrote under the excitement of discontent caused, says Lyttleton, by “the strengthening of the alliance with France, the secret enemy of England and the Protestant religion, as well as by a costly war with Holland, her natural ally,” Hume states that “during the rest of his life Charles II. was extremely attached to Querouaille, and that this favourite contributed greatly to the close alliance between her own country and England.” Voltaire, without particularising the effects of the ascendancy of the Duchess of Portsmouth over Charles II., says that that monarch “was governed by her to the very last moment of his life.” He adds that “her beauty equalled that of Madame de Montespan, and that she was in England what the other beauty had been in France, but with more influence.” This assertion, accurate as it is so far as concerns political influence—for Madame de Montespan never exercised any over the government of Louis XIV.—is not equally so with regard to the question of beauty. On that head, indeed, the Duchess had her detractors. “I have seen that famous beauty, Mademoiselle Querouaille,” wrote Evelyn in his Diary, about a month after her arrival in England; “but, in my opinion, she is of a childish, simple, and baby face.”

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Duchess of Cleveland.

[11] Letter 190.

[12] Macaulay.

[13] Evelyn’s Diary, Jan. 24, 1681-2. Oct. 4, 1683.

PART III.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

TWO LADIES OF THE BEDCHAMBER DURING THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION, LADY CHURCHILL AND THE PRINCESS DES URSINS—POLITICAL MOTIVES FOR THEIR ELEVATION IN ENGLAND AND SPAIN.

At the outset of that historic period known as the War of the Spanish Succession a remarkable feature presents itself in the fact that two women were chosen to be, as it were, its advanced sentinels—the one of the Austrian party in England, the other of the French party in Spain. These were Lady Churchill (wife of the famous soldier, Marlborough), first lady of the bedchamber to our Queen Anne, and the Princess des Ursins, fulfilling, under the title of Camerara-Mayor, the same functions for the new Queen of Spain, Marie-Louise of Savoy, first wife of Philip V.

The perpetual struggle previously waged between France and Spain for two centuries constitutes a theme of no ordinary interest. True, that in modern times armed interventions and dynastic and family tendencies have attested the political predominance of the former power, but it was not so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the bigoted Philip II. looked upon himself as the head of all Catholicism and the vicegerent of God on earth. The general character of the struggle, the events, the men, the results, are all worthy of consideration, and replete with illustrations of historical and political adventure. Every effort made by the two great adversaries shook Europe to its centre, and the ultimate result of each has always been in favour of the great cause of religious and political freedom. Two centuries of warfare between two absolute governments and two states so profoundly Catholic gave birth to the first European republic—Holland; and served to confirm the power of the great Protestant state—England; and to establish religious liberty in Germany.

A brief glance at the more immediate circumstances which brought about this War of Succession may here be necessary. The Treaty of the Pyrenees had terminated the long struggle above alluded to; peace being cemented by the marriage of the Infanta Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV. of Spain, to the young Louis XIV. of France, on the 3rd of June, 1660. The royal husband renounced for himself and his heirs all right of succession to the Spanish throne, but was promised in return a moderate dowry, which, however, was only partially paid. Forty years after this marriage, Charles II. of Spain, widowed, childless, and broken in health, selected as his successor Prince Leopold of Bavaria, but he died when five years old. In this difficulty Charles consulted Pope Innocent XII., who decreed that the children of the Dauphin of France were the true, only, and legitimate heirs. But this negotiation was conducted with such profound secresy that it was only after the accession of Philip V., grandson of Louis XIV., that the Pope’s interference became public.

The Holy Father’s reply, however, was so positive, that all the scruples of Charles II. were removed. His previous will was immediately burnt in the presence of his confessor; and a new one drawn up wherein Philip d’Anjou was declared absolute heir to the crown and kingdom of Spain; which, in the event of his demise, were to devolve to the Duke de Berri, third son of the Dauphin; and, he failing, to the Archduke Charles; with the reservation, as regarded the two first, that they should not unite in their own persons the sovereignties of France and Spain; and in that of the third that he should renounce all claim to the empire of Germany if he ever became heir to the Spanish throne; while it was, moreover, finally decreed that, if by any extraordinary concatenation of events, neither of those three princes should be enabled to claim the bequest of Charles II., it should devolve upon the Duke of Savoy without any restriction whatever.

The precaution was well-timed; for shortly afterwards, Charles, losing the use of his faculties, descended into the vaults of the Escurial, where he had commanded the tombs of his father, mother, and first wife to be opened in order that he might consult their tenants upon the sacred obligations of the will he had just signed. Wildly interrogating the mouldering relics, upon which he imprinted impassioned kisses, the unfortunate monarch fell senseless upon an adjacent tomb, destined shortly to receive his own remains, and was carried from those gloomy sepulchres back to his couch only to be borne back again in a few short days a corpse.

The royal will—the subject of so much gloomy meditation, of discussions the most anxious in the councils of the Escurial, and of intrigues the most active on the part of the foreigner, had been accepted by Louis XIV. in the name of his grandson, the Duke d’Anjou. The cabinet of Versailles, hoping to ally the Duke of Savoy to its policy, had brought about a marriage between Philip V. and the daughter of Victor Amadeus II., Marie Louise, sister of the young Duchess of Burgundy. The House of Hapsburg, during a period of almost hopeless anarchy, had exhausted its efforts in the attempt to establish a political duality in Spain. “If the government of that monarchy be closely scrutinised,” wrote Count de Rébenac,[14] “it will be found that disorder everywhere prevails to an excessive degree; but that, in the condition in which matters stand, scarcely any change can be ventured upon without risk of incurring dangers more to be dreaded than the existing evils, and a complete revolution would be necessary before perfect order in the state could be re-established.” Rébenac added that it was not the elements of strength that were wanting to Spain, but that they were scattered as in a chaos, and that no master-mind existed capable of reducing them to order and unity. The dynasty, in fact, which reigned at Madrid at that juncture had passed from incapacity to impotence, and henceforward there only remained to Spain her law of succession to rescue her from her abasement. The miserable Charles II. was then making and unmaking his will continually—sometimes indicating a prince of Bavaria as his successor, at others a prince of the house of Austria. At last he chose, as has been said, a grandson of Louis XIV., in the hope of interesting France in the preservation of the duality of the monarchy. Two years afterwards one half of Europe was in arms to hurl the youthful Philip from his throne.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Memoirs of Count de Rébenac’s Embassy to Spain in 1689, MS. No. 63, fol. 224, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

CHAPTER II.

THE PRINCESS DES URSINS.

THE MARRIED LIFE OF MARIE ANNE DE LA TRÉMOUILLE—SHE BECOMES THE CENTRE OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ROME.

Among the heroines of the Fronde there were certainly lofty minds and strongly tempered souls to be found; but, when the French nation remitted to those Erminias and Hermengildas the care of its destiny upon some grave emergency or decisive occasion, those very women so conspicuous for their generous impulses, delicate tastes, and unsparing self-abnegation, only profited by their possession of power to inaugurate a policy the record of which has remained branded with opprobrium in history as a treason to their country. The bare remembrance, indeed, of those sterile agitations proves the first rock upon which the memory of the Princess des Ursins suffered shipwreck. In the brilliant daughter of the Duke de Noirmoutier, heiress of a name mixed up with all the struggles of that epoch, we behold a last survivor of the Regency, and the dramatic vicissitudes of a life devoted to the pursuit of political power, have blinded the mental vision of posterity to the grandeur of a work of which that eminent woman was the principal instrument. Proud and restless, as largely dominated as any other of her sex by the vivacity of her preferences and her dislikes, but full of sound sense in her views and in the firmness of her designs, the skilful adviser of a King and Queen of Spain has not received at the hands of posterity the merit due to an idea pursued with a wonderful perseverance amidst obstacles which would have daunted men even of the strongest resolution. Because her public career ended in a catastrophe, popular opinion, which readily follows success, considers as merely abortive that long career during which her hand sustained upon the brow of a French prince the tottering crown against which the arms of Europe, the distrust of Spain, and the discouragement of France vied in conspiring.

Yet in her girlhood, during the last days of the Fronde, Marie Anne de la Trémouille must early have observed how greatly beauty can aid ambition, and how, by tact, endowments the most frivolous may be brought to the service of interests the most serious and complicated. Married in 1650 to the Prince de Chalais, of the house of Talleyrand, she conceived for her young husband the sole passion to be noted throughout a life in which, especially during its later period, love figured only in the dullest of hues. This marriage took place during the wars of the second Fronde, and at an epoch when a rage for duelling, the anarchical and ruthless effect of Frenchmen’s ideas touching the “point of honour,” had infused a new element into the spirit of party, and had become a veritable mania. It chanced on the occasion of one of those duels in 1663—that of the two brothers Frette—wherein four fought on either side, and in which the Duke de Beauvilliers was slain, that the Prince de Chalais figured as one of the champions. The law against duelling, enforced by Henri Quatre, and revived with so much rigour by Richelieu against the father of the famous Marshal de Luxembourg, and from which practice the blood of Bouteville had not completely delivered France, was still in full vigour. The consequences being so terrible, that the Prince de Chalais, to place himself beyond reach of them, was compelled to seek safety in flight. He succeeded in escaping to Spain, whither his wife followed him.

During this brief period of her union with the Prince de Chalais, whom she adored, Marie Anne de la Trémouille had shone as conspicuously by her wit as by her beauty in the famous circle of the Hôtel d’Albret, where she first met Madame Scarron, whose destiny it was later on in life—as Madame de Maintenon—to be so closely allied with the Princess. Thus united by ties of the tenderest affection, scarcely had the young couple quitted Madrid, after a three years’ sojourn, to establish themselves at Rome, when the death of M. de Chalais left her a childless widow, without protection, and almost destitute—a prey to grief apparently the most profound, and to anxieties concerning the future readily conceivable.

Madame de Chalais was then in the plenitude of that attractive beauty so closely observed and described in all its most delicate shades by the graphic pen of the Duke de Saint-Simon when at a more advanced period of her life, but on which beauty, by a miracle of art and nature, the wasting hand of time had as yet scarcely brought a blemish.

The first years of her widowhood, passed in a convent, were marked by the liveliest sorrow. By degrees, however, love of society resumed its sway over her, and she reappeared therein with all her wonted attractiveness, markedly patronised in the highest circles of Roman society by Cardinal d’Estrées, the French ambassador—assuredly not without design, since at the same time that high functionary so distinguished her, he directed the attention of Louis XIV. to the wit and capacity of the charming widow. It was, therefore, in great measure with a political purpose, and by the diplomatic tact of the two brothers d’Estrées, that the second marriage of the Princess de Chalais with Flavio Orsini, Duke di Bracciano, himself a widower, was arranged (1675). Thenceforward the Palazzo Orsini became the focus of French influence, which was further increased by a marriage promoted between her sister Louise Angélique de la Trémouille and her brother-in-law, the Duke de Lanti.

She thus, therefore, became definitively an inhabitant of Rome and quasi Roman. What did she do there? How did she consort with an Italian husband? With what ambition was she soon inspired in the more elevated position in which her second marriage placed her at Rome? What talents, what political aptitude were manifested by her, and developed at a court which at that time bore the highest repute for skill in politics and diplomacy? How did Italian finesse and cunning blend and harmonize with the quick penetration and delicate tact of the Frenchwoman? What advantage did the French government, which, after the death of the Prince de Chalais, could no longer treat her as a proscribed subject, seek to draw immediately from her position and disposition? What were her relations with the first personages at the court of France, with the Roman cardinals, with the French ambassadors at Rome, with the representatives or the principal personages of other nations, and what splendour did her palace display, whether through the influence of natural taste or a calculating ambition? In a word, what was the mode of life, and what was the career of the Duchess di Bracciano, at Rome, before she proceeded to make application of the science she must there have acquired upon another and a wider stage? These are the curious and interesting points, upon which the recent discovery in the public library at Stockholm, of copies of nearly one hundred inedited letters addressed by the Princess des Ursins to Madame la Maréchale de Noailles and Madame de Maintenon, in addition to five long letters published by the Abbé Millot,[15] enable us to furnish very nearly complete details, ranging from 1675 to 1701.

Owning as its mistress a woman so abundantly charming, the Palazzo Orsini became more than ever the rendezvous of the best society. The Duchess di Bracciano held therein an actual Court, as numerous also as it was distinguished. Each visitor delighted to frequent it, in order to witness with his own eyes to what a degree of perfection and gracefulness a French lady could attain. The men especially sought her society; for although womanly, and more so than many around her, the habitual subject of their conversations pleased her better than those of persons of her own sex, and she therein exhibited a solidity of understanding, a correctness of view, together with a perfect lucidity of expression which captivated the Roman nobles, and made them feel it a satisfaction to submit their ideas to her, and hear her discuss them. The Duke di Bracciano was not mentally up to her mark, nevertheless in the first season which followed their union, a season of complaisant affection, when susceptibility was held in check by a more spontaneous admiration, he felt himself flattered by the homage she received, and which wore the semblance of an eulogium upon his choice and good taste. But, eventually, too mediocre, or too much kept in the background, not having wit enough himself to appreciate that of his brilliant partner without blushing at his own defect, or, it might be, sufficient consideration not being given to the inevitable arousing of his masculine amour propre, he sought to attribute to himself the popularity which she obtained, and that which might have constituted his pride became his torment. It would have been wanting in dignity to himself, he felt, ever to have owned or even in the least degree betrayed the secret motive of his wounded self-love; but the excessive extravagance of his wife, and the enormous expenses in which she involved him afforded ample pretext for his complaints: such was the ground, therefore, upon which he fell back. The Princess unhappily comprehended all this, and went to greater lengths than ever: hence untoward misunderstandings ere long arose between them.

Nevertheless, through the effect of her irresistible attractions, the Duchess di Bracciano became the centre of a cosmopolitan society which, in the midst of the noisiest diversions, debated daily in the capital of the papal dominions the weightiest problems of contemporary politics. Whilst externally her palace on the Piazza Navone blazed broadly with illuminated devices and coloured fires, and made all the echoes of Rome resound in pealing harmonies with the name of Louis the Great, in the interior of her magnificent saloons the vicissitudes of the long struggle waged between that monarch and the Holy Father were watched with inquietude, whether as concerning regal claims or the question of religious freedom—a portentous strife which seemed to increase in energy at each fresh act of violence on the part of Louis XIV. against his Protestant subjects. To the arduous questions in which theology ran so closely parallel with State interests, to the burning rivalries of doctrines and persons which then set by the ears the most illustrious among Christian prelates, were added the daily accidents of a policy to which fell the burden of maintaining in all corners of the universe a constant equilibrium between the Houses of France and Austria—a permanent problem which soon helped to complicate the perspective opened by the next succession to the Crown of Spain.

In such a school—borne along the brimming tide of pleasure by the soft breeze of homage—did Madame di Bracciano’s political intelligence rapidly ripen: and if by a glittering gaiety, ease of manner, and a species of decorous gallantry, her life appeared to continue the traditions of Anne of Austria’s time, the restrained firmness of her opinions, her reverence for absolute authority, her settled resolve to owe nothing to any one save to her own Great King, combined to link her fast to the new school of power and respect founded by Louis XIV. in the plenitude of his sway. Thus the passion for politics and power was not slow to obtain the mastery over the mind of a woman constituted like Marie Anne de la Trémouille, who had failed to find in her second marriage any community of taste or intellect.

The disputes between Louis and Innocent XI. proved, perhaps, another source of disunion between the ducal pair. The Orsini were in some sort a sacerdotal family, at the same time that they stood at the head of the Roman aristocracy: it had always furnished Pontiffs and Cardinals to the Church. It was not, therefore, probable that the Duke di Bracciano, who was its chief, should hold, in those famous quarrels, an opinion contrary to that of the Holy Father, more especially if, as it was rumoured, having no child, he had by an adoption long kept secret, sought for a son in the family of Innocent XI. himself. The same induction cannot be drawn from acts which were comprised in the life of the Duchess di Bracciano. Whether at Rome or at Madrid, the ideas held by the Court of Versailles upon dogmatic questions, or upon the relations of the Church with the State, were hers also; and in Italy, in the halls of the Vatican, she openly evinced her detestation of the Jesuits, in whom the Ultramontane doctrines were personified. Therein, in all probability, lay a new stumbling block against which the conjugal harmony jarred, already shaken as it was by all the dissemblances of habit, appreciation, and of taste, which difference of nationality engendered. “Ce ménage ne fut pas concordant,” says Saint-Simon; “quoique sans brouillerie ouverte, et les époux furent quelquefois bien aises de se séparer.”

To escape from these different causes of domestic ennui, the Duchess di Bracciano varied her sojourn in Italy by long and frequent visits to France, going thither to present, by clever and well-timed calculation, the spectacle of a Roman princess whom no one even within the grandiose precincts of Versailles surpassed either in true French esprit or steady devotion to the Sovereign. The Duchess formed a close intimacy with the Maréchale de Noailles, to whom she was related; she made the acquaintance of the minister Torcy, who was capable of appreciating all the varied resources of her woman’s nature and her woman’s wit; and she was presented to Madame de Maintenon, who had become the goddess of the Court. Her second visit took place shortly after the period of the Treaty of Ryswick—that is to say, near upon that fatal conjuncture at which Louis XIV. saw England escape him for ever, supported as she was by the Dutch alliance, and had hope only from the Court of Spain to counterbalance the formidable union of his enemies. This was the reason that each of those personages, at Versailles or Paris, had for retaining the Duchess di Bracciano in the interests of France in the future succession of Spain, and recommended them to her at the Papal Court, to the Spanish Ambassador at Rome, the Duke d’Uzeda, or indeed to any other Spaniard of distinction whom she might meet with in that capital.

The letters addressed to the Duchess Lanti, her sister, which are, as it were, a last echo of the conversations of the Hôtel d’Albret,[16] were for the most part written from Paris between the years 1685 and 1698, the latter being the date of the demise of the Duke di Bracciano. The advanced age and failing health of her second husband had, in that year, summoned her back to Rome, and a kind of reconciliation, brought about chiefly through the good offices of Cardinal Porto-Carrero—soon afterwards destined to play a great part in the political affairs of his native country—had preceded that demise, which placed the Duchess in possession of estates and property reputed to be considerable, but upon which heavy incumbrances, increased by lawsuits, brought down upon her endless anxiety and almost ruin.

The obligation of discharging an immense amount of debt compelled Madame di Bracciano to part with the property of the duchy bearing that name. She was, therefore, forced to relinquish that title and adopt that of Princess des Ursins (Orsini), under which she has taken her place in history. The beneficence of the French King was assured beforehand to a noble widow married under his auspices, ruined, so to speak, in his service, and whose palace had become the residence of his ambassador from the moment that the Prince de Monaco had superseded the disgraced Cardinal de Bouillon in that high post. The Princess obtained, therefore, one of those Court pensions, the ordinary patrimony of all great families, and of which the good offices of the Maréchale de Noailles, the staunch patroness of her kinswoman, had ere long succeeded in doubling the amount, when the death of Cardinal Maidalchini had left the considerable subsidy disposable by which that member of the Sacred College was secretly secured to the policy of Louis XIV. She had, indeed, herself solicited an increase of her pension in a charmingly witty letter, in which she undertook to prove how useful it would be for the King’s service that she should be richer. “My house,” says she, “is the only French abode open to the public. It is in my assemblages there that one can speak to people whom it would be difficult to meet with elsewhere.” And thus she rose sufficiently high in the esteem of the cabinet of Versailles to obtain even the recall of the French Ambassador from Rome.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Among the pièces justificatives appended to the Mémoires du Maréchal de Noailles.