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

The Duchess de Longueville herself remained as strongly opposed to the Cardinal as ever. But though she still retained towards Anne of Austria that dislike which she had always felt, and which the sense of an inferiority of station greatly augmented in a woman of a haughty and ambitious character, she found herself obliged, in common propriety, to appear at Court on the conclusion of the Siege of Paris. The first visits of her husband and herself, after the insurrection, were rendered remarkable by the extraordinary degree of embarrassment and timidity shown by two such bold and fearless persons. The Duke de Longueville arrived first, coming from Normandy; and was followed by a very numerous and splendid train, as though he rested for mental support upon the number of his retainers. The Queen received him in the midst of her Court, with Mazarin standing beside her; and every one crowded round to hear what excuses the Duke would offer for abandoning the royal family at the moment of their greatest need. Longueville, however, approached the Regent with a troubled and embarrassed air, attempted to speak, became first deadly pale, and then as red as fire, but could not utter a word. He then turned and bowed to Mazarin, who came forward, spoke to him, and led him to a window, where they conversed for some time together in private; after which they visited each other frequently, and became apparent friends.

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

As there was no sincerity in these reconciliations, it is not surprising to find that ere long the conduct of the Prince de Conde gave no slight uneasiness to Mazarin. The Prince had, however, brought back the Court to Paris; but from that very day he had shown a great change in his attitude, and it is to the influence of La Rochefoucauld that such change must be attributed. At that moment, in fact, the Sieur Conde had become reconciled with every member of his family, and even with his sister's lover. He drew closer also the links between himself and the Duke d'Orleans, for whom he shewed great deference, say his contemporaries, and he began to treat Mazarin with much indifference, rallying him publicly, and declaring aloud that he regretted to have maintained him in a post of which he was so little worthy. Enjoying a great military reputation, feared and esteemed by the bulk of his countrymen, he chafed at seeing himself compromised by the unpopularity of the Cardinal. He thought that by drawing closer to the Frondeurs, he should rid himself of the feeling that oppressed him. In the outset, he had no idea of actively joining that faction, but his sister did the rest, and hurried him on to become the enemy of that party of which he had just been the saviour.

It is true that, for the memorable service which he had recently rendered, Conde reaped scarcely any benefit; but his noble conduct increased the splendour of his last campaign of 1648. It added to his military titles those of defender and saviour of the throne, of pacificator of the realm, of arbiter and enlightened conciliator of parties. It gave the climax to his credit and to his glory. Nevertheless, he did not lose sight of the jealous feeling to which such claims gave birth, whether on the part of the Duke d'Orleans or the Prime Minister; and he well knew that he was exposed to one of those coups d'etat, the necessity of which the Chancellor as well as himself had urged at Rueil. He considered himself as the head of the nobility, and that important body seemed to constitute all the military power of the State. But the French nobility was just beginning to lose its former independence of character in becoming more courtierlike. Instead of deriving from its strongholds and vassals the feeling of its strength and equality, it showed itself ambitious of such distinctions as the monarch could confer. In the indulgence of its vanity it lost sight of its proper pride; and if that new emulation which the Bourbons had excited was more easy for the sovereign to satisfy, it was more difficult for the chief of a party to direct. Moreover, Conde, as the Duchess de Nemours remarks, knew better how to win battles than hearts.[1] He found a dangerous pleasure, as did his sister the Duchess de Longueville, in braving malevolence. "In matters of consequence, they delighted to thwart people, and in ordinary life they were so impracticable that there was no getting on with them. They had such a habit of ridiculing one, and of saying offensive things, that nobody could put up with them. When visits were paid to them, they allowed such a scornful ennui to be visible, and showed so openly that their visitors bored them, that it was not difficult to understand that they did everything in their power to get rid of their company. Whatsoever might be the rank or quality of the visitors, people were made to wait any length of time in the Prince's antechamber; and very often, after having long waited, everybody was sent away without getting an interview, however short. When they were displeased they pushed people to the utmost extremity, and they were incapable of showing any gratitude for services done them. Thus they were alike hated by the Court, by the Fronde, and by the populace, and nobody could live with them long. All France impatiently suffered their irritating conduct, and especially their pride, which was excessive."[2]

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

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

In looking at the faulty side of Conde's character, we must not forget to observe the disinterested firmness with which, without considering either his family or his friends, he had hitherto acted in the interests of the King. Happy would it have been, if, after having thus terminated this sad civil war, he had quitted the Court and its intrigues to seek other battlefields, and to finish another war somewhat more useful and glorious to France—that which still remained with Spain! Happy, also for Madame de Longueville, if, taught by her own conscience, in her last interview with the Queen, and by the shameful denouement of the miserable intrigues of which she had the secret, instead of still serving as their instrument, she had shown her courage in resisting them. Happy too, if, after all the proofs of devotion which she had just given to La Rochefoucauld, she had firmly represented to him that, even for his own interest, a different course was necessary; that it would be better to look for fortune and honours by rendering himself esteemed than by trying to make himself feared; that ambition as well as duty showed his place to be by the side of Conde, in the service of the State and of the King; that it was easy for him to obtain in the army some post where he would simply have to march forward and do his duty, trusting to his courage and his other merits!

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



CHAPTER VI.

THE CAUSES WHICH LED TO THE COUP D'ETAT—THE ARREST OF THE PRINCES.

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

Anne of Austria long hesitated as to what she should do to deliver herself from the domination of a man whom she feared without loving: but at length an aggravated insult to herself, and the counsels of a woman of a bold and daring character, removed her irresolution. The Duchess de Chevreuse had been exiled from France, as we have seen, during the greater part of that period in which Conde had principally distinguished himself, and she did not share in the awe in which the Parisians held him. She still kept up what De Retz calls an incomprehensible union with the Queen, notwithstanding all her intrigues; nor did she scruple to hold out to Anne of Austria a direct prospect of gaining the support of the Fronde itself in favour of her Government, if that Government would aid in avenging the Fronde upon the Prince de Conde.

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

The hollow treaty of peace of the 11th March, 1649, had scarcely been signed ere the Prince de Conde showed himself day by day more strongly attached to the faction which opposed the Court. Feeling his own importance, determined to rule; quick, harsh, and impetuous in his manners, he took a pleasure in insulting the Minister and embarrassing the Queen. There were some personal grounds for this in the strong dislike manifested towards his sister by Anne of Austria. That feeling was signally shown on the occasion of Louis XIV. completing his eleventh year; when a grand ball was given at the Hotel de Ville, at which the young King, with all the principal members of the royal family and the Court, were present. The Queen's orders were received with regard to all the arrangements, every person of distinction being invited by her command, except the Duchess de Longueville. That princess, influenced by discontent, it is supposed, at the reception of the royal family in Paris, had remained at Chantilly, on the pretence of drinking some mineral waters in the neighbourhood. The Queen seized the same pretext not to invite her, replying to those who pressed her to do so, that she would not withdraw her from the pursuit of health; but at length the Prince de Conde himself, demanded that she should receive a summons; and his support was of too much consequence, and the bonds which attached him to the Court too slight, for the Queen to trifle with his request.

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

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

The reconciliation effected during the preceding year was rather, as has been said, a truce between the parties than a solid peace. The Parliament had retained the right of assembling and deliberating upon affairs of state, which the Court had sought to prevent: and Mazarin remained Minister, although the Parliament, the people, and even the princes, had desired that he should cease to hold that office. It rarely happens to states in like unfortunate emergencies that among the men who show themselves most active and skilful in overthrowing a government there are found those capable of conducting one; and when such do appear, the chances almost always are that circumstances hinder them from placing themselves in the front rank. It was to Gaston, the King's uncle, Lieutenant-General of the kingdom, that belonged, in concert with the Regent, the chief direction of affairs; but Gaston felt himself too weak and too incapable to pretend to charge himself with such a burden. He could never arrive at any decision, and took offence when any matter was decided without him. Jealous of Mazarin's influence, more jealous still of that of Conde, neither of the two could attempt to govern along with him; and nevertheless Gaston was powerful enough to command a party, and to hinder any one from governing without him: ready to offer opposition to everything, but impotent to carry anything into execution. If Anne of Austria had even consented to dismiss her favourite Minister, and overcome her repugnance to the Fronde and the Frondeurs, she could not have formed a government with the chiefs of that party. The Duke de Beaufort, its nominal head, lacked both instruction and intelligence. De Retz, its veritable chief—an eloquent, witty, and bold man, skilful in the conduct of business, in the art of making partisans; brave, generous, even loyal when he followed the impulses of his own mind and natural inclination—was without faith, scruple, reticence, or foresight when he abandoned himself to his passions, which urged him unceasingly to the indulgence of an excessive and irrational libertinage. Such a man could not have replaced him who for so long a period had informed himself of the affairs of France under a master such as Richelieu; who, deeply versed in dissimulation, was inaccessible to any sentiment that might possibly derange the calculations of his ambition. Besides, he, as well as Mazarin, would have had the Princes against him, and could not have resisted successfully their numerous partisans. De Retz had, through the ascendancy of his talents, great influence with the Parisian Parliament, but it mistrusted him; and that body, in its heterogeneous composition, offered rather the means for an opposition than strength to the Government. Conde, to whom the state owed its glory, and the Sovereign his safety, was therefore the sole prop upon which Anne of Austria might have rested; but that young hero had no capacity for business. He could not then have filled up the void which Mazarin's retirement would have created. Conde, whose natural pride was still further exalted by the flattery of the young nobles who formed his train, and who obtained the nickname of petits maitres, only used the influence which his position gave him to wring from Mazarin the places and good things at his disposal, and of these he and his adherents showed themselves insatiable. Thus, Conde rendered himself formidable and odious to Mazarin, and made himself detested by the people as Mazarin's supporter, at the same time that by his arrogance he shocked the Parliament, already unfavourably disposed towards him on account of his rapacity and his ambition.[1]

[1] Talon, mem. t. lxii. pp. 65-105.—Montpensier.

Such was the state of things, when the singular circumstances which attended the murder of one of Conde's domestics made that prince believe that the chiefs of the Fronde had conspired to assassinate him. He thought, by such a crime, to have found an opportunity for crushing that faction in the persons of its chiefs, and he instituted a process in parliament against the contrivers of that murder. Public report particularly pointed to two persons, De Retz and Beaufort; and Conde, by his accusation, hoped to force them to quit Paris, where they found their principal means of influence in the populace. But in attacking thus, as it were, face to face, the two most popular men of the moment, Conde showed no better tact than in dealing with the Prime Minister. He conducted himself with so much haughtiness and arrogance, that the young nobles who surrounded the soldier prince, when they wished to flatter him, spoke of Mazarin as his slave.[2]

[2] Motteville, mem. t. xxxix. p. 4.—Guy-Joly.

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

Under such circumstances Conde had need of all his friends, but he considered that he was set at defiance, and he gave way all the more to his wonted pride and overbearing obstinacy. He seemed to take pleasure in offending Anne of Austria and Mazarin. The young Duke de Richelieu had been declared heir to an immense fortune, of which his aunt and guardian, the Duchess d'Aiguillon, was the depositary. The stronghold of Havre de Grace, which the Cardinal de Richelieu had formerly held as a place of retreat, was by such title in the possession of the Duchess d'Aiguillon. Conde desired to be master of it, either for himself or for his brother-in-law, the Duke de Longueville. The young Duke de Richelieu was engaged to be married to Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, but the Prince having remarked that he had some liking for Madame de Pons, a sister of his own first love, managed to marry him clandestinely to her in the Chateau de Trye, lent him two thousand pistoles until he should be of age to enter upon possession of his property, and made him take possession of Havre de Grace. The Queen was mortally offended at such a proceeding on the part of Conde, who had moreover threatened to throw into the sea those she might send to Havre to seize the fortress; but the Duchess d'Aiguillon's resentment was still deeper and more active. She was the first to tell Anne of Austria, that she would never be queen again until she had had the Prince de Conde arrested, assuring her that all the Frondeurs would lend their hands to aid her in carrying out such a resolution.

Almost at this moment, a gentleman named Jarze, attached to Conde, foolishly took it into his head that the Queen entertained a liking for him, and it reached her ears that Conde and his friends had amused themselves whilst at table over their wine with Jarze's revelations of his amour with her, and that he had begun to feel certain of getting rid of Mazarin by that means. Mazarin himself probably became somewhat alarmed, as he spoke pointedly to the Queen on the subject, who pretended only to have contemplated the ridiculous side of her new adorer's gallantries. But when Jarze next made his appearance in her cabinet, she rated him roundly before the whole Court upon his absurd fatuity, and forbade him ever to enter her presence again. The Prince de Conde, pretending to feel hurt at the affront put upon Jarze, early next morning paid the Prime Minister a visit, and insolently demanded that Jarze should be received that very evening by the Queen. Anne of Austria submitted to his dictation, but could not endure such humiliation without seeking to avenge herself. In a woman's heart every other species of resentment yields to that of wounded pride. A few lines addressed to the Coadjutor in the Queen's own handwriting, and carried by Madame de Chevreuse, brought to her side that wily priest and formidable tribune, disguised en cavalier. Certain negotiations, however, which had preceded this interview, had reached the ears of Conde, who went to Mazarin to denounce the treachery. The Cardinal, glowing with a hatred which would have stopped at nothing for its gratification, laughed and jested, or flattered and soothed the object of his concealed wrath. He turned the Archbishop of Corinth into ridicule when Conde blamed him for his duplicity. "If I catch him," said the Cardinal, "in the disguise you speak of—in his feathered hat, and cloak, and military boots—I will get a sight of him for your Highness;" and they roared at the idea of discovering the intriguer in so unfitting an apparel. But shortly afterwards in the wintry gloom of a January midnight (1650), disguised beyond the reach of detection, and guarded by a passport from the Cardinal himself, De Retz was admitted at midnight by a secret door into the Regent's room at the Palais Royal, and deep conference was held between the two. The conditions of agreement were readily stipulated. The Coadjutor with an inconceivable address and most extraordinary success handled the threads of the intrigues consequent upon such agreement. He succeeded in making himself the confidant of Gaston; he made him renounce his favourite, the Abbe de la Riviere; he engaged him in the coalition which had been just set on foot between the Court and the Fronde, and he obtained his assent to the arrest of the Princes. Everything succeeded that was agreed upon. The Queen-Regent, at the moment of a council being held at the Palais-Royal, gave the fatal order, and then withdrew into her oratory. There she made the young King kneel down beside her in order to invoke Heaven in concert with herself to obtain the happy achievement of an act of tyranny which was destined to produce fresh woes to the realm, and to rekindle in it the flames of civil war.

On the morrow of the 18th of January, 1650, all Paris was electrified at the news of the arrest of the three Princes—Conde, Conti, and Longueville. That bold coup d'etat was effected very easily and unceremoniously. The Princes went voluntarily, as it were, into the mouse-trap, by attending a great council at the Palais Royal. Anne had obtained from Conde an order for the seizure and detention of three or four persons whose names were left in blank; and on the authority of his own signature, the hero of Rocroy and the other two princes, were led quietly down a back stair, given over to the custody of a small escort of twenty men under the command of Guitaut and Comminges, and by them conducted during the night to Vincennes.



CHAPTER VII.

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

THE heroes having thus suddenly disappeared from the scene, the political stage was left clear for the performance of the heroines. We are now about to see the women, almost by themselves, carry on the civil war, govern, intrigue, fight. A great experience for human nature, a fine historical opportunity for observing that gallant transfer of all power from the one sex to the other—the men lagging behind, led, directed, in the second or third ranks. But those women of rank, young, beautiful, brilliant, and for the most part gallant, were doubtless more formidable to the minister at this juncture than the men. The two lovely duchesses, De Longueville and De Bouillon, having shown during the preceding year of what they were capable; the Queen therefore gave orders for their arrest. The wary lover of the fascinating politician who had lately begun to scatter her blandishments equally upon all—La Rochefoucauld—having been apprised by the captain of his quarter that some blow was meditated by Mazarin, had sent twice to warn the Princes through the Marquis de la Moussaye, but who, as it appears, failed to acquit himself of that important mission. But if La Rochefoucauld's warning failed to reach the ears of the Princes, he was more fortunate in effecting the escape of Madame de Longueville. Whilst they were seeking to arrest him as well as La Moussaye, the Queen despatched a note to the Duchess by the Secretary of State, La Vrilliere, begging her to come to the Palais Royal. Instead of going thither she went direct to the Hotel of the Princess Palatine—like herself beautiful, gallant, and intriguing, but endowed with a superior intellect. This lady speedily became the head and mainspring of the princes' party—or of the second Fronde, and the Coadjutor, who directed the Old Fronde, was fain to recognise in her a worthy rival, and his equal in political sagacity. Fearing to be discovered if she remained under the roof of the princess, a carriage was procured, and the duchess driven in it by La Rochefoucauld himself to an obscure house in the Faubourg St. Germain, where they remained until nightfall in a cellar. Thence the Duchess and her lover set out for Normandy on horseback under the escort of forty determined men provided by the Princess Palatine. Brave and resolute as her brother, the sister of Conde rode northwards through that entire winter's night and the following day, and sought no shelter until worn out with excessive fatigue she reached Rouen. But the commandant, the Marquis de Beuvron, although an old friend of the duke, declared he could not serve her, and refused to raise the banner of revolt in that stronghold of her husband's government. Her attempt at Rouen thus receiving a complete check, she had some hope of being received into the citadel of Havre, but the Duchess de Richelieu, though her friend, was not so much mistress there as the Duchess d'Aiguillon, who, on the contrary, was full of resentment against her. Discouraged and repulsed on all hands, the fugitive Duchess next made her way to Dieppe, where she thought herself in sufficient safety to part with La Rochefoucauld, who left her to assist the Duke de Bouillon to raise troops in Angoumois. In the fortress of Dieppe, commanded by a faithful officer of her husband, Madame de Longueville found the rest she so much needed. In a brief space, with spirits recruited, she resolved to make a stand to the uttermost against the Queen and Mazarin, and having replaced the royal standard by that of Conde set about putting the citadel in a state of defence to resist a siege. The Queen, however, having resolved not to give the Duchess time to raise her husband's government of Normandy into revolt, on the 1st of February quitted Paris for Rouen. The band of gentlemen who had gathered round the beautiful Frondeuse thereupon melted away, and Mademoiselle de Longueville, her step-daughter, afterwards Duchess de Nemours, quitted her to take refuge in a convent. As Montigny, the commandant at Dieppe, declared that it was impossible to hold the fortress, the Duchess left the place by a secret portal, followed by her women and some few gentlemen. She held her way for two leagues on foot along the coast to the little port of Tourville, in order to reach a small vessel which she had prudently hired in case of need. On reaching the point of embarkation the sea was breaking so furiously in surf on shore, the tide being so strong and the wind so high, that Madame de Longueville's followers entreated her not to attempt to reach the vessel. But the Duchess, dreading less the angry waves than the chance of falling into the Regent's power, persisted in going to sea. As the state of the tide and weather rendered it impossible for a boat to get near the shore, a sailor took her in his arms to carry her on board, but had not waded above twenty paces when a huge roller carried him off his feet, and he fell with his fair burden. For an instant the poor lady believed that she was lost, as in falling the sailor lost his hold of her and she sank into deep water. On being rescued, however, she expressed her resolve to reach the vessel, but the sailors refusing to make another attempt, she found herself compelled to resort to some other means of escape. Horses being luckily procured, the Duchess mounted en croupe behind one of the gentlemen of her suite, and riding all night and part of the following day, the fugitives met with a hospitable reception from a nobleman of Caux, in whose little manor-house they found rest, refection, and concealment for the space of a week.

The Duchess's tumble into the sea, though a disagreeable, turned out to have been a lucky accident, for she now learnt that the master of the vessel she had been so anxious to reach was in the interest of Mazarin, and had she gone on board she would have been arrested. At length Madame de Longueville found herself once more in Havre, and having won over the captain of an English ship to whom she introduced herself—like Madame de Chevreuse—in male attire, as a nobleman who had just been engaged in a duel, and was obliged to leave France, she succeeded in obtaining a passage to Rotterdam. Thence, passing through Flanders, she reached the stronghold of Stenay,[1] where the Viscomte de Turenne, already compromised with the Court for having openly espoused the Conde party, had shortly before the Duchess's arrival also taken refuge.

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

It was then that the Duchess, who, under the sway of La Rochefoucauld, had been one of the instruments of the first Fronde war, became the motive power of the second and far more serious one—well named by the witty Parisians "the women's war." From the citadel of Stenay, of which she took the command, she directed the wills and actions of the men of her party, into which she thoroughly won over Turenne. Her importunities, aided by her charms, prevailed so powerfully over his valiant though fallible heart, that the illustrious captain, after having struggled painfully for some time with his conscience, allied himself with the Spaniards by a treaty which placed him, as well as the sister of the great Conde, in the pay of the enemies of his king and country. The treaty effectively stipulated "that there should be a junction of the two armies, and that the war should be carried on by the assistance of the King of Spain until a peace should be concluded between the two kings and the princes liberated. That the King of Spain should engage to pay over to Madame de Longueville and to Monsieur de Turenne two hundred thousand crowns wherewith to raise and equip troops; that he should furnish them with forty thousand crowns per month for the payment of such troops, and sixty thousand crowns per annum in three payments for the table and equipages of Madame de Longueville and Monsieur de Turenne." This treaty duly signed, Madame de Longueville issued, in the form of a letter to his Majesty the King of France, a manifesto very skilfully drawn up and filled with artful complaints and accusations against Mazarin, with the design of soliciting through the one and the other an apology for her own conduct, as though it were possible to justify herself for having entered into a compact with the enemies of her country.

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

During the whole of this period, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld gave constant proof of a rare fidelity. M. Cousin speaks very precisely on this head. "Whilst Madame de Longueville was pledging her diamonds in Holland for the defence of Stenay, La Rochefoucauld expended his fortune in Guienne. It was the most grievous and, at the same time, the most touching moment of their lives and their adventures. They were far away from each other, but they still fondly loved; they served with equal ardour the same cause, they fought and suffered equally and at the same time." Abundant proofs might be instanced of this love and devotion on their part. La Rochefoucauld wrote unceasingly to Stenay, and gave an account of everything he did. "The sole aim, then, of all the Duke's exertions," says Lenet, "was to please that beautiful princess, and he took endless care and pleasure to acquaint her with all he did for her, and to deliver the princess her sister-in-law (Conde's wife), by despatching couriers to her on the subject." He informs us moreover that, "in every juncture, he forwarded expresses to render account to the Duchess of all that respect for her made him undertake. At this moment, in fact, having just succeeded to his patrimonial estates through the death of his father, La Rochefoucauld recognised no obstacle in his path, but bravely went forward in the cause he had espoused and generously sacrificed his property in Angoumois and Saintonge. His ancestral chateau of Verteuil was even razed to the ground by Mazarin's orders, and when the tidings of it reached him, he received them with such great firmness", says Lenet, "that he seemed as though he were delighted, through a feeling that it would inspire confidence in the minds of the Bordelais. It was further said that what gave him the liveliest pleasure was to let the Duchess de Longueville see that he hazarded everything in her service." It cannot be denied, in fine, that the Duke at that time yielded himself up to a sentiment as deep as it was sincere, and which contradicts very happily and without any possible doubt the assertion so often hazarded that he had never loved the woman whom he had seduced and dragged into the vortex of politics. Madame de Longueville and he adored each other at this period, says M. Cousin, and it is pleasant to be able to cite the opinion of that eminent historian upon such fact; although separated by the entire length of France, they suffered and struggled each for the other: they had the same aim, the same faith, the same hope. They wrote incessantly to communicate their thoughts and projects, and thus sought to diminish in imagination the enormous distance which is between Stenay and Bordeaux.



BOOK IV.



CHAPTER I.

THE PRINCESS PALATINE.

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

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

The party of the Princes, which the success of the enemies of France, during their captivity, rendered from day to day more popular and interesting, was composed of all the young nobility. Of its apparent chiefs, the one alone capable of directing it was the Duke de Bouillon. But to lead a party it is necessary to identify oneself with it, and devote oneself to it wholly; and the Duke de Bouillon had views peculiar, foreign, and even adverse to the interests of his party; and before such interest he placed that of the maintenance, or rather elevation, of his own house. The Duchess de Longueville, the Princess de Conde, La Rochefoucauld, and Turenne had neither sufficient finesse nor skill in intrigue to be able to direct that party and struggle successfully against Mazarin; but they were seconded by three men who, although obscure, displayed in these circumstances extraordinary talent. Lenet,[1] who never quitted the Princess de Conde throughout these troubles, but served her faithfully with his pen and advice. Montreuil, who, although he had never published anything, was a member of the French Academy and secretary to the Prince de Conde. He managed, with infinite address, and incessantly devising new means, to correspond with the Princes, and bring the vigilance of their keepers in default. And it was Gourville especially, who, after having worn the livery of the Duke de la Rochefoucauld as his valet, had become his man of business, his confidant, and friend. It was Gourville who, under a heavy expression of countenance, concealed a most subtle, most acute, and fertile intelligence. Persuasive, energetic, prompt, reflective; knowing how to gain an end by the direct road; or, under the eyes of those opposing, attaining it unperceived, by covert and tortuous ways. A man who never found himself in any situation, however desperate it might be, without having the confidence that he could extricate himself from it. Did the cleverest consider a position as lost? Gourville intervened, infused hope, promised to lend a hand to it, and success was immediately certain and defeat impossible.

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

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

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

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

In her earliest youth she had been placed in the convent of Faremoustier, where nothing was neglected that could tend to inspire her with a desire for cloister life. Her father, the Duke of Mantua, had determined that his two younger daughters, Anne and Benedicte, should help, by taking the veil, to augment the fortune of their elder sister. Benedicte submitted to her fate, but Anne soon perceived what her father's plan was, and in her indignation she resolved to defeat it. Unlike her younger sister, she had an adventurous spirit, an ardent imagination, a strong desire to play an active part in life. Even to withdraw from a mode of existence that was hateful to her, she made her escape from Faremoustier, and went to confide to her sister's bosom, in the convent of Avenai, her wrath, her ennui, and her hopes. For awhile it seemed as though conventual life was about to exercise a strange fascination over her. The discourse and example of her sister touched deeply the youthful heart which had proved rebellious to a parent's will. It seemed not improbable that she would yield to persuasion that which she had refused to compulsion. But her destiny determined otherwise. Events cast her upon another course; her imperfect vocation yielded quickly to their influence. She had been worked upon, in the solitude of the cloister, by that mysterious yearning for an encounter with those struggles which human passions involve, the experience of which can alone extinguish such yearning in certain souls. It was necessary that she should see the world, undergo its deceptions, and be wearied of it, in order to desire repose and be capable of appreciating the inestimable blessings of peace and silence and tranquillity.

The Duke of Mantua dying in 1637, Anne was obliged to leave the cloister on business connected with the paternal succession, and appeared at Court with Marie, her elder sister. The turmoil of the world and its sensuous enjoyments speedily engrossed the young and lovely princess, involved her in their trammels, and only restored her to tranquillity and solitude after a lapse of many years; for at this time she also lost her sister, the youthful abbess of Avenai, and the last link which attached Anne to cloister life was severed by that death. An absorbing passion, too, was destined to confirm her relinquishment of such vocation. The youthful Henri de Guise was then one of the most brilliant gentlemen at the French Court. Grandson of the Balafre, his high birth fixed the eyes of all upon him, at the same time that his impetuous imagination, his profession, all the aristocratic follies of the day—remarkable duels, romantic loves, eccentricities, the adventures and elegant habits of the grand seigneur—had constituted him an oracle of fashion and the hero of every festival. He was fascinated by the grace and beauty of Anne de Gonzagua, and she herself, in the midst of that gallant Court which masked a real depravation under the thin varnish of an ingenious subtlety of expression,—she herself, a disciple of the Hotel de Rambouillet, where questions of sentiment were discussed, studied, and analysed incessantly, knew not how to resist the gilded accents of a young, handsome, and impassioned lover. She let him see that she loved him. He made her a promise of marriage, signed, it is said, with his blood; and the affair seemed to promise a happy conclusion. But their mutual inclination was thwarted by Madame de Guise. The Duchess thought that the high dignities of the Church would procure greater wealth, honour, and power for her son than he could obtain in any other career: Henri was then Archbishop of Rheims. Nevertheless, he persisted in his love for Mademoiselle de Gonzagua, and in his design of espousing her. The overtures which he made to the Vatican were not in vain. He received from the Pope, with the authorisation to again become a layman, a dispensation which his kinship to Anne rendered necessary for the celebration of their nuptials. But the lovers did not hasten to avail themselves of such privilege, apparently through dread of Richelieu, who was also opposed to their union. Perhaps that minister, from whom nothing secret was hidden—not even the unshaped designs of the ambitious,—already suspected Henri de Guise of being favourably disposed to the interests of Spain, as well as contrary to those of France. Anne and Henri, therefore, contented themselves with the possibility which the complaisance of the Holy Father had given them of contracting an indissoluble bond, and with the oath by which they reciprocally pledged their faith. Confiding in the honour of the Prince whom she so ardently loved, Anne consented to follow him, when he quitted France in order to escape from the espionage of Richelieu. Disguising herself in male attire, Anne rejoined her lover at Besancon, according to Mademoiselle de Montpensier, at Cologne according to other writers; where, as elsewhere, she caused herself to be called "Madame de Guise"—writing and speaking of her husband, and defying the assurances which were constantly advanced of the illegality of a marriage secretly performed by a canon of Rheims in the private chapel of the Hotel de Nevers. But what are promises, marriage vows, or even bonds written in blood?

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

Thus abandoned by her volatile lover, and extremely compromised, Mademoiselle de Gonzagua returned to Paris, where she reassumed the appellation of the Princess Anne. Her grief for awhile at her abandonment was great, but happily for Anne de Gonzagua, she was possessed of youth, and, as Madame de Motteville tells us, "of beauty and great mental attractions." She had moreover sufficient address to obtain a great amount of esteem, in spite of her errors. In a few years' time, during which she took care to avoid fresh scandal, whatever she might have done "under the rose," she made a tolerably good marriage. Her husband, her senior by two years only, was Prince Edward, Count Palatine of the Rhine, son of a king without a kingdom,—the elector Frederick,[2] chosen King of Bohemia in 1619, but who lost his crown in 1620, at the battle of Prague. Prince Edward, therefore, having no sovereignty, lived at the French Court. In 1645, then, Anne de Gonzagua found herself definitively settled at Paris, and it must be owned did not give Henri de Guise much cause to regret his faithlessness. The irregularities of the Princess Palatine became notorious, and assuredly Bossuet, in the funeral oration which he pronounced many years later, in the presence of one of her daughters and other relatives, whilst displaying a prodigal eloquence, and a mastery over all oratorical resource, made use of every artifice of speech, and all the elasticity of vague terms, in speaking of that period of her life without a violation of propriety, without disguising truths known to all, without exceeding either in blame or praise the limits imposed by good taste upon the reverend orator when he pronounces a panegyric upon those who not unfrequently have very little merited it.

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

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

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

It was especially after the arrest of the Princes that her zeal and intelligence found occasion to manifest themselves. Madame de Longueville, as has been said, instantly sought the aid of Anne de Gonzagua when she learned that her two brothers and her husband were prisoners. The news made her swoon, and her despair was afterwards pitiable. The Princess Palatine was touched by it, and promised to operate on behalf of the Princes. From that moment she became, without entering into faction and especially without failing in her duties towards a sovereign whom she loved, one of the most active friends of the prisoners. Meetings were held under her roof to deliberate upon that important affair, and, to compass her ends, she contrived to bring into play the most varied resources. She began by interesting in the Princes' destiny those even who might have been thought the most irreconcileable enemies to them. However difficult this work was of accomplishment, she reunited, as in a fasces, in a single will, personages widely separated upon other points, and surprised to find that they were pursuing the same object, for none of them knew the motives which influenced the actions of the rest. On this head, Bossuet says, with somewhat excessive laudation, she declared to the chiefs of parties how far she would bind herself, and she was believed to be incapable of either deceiving or being deceived. That is rather a hazardous assertion, for if she indeed aided in the liberation of the Princes, none of the promises she made—in all sincerity doubtless—became realised. But, says Bossuet further, and this time with more precision, "her peculiar characteristic was to conciliate opposite interests, and, in raising herself above them, to discover the secret point of junction and knot, as it were, by which they might be united." She had resolved to win over the Duke d'Orleans, Madame de Chevreuse, De Retz, and the keeper of the seals, Chateauneuf. She therefore signed with them four different treaties. With the Duke d'Orleans she promised the hand of the young Duke d'Enghien in marriage to one of the Prince's daughters; to Madame de Chevreuse that of Mademoiselle de Chevreuse to the Prince de Conti; to De Retz, the cardinal's hat; to Chateauneuf, the post of prime minister. All consented to favour the princess's designs, and Mazarin, whom she could not convince, found himself surrounded by enemies whose union was formidable. That minister made allusion to the dread with which he was inspired when he remarked some years afterwards to Don Louis de Haro: "The most turbulent among the men does not give us so much trouble to keep him in check as the intrigues of a Duchess de Chevreuse or a Princess Palatine." In vain, according to his wont, did he again attempt to temporise. Anne de Gonzagua, who was ready to open fire with all her batteries, sought to terrify him by the perspective of a menacing future. "She caused him to be informed that he was lost if he did not determine upon giving the Princes their liberty, assuring him that if he did not do it promptly he would see, in a few days, the whole Court and every cabal banded against him, and that all aid would fail him." Mazarin, obstinate in his determination, and unwilling to believe that she had so thoroughly played her game as to hold in hand the threads of so many intrigues, begged her to defer the matter, asked time for reflection, and conducted himself in such a way in short that the princess saw clearly that he only wanted to gain time. She therefore hesitated no longer, but allowed those who were agitating impatiently around her to commence action.

The party of the Princes had been dubbed by the name of the New Fronde. The old, although it had lost its energy by its union with the Court, preserved nevertheless its hatred to the prime minister. It was not in De Retz's power to neutralise wholly these hostile dispositions; but he could hinder them from being brought into dangerous activity. The Coadjutor at first with that view acted in good faith, and remained faithful in the first moments of the agreement which he had entered into with the Queen. Probably it might then have been possible to attach him finally to the Court party; but Mazarin could not believe that the Coadjutor, so fertile in tricks, so full of finesse, was capable of anything like frankness and generosity. In the practical experience of life, mistrust has its perils as well as blind confidence, and failure as often happens to us through our unwillingness to believe in virtue, as through our inability to suspect vice. Mazarin judged after himself a man who resembled him in many respects, but not in all. Moreover, he feared lest he might seek to win the Queen's affection from him; and that fear was not groundless. De Retz saw himself the object of the suspicions and afterwards of the machinations of a power which laboured at his destruction, whilst for that power he was compromising his influence and his popularity. To reacquire it, he hastened, therefore, to throw himself with all his adherents on the side of the Princes, and saw no safety but in their deliverance. This alliance of the two camps, so long enemies, was concluded between the Coadjutor and the Princess Palatine, and rendered so firm and secret by the confidence with which these two party chiefs inspired each other, that Mazarin, who unceasingly dreaded such a union, and who always suspected it, did not know it for certain until it revealed itself by its effects.[3]

[3] Motteville—Joly—Lenet.

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

Gaston, who might have been the moderator of all these parties, formed by himself a fifth among them. His irresolution prevented him giving strength to any other of the factions, but he constituted a formidable obstacle to all the rest. His inclination, as well as his interest, should never have made him deviate from the Court party; yet he was always opposed to it. Impelled by his jealousy of Conde and of the prime minister, he acted in a manner contrary to his own wishes. He was, however, neither wanting in intelligence nor finesse, nor even a certain kind of eloquence; and the master-stroke of De Retz's address was to have contrived, in furtherance of the object of his designs, to set Gaston with the Fronde against the Princes, and afterwards for the Princes against Mazarin.

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

If the libels of those times are to be credited, and especially the satire in verse for which the poet Marlet was sentenced to be hanged, the obstinacy with which the Queen exposed to danger her son's crown, by retaining a minister detested by all, would be naturally explained by a reason other than that of a reason of state. The advocate-general Talon, Madame de Motteville, and the Duchess de Nemours exculpate Anne of Austria on this head. They are three respectable and trustworthy witnesses; and, without any doubt, that which they said they thought. But the Duchess d'Orleans, Elizabeth-Charlotte, affirms in her correspondence[4] that Anne of Austria had secretly married Cardinal Mazarin, who was not a priest. She says that all the details of the marriage were known, and that, in her time, the back staircase in the Palais Royal was pointed out by which at night Mazarin reached the Queen's apartments. She observes that such clandestine marriages were common at that period, and cites that of the widow of our Charles the First, who secretly espoused her equerry, Jermyn. One might be disposed to think that the Duchess Elizabeth-Charlotte could have only followed some tradition, and that her assertions cannot counterbalance the statements of the contemporary personages above mentioned. But certain species of facts are often better known long after the death of the persons to whom they relate, than during their lifetime, or at a time close upon their decease; they are not entirely unveiled until there no longer exists any motive to keep them secret. Of the Queen's sentiments towards Mazarin there can be no doubt after reading a letter which she addressed to him under date of June 30, 1660, which is extant in autograph,[5] the avowal she made to Madame de Brienne in her oratory,[6] the confidences of Madame de Chevreuse to Cardinal de Retz.[7] Moreover, whatever may have been the motives of Anne of Austria's attachment to Mazarin, it is certain that they were all-powerful over her. She lent herself to every project formed by her minister for the increase of his power and fortune. The war in Bordeaux was kindled because Mazarin desired that one of his nieces should be united to the Duke de Candale, son of the Duke d'Epernon; and, in order not to let the Swiss soldiers march thither without their pay, when their aid was most necessary, Anne of Austria put her diamonds in pledge, and would not allow Mazarin to be answerable for the sum required to be disbursed.

[4] Mem. sur la Cour de Louis XIV. et de la Regence, d'Elizabeth-Charlotte Duchesse d'Orleans, Mere du Regent. 1823, p. 319.

[5] MS. Bibliotheque Nationale.

[6] Lomenie de Brienne, Memoirs, 1828.

[7] Retz, Memoirs, edition 1836.



CHAPTER II

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Duchess de Bouillon had been quite as ardent in politics during the burlesque activity of the Fronde as Madame de Longueville; and although, perhaps, equally beautiful, happily she was entirely devoted to her domestic duties. Her husband on taking flight had been constrained to leave her behind in Paris, she being near her accouchement, which circumstance however did not prevent the Queen from giving an order for her arrest. Although the royal guards were already in the house, the Duchess contrived to effect the escape of her sons, and during that same day gave birth to her babe. Shortly afterwards she found a means of eluding the guard set over her, and would have rejoined her husband, had her daughter not been attacked with small-pox, but having returned home to nurse her, was arrested at her bedside and carried to the Bastille. The Duchess de Chevreuse, always gallant, in spite of waning beauty, constituted herself the mediatrix between the Queen and the Frondeurs; and although her daughter had openly become the mistress of the Coadjutor, it was already contemplated to make her the wife of the Prince de Conti, as a condition of the arrangement by which he should be set free. Beaufort still continued to be the obsequious lover of Madame de Montbazon, and, through her, Mazarin was kept well acquainted with all his secrets.

No other power than that of female influence could have attached the French nobility to the Prince de Conde, and determined it to take up arms for his release. In fact, his hauteur, his brusquerie, his brutality even, had, in repeated instances, offended that body, and the Queen imagined that the bulk of the French gentry would witness his arrest with as much pleasure as the citizens. But the women had been fascinated by the eclat of his four victories; they agreed to call him the champion, the hero of France, and it seemed to them that they shared his heroism in devoting themselves to his cause. As for the higher nobility, they were not bound by any political principle; they were very indifferent to the grandeur of France; very ignorant of its pretensions in foreign affairs, or to what it had been pledged with other nations. They loved war in the first place for its dangers, and in the second for the honours and wealth they got by fighting; but even in the army, far from making fidelity and obedience a rule of conduct, they cherished a spirit of independence and resistance to the Crown, and would only allow themselves to be influenced by their chivalric usages. They gloried in showing themselves reckless of the future, caring more about the glitter of the present than steady progressive advancement; equally prodigal of fortune as of life, they were prone to follow impulse rather than calculation; so that what we should perhaps call a reckless frivolity was looked upon by them as a sentiment invested with all the charm of brilliant gallantry. Those even whom neither their affection nor their interest summoned to the standards of the captive Princes, rushed gaily from the midst of their ease and festivity into civil war at the first prompting of their mistresses.

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

De Retz too, notwithstanding the superiority of his intellect, allowed himself to give way, through his inclination for the fair sex, to the commission of indiscretions and imprudences which often placed his life in danger, and caused his best-concerted measures to prove abortive. To appease the jealousy of Mademoiselle de Chevreuse he permitted himself to make use of a contemptuous expression concerning the Queen, which was repeated, and which became the cause of the violent hatred she ever afterwards bore him. The Princess de Guemenee, furious at having been abandoned, offered the Queen, if she would consent to it, to procure the disappearance of the Coadjutor by sending him an invitation, and then having him confined in a cellar of her hotel. De Retz learned that a design to assassinate him had been formed, and whenever he repaired to the Hotel de Chevreuse, by way of precaution placed sentinels outside the gate of that mansion, and quite close to the Queen's sentries who guarded the Palais-Royal, without heeding the effect such an excess of insolence and scandal produced. With every kind of talent fitting to dominate party spirit, he failed to acquire the confidence of anyone. He regarded all alliance with the foreigner as odious and impolitic; and notwithstanding, when his embarrassments increased, he lent an ear to the Archduke's envoy, and even to that of Cromwell. At the same time, full of admiration for the Marquis of Montrose, whom he called a hero worthy of Plutarch, he contracted the closest friendship with the Scottish royalist, and aided him to the utmost of his ability in the efforts he was making to restore to the throne the legitimate King of Great Britain. De Retz, in few words, appeared anxious to show himself as taking pleasure in exhausting every kind of contrast. When the intricate plot of the drama in which he was engaged had become so complicated by his intrigues, that he no longer saw the possibility of unravelling it, he sought means to retire from the situation with the greatest advantage practicable for himself and friends, and to obtain the Cardinal's hat. The marriage of Mademoiselle de Chevreuse with the Prince de Conti became the essential condition of all the negotiations which he carried on, whether with the Court or with the Duchess de Chevreuse. The remembrance of an old and close friendship, the habit of a familiarity contracted in youth, gave the Duchess de Chevreuse a means of influence over that Queen, so fixed in her hatred, so inconstant in her friendships. Anne of Austria, who then, moreover, found herself very miserable through the obstacles which so many factions created, had partially restored the Duchess to her confidence. Madame de Chevreuse appeared also to have the same interests as De Retz, since, like him, she desired intensely the union of her daughter with a Prince of the blood. But she had large sums of money to recover from the Government, and the success of her claims depended on the decision of the prime minister. She therefore used her utmost tact with Mazarin, negotiating at the same time with him, as well as with the Old and the New Fronde. She turned to her own profit the influence that her connections at Court, with the Coadjutor, and with the Princes gave her in all the several factions. She was assisted in her intrigues by the Marquis de Laignes, a man of courage but little intellect, who, from the time of her exile at Brussels, had declared himself her lover in order to gain importance in the faction of the Fronde, which he had embraced. As little more of the attractions of her youth were left to Madame de Chevreuse, save their pristine celebrity, she had not always to congratulate herself upon the good humour and behaviour of De Laignes. The latter had been until then wholly devoted to the Coadjutor; but De Retz soon perceived that De Laignes entered into projects different from his own. At length, to have some one who could be responsible to him for Madame de Chevreuse, he endeavoured to substitute Hacqueville as a go-between in the place of De Laignes. Hacqueville was the intimate friend of De Retz and also of Madame de Sevigne; and seconded by Madame de Chevreuse and Madame de Rhodes, De Retz might have succeeded in the expulsion of Laignes, if Hacqueville would have consented to that project. No man could be more obliging than Hacqueville; but, notwithstanding the disposition he showed to be useful to his friends, he shrank from such continual immolation of himself. Probably also he was too honest a man to lend himself to such a procedure.

Madame de Sevigne,—in every way qualified to play a distinguished part in the exciting game of politics,—was so entirely devoted to her husband and children as to be a stranger to all these intrigues; but she was more or less connected with the persons who seconded the Coadjutor's projects, and consequently with the Duchess de Chevreuse. An article in the "Muse Historique" of Loret shows how intimate was the connection of Madame de Sevigne with that Duchess. In the month of July, 1850, on returning from a promenade in the Cours, then the fashionable drive among the highest society, the Marquis and Marchioness de Sevigne gave a splendid supper to the Duchess de Chevreuse. The noisy manner in which the Frondeurs expressed their delight made this nocturnal repast almost assume the character of an orgie; and, for that reason, it became for awhile the talk of the capital. The rhyming gazetteer thus expresses himself on the subject:

On fait ici grand' mention D'une belle collation Qu'a la Duchesse de Chevreuse Sevigne, de race frondeuse, Donna depuis quatre ou cinq jours, Quand on fut revenue du Cours. On y vit briller aux chandelles Des gorges passablement belles; On y vit nombre de galants; On y mangea des ortolans; On chanta des chansons a boire; On dit cent fois non—oui—non, voire. La Fronde, dit-on, y claqua; Un plat d'argent on escroqua; On repandit quelque potage, Et je n'en sais pas davantage.[1]

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

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



CHAPTER III.

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

AT the commencement of 1651 all France clamoured for Conde's liberation. During the autumn Mazarin had led the Queen and the young King against Bordeaux, then held by the Princess de Conde, carrying—as usual when forced to use both means—a sword in one hand and a roll of parchment in the other. Failing to carry the place with the first, the Cardinal began to negotiate a treaty of peace, the principal item of which was full pardon to the citizens, and by others an agreement that the Princess and her son should retire to Montrond: on these terms the city yielded to its sovereign. The Cardinal also obtained a victory in the field against Turenne, who had entered the service of Spain and fired upon the fleur-de-lis. But with this momentary success of Mazarin's cause rose his pretensions and demands; and the Fronde, alarmed at his recovered authority, changed its tactics as its Protean genius De Retz frequently did his clothes—his cassock for a plumed hat and military cloak. It demanded the trial or liberation of the prisoners it had helped to send to Vincennes, without delay, and Mazarin removed them for safe custody to Havre. It then pronounced sentence of banishment on the obnoxious minister, and ordered him to quit the kingdom within fifteen days. The town militia kept watch and ward over the Queen, by the command of the Coadjutor, and hindered her flight to join the favourite. She could offer no further resistance to those who now called themselves the friends of Conde, but who were the very same persons who had fought him in the field a few months before. Orders were given to set the captives at liberty. Mazarin himself went to Havre to communicate the news of their freedom, and was received by them with the contempt that he might have expected. Conde took leave of the Cardinal with a ringing peal of laughter, and with joyous acclamations, and bonfires, and firing of guns, made his triumphal entry into Paris.

Conde was now master of the situation. He found himself equally courted by the two other chief parties into which the State was divided—the Queen's, supported by the Duke de Bouillon, and the now repentant and pardoned Turenne—and the Fronde, which had fallen into the guidance of the Duke d'Orleans, the Coadjutor, and the Duchess de Chevreuse. His own was called "the Prince's," and comprised Rochefoucauld and other personal friends and military admirers. The Duke d'Orleans had gone on before to meet Conde as far as the plain of St. Denis, accompanied by the two most conspicuous representatives of the Fronde, the Duke de Beaufort and Retz, with the Coadjutor of Paris, and there they all warmly embraced. The Duke, having taken the Prince into his carriage, brought him in great pomp to the Palais Royal to salute the Queen Regent and the young King, and thence to the Palais d'Orleans, where he was feasted magnificently. Some days afterwards (February 25th) a royal ordonnance recognised the innocence of the Princes Conde, Conti, and the Duke de Longueville, and reinstated them in all their posts and governments. On the 27th this ordonnance was confirmed in Parliament amidst loud cheers. Conde thus found himself at the highest degree of power to which a subject could reach. Misfortune had enhanced his military glory; a long captivity, endured with an unalterable serenity and high-hearted gaiety, had carried his popularity to the highest pitch. He was the victor, and, as it were, the designated heir, of Mazarin, who had fled before him, and with difficulty found a refuge without the kingdom, on the banks of the Rhine.

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

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

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

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

The aristocracy of the sword, and of ancient birth, had itself to blame for this degradation. Great alterations in manners or government—such as give a new character to human affairs—always seem brought about by some strange relaxation of morals, or atrocity of conduct, which makes society anxious for the change. The unfortunate custom in France which gave every male member of a noble family a title equivalent to that of its chief, so that a simple viscount with ten stalwart and penniless sons gave ten stalwart and penniless viscounts to the aristocracy of his country, had filled the whole land with a race of men proud of their origin, filled with reckless courage, careless of life, and despising all honest means of employment by which their fortunes might have been improved. Mounted on a sorry steed and begirt with a sword of good steel, the young cavalier took his way from the miserable castle on a rock, where his noble father tried in vain to keep up the appearance of daily dinners, and wondered how in the world all his remaining sons and daughters were to be clothed and fed, and made his way to Paris. There he pushed his fortune—fighting, bullying, gambling, and was probably stabbed by some drunken companion and flung into the Seine. If he was lucky or adroit enough, he stabbed his drunken friend and pushed him into the stream; and, after a few months of suing and importunity, obtained a saddle in the King's Guards, or a pair of boots in the Musqueteers. At this time it came out that in twenty years of the reign of Louis XIII. there had been eight thousand fatal duels in different parts of the realm. Out of the duels which were daily carried on, four hundred in each year had ended in the death of one of the combatants. When the fiercest of English wars is shaking every heart in the kingdom, there would be wailing and misery in every house if it were reported that four hundred officers had been killed in a year. Yet these young desperadoes were all of officer's rank, and the quarrel in which they fell was probably either dishonourable or contemptible. Men fought and killed each other for a word or a look, or a fashion of dress, or the mere sake of killing. Where morality is loosened to the extent of a disregard of life, we may be sure the general behaviour in other respects is equally to be deplored. There was great and almost universal depravity in the conduct of high and low. Vice and sensuality found refuge and protection even in the presence of princesses and queens. People residing in remote places heard only of the gorgeous licence in which the great and powerful lived. They knew them only during their visits to their ancestral homes as worn-out debauchees from the great city, who brought the profligacy of the purlieus of the Louvre into the peaceful cottages of the peasantry on their estates. It was, indeed, so much the fashion to be wicked, that a gentleman was hindered from the practice of his Christian or social duties by the fear of ridicule. The life of man, therefore, and the honour of woman were held equally cheap; and the blinded, rash, and self-indulgent nobility laid the foundation, in contempt of the feelings of its inferiors and neglect of their interests, for the terrible retribution which even now at intervals might be seen ready to take its course.



CHAPTER IV.

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