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

Madame de Longueville had remained at Stenay with Turenne for some time after her brother's and husband's liberation, both occupied in disengaging themselves from the engagements which they had contracted with Spain for the deliverance of the Princes, and with negotiating a truce calculated to clear the way for the much-desired general peace. Recalled by the pressing instances of her family, she had quitted Stenay on the 7th of March, before the completion of her work. On arriving in Paris "universal applause greeted her heroic deeds." Monsieur had hastened to pay her a visit with Mademoiselle Montpensier, and a train of ladies of the highest distinction. She went afterwards that same day to present her homage to their Majesties, from whom she met with the most gracious reception. That moment was, unquestionably, the most brilliant of her whole career. In 1647, after the embassy to Munster, her return to France and its Court had been also a veritable triumph, as we have attempted to show; but the power of her house and the glory of her brother constituted nearly all the merits of it. She only contributed thereto the influence of her wit and beauty. After Stenay, the eclat which surrounded her was in some sort more personal. She had just displayed eminent qualities which raised her almost to the level of Conde. In Normandy she had exhibited herself as an intrepid adventuress, and a skilful politician in the Low Countries. When, during the imprisonment of her two brothers and her husband, her sister-in-law, the Princess de Conde, had been forced at Bordeaux to recognize the royal authority, she discovered that the destinies of her house had devolved upon her. She had become the head of a great party. She had treated as from power to power with Spain; her word had appeared a sufficient guarantee to the Archduke Leopold and to the Count de Fuensaldagne. She had held in hand such commanders as Turenne, La Moussaye, Bouteville; and when, after the battle of Rethel, she seemed to be on the very verge of destruction, she had succeeded in recovering the advantage, and in contributing more than any one else to the deliverance of the Princes, thanks to the profound negotiations carried on in her name by the Princess Palatine. Whilst statesmen estimated her capacity, the multitude admired her courage and constancy. She was, in short, in possession of that political role with which La Rochefoucauld had dazzled her gaze in order to conceal his own designs:—a glittering chimera which, mingling itself with that of love, had seduced that ardent and haughty soul of hers. She was then the idol of Spain, the terror of the Court, one of the grandeurs of her family. We shall soon see whether she can better sustain this new ordeal than she did the first, at the close of the year 1647.

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

Those two strong-minded women had conceived the idea of a grand aristocratic league which should seat the Fronde upon an union of all the interests which it comprised, close the avenues of France and the Court to Mazarin, and under the auspices of the Duke d'Orleans and the Prince de Conde form a government into which the friends of both should enter, the most accredited representatives of every fraction of a party. Further, the basis of this plan was that of a double marriage: on the one side between the young Duke d'Enghien and one of the Duke d'Orleans' daughters, on the other between the Prince de Conti and the daughter of Madame de Chevreuse.[1] This latter marriage might be accomplished immediately. Conde had accepted the proposition without any difficulty. Madame de Longueville, far from opposing it at Stenay, had embraced the idea of it with so much ardour that, in a letter to the Palatine of the 26th of November, 1650, after having weighed the different resolutions to be taken, she stops at this latter, and concludes thus: "this, therefore, is what we must stick to." That marriage was, in short, of a supreme importance: it gave the house of Conde to the Fronde for ever, and the Fronde to the house of Conde; for the Fronde was then Madame de Chevreuse. She disposed, by her daughter, of the Coadjutor, who in his turn disposed of the Duke d'Orleans, and by him of the parliament. It was Madame de Chevreuse who, in 1650, had emboldened Mazarin to lay his hand upon Conde, in making him see that he might strike that bold stroke with impunity, since she answered to him for the secret connivance of the Duke d'Orleans and the parliament, who were alone able to oppose it. Here, Mazarin had committed an immense blunder: seeing himself delivered from Conde, by the aid of the Fronde, having nothing more hostile to cope with than the latter, he had imagined himself able to turn round upon it, and had treated Madame de Chevreuse very cavalierly, who, growing cold towards the Cardinal, and no longer finding it to her account to serve him, had lent an ear to the propositions of Conde's friends, and had procured his release from prison, reconciling to him the Duke d'Orleans and the parliament, which at first she had stirred up against him. She brought, moreover, to the house of Conde the most politic mind of the Fronde, an audacity towering to the height of his designs, a consummate experience, with the support of her three powerful families, the houses of de Rohan, de Luynes, and Lorraine. She rendered sure the alliance of the Duke d'Orleans and the Prince de Conde, and completed the ruin of Mazarin by constructing a strong government which probably might have succeeded ultimately in triumphing over the affection of the Queen. She held in hand a statesman bred in the school of Richelieu, and whom she judged capable of replacing Mazarin, the former Keeper of the Seals—Chateauneuf, already a member of the Cabinet. She believed herself certain of acquiring De Retz by means of the Cardinal's hat. She had not the least objection to make to the elevation of the friends of Conde, and she was ready to favour the ambition of La Rochefoucauld, for whom formerly, in 1643, she had so greatly importuned the Queen and Mazarin. Add to all this, that on quitting the citadel of Havre, the young Prince de Conti had not beheld the lovely Charlotte de Lorraine without being smitten with her charms, and he himself strongly desired that marriage. Who, then, prevented it? Who broke off the contracted engagement? Who struck at and wounded by the self-same blow the Palatine and Madame de Chevreuse? Who restored them both and for ever to the Queen and Mazarin? Who destroyed the Fronde by dividing it? We shall find out by-and-by, but let us merely say just now that it was the rupture of that marriage which again shuffled the cards and changed the face of the situation. In pitting against himself those who had so powerfully succoured him in his misfortune, Conde ought at least to have drawn closer to the Court and had a serious understanding with the Queen; but he tergiversated, and at the end of some months of that wavering policy, he found himself standing unmasked between the Court and the Fronde, both equally discontented with him, repeating and exaggerating the blunder committed by Mazarin. The greatest error during the course of a revolution is to believe that the support of either of the parties who are in actual collision may be dispensed with. At the close of a revolution the attempt to dominate may be tried; during the crisis a choice must be made. Mazarin had fallen through having tried to dominate the Fronde and Conde at one and the same time; Conde lost himself in thinking to dominate the Fronde and the Court.

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

It is an historical problem very difficult to solve, as to who was the author of the rupture of the marriage projected between the Prince de Conti and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse. We are well inclined to believe that that individual at any rate was the chief author of the rupture to whom it was the most profitable. The Queen and Mazarin, who from his place of retirement governed her with as absolute a sway as ever, saw from the first the danger which threatened them from such an alliance, entirely unexpected as it was by both. The negotiations between Madame de Chevreuse, while Conde was prisoner, and Madame de Longueville at Stenay, had been conducted by the Palatine with such consummate skill and perfect secrecy that neither the Queen nor Mazarin had the slightest suspicion of them. When the rumour reached the ears of the Cardinal in his retreat at Bruhl, near Cologne, he broke out against Madame de Chevreuse with a violence the coarseness of which even was an involuntary homage rendered to the profound ability of Marie de Rohan. The Queen showed herself warmly opposed to it, and the ministers were ordered to thwart in every way the projected alliance. They began, therefore, to negotiate with Conde. As a result of these negotiations he obtained in exchange for his government of Burgundy that of Guienne, one of far greater importance; he was even led to indulge a hope that Provence would be given to the Prince de Conti instead of Champagne and La Brie, and the port and fortress of Blaye to La Rochefoucauld in augmentation of his government of Poitou, although there was not the slightest intention of fulfilling that hope. So states the Duchess de Nemours, the enemy of the Fronde and the Condes, and who, having given herself to the Court party, must have well known its intentions. De Retz likewise doubts not that the Queen combated an alliance so evidently opposed to her interests. Madame de Motteville, the Queen's close friend, avows it. In short, it is certain, and we have hereupon the irrefragable testimony of Madame de Motteville, that when the Queen had succeeded in gaining over Conde, she caused Madame de Chevreuse to be informed "that she desired that such marriage should not take place, because it had been concerted for objects inimical to the royal interests. This command was the cause of all these propositions falling through and that they were no more spoken of."

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

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

This interpretation of Conde's conduct does not do him great honour, but it is a very probable one. In the first place, if La Rochefoucauld knew how to glide so cleverly over all the ticklish points in which he could not appear to advantage, he did not, strictly speaking, tell lies; he retires rather than attacks, unless hurried away by passion, and he was never in a passion with Conde. And, further, the conduct which he attributes to Conde springs quite naturally out of the false position in which Conde had, by degrees, suffered himself to be placed.

Altogether, we are persuaded that Conde was then sincere. His sole error, and it is that which marked his entire conduct during the Fronde, was the not having had, either on this occasion or any other, a fixed and unalterable object. On the 13th of April the Queen took the seals from Madame de Chevreuse's friend, Chateauneuf, the representative of the Fronde in the Cabinet, to give them to the gravest person of his time, the first president, Mathieu Mole, a worthy servant of the State, very little friendly to the Fronde, and who then was sufficiently favourable towards the Prince de Conde. That same day she recalled to the Council as Secretary of State the Count de Chavigny, who had been formerly minister for Foreign Affairs under Richelieu. Formed in the school of the great Cardinal, as well as Mazarin, ousted from place, crafty and resolute, feeling himself capable of bearing the weight of a ministry, Chavigny had beheld with a sufficiently ominous countenance, after the death of their common master, the sudden elevation of a colleague who had even begun by being his dependent. Since 1643, vanity had turned him aside from the high road of ambition, and he had entangled himself in the brakes of very complicated intrigues. In 1651, he passed as the friend of Conde. It was then only, if we can believe La Rochefoucauld, that Conde declared himself opposed to the marriage of his youthful brother with Mademoiselle de Chevreuse; and it was time that he opposed it, for that marriage was on the eve of accomplishment. Conti gave proof of the most ardent passion for Mademoiselle de Chevreuse; he paid her a thousand attentions which he hid from his friends, and particularly from his sister, for whom he ever professed to entertain an undivided adoration. He held long conferences with the Marquis de Laigues and other intimate friends of Mademoiselle de Chevreuse; it was even feared lest he should marry her without the necessary dispensations and without the participation of the head of his family. Conde, therefore, decided to act at once, and the reputation of the fair lady afforded him a means of attack which he employed with success upon his brother. He seems to have had no great difficulty in attaining his object. The Prince de Conti soon received proof that she was not by any means so immaculate as he had believed: her scarcely doubtful connection with the Coadjutor was placed in its true light, and, convinced that the object of his passion was unworthy the love of a man of honour, he began to look upon her with horror. He even blamed Madame de Longueville and the Duke de la Rochefoucauld for not having warned him sooner of what was said of her in society. From that moment means of breaking off the affair without acrimony were sought; but the interests involved were too great, and the circumstances too piquant not to renew and augment still more the old hatred of Madame de Chevreuse and the Frondeurs against the Prince de Conde, and against those whom they suspected of taking part in that which had just been done.[2]

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

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

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

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

After some time passed in sharp discussion, the Duke retired into the apartments of his wife with De Retz, and there a brief consultation ensued, in which the Duchess d'Orleans, Madame de Chevreuse, and the Coadjutor endeavoured to persuade him to arrest the leaders of the opposite party, and rouse the people to insurrection. The Duke d'Orleans was in some degree moved; Conde, Conti, and the Duke de Beaufort and others, had retired into the library, and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, springing towards the door, exclaimed, "Nothing is wanting but a turn of the key! It would be a fine thing indeed for a girl to arrest a winner of battles!"

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

At the same time in the parliament all the violent measures taken against Mazarin were renewed: he was banished and rebanished, with confiscation of his possessions, and even his books and pictures were ordered to be sold. A decree had already been passed declaring all foreign cardinals incapable of serving in France, and of entering into the ministry. They did not stop there, and certain councillors who were not in the secrets of the party, and obeying only their passion, proposed to exclude from the ministry even the French cardinals as being still too dependent upon Rome. This sweeping motion was carried amid loud cheers, which resounded through all parts of the hall. Whereupon Conde laughingly remarked: "There's a fine echo." That same echo was the ruin of De Retz's hopes, who only so passionately desired to become a cardinal in order to succeed to Mazarin. Shortly afterwards the division between Conde and the Old Fronde was declared, and Conde applied himself to form an intermediate party, a new Fronde, which became sufficiently powerful to disquiet Madame de Chevreuse and the Coadjutor.[3] "Imagine," says the latter, "what the royal authority purged of Mazarinism would have been, and the party of the Prince de Conde purged of faction! More than all, what surety was there in M. the Duke d'Orleans!"

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

[4] The same, p. 214.

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

There is little doubt that, in the first instance, Conde might have carried off the Regency from the Queen, deprived as she was of her prime minister, and by her own acknowledgment incapable of governing by herself; but then the direction of affairs belonged by right to the Duke d'Orleans, of whom Conde was jealous. Conde, however, preferred to keep the Regency in the Queen's hands, and by rendering himself formidable to the Government, forcing it to reckon with him. If that union of the Princes between themselves and the Fronde faction had subsisted, the re-establishment of the royal authority would have been impossible: and the commencement of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, who, although he had only completed his thirteenth year, was about, by the force of an exceptional law, to be declared of age, would have offered the spectacle, so frequent in French annals,[5] of a state a prey to the divulsion of factions and the horrors of anarchy.

[5] Retz—La Rochefoucauld—Joly.

But for the happiness of France and the Queen-Regent, Conde was as unskilful in politics as he was great in war. He kept none of the promises he had made to the chiefs of the Fronde, the authors of his deliverance. The marriage of the Prince de Conti and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse, which had been the base of the treaty, and involved other engagements, was, as we have seen, remorselessly broken off. The Queen Regent, in order to succeed in bringing back her favourite minister to power, had the tact to conceal his advances, and therefore chose in the first instance to replace him by Chavigny, who was his personal enemy. Then she negotiated with all parties, and skilfully opposed the Fronde to the Prince de Conde, the latter to the Duke d'Orleans, the parliament to the assembly of the nobles, the aversion to Mazarin to the fear which the Coadjutor inspired. Her ministers, whom she abused, had only the semblance of power; all that was real was possessed by Mazarin. From Bruhl, his place of exile, he governed France; the Queen adopted no resolution without its having been inspired by him, or met with his approval. Thus hidden by the Regent's mantle, the Cardinal followed with vigilant eye the quarrels of the Prince de Conde and the Frondeurs, fomenting them and inflaming them by every means at his disposal, prodigalising to Conde promises which must in the highest degree have alarmed the Fronde, and entangling him daily more and more in the meshes of intricate, tortuous negotiations, until he had seen the separation, for which he manoeuvred, irremediably consummated. Then he stopped, and began insensibly even to fall back. The placing of Provence in the Prince de Conti's hands was deferred; and in fact it was held in reserve for the Duke de Mercoeur, the eldest son of the Duke de Vendome, who was seeking the hand of one of Mazarin's nieces; and it was also found inexpedient to deprive the Duke de Saint-Simon of Blaye to give it to La Rochefoucauld; and a thousand other difficulties of a like nature were raised, which both astonished and irritated Conde. Since he broke with the Fronde, it was apparently to unite himself with the Queen, and the higher his ambition soared, the more necessary it was to cover it with respect and deference, in order to hasten and secure the treaty on foot, and to enchain the monarchy with his own fate. But the fiery Conde was incapable of such a line of conduct. Finding unexpected obstacles where previously he had met with facilities and hopeful anticipations, he lost his temper, and resumed the imperious tone which already, in 1649, had embroiled him with the Queen and Mazarin.

It appears also that Madame de Longueville shared in the soaring illusions of her brother, and that she bore but indifferently well her newly blown prosperity. Madame de Motteville gives us to understand so with her usual moderation, and the Duchess de Nemours rejoices to say so with all the acrimony and doubtless also the exaggeration of hatred.[6] It must, indeed, be owned, with the heroic instincts of Conde, Madame de Longueville shared also his haughty spirit. All her contemporaries ascribe to her an innate majesty which did not show itself on ordinary occasions; far from it, she was simple, amiable, adding thereto, when desirous of pleasing, a caressing and irresistible gentleness; but, with people whom she disliked, she intrenched herself in a frigid dignity, and Anne of Austria and she had never loved one another. A misplaced haughtiness towards the Queen is attributed to her. One day, says Madame de Nemours, she kept her waiting for two or three hours. It is very doubtful whether Madame de Longueville could have so far forgotten herself; but it is not impossible that she may have imagined, as well as her brother, that the fortunes of their house, having emerged more brilliant than ever from so rude a tempest, had no longer to dread the recurrence of further ill-omened shocks.

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

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

Immediately that Madame de Chevreuse had seen that the Queen was growing colder towards Conde, and did not seem disposed to keep the promises that had been made him, her keen-sighted animosity instantly determined her course of action, and being for ever separated from Conde, she again drew towards the Queen with an offer of her services and those of her entire party against the common enemy. Mazarin, recognising the error he had committed in giving himself two enemies at the same time, and that at that moment the redoubtable individual, the man who at any cost must be destroyed, was Conde, very quickly forgot his grudges against Madame de Chevreuse, and advised the acceptance of her propositions. The Queen, it appears, was very averse to receive De Retz, or avail herself of his services; she detested him almost as much as she did Conde, well knowing that they were the two most dangerous enemies of him without whom she did not believe that she could really reign. Mazarin exhorted her himself to flatter De Retz's ambition, and, marvellously understanding each other at a distance—almost as well as when in each other's presence,—they composed and played out in the most perfect manner a comedy of which De Retz himself seems to have been the dupe, and of which Conde was very nearly being the victim.

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

By nature yet more restless than ambitious, a bad priest, impatient of his condition and having long struggled to emancipate himself from it, Paul de Gondi had prepared himself for cabals by composing or translating the life of a celebrated conspirator. Then, passing quickly from theory to practice, he had entered into one of the most sinister plots framed against Richelieu, and for his first experiment he had accepted the task, he, a young abbe, of assassinating the Cardinal at the altar during the ceremony of Mademoiselle de Montpensier's baptism. In 1643, he had not hesitated to throw himself into the arms of the Importants; but the title of Coadjutor of Paris, which had just been conferred upon him as a recompense for the virtues and services of his father, arrested him. The Fronde seemed created altogether expressly for him. He shared the parentage of it along with La Rochefoucauld. In vain in his Memoirs does he studiedly put forward general considerations: like La Rochefoucauld, he was only working for himself, and at least had the candour to own it. Compelled to remain in the Church, De Retz desired to rise in it as high as possible. He aspired to a cardinal's hat, and soon obtained it, thanks to his inscrutable manoeuvring; but his supreme object was the post of prime minister, and to reach it, he played that double game which he so craftily concerted and so skilfully played out. Seeing that Mazarin and Conde were not heads of a government which would leave to others acting with them any great share of importance, he undertook to overthrow them, the one by the other, to carve out his way between them by them, and to raise upon their ruin the Duke d'Orleans, under whose name he would govern. To effect this he incessantly urged alike the Duke, the parliament, and the people, to demand, as the first condition of any reconciliation with the Court, the dismissal of Mazarin, and at the same time he, under a mask, exhibited himself as a benevolent conciliator between royalty and the Fronde, promising the Queen, the indispensable sacrifice accomplished, to smooth all difficulties, and to bring over to her the Duke d'Orleans by separating him from Conde. Such was the real mainspring of all De Retz's movements—even those seemingly the most contrary: first the cardinalate, then the premiership under the auspices of the Duke d'Orleans, associated in some sort with royalty, without Mazarin or Conde. He was fain to hide his secret under the guise of the public weal, but that secret revealed itself by the very efforts he made to conceal it, and it did not escape the penetration of La Rochefoucauld, his accomplice at the outset of the Fronde, afterwards his adversary, who had a perfect knowledge of his character, and who had sketched it with a masterly hand, as De Retz also thoroughly comprehended and admirably depicted La Rochefoucauld. De Retz was indeed the evil genius of the Fronde. He always hindered it from progressing whether led by Mazarin or Conde, because he merely desired to have a weak government which he could dominate. To arrive at that end, he was capable of anything—tortuous intrigues, anonymous pamphlets, hypocritical sermons from the pulpit, studied orations in parliament, popular insurrections and desperate coups de main. Such was the man who, towards the end of May, 1651, was admitted, much against her will, into the secret councils of Anne of Austria.

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

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

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

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

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

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

De Retz kept his word, and went to the parliament, but the progress against Conde was so slow that Mazarin, the Queen, and De Retz, began to revolve more summary measures, and, towards the latter part of June, their deliberations ended in a sinister project of again arresting or of assassinating Conde.

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

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

Too high-minded to quit Paris as though he were terrified, Conde exhibited no change in his conduct; merely confining himself to no longer visiting the Palais-Royal or the Palais d'Orleans, and never going abroad without a numerous escort of officers and retainers. Already for some time past foreseeing the storm that was gathering against him, he had taken serious measures to confront it: he had strengthened all the fortresses that were in his hands. He had despatched to Flanders the Marquis de Sillery, La Rochefoucauld's brother-in-law, under pretext of finally disengaging Madame de Longueville and Turenne from the treaties they had made with the Spaniards in 1650, with secret instructions to renew them, and to ascertain how far he might reckon on the assistance of Spain if he were compelled to draw the sword. The Count de Fuensaldagne did not fail, agreeable to the policy of his court, to promise much more than was asked of him, and he omitted nothing calculated to stir up Conde to have recourse to arms.

Chance had a share in urging Conde to take a further and almost decisive step in the dangerous path that was opening before him. One evening, just as he had lain down on his bed and was chatting with Vineuil, one of his trusty friends, the latter received a note which directed him to warn the Prince that two companies of guards were advancing on the side of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was thought that those troops were about to invest the hotel. Conde jumped out of bed, dressed himself, mounted his horse instantly, and, accompanied by a few attendants, took his way through the faubourg Saint-Michel. On gaining the high road, he heard the clatter of a somewhat strong body of horsemen approaching, and thinking that it was the squadron in search of him, he fell back at first in the direction of Meudon; then, instead of re-entering Paris, when day broke he sought an asylum in his chateau of Saint-Maur. He reached it on the morning of the 6th of July; and it may readily be guessed what the effect, in Paris and throughout the kingdom, of such a retreat was, and for such motives. The Princess de Conde, the Prince de Conti, Madame de Longueville, La Rochefoucauld, the Duke de Nemours, the Duke de Richelieu, the Prince's most intimate friends, and more than one illustrious personage, such as the Duke de Bouillon and Turenne, repaired immediately to Saint-Maur. In a day or two, Conde saw himself surrounded by a court as brilliant and as numerous as that of the King, and there he kept up a right royal festivity. After a while he sent a considerable number of officers disguised into Paris, who bestirred themselves in every quarter in his favour; and when he considered himself in a position to hold his own against both the Queen and the Frondeurs together, he quitted Saint-Maur and returned to his hotel near the Palais d'Orleans, desiring to put a good complexion on the aspect of his affairs and to impose upon his enemies by that bold and high-minded conduct.[7] He appeared again also in the parliament, now once more become the battle-field of parties. De Retz, full of his own individual hatred, augmented by that of Madame de Chevreuse, seconded at once by the friends of the Duke d'Orleans and by those of the Queen, burning to tear from the Court and win, by serving it, the cardinal's hat, the object of his ardent desires, the necessary stepping-stone to his ambition, brought all his courage and vanity towards enacting the part of the Prince's enemy. And there, during the months of July and August, in that pretended sanctuary of law and justice, passed all those deplorable scenes which De Retz and La Rochefoucauld have related, and in which Mazarin, from his retreat on the banks of the Rhine, rejoiced to see his two enemies waste their strength, and work unwittingly but surely their common ruin and his approaching triumph.

[7] La Rochefoucauld, p. 83.

A crisis was clearly inevitable. Conde could no longer perceive any sign of a pacific issue from the position in which he had been placed, or rather in which he had placed himself, and at his right hand stood Madame de Longueville and the Prince de Conti, who held no opinions contrary to those of his sister, urging him to cut the knot which he knew not how to untie. La Rochefoucauld stopped him for a moment on the threshold of war, entreating Conde to allow him to undertake fresh negotiations. The Prince consented willingly thereto. Madame de Longueville was opposed to it. La Rochefoucauld, speaking to her with that authority which his long devotion gave him, represented to her the terrible responsibility which she took upon herself both towards Conde and the State, and he obtained from her a promise that she would withdraw for a time from the arena of strife, and accompany her sister-in-law, the Princess de Conde, to Berri, and allow him to remain in Paris by the side of Conde in order to make a last essay towards conjuring the tempest.

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

Let us remember:—Anne de Bourbon exhibited extraordinary contrasts in her character, entirely opposite qualities which, developing themselves in turn according to circumstances, gave a particular impress to different periods of her life. She derived from nature and the Christian education she had received a delicate and susceptible conscience, a humility in her own eyes and before God that would have made her an accomplished Carmelite; and at the same time she was born with that ardour of soul which is termed ambition, the instinct of glory and of grandeur. This instinct, which was also that of her house and her age, soon obtained the mastery on emerging from her pious adolescence, and when she despaired of overcoming her father's resistance to the serious desire she had manifested of burying herself, at fifteen, in the convent of the Rue St. Jacques, with her already formidable beauty and the nascent desire to shine and to please. That desire was at once Madame de Longueville's strength and weakness, the principle of her coquetry amid the amusements of peace, as of her intrepidity in the midst of war and danger. Once condemned to live in the world, she transferred the dreams of glory which she dared not realise for herself, to gild her brother's wreath of laurel,—that Louis de Bourbon, almost of the same age as herself, the cherished companion of her infancy, so witty, so generous, so bold, that he was at once a friend and a master, and the idol of her heart, before another object had usurped the place or after he had abandoned it. In the first and the last portion of her life, which are incomparably the best, she referred everything to Conde, and Conde had a confidence in her altogether boundless. The suspicious and penetrating Mazarin had very early formed that opinion of her, and in the carnets, to which he has confided his very inmost feelings, he depicts her with the pen of an enemy, but of an enemy who knew her well. "Madame de Longueville," says he, "has entire power over her brother. She desires to see Conde dominate and dispose of all favours. If she is prone to gallantry, it is by no means that she thinks of doing wrong, but in order to make friends and servitors for her brother. She insinuates ambitious ideas into his mind to which he is already only too much inclined." If, in 1648, she became violently enraged against her brother, it was that, fascinated and misled by La Rochefoucauld, she thought that Conde, by serving the Court and Mazarin, was false to his own fame. In 1649, she had only too far contributed to make him enter by degrees upon that fatal path into which La Rochefoucauld had lured herself. Here, pride nourished the hope of one day seeing the Condes replace the D'Orleans. When, in 1850, a son was born to Gaston, the little Duke de Valois, who did not live, she fretted at an event which threatened to strengthen and perpetuate a house for which she had no affection, and in a letter which has remained inedited up to the present day, she allows the thoughts that had insinuated themselves into her heart to appear. "I think," she writes to Lenet on the 22nd August, 1650, "that the news of the birth of M. d'Orleans' son will no more rejoice my sister-in-law than it has delighted me. It is to my nephew that we must offer our condolence." In 1651, that ambition was carried to its highest pitch. Madame de Longueville experienced the natural intoxication that the power and prosperity of her house was calculated to give her; and when we think of what perils she had just surmounted, by what homage she was surrounded on all sides, that she was then thirty-two, that she was in all the splendour of her beauty, and also under all the strength of her passions, we might well be disposed to pardon her that fugitive intoxication, if it had not likewise drawn down disastrous consequences upon herself, upon Conde, and upon her country.

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

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

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

As has been already said, Madame de Longueville did not love her husband. Not only was he greatly her senior, but there was nothing about him that responded to the ideal which that illustrious disciple of the Hotel de Rambouillet had formed for herself, and which she pursued in vain through guilty illusions, until that which she sought and found at its very source—no longer in the school of Corneille and of Mademoiselle de Scuderi, but in that of her Saviour, in the Carmelite convent and at Port Royal. Never was woman less prone to gallantry by nature than Anne de Bourbon; but, as we have just remarked, her heart and her imagination created in her the necessity of pleasing and of being beloved; and it was that want, early cultivated by poetry, romances, and the theatre, and somewhat later corrupted by the example of the society in which she lived, which lured her far from the domestic hearth, and hurried her into the brilliant and adventurous career amidst which we find her in 1651. Then her greatest fear was to fall again into her husband's hands. M. de Longueville had very willingly followed his wife in the Fronde; his own discontentments of themselves drove him into it, as well as his uncertain and mobile character which led him to embark in novel enterprises with as much facility as it urged him to abandon them. In 1649 he had figured as one of the generals of Paris, and had raised Normandy against Mazarin. One year of imprisonment had cooled him, and in 1651, having recovered his government of Normandy and tasted some few months of that peaceful grandeur, he found it so much to his liking as to be not readily tempted to re-embark upon a stormy course of life at the age of nearly fifty-seven. Reports, only too true, had informed him of what until then he had only surmised imperfectly—the declared liaison of his wife with La Rochefoucauld. He had been greatly irritated at it, and Conde's enemies, with De Retz at their head, carefully fostered his ill humour, and his daughter, Marie d'Orleans, afterwards Duchess de Nemours, seconded them to the utmost of her power.

She detested her stepmother, whose faults her strong common-sense led her easily to scan, without her own vulgar and commonplace mind being capable of comprehending the Duchess's great qualities. It was impossible less to resemble each other. The one adored grandeur even to the romantic and the chimerical, the other was entirely positive and matter-of-fact, and absorbed with her own interest, especially in those relating to her property. Alienated from the Fronde through the jealous hatred she bore towards her stepmother, who in turn liked her almost as little, and probably also did not take pains enough to manage her, Mademoiselle turned towards the Queen, and strove to gain over her father to the same party. Therein she succeeded by degrees. The Duke de Longueville could not overtly separate himself from Conde, and at first promised him all he required; then he shut himself up in Normandy, and there followed a dubious line of conduct which neither compromised him with the Court party nor that of Conde. But he recalled his wife peremptorily, and sent her a mandate to rejoin him. That mandate was pressing and threatening, and it terrified Madame de Longueville. She knew that her husband had been informed of everything, and that he was wholly given up to the influence of his daughter. She feared ill-treatment; she felt certain at least that once in Normandy she would no more quit it, and that her time would be passed between an aged, irritated husband, and an overruling step-daughter, who would apply themselves in concert to retain her in the solitude of a province, and perhaps to make her expiate in confinement her bygone triumphs. The idea of the sorrowful life which awaited her in Normandy produced very nearly the same effect upon her as the thought of a second imprisonment upon the mind of Conde. She sought for a means of avoiding that which was to her the worst of all evils; there was an assured though dangerous one—war, which would prevent her from repairing to Normandy, under the pretext more or less specious that she could not abandon her brother. Such was the design she formed within herself and very soon resolved upon adopting, and the fresh negotiations which La Rochefoucauld proposed thwarted her doubly. Should those negotiations prove successful they would deprive her of the only pretext she had for not rejoining her husband in Normandy, and she thought it strange that it was La Rochefoucauld who would expose her to that peril. From that moment doubtless angry explanations took place between them. She perceived that La Rochefoucauld was wearied of his sacrifices, that he wished to reconcile himself with the Court, repair his fortunes, and taste the sweets of peace; whilst in the eyes of the superb princess the paramount consideration with him, for whom she had done so much, ought to have been never to forsake her, should they both together rush to certain ruin. But La Rochefoucauld was no longer wound up to a tone so lofty, worthy of the Great Cyrus and of their chivalrous love of 1648, and the haughty Madame[8] was deeply wounded at the discovery. Nevertheless, she was not insensible to what there was of reasonable in La Rochefoucauld's advice, and not to incur the entire responsibility of the part which her brother might take, she consented to follow her sister-in-law, the Princess de Conde, and her nephew, the Duke d'Enghien, into Berri, one of Conde's governments:—a journey which moreover had the advantage of separating her from her husband. She set out, therefore, on the 18th of July for Bourges, taking with her the elder of her two sons, the younger, Charles de Paris, born in 1649, not being able to bear the fatigue of the journey. M. de Longueville recalled her from Berri as he had from the capital, and he insisted on the return of his son in terms so forcible that she was compelled to comply, so far as the boy was concerned. Thenceforward, being alone and exposing only herself, without breaking with M. de Longueville, and by using all her wit to colour her disobedience, she eluded his orders, remained in Berri, forming in the depth of her heart the most ardent desire for war, but calm in appearance; sometimes accompanying the Princess de Conde to Montrond, at others making somewhat lengthened visits to the Carmelite convent at Bourges. And thus she awaited the issue of the negotiations, counselled and carried on by La Rochefoucauld, which should decide her destiny.

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

La Rochefoucauld must indeed have very earnestly longed to bring to a close the life of fatigue and danger which he had for three years led, to have been able to cherish any illusion as to the success of the steps he was about again to take. Where was the hope of regaining the Fronde which had just been outrageously deceived, after it had given itself to the Prince de Conde in his misfortune, and had extricated him from it? If La Rochefoucauld thought that the alliance of the Fronde was necessary, he ought to have set about it sooner and at the proper time, persuaded Conde and his sister to keep their word, and sealed the alliance agreed upon between the Prince de Conti and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse. He had not done so; and now that he had allowed a treacherous war to spring up between Conde and the Fronde, by what charm did he think he could suspend it? With the Queen also all negotiation was exhausted and superfluous. An understanding should have been come to with her when she was so disposed, when Conde was all-powerful, when he could either have more readily abased or exalted the Crown: Tum decuit cum sceptra dabas. But at the end of August, Conde, embroiled with the Court and with the Fronde, had nothing left save his sword. That was sufficient, doubtless, to make everybody tremble, but was it enough to inspire confidence in anyone? La Rochefoucauld obtained, therefore, on all sides to his advances only very vague responses. The time for negotiation was passed irrevocably, and whilst La Rochefoucauld exhausted himself in useless efforts, the Queen and the Fronde concluded a treaty together, with the common design of overwhelming Conde.

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

That majority had been declared on the 7th of September in a Bed of Justice, with all the customary pomp. As the first Prince of the blood did not think it possible to be present at it in safety, during that evening the Queen in her indignation had whispered these significant words to De Retz: "Either M. le Prince or I must perish."[9]

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



CHAPTER V.

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

ANNE OF AUSTRIA now seriously prepared to make head against Conde, and with that intent she rallied round her all the forces of the Fronde united with those of the royal army. In fine, with the firm design of inspiring the Fronde with perfect confidence, at the same time that the nomination of France to the Cardinalate had devolved upon the Coadjutor, the Queen again brought into the cabinet, as a sort of Prime Minister, the statesman of the party, the friend and instrument of Madame de Chevreuse, the aged but ambitious Chateauneuf, with the two-fold engagement to serve Mazarin in secret and to contribute to the utmost of his power to destroy Conde. In such arrangements, let it be thoroughly understood, no one was acting with good faith: De Retz and Chateauneuf in nowise proposed to re-establish Mazarin; Chateauneuf did not dream of making another man's bed, but, once having attained power, he intended to keep it for himself, and Mazarin was firmly resolved to dismiss Chateauneuf as soon as he could. But if these crafty politicians were ready to betray one another in everything else, there was one point on which they were sincerely united—the destruction of Conde. At that they laboured in concert, or rather vied with each other. Queen Anne manifested therein a fervour, a constancy, a marvellous skill, and succeeded in carrying off from Conde the chief supports of his great strength. He saw that war was inevitable, and yet, says Sismondi, he only yielded to it with repugnance. "You will have it so," said Conde at last; "but understand that if I do draw the sword, I shall be the last to return it to the scabbard." It was the women especially who hurried their admirers into the melee.

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

He remained for some few days at Chantilly, pensive and agitated in presence of the great resolution he was on the eve of taking. The mediation of the Duke d'Orleans, the only one he could accept, offered no security, the Duke instead of governing the Coadjutor and Madame de Chevreuse, was then governed by them. His individual inclination was to come to an understanding with the Queen and even with Mazarin, as he had very clearly shown. He had continually returned to it; but after so many lying words and odious plots, the execution of which alone was wanting, he thought he would be in a better position to treat solidly with the Court at the head of a powerful and victorious army, than in the midst of wretched intrigues, unworthy of his character, in which he momentarily staked his honour and his life. He never permitted the idea of raising himself above royalty to enter into his mind; he merely thought that to obtain better conditions from it it was necessary to render himself imposing to it, and to make himself feared. That is what was then passing in his mind. Civil war inspired him with horror, and we may learn from La Rochefoucauld,[1] who was then in his most intimate confidence, that he long weighed "the consequences of so grave a determination." Let us be chary, therefore, of accusing Conde of levity; let us recognise that insensibly his position had become such that he could neither remain in it nor quit it, in one way or another, save with equal danger.

[1] La Rochefoucauld, p. 76.

Among the different motives which rendered Conde averse to civil war, the passion that he had just begun to feel for the Duchess de Chatillon must not be forgotten. We shall return a little further on to this episode in Conde's life. It is sufficient to remark here that it was grievous to him to quit the lovely Duchess, who then was residing very close to Chantilly, in the charming chateau of Merlon or Mello, near Pontoise, the enjoyment of which had been granted to her for life by the old Princess de Conde, Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency, who expired in her arms at Chatillon-sur-Loing, in December, 1650—a gracious grant, which the Prince, her son, had hastened to ratify with a somewhat interested generosity. Madame de Chatillon had her reasons of more than one kind for being opposed to the war, and in the intimate counsels of the Prince she urged him to an understanding with the Court. In that she made common cause with La Rochefoucauld, and was in open quarrel with Madame de Longueville. Sensible of Conde's passion without sharing it, she managed that lofty lover with infinite tact, at the same time that she was deeply enamoured of the young, handsome, and brave Duke Charles Amadeus of Savoy, Nemours,[2] who from his youth and adventurous instincts would have longed for war, and whom she alone, seconded by La Rochefoucauld, retained in the party of peace.

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

Everything, however, tended to precipitate Conde towards the fatal resolution. Prudence did not permit him to remain any longer at Chantilly,[3] and it behoved him to place himself beyond the risk of a coup-de-main by withdrawing to his government of Berri, whither he had already sent his son, his wife, and his sister. It was, it is true, the road to Guienne, but he might stop there. All the population was devoted to him, and the tower of Bourges and the strong fortalice of Montrond offered him a safe asylum.

[3] La Rochefoucauld, p. 96.

Conde, even after reaching Berri, still hesitated, not wishing to take any step before again conferring with his sister, who was then at Montrond with the Princess. There he held a final council, a supreme deliberation, at which Madame de Longueville, Conti, and La Rochefoucauld were present. More than one grave motive urged him to war: the well-founded dread of assassination or of a fresh incarceration, the ardent hatred of his enemies, of the Queen and the Fronde, the power of Chateauneuf which certainly had not been given him in vain, the inutility of negotiations with people who seemed decidedly to have taken their choice, the necessity of avoiding the fate of Henri de Guise, the consciousness of his strength so soon as his foot should tread the field of battle, the promises seemingly so sure of the Bouillons and many others. At the same time, his good sense, his loyalty, the scarcely stifled instincts of duty, and his innate aversion for anything which resembled anarchy, restrained him; and in that prolonged and dubious struggle between conflicting feelings, there were others which hurried him onward. Madame de Longueville, the Prince de Conti, La Rochefoucauld also urged him to declare himself against the Court, and Madame de Longueville with more vivacity than anyone else.[4] Conde still resisted, explaining to them all the strength of royalty, the ascendancy of the King's name, the weakness and treachery of factions, the bad faith of Spain. Then concluding by yielding, he addressed them in these memorable words: "You commit me to a strange line of action, of which you will tire sooner than I, and in which you will abandon me." He spoke truly as regarded Conti, and perhaps also La Rochefoucauld; but it remains to be seen whether Madame de Longueville, after having helped to drive her heroic brother into civil war, did not follow him with an inviolable constancy, whether she did not share, even to extremity, the dangers and adversities of the Prince, and whether, during his long exile, she reappeared for a single moment at Court or in those salons of the Louvre and the Palais Royal, which had witnessed her early successes, and in which her wit and beauty still promised her fresh triumphs.

[4] Mad. de Motteville.



CHAPTER VI.

MADAME DE LONGUEVILLE COQUETS WITH THE DUKE DE NEMOURS.

HIS determination to unsheath the sword once taken, Conde put his plans into execution without throwing one glance behind him. Having collected together in Berri his family and chief supporters, he distributed amongst them the several parts they had to play in their common enterprise. After this, accompanied by La Rochefoucauld, he went to take possession of his new government of Guienne, and there raise the standard of insurrection, leaving in Berri his wife and son, his sister, the Prince de Conti, the Duke de Nemours, with the President Viole and others whom he nominated to important functions. He had placed his brother at the head of affairs there, and given the military command to the Duke de Nemours. But the result of these arrangements was disappointing to him. The Duke de Nemours undoubtedly possessed the most brilliant courage, but he had neither the talents nor the steadiness of a general. Still absorbed with his passion for Madame de Chatillon, who, as has been said, had long retained him in the party of peace, he found in Berri a counter-attraction in Madame de Longueville who drew him towards that of war; and it would seem that he occupied himself more with paying court to the lovely lady than of raising and arming soldiers and making Berri a focus of resistance, both political and military; for very speedily the Prince de Conti and he were reduced to defend themselves in Bourges instead of being able to operate in the open and make any advance. The new Minister Chateauneuf showed himself worthy of the confidence of Madame de Chevreuse and the Fronde. He made the Queen understand that it was necessary to combat the revolt foot to foot from its very first step, and he persuaded her to march herself with the young King into Berri at the head of a strong army. He nobly inaugurated the new ministry by that measure, which had two objects: the one direct and immediate, to strangle the insurrection at its birth; the other still more important, to set royalty at liberty far from Duke Gaston and the Parliament. The city of Bourges, which had shown so much enthusiasm on Conde's arrival, opened its gates to the King and Chateauneuf. The strong tower which defended the city, offering no resistance, was taken without a blow being struck, and instantly demolished. The Princess de Conde, her son, Madame de Longueville, Conti, and Nemours were forced to take refuge hastily in the citadel of Montrond. On learning that Palluan was advancing on that fortress, Conti and Nemours not wishing that the precious pledges confided to their charge should incur any risk, left the Marquis de Persan in Montrond, and with what remained to them of their faithful troops escorted the Princess, her son, and Madame de Longueville as far as Guienne, which they reached by the end of the month of October.

It was during that rapid journey and their very brief sojourn in Berri that certain obscure relations, it would appear, were formed between the Duke de Nemours and Madame de Longueville, the report of which reaching Bordeaux, exaggerated probably by interested and malevolent underlings, wounded La Rochefoucauld and drove him to a violent rupture. A loyal and confiding explanation might have sufficed to disperse a cloud, such as at times will obscure the most settled friendships. La Rochefoucauld brewed a storm out of it which, thanks to his Memoirs, has sent its echoes down to posterity. His separation from Madame de Longueville was marked by an eagerness which excites the suspicion that he had longed for it.[1] He ought at least to have stopped there, but hurried away by an implacable resentment, he accused her, or caused her to be accused by Conde, of having wished to betray his interests to serve those of the Duke de Nemours, giving her even to understand that "if a like prepossession took her for another, she was capable of going to the same extremities if that person desired it."[2] The accusation is yet more absurd than odious. The Duke de Nemours was not the least in the world a party chief; he was a friend of Conde, whose fidelity could only be shaken through his love for Madame de Chatillon. To detach him from Madame de Chatillon was therefore to give him wholly to Conde. Moreover, Madame de Chatillon, like La Rochefoucauld, was for peace, she had won over the Duke de Nemours to it, and both together urged Conde thereto. To carry off the Duke de Nemours from such conspiracy and to seduce him to the war party, was to serve the interests of Conde like as his sister intended. Thus the principal and the dominant motive of Madame de Longueville's conduct was just the opposite of that which La Rochefoucauld imputed to her. Let us add further that she had always had a rivalry of beauty with Madame de Chatillon, and that her vanity was not sorry to humiliate a rival whom she did not tolerate by depriving her for a few days of a lover of whose attachment the latter fancied herself perfectly secure. Love and the senses had nothing to do with it in this matter. The gratification of the senses, it has already been remarked, did not ensnare her; she was proof against their surprises. Previously the Duke de Nemours had addressed his ardent homage to her, but all the attractions of his handsome person and his lofty bearing had made no impression upon her, and she only bestowed a thought on the amiable Duke when she had some interest to forward by reviving such conquest. And this is not an opinion hazarded at a venture; it is furnished us by a person thoroughly well informed, and who had no affection for Madame de Longueville; the testimony therefore is the more valuable: "M. de Nemours[3] previously had not much pleased her, and notwithstanding the attachment he appeared to entertain for her, as well as all the good qualities and grand airs of which he could boast, she had found nothing charming about him save the pleasure he showed himself desirous of giving her by abandoning Madame de Chatillon for herself, and that which she had of depriving a woman whom she did not like of a friend of so much consequence." Now how far had this liaison of a few days gone? Bussy is the only contemporary who offers any reply to this question in the cynical light of his Histoire amoreuse des Gaules. But who would accept that satire literally? It proves only one thing, the unfortunate notoriety which the imprudence of Madame de Longueville derived from the Memoirs of La Rochefoucauld published in 1662. Before those Memoirs saw the light, not a word is anywhere to be found on a point as obscure as it is delicate. After, Bussy was delighted to repeat La Rochefoucauld, and Madame de Longueville has thus fallen into the scandalous chronicle.

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

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

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

Let us abstain from defending her; although even we should be convinced that she knew where to stop in that dangerous game of coquetry, she is not the less culpable in our eyes both towards La Rochefoucauld and herself, and we do not hesitate to say that she went so far as to deserve the calumny. Doubtless she was justly hurt by the incertitude of La Rochefoucauld, who, after having plunged her into civil war in 1648 with no other motive than that of his own interest, would have made her abandon it in 1651 through the same motive still; which at one moment impelled her towards the Fronde, at another brought her back to the Court, at the will of his fickle hopes, and linked her with Madame de Chatillon for the purpose of engaging Conde in negotiations the success of which involved their separation and procured her a prison in Normandy. Yes—she had grave cause of complaint against La Rochefoucauld. She might have quitted him, it is true, but not for another. She had only one means of covering, of almost condoning the single error of her life, which was to maintain faithful to it, or to renounce it for virtue and Heaven. And it is just that which Madame de Longueville appears to have done, if that sad and rapid episode had remained unknown; but there is no favourable shade for those personages who appear in the glaring front of the stage of this world; their slightest actions do not escape the formidable light of history: the weakness of a moment is recorded as an irredeemable error against them. That of Madame de Longueville, fugitive as it may have been, dubious even as it was, sufficed to tarnish a fidelity until then victorious over so many trials; it needed to be atoned for by the sincere conversion which was speedily about to follow it, and by five-and-twenty years of the severest penitence; and still further it forces us to place Anne de Bourbon, in the record of great sentiments and exalted loves, above Heloise and Mademoiselle de la Valliere.

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

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

Dating from the arrest of Broussel, nothing could exceed the rapidity of events; the wheel of fortune had turned with such terrific mobility for those of her favourites who sought to attach themselves to it. The revolt had, in fact, broken out on the 26th of August, 1648; in January, 1649, the Court withdrew to Saint Germain, at the risk of never re-entering Paris; in April, the sword of Conde imposed the treaty of Saint Germain, and the King returned in October. Mazarin shortly afterwards believed himself strong enough to arrest, in January, 1650, Conde, Conti, and Longueville. A year after that bold coup d'etat he was himself obliged to flee (February, 1651) from his enemies, and quit France. At the end of eight months, Mazarin returned with an army to the aid of royalty; but it required two years of negotiations, intrigues, and patient waiting, it needed the errors which the indecision of the Duke d'Orleans brought about, the rash violence of Conde, urged onwards by his sister, it required, indeed, the entire ruin of France ere the Cardinal could, after having led the young King by the hand to the very gates of his capital, resume that place in the Louvre which he had sagaciously abandoned.

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

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

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

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

The Fronde is reputed, not without reason, to have been one of the most interesting as well as diverting periods in French history; that in which the volatile and frivolous vivacity of the national character shone with irresistible comicality. How striking was the contrast between it in its main features and the great Civil War waged at the same time in our own country! Yet the Fronde had its serious—terrible aspect, too, in the wide-spread misery it entailed upon France, as may be seen from the valuable statistical researches of M. Feillet. That writer cites the following passage from the record of an eye-witness of what he describes:[4]—"No tongue can tell, no pen describe, no ear may hear that which we have seen (at Rheims, Chalons, Rethel, &c). Famine and death on all sides, and bodies unburied. Those remaining alive pick up from the fields the rotten oat-straw, and make bread of it by mixing it with mud. Their faces are quite black; they have no longer the semblance of human beings, but that of phantoms.... War has placed every one on an equality; nobility lies upon straw, dares not beg, and dies.... Even lizards are eaten, and dogs which have been dead perhaps some eight days.... Moreover, in Picardy, a band of five hundred children, orphans, and under seven years of age, was met with. In Lorraine, the famished nuns quitted their convents and became mendicants: the poor creatures gave themselves up to be dishonoured for the sake of a morsel of bread. No pity, no remorse. An execrable and sanguinary war upon the weak. In the heart of the city of Rheims, a beautiful girl was chased from street to street for ten days by the licentious soldiery; and as they could not catch her, they killed her by shooting her down. In the vicinity of Angers, Alais, and Condom, upon all the highways of Lorraine, women and children were indiscriminately outraged, and left to die drenched in their blood."

[4] La Misere dans la Fronde.

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

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

"Si la France est en deuil, qu'elle pleure et soupire; Pour moi, je veux chasser, galantiser et rire."

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



BOOK V.



CHAPTER I.

CONDE'S ADVENTUROUS EXPEDITION.

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

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

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