ll Him cc CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY I. 1 will IK suited 2. 1 with tl vi>him side ol 3 1 , and m may W »■»-...•— ■. ■ — — ^ more. i •, , • 4 If aWjJbook is injured or soiled, so as, in the opiniStof the Library Committee, to be unfit to remain oir'tfc shel-ves»JJlt Jierno" resiioiisible ior the same shall pav the martel l^ieMhereol or of the set to which it belongs. If the uijurv- be 'ess than above specified, the person responsible •refor shall pav a line of one dollar. Any person failing to return a book at the ■ two ^veeks, shall pay a fine of two cents a each day's detention beyond the time cases where fines or other penalties n breach of these rules, the person forfeit all rights to the benefits ♦ie Library until such fines or y \ .^ ^.T^,^p ip mp^rf^ Cornell University Library DC 130.M79P94 Princess of the Old world. 3 1924 028 185 613 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD BY ELEANOR C. PRICE "Duquel mariage est sortie la tres-belle, tres-excellente et tres-accomplie Princesse Anne Marie Louise d'Orlians, qui possede en perfection les plus rares qualitez qui parent un esprit, et qui font aymer un corps : c'est elle que nous nommons ordinairement Mademoiselle, souhaittde des plus grands Monarques, et aym^e universellement de toute la terre." WITH TWENTY-ONE ILlUS T^lAT'ONy New York : G. P, PUTNAM'S SONSj London: METHUEN & CO. FAGB CONTENTS PART I CHAPTER I Mademoiselle arrives — The Chalais affair — The Montpensier marriage — The death of the Duchess — Mademoiselle in her nursery — Louis XIII . . . . . . 3 CHAPTER n The new Madame — Her adventures — The fate of Puylaurens — The playfellows of Mademoiselle — His Eminence her Godfather . 16 CHAPTER HI On the roads — Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse — The affair of the Val-de-Grace — A famous ride — La Rochefoucauld — Mademoiselle at Chantilly . . ... 25 CHAPTER IV Mademoiselle in Touraine — Champigny and Richelieu — The Duchesse d'Aiguillon and her friends — Fontevrault and Madame Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon — A winter of hope . ■ • 39 CHAPTER V Mademoiselle de Hautefort — Royal sport — "Mon petit mari" — The story of Cinq- Mars — The death of Richelieu . . -55 CHAPTER VI The streets of Paris — Corneille — The theatres — The Academy — The Hotel de Kanibouillet . . ... 69 CHAPTER VII Court mourning — The death of Madame de Saint-Georges — Madame de Fiesque — The family of Guise— The death of the King 86 vi A PRINCliSS OF THE OLD WORLD CHAPTER VIII PAca I.,i rtciiuu- MV^'/zfi'— The Superior of the Carmelites— The Due de licnuforl rtnd tlic Iinportaiits—'X\K arrival of Madame— The I'rin- cessc de Condc and Madame dc Montljazun- A cold collation — Mazarin's triumph . . . • • ■ 97 CHAPTER IX Henrietta of En-land— The Prince of Wales— A ball at the Palais Royal — Mademoiselle's vocation — The Saujon affair— The eve of the Fronde . . . ■ . . II2 PART II CHAPTER I The causes of the Kronde — Father Vincent— Monsieur le Coad- juleur — The riot at Saint-Eustache — A popular Princess — Retz at the Palais Royal— The yoKr«/t' ->io., Neurdeitty Paris.) The Palace of the Luxembourg : from an Old Print . 248 Marie Tht'rcse of Austria, Queen of France : after a Portrait ijy Heaubrun . 273 {Photo., Neurdcin, Paris.) Mademoiselle de Montpensier : from an Engraving by Nicolas dc I'Armessin 286 Philippe de France, Due d'Orlcans . . ... 298 {Photo,, Neurdcin, Paris.) Louis XIV . . ... 318 {P/wtiK, Ncurdein, Paris.) INTRODUCTORY NOTE THIS book is meant to be a true picture in more or less detail, drawn chiefly from contemporary memoirs, of French society in the seventeenth century, especially the society which is a natural background for the distinguished, eccentric personality of Anne Marie Louise d'Orleans, Duchesse de Montpensier, known in her own day and ours as La Grande Mademoiselle. The life of Mademoiselle covers nearly three-quarters of the century. If the earlier part of this period has been more dwelt upon than the later, it is because people and manners in the final years of Louis XIII, under the Regency, and during the Wars of the Fronde, are less familiar to English readers than those belonging to the actual age of Louis XIV. It is also because Mademoiselle herself, picturesque, ad- venturous, original, loses much of her characteristic charm when she falls once and for ever under the baleful little shadow of Lauzun. FTP CHIEF AUTHORITIES CONTEMPORARY Mimoires de Gaston Due d' Or Hans. Edition Petitot et Monmerque. Mimoires de Valentin Conrart. ,, ,, ,, Mimoires de PAbbi de Choisy. ,, „ „ Mimoires de Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Edition Cheruel. Mimoires de Madame de Mottevilk. Edition Riaux. Mimoires du Cardinal de Retz. Edition Champollion-Figeac. Mimoires du Dice de Saint-Simon. Edition Cheruel. M'emoires du Marquis de Da?igeau. Lettres de Madame de Sivigni. La Galerie de Portraits de Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Description de la Ville de Paris. Germain Price. Les Historiettes de Tallemant des Riaux. Edition Monmerque. MODERN Histoire du Cardinal de Richelieu. G. Hanotaux. Etudes Historiques. G. Hanotaux. Le Roi chez la Peine. A. Paschet. Histoire de France. Henri Martin. Vols. XI and XH. Histoire de France pendant la Minoriti de Louis XIV. A. Cheruel. Madame de Chevreuse. Victor Cousin. Madame de Hautefort. „ „ La Jeunesse de Madame de Longueville. Victor Cousin. Madame de Longueville pendant la Fronde. „ „ Life of Louis Prince of Condi. Lord Mahori. La Misere au Temps de la Fronde. A. Feillet. Extravagants et Originaux du 17'"' Siecle. P. de Musset. Causeries du Lundi. Vols. IH and V. Sainte-Peuve. Les Ennemis de Racine au 17"" Siecle. F. Deltour. xiv A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD La Jcii/icssf (it- la Grande Mademoiselle. Arvide Barine. Louis XIV et la Grande Mademoiselle. „ „ La Duchtsse de Montmorency. M. R. Monlaur. La Rochefoucauld. A. Bourdcau. (( Irands Pxrivains franrais.) Corneille. G. Lanson. ,, ,, ,, Madame de Sh'it^nL G. Boissier. ,, „ „ V ^, OJ t/i ^^^ S rt D a rQ 3 3 K O -S So Q O 3 C O O C 3 ffi C-l a. ■— ' O CU ro d T3 in G "in ffi ■13 a .= C m n u (U S i=i o c • « t^ si- CIJ ,■« "T -t Vh Q nl 3 0> vit .o n o s^ ^, O o >> n) () SI > -1 O oco O ^O \0 ^ .o-d c 3 g > 3 s ° w (U Ul ^lU su ™ ^ Jh H t^ -, 3 .iy< 1" ai V- o-r. o l-l 3 — tj T3 (U 4) 3^ ^1- II D- O 3 g< 1) d —'■3'^ 3i rz ■— j-i > t—t'" . k> OO "^ ►^ m ^ •g •-_ " 0^113 o 3" PART I CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 1627-48 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD CHAPTER I 1626-1635 " And cymbals glorious Swinging uproarious In the gorgeous turrets Of Notre Dame." "And the flare of the bonfires died down into the flickering tapers that dimly lit the funerals.'' MADEMOISELLE ARRIVES— THE CHALAIS AFFAIR— THE MONTPEN- SIER MARRIAGE— THE DEATH OF THE DUCHESS— MADEMOISELLE IN HER NURSERY — LOUIS XIII. ON the 29th of May, in the year 1627, the cannon of noisy Paris were thundering, the bells clanging and clashing, for the birth of a grandchild of France. The news ran through the narrow, crowded streets, where the citizens stopped to laugh and gossip till scattered aside by some great lady's plunging coach, some splendid courtier with his train of men-at-arms and lackeys, on the way to offer con- gratulations at the Louvre. On the quays of the Seine, on the Pont Neuf, the new thoroughfare, not blocked by houses like the other bridges, where King Henry IV on horseback kept guard over " Paris, sa grand'-ville," crowds gathered with their heads turned towards the palace, whose high roofs, stately and glittering in the May sunshine, sheltered the new baby and 3 4 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD its mother. The crowds were pleased and good-tempered, though the desired prince had failed to arrive. Madame la Duchesse d'Orlc-ans had done her duty, and as quickly as possible. In the meanwhile, Paris took "Mademoiselle" to its light heart and capricious fancy. The marriage of Monsieur, the King's brother, with Marie de Bourbon, Duchesse de Montpensier, the richest heiress in Europe, was one of the early triumphs of Richelieu. When he became First Minister, the kingdom of France was repre- sented in Europe by two inglorious young men, Louis XIII and his heir presumptive, Gaston, Due d'Anjou ; and there was little hope of an heir apparent, the King having been married some years without children. French royalty seemed therefore at a low ebb, from a personal point of view. With regard to State affairs, the work of those two clever and practical men, Henry IV and Sully, as to the strengthening of the King's supremacy, the centralisation of France, the beginnings of her foreign and financial policy, the checking of a rampant nobility, had been largely undone, especially in the last matter, by the undisciplined, favourite-ridden years of Marie de Mcdicis' regency. The struggle for com- mand at home and abroad was taken up by Richelieu, and carried on through great difficulties, as far as the princes and nobles were concerned. It seems doubtful whether the general advance in royal despotism and centralisation, accom- panied by heavy taxes, was good for the people of France in the long run ; but Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV, saw no alternative except anarchy. In such a world of stormy rivalry, some one had to rule ; they determined that the King should be the ruler. At Mademoiselle's birth, the struggle was still proceeding ; she lived on into a changed France, where revolts and con- spiracies were things of the past, the Rot SoUil shining in all his glory. In 1G2O, Cardinal de Richelieu had been First Minister for two years, and was not yet at the zenith of his power. Louis XIII was five-and-twenty, and of a character most CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 5 unattractive to the French, though they respected him as " Louis le Juste." He was brave and straightforward, a passionate sportsman, but reserved, shy, self-diffident, in manners and temperament the very opposite to his father, Henry IV. Of a gloomy disposition and indifferent health, a stammerer, easily bored, caring for no one on earth but the few young men who were his friends, he was a disagreeable and disappointing husband to Queen Anne, the proud and lovely Spaniard. Years before, she had been attracted by the young King's dark beauty, but now, long unloved, neglected, childless, the object of suspicions not all un- justified, there were few women more unhappy. France wanted an heir, a royal child of her own, and this, even more than the King's little care for popularity, accounts for the rise of a party which set its hopes and affections on his brother Gaston, a handsome, pleasant, intelligent, weak, vicious boy of eighteen. Henry IV's youngest son, he was the spoilt favourite of his mother, Marie de M^dicis ; and she — a curious touch of the times — had provided him with a bad fairy godmother in the person of Marguerite de Valois, her husband's divorced wife. His name of Gaston had been borne by no prince since the famous young hero Gaston de Foix, Due de Nemours, nephew of Louis XII. Not any heroic virtues, however, but rather the vices of the Valois, were bestowed on this new Gaston by his godmother. As to an easy conscience and popular manners and morals, he was his father's son, and it was no difficult task to set him up, the heir presumptive, as a rival to his brother the King. Once married, and the father of kings to be. Monsieur would easily become the most powerful man in France. Several of the great nobles, who hated law and loved dis- order, certain princes of the blood royal, each with his own ambition, and the wild crowd of general society, checked in its desperate race after adventure and amusement by the dull indifference of the King — all were ready to throw them- selves into the new young Court of the future. No dulness with Monsieur: he was alive to the tips of his restless 6 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD finprers, to the ends of his curling hair on which the feathered hat was perched jauntily. Me was always whistling ; he could not even stand still to have his coat buttoned. Some- times he was like a real Prince Charming, friendly and delightful. No gloomy palace walls or damp forests for him : he must see life, must be amused, must go out among the people. His was a curious mind, constant to nothing and to nobody ; at his worst, he was a mere flibbertigibbet of a prince, an irresponsible sprig of royalty. For the good of France, and as a check on Henry, Prince de Condc, who considered himself next in the succession. Cardinal de Richelieu and the Queen-mother intended Monsieur to marry. Louis XIII, not without pangs, gave his consent ; he had at least one of his father's royal virtues — loyalty, however unwilling, to a great minister ; and also, to do him justice, never was there a king who identified him- self more entirely with his kingdom. Monsieur was ready to marry, but he and his friends had views of their own. They decided that he ought to marry a foreign princess : he would then, they thought, be more independent of his brother; and when the King died, an event neither unwished nor unexpected, he would have foreign allies as well as a strong party in France. Richelieu's views differed from theirs. He intended Gaston, single or married, to remain the King's subject, and had already chosen Mademoiselle de Montpensier as his bride. This was a marriage which would bring about no cabals in the country, would in no way affect the King's power, and presented a thousand advantages. The young Princess was descended, through the Dukes of Montpensier, from the elder branch of the House of Bourbon, who traced their descent from Saint-Louis through Robert de Clermont, his sixth son. Marie de Bourbon, their one representative, besides being Duchess in her own right of Montpensier, Chatellerault, and Saint-Fargcau, was Sovereign Princess of Dombes and La Roche-sur-Yon, and possessed many other fine estates, marquisates, counties, baronies, as well as an GASTOX DE FRANCF,, DUG D'ORT.EANS CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 7 immense fortune in funded property. It was a marriage which would give satisfaction to the great House of Lorraine, always to be reckoned with. Charles, Due de Guise, was the second husband of Henriette de Joyeuse, Mademoiselle de Montpensier's mother. The inner circle of Monsieur's friends, with his late governor, the Marechal d'Ornano, at their head, and en- couraged by the Due de Vendome and his brother the Grand Prior, sons of Henry IV by Gabrielle d'Estr6es, went so far in conspiring against this marriage that they threatened the life of Richelieu. Of the several foolish young men who were concerned in this conspiracy, the unfortunate Comte de Chalais, Master of the Wardrobe to the King, was the most terribly punished. He had been drawn in by his passion for Madame de Chevreuse, the Queen's friend, who hated Richelieu on her own account, and was furiously opposed to a marriage which filled the childless Queen with jealous dread. The whole plot, with all its double intrigues and ramifications, even with accusations against the Queen herself, suggesting that the life of Louis was also threatened, and that after his death she intended to marry his brother, came to the Cardinal's knowledge by means of his spies, then and always legion. Monsieur was called upon to answer for himself He confessed everything and betrayed every- body. Some charitable writers say that he lost his nerve; others, that with perfect coolness of head he made the best bargain possible for himself. His one excuse is that he was only a spoilt, ill-taught boy of eighteen. The Queen's in- dignant denials convinced Louis that she had been atro- ciously slandered. Richelieu probably knew this very well at the time. D'Ornano, the Vendome Princes, and others were imprisoned ; some of them died in prison. Madame de Chevreuse was exiled from the Court and then from France. Jealousy of Chalais and the King's former affection for him, quite as much as a prudent fear of touching greater personages, seems to have been Richelieu's chief reason for 8 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD making him the scapegoat of the whole affair. His head was chopped off at Nantes with circumstances of horrible cruelty. In the same city, a few days earlier, Monsieur had been hurriedly married to the unfortunate girl whom the Cardinal and the Queen-mother had chosen. Richelieu him- self performed the ceremony. As the price of his obedience in "ranging himself," Gaston became Duke of Orleans and of Chartres, and Count of Blois. Mis household almost equalled the King's in number and magnificence. He had a guard of eighty men in his livery, and four-and-twenty Suisses who marched before him, tambour battant, on Sundays and holy days. He and his wife had their apartments at the Louvre, where, in the intervals of court ballets, comedies, and hunting parties, during that winter of uncertain hopes and fears, courtiers hurried scuffling through the labyrinth of dirty passages to pay their respects to the rising sun. Monsieur and Madame were exceedingly happy and triumphant. He had all that heart could desire in the way of money and amusement, and the fate of his former friends had not troubled him for a day. She looked forward confidently to being the mother of a future King of France. It was some additional satisfaction, possibly, that neither the King nor the Queen could very well hide the jealous sadness such a prospect caused them. The best known description of Madame — pliysianomie de moiiton — does not suggest beauty, though old writers say she was beautiful. Perhaps the truth is that her looks and disposition were both lamb-like ; but the courtiers and the gossips took a different view, declaring that she was ficre conime tin dragon. This means, probably, that she was a modest, dignified woman, who fearlessly showed her dislike of the e.xtreme freedom of manners that lay just beneath the top crust of courtly affectation. She was fond of Monsieur, who had his attractive side, and did her best, during their few months of married life, to make a man of him. She tried to please him by indulgences siie could easily afford, her fortune being largely at her own disposal. l""ind- CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 9 ing him, through the influence of his friends, a little reserved and cold, she hoped to draw him nearer to her by presents of money, bestowed whenever he came back from the gaming table in a bad temper. Gambling was one of his chief re- sources during that winter, and he had one or two other characteristic amusements. Sometimes he spent the night wandering in disguise, with a few gentlemen, in the dark and dangerous streets of Paris. Any house lighted up for an entertainment was liable to be entered by these uninvited guests, and scandals were frequently the consequence. If Madame knew of these expeditions, she felt no alarm, ex- cept for Monsieur's personal safety. No other fears troubled her generous, unsuspicious mind. Monsieur had worthier tastes and more innocent games. He collected pictures, medals, bibelots, and all kinds of antiquities. He liked botany, studied herbs and simples, had flowers painted from nature in a large book by Jules Donnabella. He had meetings of his friends — Puylaurens conspicuous among them — for discussions either serious or grotesque. Sometimes they held councils of " Vauriennerie," at which they managed the affairs of an imaginary kingdom- Monsieur himself made the map of this strange country — possibly the original of Mile de Scud^ry's carte du Pays de Tendre — gave names to its provinces, cities, and rivers, and appointed its great officers, to whom he wrote despatches. One of them was the Abb6 de la Riviere, already his favourite ; another was Antoine de Bourbon, Comte de Moret, his half-brother, who is said to have been more like Henry IV than any other of his children. Historians say that this young man, brought up as an ecclesiastic, but a brilliant soldier, fell in Gaston's quarrel at Castelnaudary. Tradition, which the paintings at Fontevrault seem to prove worthy of belief, saves him from that rout, carries him away into Italy, and gives him sixty years more of life as Brother John Baptist, a hermit at Gardelles, near Saumur, in the green depth of Anjou. Winter and spring passed in this way for the two royal lo A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD households in the Louvre : on one side, half-shown jealousy and dismal fear ; on the other, triumph and hope without any reserve. The weeks travelled on leaden feet for Monsieur, with all his pastimes. At last, instead of the expected prince, Mademoiselle arrived ; and the most part of l-"rance,/aw/f dc iiiieux, received her very well. Princess Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orleans was popular from her cradle. She was a terrible disappointment to her father, for she did not increase his consequence in the State. The Queen- mother and Richelieu, as well as all those who had lately paid court to Monsieur, were furious with the Fates who had deprived them of a future dauphin. The King and Queen and their personal friends — entirely distinct parties, for there was no sympathy between them — found themselves for once in a state of pleasant agreement. They had not wished for a nephew, and they gave a very kind welcome to their baby niece. For once Louis XIII could look out on Paris with a smile ; the joy of the good Parisians, the ring- ing of the bells for this new princess, found echoes in his melancholy soul. A few days later, in the first week of June, those joy-bells were followed by a funeral chime, for Madame was dead. The grief was universal, except among Monsieur's favourites, Puylaurens and others, who feared her good influence on their master. The news touched court and city, probably, more nearly than any since King Henry was stabbed by Fran9ois Ravaillac, the royal coach being blocked by wine- carts and hay-waggons at the corner of the Rue de la P'erronnerie, on the 14th of May, seventeen years before. The young Duchess was buried in royal state at Saint- Denis. The King and all the princes assisted at the magni- ficent ceremony, and the Queen was present incognito. Tliis being unusual, her motives were a good deal discussed. But Anne (jf Austria was by no means bad at heart, and it was not strange if, after suffering the torments of jealousy and even iiatrcd U)T so many months, she was touched by the pathetic end of her young sister-in-law. Still she was CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS ii Spanish, and she never quite forgave her own sufferings throughout that winter. There were days long after when Mademoiselle, her niece, felt their consequences. The persons who grieved most sincerely for Madame's untimely death were her mother and her mother-in-law. Monsieur's sorrow was noisy, but fleeting ; the marriage, after all, had been forced upon him, and he consoled himself easily with his old amusements, soon varied by a fresh con- spiracy. Puylaurens, Le Coigneux and the rest took care of that. To Madame de Guise the loss was heartbreaking and irreparable. The young Duchess had been the most obedient and loving of daughters ; besides this, her marriage had given the House of Lorraine a good place in the fight for honours and possessions, always going on. And last, possibly least, Madame de Guise had made a wedding gift to her daughter of her great diamond, one of the finest known, given to her father the Due de Joyeuse by Henry HI, and valued at eighty thousand crowns. This diamond passed with all the rest of Marie de Bourbon's possessions to her little daughter, who, at least when a child, thought rather scornfully of a grandmother who was not a queen. Marie de Medicis, fat, unwise, ill-judging if also ill-used, weak, violent-tempered, was a kind-hearted woman with strong family affections. She had pressed on her son's marriage and rejoiced in it, for personal as well as political reasons. His riotous living troubled her, if only for the sake of his constitution ; and she sincerely mourned a daughter- in-law who seemed likely to influence him for good. How- ever, the short-lived experiment being over, there remained Mademoiselle. Her grandmother, the Queen, took charge at once of the child, whose fortune and estates were formally held in trust by her father during her minority. Mademoiselle owed a great deal to Queen Marie de Mddicis, and realised the debt, though she was not four years old when her grandmother was driven out of France, after the Journh des Dupes, never to return. She owed her a child- hood watched over by a charming woman, the Marquise de 12 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD Saint-Georges, who had an almost hereditary right, however, to commant! a royal nursery. All the children of Henry IV, the sons till they were eight years old and passed on to a governor, the daughters much longer, had been brought up by her mother, Madame de Montglat, one of those rare good women in a brilliant, coarse, unprincipled time, of whom even court gossips could not tell a disreputable story. She was the beloved " Maman Ga" of Louis XIII, his brother Nicolas, Due d'Orleans, who died a child, and Gaston, Due d'Anjou ; his sisters EI i.sabeth, Queen of Spain, Christine, Duchess of Savoy, Henriette- Marie, Queen of England, la Rcine Malheurcusc, youngest and un- happiest of all. In the days of Madame de Montglat they were a lovely little family of most attractive children. Madame de Saint-Georges, as a young married woman, had been much in their nursery. She afterwards became lady-in-waiting, first to the Duchess of Savoy, then to the Queen of England, and at this time had very lately returned to France. It was in 1626 that Charles I insisted on sending back the French members of his wife's household, and the departure of Madame de Saint-Georges from London had been very stormy. She now took charge of the new grandchild of France, also the greatest heiress in Europe, treated, for both reasons, with the highest honours the Court could bestow. A house- hold of much dignity having been organised for Mademoi- selle, she was carried in her swaddling clothes along the great gallery, lately finished, that led from the Louvre to the Tuileries. Here she was established in a suite of splendid rooms, looking west towards the formal gardens of the palace, though divided from them by a street. The gardens extended as far as a wild sandy warren where the royal kennels were, now the Place de la Concorde. The Tuileries was still the fantastic, original palace which I'hilibcrt de I'Orme had built for Queen Catherine de Medicis. The world wagged with considerable violence round those high walls, round the cradle where Mademoiselle, carefully CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 13 watched night and day, slept and laughed and played with her first toys and grew quickly into the fair, blue-eyed beauty of her childhood. Naturally, it was long before she knew anything of the State intrigues and family quarrels which surrounded her. She did not even miss the grandmother who had taken her mother's place when Marie de M^dicis ceased to come, driving across Paris from her own new palace of the Luxembourg, to visit the child at the Tuileries. Monsieur had disappeared a few weeks before, after violently taking his mother's part in her quarrel with the King and with Richelieu — once her slave, then her ally, now, for him- self and the State, her deadly enemy and persecutor. The visits of a grandmother, however kind, a rather worried, ponderous lady of fifty-seven, with Madame de Saint-Georges as a go-between, were more easy to forget than those of Mademoiselle's lively and picturesque young father. She had seen him constantly, and loved him dearly. He had left the Louvre after his wife's death, but in the intervals of his varied flirtations and amusements, and when he was not playing at war with the English or making love to a future Madame — greatly to the royal displeasure — at the Court of Lorraine, he was often with his little daughter at the Tuileries, and she found him a charming companion. He played games with her, whistled and sang to her — he was a musician, like most of his family — taught her songs with gay refrains, such as they sang in the streets, sometimes about himself — none the less enjoyable — sometimes about the Eminence rouge, the ogre of the Court, Mattre Gonin, Cardinal de Richelieu. Madame de Saint-Georges may have had some difficulty in driving " Ton, ton, ton. Monsieur Ribaudon, tutaine, tuton, tutaine," and " Guillemette, Ion Ian la" and " Landerirette, landerira" and other refrains de vaude- ville hardly fit for little girls, out of Mademoiselle's mouth and memory. The child, quick-tempered, proud, and constant to those she loved, understood easily enough who was to blame for her father's disappearance. She was very angry with the 14 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD Kinc; and the Carciinal ; she kicked and screamed when her ro\'al uncle and aunt sent for her to visit them at the Louvre. Ilerfcclinc^ towards Richelieu never chanfjcd, but she soon forgave her uncle. Louis XIII, when not unbearably weighed down b)' the responsibilities of kingdom and family, had qualities which made him a very good playfellow. Mademoi- selle liked him personally, and always valued his kindness. Anne of Austria, too, was kind, but Mademoiselle never loved her ; there was always some impassable barrier be- tween the Spanish Queen — forced to walk warily by her husband's dislike and Richelieu's politics strangely lined with passion — and the F"rench Princess, who even as a child, frank, haughty, outspoken, was an incarnation of the Bourbon temper. But the King loved games as well as his brother, different as the two men were. He not only wrote verses and com- posed songs — unlike Gaston's — and arranged ballets of the most delightful kind, with masks and fancy dresses, to be danced by all those lovely ladies to whose charms he was so oddly indifferent, but he was a confectioner, a gardener, a maker of nets, a worker in leather and metal. Then he loved natural history, had a fine collection of birds, and the best horses and dogs in Europe. He was the last King of France who cared for the ancient sport of falconry. He could tell stories without end, if he chose ; and being still, with all his bored looks, something of the enfant enfantissime of his young days, it is well to be believed that he amused himself and his little niece by making castles and coaches of cards, or swimming feather boats with a cargo of roses, " disant que ce sont navires qui viennent des Indes et de Goa." These visits to the Louvre, and afterwards to Fontaine- bleau, with a fresh round of amusements, and with the pleasure of feeling herself a person of an immense import- ance disputed by no other royal children, carried Mademoi- selle through the few years that passed before Monsieur came back to his country. She was then not eight years CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 15 old, a brilliantly pretty little girl. She knew little or nothing of her father's past doings, of the history of his wars against the King, of the noble lives that had been sacrificed in his quarrel ; but her quick ears heard and her heart and tongue resented Richelieu's first conditions, disgraceful enough, as to the reconciliation. They took her to meet Gaston at Limours. He, with his charming fancy, took off the cordon bleu which distinguished him from the gentlemen of his suite, and the child was asked, "Which is Monsieur?" She flew straight into his arms, and the worthless young fellow was touched with a marvellous joy. CHAPTER II " I'aurai toujniirs iiii crcur (?critc Sur toutes flours la Marguerite." THE NEW MADAME— HER ADVENTURES— THE FATE OF PUYLAURENS —THE PLAYFELLOWS OF MADEMOISKLLE— HIS EMINENCE HER GOD- FATHER MADEMOISELLE had now a stepmother, not much more than double her own age. But Louis and the Cardinal were unforgiving, and Gaston's return from exile had not meant the acknowledgment of his new wife. It is characteristic that though he was really in love with Princess Marguerite of Lorraine, and though he had married her, twice over, under very romantic circumstances, he came back happily without her, sacrificing, as usual, what was most dear to the ease and convenience of the moment. He confided the whole story to Mademoiselle, who listened with delight, being already a strong champion of her young stepmother and the forbidden marriage. Monsieur had fallen in love with Princess Marguerite at Nancy, at the Court of her brother, Duke Charles IV, before she was sixteen. He had married her secretly, two years later, when he was him- self an exile. Most of her relations were flattered by the alliance, but her brother the Duke could not give his consent without bringing down the power of France on Lorraine, the King and the Cardinal being strongly opposed to a marriage which would strengthen the hands of their enemy, Spain, and of all those, within and without the kingdom, whose sympathies were with the Queen-mother and Monsieur. Outside politics, the Duke of Lorraine's consent was not so necessary, as his father the Prince de Vaudemont was alive and favourable. And there were other strong influences at |6 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 17 work. The Sieur de Puylaurens, who pulled all the strings of Gaston's life at this time, had fallen desperately in love with Madame Henriette de Lorraine, Princesse de Phalsbourg, Marguerite's elder sister. She, knowing his influence on his master, made use of him as a stepping-stone for the family ambition — to see the young Marguerite, at no distant day. Queen of France. Things were brought to a point by the energy of the Abbess of Remiremont, a Lorraine Princess and aunt of Marguerite. She had built a convent of Benedictine nuns at Nancy, and she arranged that the lovers should meet there, at seven o'clock on a winter's evening. A Benedictine monk was waiting in the chapel, and they were quietly married ; the witnesses being the Prince de Vaudemont, Gaston's half-brother the Comte de Moret, Puylaurens, and Madame de la Neuvillette, Princess Marguerite's governess. Immediately after the marriage Monsieur fled, " aux flambeaux," leaving his bride behind him, and escaped to his mother at Brussels, where neither the Duke of Lorraine's "despair " nor the anger of the King and Cardinal could reach him. He and his young wife did not meet again for many months, and then only for a few hours. After this followed his unhappy expedition into France, which ended in the defeat of Castelnaudary, the sacrifice of so many brave lives for him, and the utter ruin of the great House of Montmorency. Richelieu's strength and terrible severity, the death of Henry de Montmorency, noblest and most brilliant of Frenchmen, on the scaffold at Toulouse, shook French society sharply to its centre, and made nothing but submission possible for Gaston, unless he chose to remain in exile, with Queen Marie de Medicis, for the rest of his brother's life. Everybody knew what was likely to be one of Richelieu's conditions of peace — the declaring the Lorraine marriage null and void. Even Mademoiselle in her nursery had known that and resented it. In fact, it was not long after the Languedoc campaign that the King's army entered Lorraine c iS A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD and bcsictjed Nancy. The Duke could not hold out long afjainst his su7.crain, except by throwing himself into the arms of Sjiain and seeing his duchy dividefl between the two Powers. Louis would soon have had his way as to the marriage. Nancy was to be surrendered in ten days and the young Princess placed in the hands of the King. But they all reckoned without Madame Marguerite, who had no inten- tion of giving up her husband at the bidding of King, Cardinal, or even Pope. Her brother, the Cardinal dc Lorraine, had asked permis- sion of the besiegers to leave Nancy with his suite. She determined to escape in disguise as one of his gentlemen. With a spirit worthy of Madame de Chevreuse or Madame de Longueville, she dressed herself in men's clothes, clapped on a black wig over her fair hair, darkened her skin by rubbing in soot, and went at five o'clock in the morning, as the old memoirs tell us, to say adieu to Madame de Rcmiremont at the Benedictine convent. The nuns, singing their office in the dimly lit chapel, looked up, and their voices quavered with terror at the sight of an armed man. But ALidame soon reassured them. They prayed with her for a successful journey, and after affectionate farewells the girl left them, slipping away in rising daylight to the coach in which she was to begin her journey. In passing through the royal army she had a narrow escape : the passports of the Cardinal's suite were examined, and if the right officer had performed this duty, he would certainly have recognised the Princess, whom he knew by sight. But M. du Chfttelier was in bed at that early hour, and the young Duchess in her disguise passed unarrested. When safely through the camp, she mounted and rode about forty miles without stopping, out of Lorraine tcrritur}- to Thion- ville, which was in the hands of Spain, l^efore entering the town she sent one of her two servants with a message to the Governor, M. de Wilthz, and in the meanwhile, dead tired, she lay down on the grass near the gate. The sentinel looked laughing at the dark boy, and remarked that this CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 19 young cadet was not used to long rides. The Governor sent down in haste, and his wife received the fugitive with tender respect, providing her with clothes until her own baggage was sent after her. She travelled on to Namur, where Monsieur joyfully met her and conveyed her to Brussels. After some time, Cardinal de Richelieu doing his best to have the first marriage declared null and void, Monsieur and Madame were solemnly married again at Brussels by the Archbishop of Malines. This marriage was confirmed and approved by the Doctors of the Faculty of Louvain. Thus ecclesiastical law was satisfied ; and the Pope never gave his consent to the nullifying of the marriage, even when the Church authorities in France, under Richelieu's orders, pro- nounced a decree of separation. Monsieur remained faithful to his wife, although he bowed to the storm so far as to live in France for several years without her. At first, the King allowed him to send her a handsome pension, but this stopped when war was declared with Spain. Marie de Mddicis, herself in serious difficulties, could not help her daughter-in-law, and Madame seems to have lived on the charity of the Spanish Court till the death of her French persecutors. Then, at last, she took her right place in her husband's country ; but the charm and the spirit of her youth had passed away. Monsieur's return to France, married or unmarried, was looked upon by Louis XIII and Richelieu as a political necessity. The Cardinal brought it about by intriguing with Puylaurens, who, having quarrelled with Madame de Phals- bourg, was not unwilling to make terms for himself and his master. Richelieu's first plan, if he could have done away with the Lorraine marriage, was to make a match between Monsieur and his own niece, Madame de Combalet, after- wards created Duchesse d'Aiguillon, an ambitious woman, whose airs of devotion were remarkable, even in that age of extremes. Mademoiselle justly hits off this plan as " shameful and ridiculous," and it seems that everybody agreed with her. The suggestion was one of Richelieu's few mistakes. 20 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD In Mailcmniscllc's childish eyes, the return of her charming )-iiuni; lather was something' like a triumph. As long as he was in Paris he devoted himself to her amusement. He arranged a ballet specially for her, the royal dances being too grown-up for people of eight years old. This ballet, a "dance of pygmies," was composed of little princesses, and girls and boys of quality, magnificently dressed. The figures and steps were easy, and the " entrees," with which the ballet was diversified, were suited to the company. Cages full of birds were let loose in the ballroom. Flying wildly about, a bird caught itself in the frills of Mademoiselle Claire-Clcmence de Maillc-Brczc, the Cardinal's niece, after- wards the wife of the great Cond(5 and the heroine of Bordeaux. She was not heroic on this occasion, and her shrieks and tears made the whole company scream with laughter. Mademoiselle was a good deal flattered by the attention of M. de Puylaurens, who had been rewarded with a dukedom and peerage for his services in bringing Monsieur back to France. He had also received a wife at the Cardinal's hands — Mademoiselle de Pontchfiteau, cousin of His Eminence — and to all appearance was high in favour. He gained Made- moiselle's heart by treating her with the ceremony due to a grown-up person, considerately sweetened by large presents of confitures. But Puylaurens, like so many others who incautiously trusted themselves at Court when the Cardinal still doubted their loyalty or had anything in their past lives to forgive, speedily fell from his high estate. Only a few weeks had passed when he was arrested and taken to Vincennes. There he died a few months later, another victim of Richelieu's unsparing vengeance. Some said that he was poisoned by eating " champignons du bois de Vin- cennes " ; the same thing had been said of other prisoners, the Marechal d'Ornano, the Grand Prieur de Vendome ; but it seems that the damp, unwholesome chill of the vaulted dungeons of Vincennes was quite sufficiently murderous. Monsieur took the disgrace and death of his friend with CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 21 a cheerful indifference, and retired soon after to his estates in the West. Mademoiselle, who was always rather the child of France, the granddaughter of Henry IV, than the daughter of the Due d'Orleans, remained with Madame de Saint-Georges and various young companions at the Tuileries. A singular figure in her surroundings was a pet dwarf, "the smallest ever seen," with an alarmingly large nose. Ursule Matton was her name. Among the young girls who were Mademoiselle's play- fellows at this time, and her friends and acquaintances always, one at least was of legitimate royal blood — Mademoiselle de Longueville, afterwards married to Henri, Due de Nemours, only and spoilt child of that typical French noble and very good-natured man, the Due de Longueville, by his first marriage with Louise de Bourbon, granddaughter of the first Prince de Conde. He married, in 1642, a second wife half his own age, the beautiful and famous Anne Genevieve de Bourbon, daughter of Henry Prince de Cond^ and Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency. Mademoiselle de Bourbon, the adored angel of the Court, eight years older than Mademoiselle de Montpensier, was never either her playfellow or her friend. Mademoiselle's hates were as cordial as her loves, and in these days she detested the House of Conde. She was very fond of Mademoiselle de Longueville, a clever, sharp-tongued girl ; they were always joking and laughing together ; but her special affection was given to Mademoiselle d'Epernon, whose mother, Gabrielle-Angelique de Bourbon, was a daughter of Henry IV and Henriette d'Entragues, Marquise de Verneuil, and who caused her the greatest sorrow, some years later, by becoming a Carmelite nun. Others among Mademoiselle's early friends were the young daughters of Timoleon de Daillon, Comte du Lude, who had been for a short time governor of Monsieur. Strange legends of the Middle Ages hung round the name of Daillon, and even now they haunt the neighbourhood of Le Lude, in Anjou, where the splendid old chateau, long 22 A PRINCESS OI- THE OLD WORLD passed away frnm the ancient name, still stands above the Loir. There was also Charlotte de Ranee, with whom Mademoiselle kept up a lifelong friendship. Her wild brother, the notorious Abbe Armand de Ranee, afterwards the reformer of La Trappe, attended many years later, not long after his own tragical conversion, the sad death-bed of Monsieur. It was with his advice and help that Mademoi- selle, in advancing age, made various charitable foundations on the estates left to her by the greed of Madame de Montespan. These young people and many others played together at the Tuilcrics and danced before the King and Queen at the Louvre, enjoying life from day to day with all the energy of their country and time, with no serious interests beyond balls and ciimedies, dress and toys and sugar-plums, and very little trouble of lessons. Mademoiselle, at least, was let off easily under the light authority of Madame de Saint- Georges. She could read, write, dance, and ride ; that was all. And for a girl of Mademoiselle's lively wits, with no turn and no necessity for classical learning, it appears to have been enough. She could appreciate Corneille, and knew how to make his ideals her own. She had an instinc- tive knowledge of what a princess ought to be. She was intelligent in matters of business. And never, in youth or old age, with a restless, imperious temper and plenty of foolish fancies and ambitions, was there anything mean or small about Mademoiselle. As a child, the one person who gave her serious annoy- ance was the red-robed ogre, Richelieu. He moved in a Court where no one liked him and every one feared him — a tall, slight, wasted figure, with white hair, dark pointed beard, and moustache brushed up sharply. The long thin hand was of iron, without Henry IV's velvet glove, and might at any moment, moved by some secret spring of information, dart down on some unhappy courtier and whisk hifn off to Vincennes or the ]5astille. Mademoiselle hated Richelieu, not alone for the sake of her father and his CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 23 friends. He had a way of injuring her young royal dignity by treating her as " a little girl." At nine years old, she had to go through a terrible ceremony of baptism ; she had, of course, been baptised as an infant, but this was the public christening. The Queen was her godmother, the Cardinal her godfather. This alone hurt her pride ; but when he gave her good advice, and promised to marry her well, he became quite insupportable. She would not have been absolutely displeased, perhaps, had she known that at this ceremony of her baptism the Cardinal narrowly escaped assassination, and from the hands of a future Cardinal — no less a personage than the Abbe de Retz, then a wild scamp of two-and-twenty. It is no great wonder that Richelieu, with the fate of France in his hands, with personal enemies all round him and no supporter to depend on but the King, with the noises of war rolling more and more loudly round and over the frontiers of the kingdom, could not give much time or thought to pleasing women and children. Still, he had a taste in toys, if we may judge by a present he made to his niece, Claire- Clemence de Maille-Breze. This was a little room com- pletely furnished and inhabited by dolls ; a lady in bed, a baby, a grandmother, a nurse and other servants. All these could be dressed and undressed, and gave immense satisfac- tion, if not to Mademoiselle, to many of her young contem- poraries. The Comte de Brienne's queer story of Cardinal de Richelieu shows the odd mixture of love and hatred which moved him where Anne of Austria was concerned. Had the Queen encouraged the Cardinal, the course of history might have been altered. So people said at the time. The long war with Spain, for instance, might never have begun. One can hardly believe that even Anne's singular charm would have had power to turn Richelieu from his one object, the aggrandisement of France. But there was a background of private quarrel and intrigue to all the politics of that day. One day, says the Comte de Brienne, the Queen and a 24 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD friend of licrs were talking; together and laughing at the Cardinal. "He is passionately in love, Madame," said the confidante. "There is nothing he would not do to please Your Majesty. Shall I send him to you, some evening, dressed en baladin ; shall I make him dance a saraband ? Would you like it? He would come." " What nonsense ! " said the Queen. But she was young, gay, and li\ely ; the idea was diverting. She took the lad}- at her worfl, and allowed her to go to the Cardinal. He accepted the singular rendezvous, and came at the appointed time. Boccau, the famous violin-player, had been engaged, and sworn to secrecy ; but are such secrets ever kept? The Queen, her friend, the musician, and two gentle- men were hidden behind a screen ; yet not so carefully that they could not enjoy the spectacle. Richelieu was dressed in green velvet ; he had silver bells at his knees and castanets in his hands ; he danced the saraband to Boccau's music. The spectators laughed till they could laugh no more. "After fifty years," says the Comte de Bricnne, " I laugh myself when I think of it!" But the Eminence rouge was a dangerous plaything; his follies were froth on the surface, and the Queen's worst experience of his power was yet to come. CHAPTER III 1637 " Laboissiere, dis-moi Vais-je pas bien en homme ? — Vous chevauchez, ma foi, Mieux que tant que nous sommes. Elle est Parmi les hallebardes Au regiment des gardes, Comme un cadet." ON THE ROADS — MARIE DE ROHAN, DUCHESSE DE CHEVREUSE — THE AFFAIR OF THE VAL-DE-GRACE — A FAMOUS RIDE— LA ROCHE- FOUCAULD — MADEMOISELLE AT CHANTILLY IT was always the custom, after travelling became possible at all, for great people to escape from the heat and horrible smells of Paris at the end of the summer. The nobles fled to their castles, which in Richelieu's days suffered much dismantling of walls and towers. Some of them found consolation in laying out splendid gardens in a style full of formal affectations, yet with a grandeur of its own. The Royalties, weary of Saint-Germain and Fontainebleau, often followed the fashion set in a former century and travelled in state about the kingdom. Sometimes they borrowed a palatial house from its owners ; sometimes they were enter- tained, as Henry IV so often was, by great seigneurs or princes of the blood. Trains of coaches, carts, baggage- waggons, pack-horses, mules, troops of guards or armed servants, were added to the usual population of the great roads, always lively with highwaymen, beggars, gipsies, pedlars, students, travelling players, caravans and shows, as well as the smaller public who travelled unwillingly and of necessity, messengers, merchants, ecclesiastics, or occasion- 25 26 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD ally Kiitjlish forcii^ncrs on their way to Italy or Spain. Great people needed threat trains, for they travelled with their beds and all necessary furniture, with their household servants and stores of provisions of every kind. Their nightly hosts on the way were asked, in theory at least, for no hospitality beyond bare walls. The King himself, when he invited guests to his palaces, gave them no more, except an occa- sional banquet. Journeys became a serious matter when one had to leave the route royalc itself, frequently bad and dangerous enough, for the lanes, the tracks across wild heaths and through forest country, the narrow causeways crossing marshy ground, the rotten bridges or uncertain fords of streams. Many of the great castles, many even of the smaller towns, unless lucky enough to stand on a high road or a river, were plunged in remote country that could only be penetrated in such-like risky ways. And the lonely woods and moors had other dangers of their own. Even after Louis XI I I's reign, and in spite of Richelieu's years of stern home rule, some of the smaller country nobles, hidden away in their almost inaccess- ible towers among the forests, led the life of robbers and rebels which had come down in tradition from the civil wars of the sixteenth century. Like the savage barons of the Middle Ages, they pounced down on any unhappy traveller in difficulties, and if he escaped alive out of their hands, he left his valuables behind him. And justice, even under Richelieu, had some difficulty in tracing and punishing these adventurers. The manners of the League were quite in discredit at Court and among the higher society, a change partly owing to the wave of Church reform under Marie de Medicis, partly to the romantic influence of L'Astrie and of Corneille's early plays, partly to the new atmosphere of the Hotel de Rambouillet and to the dignified Spanish ideas of Anne of y\ustria. Brutality was out of fashion; but it still existed; all the memoirs and stories of the time bear witness to that. And the few poor hobcreaux who found their profit and CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 27 excitement in highway robbery, in coining false money, in oppressing and torturing miserable peasants, were not much worse than the many great people, men and women, whose restless lives were spent in unscrupulous plotting and treason, and who for the sake of their own wild amusement, quite as much as for the defence of their order, devastated France by such wars as the second Fronde. They lived every moment of their lives, those people of Mademoiselle's early days. They breathed danger and adventure. Some of them — of whom Madame de Chevreuse was a type — never hesitated between the joy of opposition and risk of life and liberty. Through nearly all the lifetime of Louis XIII, Anne of Austria's name is not to be separated from that of the daring friend who did her best to drag the Queen into the moral and political scrapes which were her own native air. Marie de Rohan was a gay and audacious crea- ture, frank, affectionate, loyal to her many lovers and friends. If her portraits are to be trusted, her lovely face had the expression of an innocent child. Poor Chalais was not the only man who died for his faith in her. Devoted to the Queen from her first coming into France, and as Duchesse de Luynes the chief of her ladies, she was to blame for the Buckingham adventure, the greatest and most narrowly escaped danger of Anne's life. But religious scruples and Spanish reserve were rather ridiculous to Madame de Chevreuse, who had neither. She was born of an old and illustrious race, the daughter of Hercule de Rohan, Due de Montbazon. She inherited all the pride and the fearless independence of the Rohan ni°tto, Roi ne puis, Prince ne daigne, Rohan je suis. Her early marriage with Luynes was something of a mes- alliance, in spite of the high place he had gained ; she made up for it by her second marriage with the Due de Chevreuse, of the House of Lorraine, as much above Luynes in birth as below him in intellect and character. She was a great lady ::S A TRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD of tlie [:;reatest, superior to fashions and laws, " trop grande dame pour daigner connaitrc la retenue et n'ayant d'autre frein que I'honneur." Public opinion was nothing to her. She had a genius for intrigue, scorned the thought of danger, would go to any length for her friends without a spark of personal ambition. The game of politics was for her a passion, in which her dashing courage and brilliant cleverness never failed, but she did not play it in her own interest. Neither Richelieu nor his successor had a more dangerous enemy than Madame de Chevreuse. In the late summer of 1637, Mademoiselle, a forward child of ten, on that first country journey which taught her some curious things about the world she lived in, just missed seeing Madame de Chevreuse at Tours. She was in the act of flying from Richelieu's dreaded vengeance into Spain. The details of the Val-de-GrSce intrigue are complicated and curious. A letter written by the Queen to Madame de Chevreuse — then exiled from the Court and living chiefly at Tours near her devoted, eccentric admirer, the old Arch- bishop^was intercepted by Richelieu's spies and its bearer, the Queen's valet. La Porte, thrown into prison. This letter seems to have been the first distinct proof gained by the Cardinal of a correspondence kept up by Anne with her relatives in Spain and the Low Countries, as well as with the Court of London and with the Duke of Lorraine — all enemies of Richelieu, if not of France. This correspondence was partly, no doubt, on family affairs, but it contained a good deal of political information ; in fact, from her own confession, the ill-used Queen had been persecuted and pro- voked into great imjirudencc, if not disloyalty. Even Madame de Motte\ille, who from her childhood loved and revered the Queen, though it was only after the King's death that she became her personal attendant, owns that Anne " faisoit quelques petitcs intrigues contre le cardinal, on tout au moins dcsiroit d'en faire ([ui eussent rcussi a sa niinc" Tims it was a [icrsonal matter with Richelieu, who cuuld now take a justifiable rcs'engc, in disgracing the Queen CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 29 and punishing her friends, for any past scornfulness on her part. The Convent of the Val-de-Grace, in the Faubourg St. Jacques, a favourite refuge of the Queen, who had founded it, and who often wrote and received letters there, was visited and searched by the Archbishop of Paris and Chancellor Seguier. The Abbess, Louise de Milley, called the Mhre de Saint-Etienne, of Spanish birth, and therefore the more devoted to the Queen, was threatened with ex- communication and forced to resign her office. There was a talk of the Queen's being divorced and sent back to Spain ; people said that Richelieu intended to marry the King to his niece, the Duchesse d'Aiguillon, whom he had already destined for Monsieur. However, after threats and scoldings and disgrace and humiliation deep enough to satisfy the Cardinal, and after being forbidden to write any letters without the King's knowledge or to visit any convents without his leave, the Queen was solemnly forgiven. One may judge whether she and her friends loved Richelieu any better. The Court in general was afraid to take the Queen's part, but at the worst moment she very nearly accepted the romantic offer of young La Rochefoucauld, then Prince de Marcillac and an adorer of Madame de Chevreuse, to carry her off with her most loyal maid of honour, Mademoiselle de Hautefort, to her aunt the Infanta at Brussels. Such an enlkiemeni would indeed have been a choice jewel among the adventures of the time. The idea was probably suggested by that queen of romance, Madame de Chevreuse. Richelieu knew very well that she was the moving spirit of all opposition and every intrigue ; still the fascination of her beauty and originality was so great, that he had never attempted to punish her more seriously than by exile — trying enough to a woman of her character. Even after the Val-de-Grace affair he wrote to her in friendly terms, and appeared to accept her own ex- planation of the part she had played. But Madame de Chevreuse knew the Cardinal too well to trust his fair words. Her friends at Court warned her that he meant to imprison 30 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD her at Loches, a terrible prospect. They arranf^ed a warning signal, in case the danger was imminent. A Htxjk of Hours was to be sent to her from Paris ; if bound in green, it would mean safety ; if in red, danger. A green book arrived ; it seems that, the Queen having confessed and been formally forgiven, Richelieu really meant to let Madame de Chevreuse alone. In her eager anxiety she mistook the sign ; the cold shadow of Loches fell upon her ; there was nothing for it but instant flight. The old Archbishop did his best for her ; he was a loyal friend, though hardly a credit to the Church, if all the stories about him are true. For instance, he and Madame de Chevreuse were one day much moved by a representation of Tristan's Alariamne. "It seems to me, monseigneur," she said, "we are not touched by the story of the Passion as we are by this play." "Je crois bien, madame," he answered ; "c'est histoire, ceci, c'est histoire. I have read it in Josephus." A foreshadowing of the Higher Criticism, perhaps! But it is to be counted among Richelieu's good deeds that he prevented this worthy man from being made a Cardinal. The Archbishop was of a Basque family, a native of Bcarn. All the roads from Paris to the south were intimately known to him, and he had relations on the Spanish frontier. He gave Madame de Chevreuse letters of credit and wrote down many directions for the journey. But in her haste and terror she lost or forgot everything. Leaving her old friend in despair and lamentation, she rode off with two servants dressed as a man, her head bound up that she might pass for a gentleman wounded in a duel. Everybody would help such a person to escape. Duels were forbidden, a most un- popular law among the golden youth of France ; the edict against duelling, like that for demolishing fortresses, was part of Richelieu's plan for bringing the nobles under authority. They never forgave him the execution of the Counts de B(jutteville-Montmorency and des Chapelles, the first victims of this law. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 31 When Madame de Chevreuse had ridden some leagues on the south road without rest or food, she arrived utterly exhausted at Ruffec, near which was the Due de la Roche- foucauld's Chateau of Verteuil. She discovered that the Duke himself was away, but Marcillac, her admirer, was there. Had he been alone she might have asked for hospitality ; but his mother the Duchess was at home, as well as his much-neglected wife, and the name of Madame de Chevreuse was alarming to ladies of more conventional manners. She sent Marcillac a characteristic note by one of her men. " Monsieur, — I am a French gentleman, and ask your help in saving my liberty, perhaps my life. I have had an unlucky fight. I have killed a well-known nobleman. Justice is in search of me, and I must leave France at once. I think you are generous enough to help me without knowing me. I am in need of a coach and a servant to guide me." Marcillac in his young days, as everybody knows, was the handsomest, the most brilliant, in many ways the most dis- tinguished, of the high nobility of France. His literary fame was of a later growth. His courage, of course, was beyond question, but it was not the single-fold courage of such a man as Conde, and with all his attractiveness he was not generous. They say he was irresolute ; probably he was too clever, too imaginative, to act without calculation. He knew the handwriting of Madame de Chevreuse. He was also aware of being himself slightly entangled in the Val-de-Grace intrigue, and to that extent out of favour at Court. The Chateau de Verteuil, as usual at this time of the year, was full of guests, and Marcillac could not, without everybody's knowledge, have gone personally to the fugitive's aid. Only two miles off; she may very well have expected him. He did more than she asked, however. He sent her a coach and four, four saddle-horses, and three men. She had been too impatient to wait at Ruffec. A hundred yards from the gates of Verteuil the servants met a young gentleman dressed in black with a fair wig, who threw him- 32 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD self into the coach, " |iaroissant f(jrt las." Then the coach with its small escort rumbled and jolted along the country roads of southern I'oitou — a stony land scattered with oaks and chestnuts — till three o'clock the next morning, when after a drive of weary length it drew up at another house belonging to the La Rochcfoucaulds, inhabited by a gentle- man with the unattractive name of Malbasty. He and his wife received the supposed young seigneur respectfully, as a friend of M. de Marcillac. The coach was sent back from this place, as well as the fugitive's own two servants. She mounted again and rode on southward, attended by Malbasty and one of the men from Verteuil. Malbasty was completely mystified, and devoured by curiosity. The journey was full of romantic incidents. The rough inns on the road, with their mixed, uncivilised com- pany, were not at all to the young gentleman's taste. At one place he slept on hay in a barn, utterly exhausted, after refusing with disgust the dinner of boiled goose which was brought to him. A worthy woman of the village, passing by the open barn doors and seeing him there, cried out in pity and admiration, " That's the handsomest boy I ever saw! I'm sorry for you, sir I Won't you come and rest at my house ? " The traveller thanked her in a low, hoarse voice, but declined to move. The good creature hurried home and came back with half a dozen fresh eggs, which were gratefully accepted. At the end of the first day, Malbasty begged his mysterious charge to tell him his name. The unknown answered that he was the Due d'Enghien, obliged to leave France for a secret reason. Whether Malbasty believed this, or whether he was reassured by finding himself mixed up in the mad doings of a Prince of the blood, the story does not say. But at the end of the second day, when Malbasty was to return home, the Duchess suddenly and frankly declared herself, and told him that she was escaping for political reasons, but without any ill will against the King or the Cardinal. Malbasty was extremely distressed ; her charm CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 33 never failed with man or woman, grandee, simple gentleman, or lackey. He begged her not to go on, pointing out the many dangers of the road. She would lose herself in the marshy, almost pathless landes, or among the rocks and forests and torrents, the wild, high valleys of the Pyrenees. She would meet with robbers, bears, wolves, lynxes, and she had only one man to defend her. There had already been a foretaste of adventures. She had turned off the road to avoid the Marquis d'Antin and a troop of horse. She had been accosted by a mysterious gentleman dressed in red, who approached her with many bows, was angrily waved away, but dogged her steps as far as the next inn. Madame de Chevreuse would listen to no warnings. She entrusted Malbasty with a letter for her old friend the Archbishop, and then, ever gay and courageous, she rode on her way, only attended by Potet, the trusty guide Marcillac had sent her. She crossed the Pyrenees, a wild and dangerous ride, even at that time of the year. With every fresh league of distance from Paris, her spirits rose and her fears lessened. The women she met fell in love with her ; the men helped her on her way. In a certain valley, close to the Spanish frontier, she met a gentleman who was on guard there, and who might have detained her in the very sight of safety. He had seen her in Paris, and he told the handsome traveller that, but for his dress, he would have sworn Madame de Chevreuse was riding by. She answered him gaily that being a near relation of the Duchess, the likeness was not to be marvelled at. They parted with all kinds of courtesies, and half an hour later her dangers were over for the time : she was safe on Spanish soil, where a friend of the Queen, an enemy of Richelieu, the most famous beauty of her day, was sure of welcome. No sooner had she reached the frontier, than she wrote to the friendly gentleman on guard among the mountains, told him that he had not been mistaken, for she was indeed Madame de Chevreuse, thanked him for his " extraordinary 34 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD civilit>-," .'intl l)ct::[;e(l him to send her a supply of clothes suit,ii)lc to her sex and conflition " avant do passer outre." So ended the f.imous ride which was the great subject of talk in that da>', and wliiih has been the foundation of many riiniances. It will be amusini; to return for a moment to the Chateau de V^erteuil, where Madame de Chevreuse, as her way was, had caused great flutterings. The I'rince de Marcillac, it seems, had been obliged to account to his mother for the sudden departure of the coach. He told her no fable about a duellist. Madame de Chevreuse, he said, passing by Ruffec, had asked for a coach to convey her to Saintes on private business. On her return, she would have the pleasure of paying a visit to Madame la Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld. Whether all this was Marcillac's own inven- tinn, iir whether Madame de Chevreuse had written him a second letter to that effect, does not seem clear. That he was uneasy in his mind as to the lady's intentions is shown by a prudent letter he wrote to his secretary in Paris. Here he tells the same storj-, evidently with the object of keeping himself on the safe side, in case, the coach having travelled towards Bordeaux and not towards Saintes, the affair should be thought of any consequence. Madame de la Rochefoucauld was not delighted at the prospect of this " visite de haut appareil." Madame de Chevreuse was an embarrassing guest. But she prepared to show all proper hospitality, and the return of the empty coach, though in one way a relief, made her not a little uneasy. Why had Madame de Chevreuse driven south instead of west? Where was she going? What did it mean ? The doings of such a personage, with whom in- trigue, social and political, was as natural as the air she breathed, were inevitably suspicious. If anything was wrong, her borrowmg the La Rochefoucauld coach might have serious consequences for its owners, even though they ranked next to the blood royal. The Duchess felt it necessary to write the whole affair to her husband in Paris, excusing her- CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 35 self and her son while she put the Duke on his guard. She sent the letter by an express messenger, as safer than the ordinary post. The straightforward ease of this letter is worthy of a great writer's mother — she was a Liancourt — and proves that women could say what they meant when Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, afterwards Marquise de Sevigne, was only eleven years old. "... You will judge better than I if the thing is of con- sequence. Whether it is or not, I wish she had gone any way but this, or that Ruffec was not near Verteuil, for any one cleverer than I am would have been deceived. Though I only knew she had asked for the coach after it had started, I should have sent it just the same if she had asked me, think- ing, as my son did, that the civility could not be refused and would matter to no one, and knowing very well that she and her husband have plenty of private affairs of their own. . . ." It is fairly certain that Marcillac knew what he was doing, though his mother did not. In spite of these letters, the reports that reached the Cardinal went a good deal further than a borrowed coach. It was said that he had gone to meet Madame de Chevreuse, had entertained her at one of his houses, had given her every mark of devotion short of flying with her into Spain. As a fact, she had entrusted her jewellery, worth two hundred thousand crowns, to his care. He was to return it if they ever met again, or keep it as a gift if she died. The affair did not end without a good deal of trouble and fuss. A formal inquiry was held that autumn by the Cardinal's agent, President Vignier, both at Tours and Verteuil. Riche- lieu was not, however, bent on punishing either Madame de Chevreuse or her friends very severely. By way of warning him to help no more duellists or disguised heroines, young Marcillac was sent to the Bastille. But only for a week ; and the King gave special orders to M. du Tremblay, the governor — who was the brother, by the by, of Pere Joseph, the Eminence grise — that M. de Marcillac should 36 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD be lodf^ed and treated well, with liberty to walk on the terrace. l\Icaiuvhi!e, Madame de Chevreiise, havinf,^ been made much of at the Spanish Court, proceeded to ICngland, and was most cordially received there by her old acquaintances, Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Their favour enabled her to negotiate with Richelieu her return to France and the restoration of her property. But he was inexorable ; and even Anne of Austria, when better days dawned for her, was not very true to her dangerous old friend. Madame de Chevreuse remained in exile six years longer, a sharp thorn in the side of the French Government, till after both Riche- lieu and Louis XIII were dead. Mademoiselle was slightly entangled in the fringe of the Val-dc-Grace affair, and that at its most thrilling moment. When she began her country progress that summer, driving out into the land of windmills and village spires and distant woods that lay round Paris, one of her first visits was paid to Chantillj', where the King and Queen were staying, and where Anne of Austria had just gone through the painful experi- ence of being examined by Chancellor Seguier and the Cardinal as to her correspondence with Spain. Chantilly was in those days a place of sad associations, though such changes of fortune were too common to make any deep impression on the Court. A very few years before, it had been the palace of the Montmorencys, where Henrj', the last Duke, the victim of Gaston d'Orldans and Richelieu, had lived splendidly with his Roman wife, Maria Felice Orsini. The forests and avenues and terraces still echoed to the name of " Sylvie," under which Theophile de Viau, the poet whose life she had protected and reformed, sang of the good and unhappy Duchess. After the Duke's tragic death, Chantilly, confiscated to the Crown, was given by Louis XIII to his brother-in-law the Prince de Condc, who had not attempted to save him, though his great influence might probably have done so. Down to the great Revolution, Chantilly was "the Ver;ailles of the Princes of Condc." CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 37 Louis XIII, with all the Court, had honoured and admired the Duchesse de Montmorency. He had written a little poem to her with his own hand : — Je vols ta renommee Semde Dejk bien loin d'icy, D'un chacun estimde, Sage Montmorency. Now truly " bien loin d'icy," the noble Duchess, whose very presence had been a check on gossip and malignity, had retired in her deep disgrace to a convent at Moulins, where she was to spend the rest of her life in mourning her young husband, and where the stately monument she raised to him keeps their memory alive to this day. Mademoiselle found things very dismal at Chantilly. Being a lively and irrepressible princess, however, with a con- viction that her amusement was the world's first duty, she soon changed all that. "Je mis toute la cour en belle humeur." The King was glad to forget his suspicions and grievances for a few days in entertaining her, and the cloudy faces of the courtiers cleared up. The Queen was in bed, ill with anger and mortification. The arrival of Mademoiselle, restless and noisy, was no par- ticular pleasure to her, but she was extremely glad to see Madame de Saint-Georges, and their talks were long and confidential. Anne of Austria opened her whole heart to this old friend of the Royal Family. But it was necessary that none of her ladies, responsible to the King, should know of this consolation. Mademoiselle was therefore obliged to sit in the room while they talked. No one, the Queen thought, would suspect her of discussing such affairs in the presence of a child. Mademoiselle, amusing herself as best she could during these important hours, made a promise of secrecy, and wisely thought that the best means of keeping it would be to forget everything she heard. She carried out this plan so effectually as to regret, when in after-years she came to write 38 A PRINCESS OF THK OLD WORLD lier Memoirs, havincj forr^ottcn a pood many curious things which no one but she and her governess, probably, had ever heard or known. Madame de Saint-Georges felt the danger of these royal confidences in the very heart of the storm and under the shadow of Richelieu. She conveyed Mademoiselle back to Paris as soon as possible, and started with her on a longer journey, to visit Monsieur on the borders of Touraine. CHAPTER IV 1637 " Et toujours apparaissaient de riants chateaux, des villages suspendus, or quelques routes bordees de peupliers majestueux ; enfin la Loire et ses longues nappes diamantees reluisirent au milieu de ses sables dores. Seductions sans fin ! " MADEMOISELLE IN TOURAINE — CHAMPIGNY AND RICHELIEU — THE DUCHESSE D'AIGUILLON AND HER FRIENDS — FONTEVRAULT AND MADAME JEANNE-BAPTISTE DE BOURBON — A WINTER OF HOPE NO difficulties as to travelling lay in wait for Mademoi- selle in the first of her many progresses about her grandfather's kingdom. The route royale into Touraine and the west was really a good road, and had borne its character for centuries. Kings of France, from very early times down to Henry IV, had made homes in these provinces, which they loved better than the neighbourhood of fierce and rest- less Paris. The " garden of France," " the afternoon-land of idleness and laughter," with its parks and forests, its ever- green meadows and the broad mirror of its blue and silver Loire, had been literally the happy hunting-ground of all the most brilliant personages in France, till near the end of the sixteenth century. The badges and devices of Francis I and of Henry II were everywhere, on the stately walls of cream-coloured stone, over the beautiful windows and arch- ways of the chateaux built or restored by them. Each interior was a picture gallery of themselves and their courts. And it was not only the royal castles and palaces that gave splendour and civilisation to Touraine and its borders, for all this part of France was full of the country-houses of great nobles and great statesmen. At this time Touraine had lost a good deal of its regal glory ; most of that had passed with the Valois. Gaston 39 Mm^J^ 40 A TRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD d'Orlcans, neither prince nor sportsman in the old sense, was a poor substitute for tlie Royalties of a hundred years before. 15ut the charm and dclii^htfulncss, the old spirit of Touraine, still lived. And Gaston, whatever his faults, was able to appreciate its atmosphere and its traditions better, possibly, than many a better man. Mademoiselle travelled in her large leathern coach drawn by four or six horses, with the glass windows not long intro- duced. Such a coach would hold six or eight persons inside, their places being strictly settled by etiquette, and four or six servants outside. An armed escort protected the coach and the convoy of carts and pack-mules which followed with the baggage, including Mademoiselle's bed and other furniture. Chief among the suite, after Madame de Saint-Georges, were Mademoiselle de Saint-Louis and Mademoiselle de ]?eaumont, both women of character and energy. At Chantilly, the little Princess had taken an immense fancy to Mademoiselle de Saint-Louis, who was one of the Queen's maids of honour and related to Madame de Saint-Georges. She begged so hard that the Queen allowed her to carry her favourite away. Mademoiselle de Beaumont was an im- petuous person, afraid of nothing and nobody, whose frank opposition to Cardinal Mazarin cost her the Queen's favour later on. She had had a certain training in England a dozen years before, as one of Henrietta Maria's ladies, and their very rude and violent expulsion had made a bond between her and Madame de Saint-Georges, who had gone through the same experience. Monsieur sent officers of his household to meet his little daughter at I'ithiviers, and she made her journey by short stages, sleeping at various chAteaux by the way, to Chambord, where he was waiting to receive her. Chambord in its gorgeous youth — it was built by Francis I in 1526 and following years, on the site of a feudal castle of the Counts of Hlois — had attractions quite lost by the dismal, rococo, ponderous old pile we see now. Like the CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 41 fantastic palace of a dream, its immense towers, its hundreds of fanciful pinnacles and chimneys, its shining grey roofs and gilded vanes, were approached by a long avenue through a vast park or forest several leagues round, where the Valois kings had hunted wolf and wild boar. Above this forest, sweeping like the wind through the clouds, the cry of a pack of hounds and the horn of their ghostly huntsman were heard — are heard still — on winter nights. When the chateau belonged to Gaston d'OrMans, the foundations of its towers were still surrounded by a broad moat, with arches and open balustrades and a bridge guarded by stone lions. All this was improved away in later years, but must have given Chambord the touch of enchantment which is lacking to it now. It was a glorious place in the liquid deep blue air of late summer weather, when the little Princess, very conscious of her own dignity, pleased with the ceremony that attended her, arrived with her train at the stately entrance under the centre lantern. Gaston had his redeeming points, though it is hard to find an historian or a novelist who will allow their existence. The best of them, perhaps, was that boyish good nature which also belonged to his brother Louis, though in his case generally smothered in clouds of dark temper and suspicious- ness. Gaston's lightness of spirit, his talent for amusing himself and other people, seems to have died out of him as middle age advanced, and after Madame Marguerite resumed her lawful and lifelong empire. But at this time, whatever modern writers may say, he could be delightful, and his daughter found him so. Chambord has thirteen great staircases ; of which the greatest, the famous one, is made of two spiral flights wind- ing round a centre pillar ; so contrived that two persons can go up or down without meeting each other, from the ground floor to the lofty lantern which commands the whole wonder- ful roof, to say nothing of the surrounding country. On each story the staircase opens on four large halls. In one of these, by the by, then arranged as a theatre, Louis XIV watched 42 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD the first performances of M. de I'ourceaugnac and Le Jiours^rois CicntilliotiiDic. On this summer day of 1637, Monsieur and Mademoiselle played a grand game up and down the staircase of Chambord. When she arrived, he was at the top ; she ran up, he ran down. There were screams of laughter. Mademoiselle was enchanted with the difficulty of catching her father, and still more enchanted when she had caught him. They were the best friends in the world. Chambord at this time, however, was only a playground. Monsieur was living at the Chateau de Blois, which became, in fact, his country home for the rest of his life, and here Mademoiselle and her suite paid him a long visit. She was received with royal honours by the stately little town on the Loire, and reigned like a young Queen at the castle. Out- wardly, though full of stir and magnificence and gaiety, the building was much the same as it is now : the red cloister of Louis XII, the gorgeous creamy wing of Francjois I, with its wealth of carving, his salamander everywhere ; the beautiful open staircase, light as lace and strong as iron, the labyrinth of rooms with their deep windows and terrible echoes of struggle and murder. There was a noise of masons and carpenters in the great court, for Mansard, under Gaston's orders, was at this time employed in rebuilding the wing opposite the entrance. It is said that Gaston meant to rebuild the whole castle in the stiff taste of his own day, but mercifully this plan came to nothing ; rather from want of money than of time. He made a beautiful garden behind his new wing, where he cultivated for his amusement all kinds of curious plants and simples. The fair-haired Princess went romping over the castle high and low. Always something of a tomboy, active games were her passion, and her father willingly spent his time in playing with her. The favourite game was battledore and shuttlecock, and they [ilaycd matches which Mademoiselle generally won. Then the shops of Blois were ransacketl for prizes — watches, trinkets, anything that Her Royal Highness would accept. PS o Q o Q D X u X H CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 43 All the people of quality who lived within reasonable dis- tance of Blois came riding and driving in to pay their respects to Mademoiselle. Among these was her half-uncle, Cesar Due de Vendome, who, more fortunate than his brother, the Grand Prleur, had escaped with his life from Vincennes after the affaire Chalais. He had been an exile from Court ever since, living partly at the beautiful Chateau of Chenonceaux, which was given to his wife, Fran^oise de Lorraine, daughter of the Due de Mercceur, by her aunt. Queen Louise de Lorraine, the gentle and saintly widow of Henry HI of France. The Due de Vendome was a doubtful character, according to his contemporaries — " un homme d'esprit sans reputation, sans bont6 et sans fidelity." But he and his two sons, Louis Due de Mercoeur and Francois Due de Beaufort, were among the chief of those great nobles whom Richelieu could never really crush, though Mercceur, in later years, resigned himself to an alliance with Mazarin. His daughter, who afterwards married the unlucky Charles Amedee Due de Nemours, was allowed, after the first time, to visit Mademoiselle at Blois without her mother. Made- moiselle thought this incorrect. But Madame de Vendome was a devout person of rather recluse habits, and did not find it necessary to pay more than one visit of ceremony to Monsieur and his daughter. His Court had not then attained the " chilling respectability " of later years. Mademoiselle found her Vendome cousins very agreeable, especially M. de Beaufort, and visited Chenonceaux more than once during her stay in Touraine, Beautiful Chenon- ceaux, the most enchanting and romantic of all the famous chateaux of the west, was hardly appreciated by Mademoi- selle. It was of course in the taste of a past century — not so long past as to have come back into fashion. No doubt she admired her father's new wing at Blois. Chenonceaux, white and grey, smiling in the sunshine, with its graceful windows, and all its turrets and chimney-tops crowned with a gilded flourish of vanes, its feet bathed in the bright ripples of the Cher — Chenonceaux like an enchanter's palace, a little evil 44 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD and very luxurious in the midst of its gardens and woods — was to Mademoiselle not much more than "a most extra- ordinary old house." She was delighted, however, with a magnificent supper there, at which young Beaufort acted as host. There were eight courses of twelve dishes each, and Paris itself could not have surpassed either cookery or service. Even at ten years old, true to her nation, Made- moiselle was a critic. She never admired anything not in its own way admirable. She had also, like most people in those happy days, a good appetite and a good digestion. Then, as now, Touraine was a Paradise for such. Mademoiselle found a more spiritual kind of pleasure, of which she was not unworthy, in a visit of two days to the Chateau de Selles, Madame de Bdthune having duly paid her respects at Blois. This chateau, also on the Cher, had been built by Philippe de B^thune, the younger brother of the Due de Sully — still living, a very old man, on his estate of Villebon. Philippe, who had also been a faithful servant of the great Henry, was now seventy-six, and lived at Selles with his son Hippolyte and his wife. They were among the most cultivated people of their time. The father had been Henry's ambassador at Rome ; the son, who was born at Rome, seems to have breathed in with his native air a passion for classical learning rare among the French nobles of that day. He made it the work of his life to collect ancient manuscripts, and his collection is even now one of the treasures of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Mademoiselle was used to finding herself an honoured guest, but there was something in her reception at Selles which she could never forget. The old man's passionate loyalty to his master, Henry IV — who had certainly a genius, tant bien que mal, for making himself loved — sprang to life again at the sight of Henry's grandchild. Mademoiselle had indeed a good deal of her grandfather, especially as to his fearless frankness and bonhomie. She was intensely proud of him too ; and if his heroic virtues were inimitable in her eyes, so also was his clever judgment and knowledge CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 45 of men. She was ready and eager, therefore, on her side, to pay every honour to the venerable M. de Bethune. With childish delight she accepted all his compliments, as well as a number of Roman curiosities with which he presented her. Another visit — desired, one may be sure, by neither hosts nor guest — was paid to the Chateau de Richelieu. Mademoi- selle travelled there in state from Tours. She was conveyed down the Loire to that city in Monsieur's barge, arriving just after Madame de Chevreuse had galloped away, and she found there plenty of amusements of all kinds, including the universal comMie. She was also expected, in Monsieur's amazing way, to entertain at least one person who startled the propriety of Madame de Saint-Georges, easy-going as she and public opinion both were. Although Mademoiselle had even then, she tells us, a horror of vice, and needed to be assured that Louison Roger was a good girl before she would play with her, it seems likely that Madame de Saint- Georges was glad to carry off her charge into more discreet society. Long afterwards Mademoiselle took under her protection, as a pretty boy who grew into a gallant young man, the son of that dark-eyed Louison of Tours. His mother had re- tired into a convent. His royal father, unlike his own father in such circumstances, quite declined all responsibility in the matter. Mademoiselle educated the boy, called him first Chevalier, then Comte de Charny, after one of her estates, and bought him commissions in the Guards and in the Regiment de la Couronne. It seems that he was the only son of Gaston d'Orldans who lived to grow up. On the way to Richelieu, Mademoiselle visited Champigny — afterwards the scene of Madame de la Fayette's romance, La Princesse de Montpensier — which had belonged to her ancestors. She had been robbed of this estate, with the pretext of an exchange, by Cardinal de Richelieu, on whose lands it bordered. Gaston d'Orleans, her guardian, was too weak to resist him. At the time this happened Mademoi- selle was not old enough to make her voice heard, but now 46 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD and ever after, till she at leiifjth succeeded in recovering her property, she strongly resented the tyrannical bargain. The splendid old house of the Dukes of Montjiensier had been demolished, and was gone for ever, but the cha[)el in which the)' were buried, with its desecrated tombs and its fine stained glass, stands to this day. It was not spared by any wish of the Cardinal, but through the fortunately good memory of Pojie Urban VIII. He was asked to consent to its destruction. It was so ruinous, the Cardinal assured him, that Mass could no longer be said there. But Urban re- membered the former days of Champigny and its illustrious owners. He even remembered, when Nuncio in France, having said Mass there, and he refused to allow the chapel to be pulled down. Richelieu was very angry, but even he could not disobey the I'ope. So it was left for the Revolu- tion to dishonour the tombs of the Montpensiers and to deface their ancient coats of arms. Mademoiselle, praying in the chapel for her ancestors' souls, was beset by a crowd of the villagers of Champigny. Her grandfather, Duke Henry, had loaded them with kind- ness ; they had not forgotten him, though he had been thirty years dead, and they came with loud crying and tears and shouts of welcome to greet the child who ought to have been their liege lady. It was a poor change for them to be under the rule of a Richelieu. These good peasants, no doubt, had all the scorn in the world for the upstart Cardinal. He was not a prophet in his own country. He had not even been born there. The Du I'lessis, to whom his father be- longed, were people of old family in the country, but they were not great nobles ; they were many degrees below the rank of a Montpensier, though his grandfather had made a fine match by marrying a Rochechouart. And now he posed as— what he was, after all — the first man in France. Even the King had to bow before Armand du I'lessis, Cardinal- Due de Richelieu. But the people of Champigny kept their old faith. Their village had been absorbed by its gorgeous neighbour ; they remained loyal to the heiress of their ancient THE CHAPEL AT CHAMPIGNY CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 47 lords, Mademoiselle. And she, who never forgot an old friend, did not rest till Champigny was her own again. All this — Mademoiselle's devotions at the tombs of her ancestors, and the people's love for her — was not pleasing to the great lady who now reigned at Richelieu. The Duchesse d'Aiguillon had driven over to Champigny to meet her young royal guest, and found herself in the midst of an excited, dark-faced crowd whose shouts were not for her. She hurried Mademoiselle away as soon as possible from her former vassals and carried her off to the little town and vast chateau of Richelieu. They drove through a woody, lonely country, with chalk hills and scrambling vines and walnut trees every- where, just as one may see them now. The peasants, gather- ing in their crops, shaded their eyes from the low sunlight to see the last Montpensier passing in her coach, escorted by the Cardinal's niece, surrounded by the Cardinal's liveries. They pranced along the road from Chinon to ChStellerault — the only way of approach to Richelieu — and forded the river Mable at the very place where, fifty or sixty years before, Frangois du Plessis, father of the Cardinal, had lain in wait for his neighbour, the Sieur de Mausson, and murdered him, in revenge for the death of his own elder brother at Mausson's hands. Mademoiselle was very finely received at her godfather's castle. It was dark when she arrived, for September even- ings, down there, are as short as they are lovely. The little town, built by the Cardinal on the site of an old tumble- down village, was lit up, as well as the castle, with coloured lanterns. Mademoiselle found the effect most agreeable. The chateau — destroyed a hundred years ago — ^was royal in its size and magnificence. Europe had been ransacked to ornament it with statues, bronzes, paintings, tapestries, and gorgeous furniture. It was regarded as one of the wonders of France. Its courts and terraces, domes and pavilions, had all grown up in a marvellous way round about the feudal manor which had come down to the Du Plessis, through a marriage into the old family of C16rembault, about the time 48 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD of Charles VII. The Cardinal had vexed his architect by forbiddinc; him to pull down the old rooms that his father and mother had lived in ; a pleasant trait in " le plus ambitieux et Ic [ilus gloricux' homme du monde " ; but the consequence was that the interior of the chAteau hardly corresponded in grandeur with the exterior. It was all splendid enough, how- ever. Mademoiselle was especially struck with Michel- angelo's two marble Slaves, standing at the top of the great staircase on a balcony commanding the courtyard. These statues, now at the Louvre, had been presented by the sculptor to Strozzi, the great collector, and by him to Francis I, who gave them to the Constable de Montmorency. In the ruin of that house they had come into the Cardinal's pos- session. Mademoiselle and her suite were a good deal amused by the manners and customs of Madame d'Aiguillon and the ladies staying with her at Richelieu. These were Madame du Vigean, her devoted friend — mother of that lovely Marthe du Vigean who bewitched the great Condc later on — and the already famous Mademoiselle de Rambouillet, Julie d'Angennes, the flower of the Prt'cieuses, the flattered heroine of the poets who haunted her mother's sacred Blue Room at the Hotel de Rambouillet. Julie d'Angennes was at this time thirty, and it was not till eight years later that she married the Marquis de Montausier, who had been in love with her for thirteen years. Even now, popular and charming, she was a leading figure in the intelligent, the cultured, the more refined half of society, whose influence, becoming fashionable in spite of certain great ladies like Madame de Chevreuse, was fast softening manners as a whole. Madame d'Aiguillon, a very powerful person during her uncle's lifetime, hovering between the Carmelites and a world in which she could not reign as despotically as she wished, had a rather half-hearted respect for the Hotel de Rambouillet, though she tenderly loved Mademoiselle Julie. Letters were all very well, and to some extent a means of distinction. She preferred cither the cloister and its fame of CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 49 pure devotion or a life of politics and lucrative governments. She was a clever woman who could not live without friend- ship, so far as it meant flattery. At this time she and Madame du Vigean were inseparable. If Mademoiselle herself was not particularly welcome to the three ladies at Richelieu, still less so was one member at least of her suite. Madame d'Aiguillon was furious, Madame du Vigean was embarrassed : her husband, the Baron du Vigean, one of Monsieur's courtiers, had the bad taste to in- trude on his wife's peaceful and friendly little idyl. The fuss was prodigious. Mademoiselle, even at her age, found it very amusing, and enjoyed the joke privately with her own ladies. They were all, even Madame de Saint-Georges, in fits of laughter. Mademoiselle having been called to account by Madame d'Aiguillon for her indiscretion in bringing this gentleman to Richelieu. Mademoiselle, always a Princess, answered politely, but was not repentant or meek. In truth M. du Vigean, for his own ends, had added himself without leave to the party. He had attached himself to Monsieur's secretary, and travelled in his coach. Another hanger-on, a young man who in those days was glad to eat at the secre- tary's table, was that handsome Chabot who in after years married the heiress, Mademoiselle de Rohan, and as Due de Rohan-Chabot took a very high place in society. Two days at Richelieu were enough for Mademoiselle and for her hostess. The whole party started together to drive to Fontevrault, where Mademoiselle was to visit her half-aunt, the Abbess, Madame Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon. Madame d'Aiguillon, with her friends, felt bound to escort the little Princess on her way, but their sense of duty only carried them as far as the stopping-place where the party break- fasted. A little scene here was watched by Mademoiselle and her ladies with unkind amusement. Madame d'Aiguillon changes colour suddenly. The weather was probably hot ; the bore- dom of the situation was too much for a nervous woman, accustomed to be petted and worshipped, tired of making E 50 A PR I NCI- SS OF THE OLD WORLD rcvorcna-s to a rather haufjhty, quick-witlcfl royal minx of ten )'oars old. Madame rlu \''it;can flics to hc-r friend's side, feels her iniNe. " M)' dear, ymi are ill ; you are feverish!" l''or half an hour, Mademoiselle asserts, these ladies entertain each other with "discours patclins." The complaininfj, coaxing, natterin;_j, brings about the desired end. Mademoiselle begs the Duchesse not to take the trouble of coming any further. She presses it so earnestly that Madame d'Aiguillon is per- suaded. She, with her devoted friends, drives back to Riche- lieu, and Mademoiselle realises the joy of that drive. She herself is quite as much pleased and relieved as Madame d'Aiguillon. " Toute cette comedie," she says, "nous fit gagner gaiement Fontevrault." I'ontevrault is desolate enough now. Even sadder in its doom than other great I'Vench abbeys, more than a hundred years have passed since its glory departed. The Plantagenet tombs are there still, witnessing to the times when Henry II was carried from Chinon, b)' the Pont des Nonnains he built o\er the Vienne, and when the great Richard was brought from Chalu/. to the chief sanctuary of Anjou, and when Eleanor of Aquitaine ended her storm}' life there as a cloistered nun. But except the bare framework of the desecrated church, and the old refectory with its portraits of the thirty-six abbesses from i lOO to the Revolution, and certain white crumbling walls covered with ivy and roses, and the cver-li\'ing landscape of remote I*"rance, glowing vineyard, oak and walnut and chestnut shade, grey poplars rustling, goats climbing the roadside banks and dark-faced peasant children watching them, or an old woman, very thin and brown, spinning with a distaff — except these things, the little-noticed background of centuries, all the life of the great Abbey has disappeared as if it had never been. It has faded into the life of a modern prison. in Mademoiselle's days I'ontevrault was one of the most famous and splendid abbeys of France. The abbesses were very great ladies, generally of royal blood, and of necessity CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 51 clever and wise, for by the founder's statutes they ruled com- munities of men as well as of women, not onl)'- in the mother house, but scattered through France, England, and Spain. The Abbey was also a school for princesses and girls of high birth ; down to its extinction, daughters of France were educated there. And though the mixture of religion and the world could not be always edifying, a generally high standard was kept at Fontevrault .through seven hundred years. Madame Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon, the daughter of Henry IV and Charlotte des Essarts, was by no means the least distinguished in the long line of abbesses, though neither a religious reformer like her predecessors, Marie de Bretagne and Renee de Bourbon, nor a brilliant and learned lady like her successor, Gabrielle de Rochechouart-Morte- mart, sister of Madame de Montespan. She spent years in unsuccessful efforts for the canonisation of the founder, Robert d'Arbrissel, and she had long struggles with her rebellious monks, who kicked against the authority of a woman, as they had often done before, and not unnaturally. This affair ended in the submission of the monks, for Madame, besides being a person of much sweetness and charm, had the weight of tradition and authority behind her. And with all her lively gentleness, no one could forget that she was of the royal blood of France, " et du plus chaud." Known originally as Mademoiselle de Romorantin, and made Abbess of Fontevrault at seventeen, Jeanne-Baptiste was perhaps the best and the most attractive of Henry's various children. She was on affectionate terms with her half- brothers and sisters, especially with Louis XHI and Henri- etta Maria of England. It may have been her ruling pre- sence at Fontevrault which drew her brother, the Comte de Moret, as tradition says, to his hermitage at Gardelles. Gaily then, with rumbling of coach-wheels, trampling of horses, a mighty cracking of whips and jingling of bells. Mademoiselle and her escort came dashing out of the country roads into the white paved square before the Abbey gates. She was received with great respect and honour. Being a 52 A TRINCKSS OF THE OLD WORLD ni\al visitdr, tlic peiitlemcn of her suite had a ri^'ht t(j enter tin- .\1)1k\-, .iiii! the scene in those old courts was Hvely enouidi. it was sunset; the hri^lit lii^ht, the marvellously clear air of Anjou, made the whole picture like a middle- aL;e illumination. Mademoiselle tells us of the excitement of the nuns, who crowded round her in eager welcome. The demonstrations of " ces bonnes filles" in their white habits rather bored the little Princess, who never but once — and that was later — felt any inclination towards a convent life. She is slightly scornful of the " raison de la parentc" which brouL:ht the nuns to her feet as " la niece de Madame." By Madame herself she was " accablee de caresses." Then the whole company was swept into the church for a Te Dcum and other ceremonies, and by the time all this was over, to Mademoiselle's vexation, the swift twilight had descended and it was nearly dark. Not too dark, however, for the evening's amusement in hope of which Mademoiselle had come to Fontevrault, and which had filled her thoughts, she frankly confesses, through all the solemn singing in the Grand Moustier. Rumour said that one of the nuns had gone mad. The sight of this unhappy yc;//f would be worth that of all the treasures of the Abbey, many and magnificent, sacred relics, gorgeous plate and jewellery, rare lace, precious manuscripts. It so happened that Mesdemoiselles de Beaumont and de Saint-Louis, frivolous-minded or wishing for fresh air, slipped away from the duty of attending their mistress at church and strolled round the various courts of the Abbey. They had not gone far when they heard horrible screams. Mademoiselle de Beaumont wanted to run awa)'. Mademoi- selle de Saint-Louis, more adventurous, insisted on finding out what the noise meant. A dungeon grating, nearly level with the ground, showed them the head of the wretched lunatic they had heard of. As the poor creature, screaming, leaped at her prison bars, they saw that she was naked. I ler " extravagance " delighted them so much, they were so immensely amused, that after watching her for some time CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 53 they hurried back towards the church. Mademoiselle must not miss such a rare spectacle. The child tore herself away from her reverend aunt — who smiled indulgently, no doubt, being " excessivement bonne et douce" — and spent the rest of the evening, till supper-time, in laughing at the antics of that poor mad nun. This, unfortunately, was the one really exciting attraction that the Abbey had to offer. The sane nuns were tiresome, the cooking was bad, and Madame could not persuade her wilful niece to stay more than two days in the house where so many royal personages had delighted to linger. Hunting, dancing, games, comedie, collations, at many different castles and abbeys of Anjou and Touraine, weeks of delightful entertainment in Monsieur's company at Tours, Blois, Amboise ; with all this the autumn slipped happily away. At Amboise on the 3rd of November was celebrated the Saint-Hubert, the old hunting festival of France. After this the weather became cold and wintry, and Mademoiselle, not without tears, had to leave her agreeable father and set out on her journey back to Paris. Arrived there, her first duty was to visit the King and Queen at Saint-Germain. Their Majesties, who were both in a particularly good humour, received her with affectionate caresses, and each accepted with joy an enamelled watch of the latest fashion, which she had brought from Blois. The King's watch, dark blue and very small, must have been a gem of its kind. This was the beginning of a very agreeable winter for Mademoiselle and the whole Court. There was a brightness of dawn in the sky. Everybody was waiting, at last in hope not to be disappointed, for the rising of the sun. " Vous serez ma belle-fille ! " said Anne of Austria to the young niece who shared frankly in the excitement and joy of her elders. The poor Queen, at last, was too happy not to talk non- sense, or to be in less than charity with all the world. The sincere gladness of Gaston's little daughter touched her 54 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD heart, for Gaston would be the one person injured by a prince's birth. Not unnaturally, a fancy of compensation came to her, and Mademoiselle, not unnaturally, took the words in earnest. Cardinal de Richelieu was already frowning on this young ambition, which lived long enough to die under the cannon of the Fronde. CHAPTER V 1638-1642 " II est passe, il a plie bagage Ce cardinal, dont c'est moult grand dommage Pour sa maison : c'est comme je I'entends ; Car pour autrui, maints hommes sent contents, En bonne foi, de n'en voir que I'image. Or parlerons sans crainte d'etre en cage ; II est en plomb I'^minent personnage Qui de nos maux a ri plus de vingt ans. . . II est passe." MADEMOISELLE DE HAUTEFORT— ROYAL SPORT— "MON PETIT MARI" — THE STORY OF CINQ-MARS— THE DEATH OF RICHELIEU. THOSE were the days when Mademoiselle de Hautefort, the beautiful fair girl, Anne of Austria's most loyal confidante, who dared Richelieu's anger for her in the Val- de-Grice affair, stood almost higher in the King's affections than his horses and his dogs. Two of the Queen's ladies, both loyal to their mistress — she too indifferent to be jealous — both hating and hated by the Cardinal, reigned long in turn over the queer heart of Louis Xni. Sometimes it was Marie de Hautefort's blue- eyed brilliancy, sometimes the gentle saintliness, the dark, soft, twilight beauty of Louise de la Fayette. This last was the only woman, probably, who ever had any real and deep influence with the King. His love for her was an affectionate and confiding friendship, and she loved him tenderly for himself. It was the love of friends, or of a brother and sister : so much the more alarming to Richelieu, who never rested till he had driven Mademoiselle de la Fayette into the Convent of Sainte Marie de Chaillot, where she died Superior after many years. 55 56 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD There was no sentiment in Mademoiselle de Hautefort's fliitatiniis with Louis. She dazzled and fascinated him. She did her best, hard as it was, to strike a spark of passion or even manhood out of the shyest of princes. She tor- mented him as far as his dignity would allow, while the Oucen and the Court laughed in the background. In com- pany, Louis did his best to hide his immense admiration for Mademoiselle de Hautefort ; alone, he made songs in her honour, which were sung at the Queen's evening concerts, three times a week, to music of his composition. Very often they quarrelled, for Mademoiselle de Hautefort was plain- spoken. Then he spent solitary hours in writing out all their talks and arguments. At such times his company was more unpleasant than usual ; even in the Queen's rooms, he would sit sulking and yawning in a corner, speaking to nobody, no- body daring to speak to him. All amusements ceased, and a chill melancholy reigned, till the brouillerie had passed over. When Mademoiselle de Hautefort was amiable and the King was happy, his hunting parties that winter were delight- ful. Mademoiselle de Hautefort rode as the central figure in a brilliant group of the Queen's ladies, among whom were her young sister Mademoiselle d'Escars, Mademoiselle de Chemerault — sent away from Court later on because of a love affair with the famous Cinq-Mars, and also unenviably known as a spy of Richelieu's — Mesdemoiselles de Beaumont and de Saint-Louis, and last but by no means least, the little Princess of Orleans, the ten-year-old Mademoiselle. Dressed in bright colours, with feathered hats, riding fine horses richly caparisoned, this gay party rode after the King and his hounds, at a swinging pace, through the long glades of the forests that echoed with horns and shouting. The hunt, cleverly managed, always led in the direction of some house or castle, where the royal party found refreshments, and the King, like a simple gentleman, waited on the ladies. One of Ihc' favourite haunts was Versailles, where on the top of a hill crowned with a windmill Louis had built a small hunting chateau some years before. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 57 When chase and banquet were over, the King drove back to Saint-Germain in Mademoiselle's coach, sitting between her and Mademoiselle de Hautefort and entertaining them with stories of horses and dogs and birds. Sometimes, too, when in a specially good humour, he allowed them to chatter freely on even so dangerous a subject as the Cardinal, whose social tyranny he resented quite as much as they did, though a mixture of moral weakness and political sense kept him silent in the matter. Long after, Mademoiselle remembered those hunting days among the brightest of her childhood. She always spoke with affection of her curious uncle, whose kindness to her never failed, though a strange face among her young com- panions was enough to frighten and displease him. For instance, when the Princesse de Conde and the Duchesse de Vendome brought their daughters to Saint-Germain — where the Court spent that winter and spring — etiquette demanding that Mademoiselle should entertain these two young girls, the King shrank away from his niece's company in an access of awkward shyness, as if he had been a countryman just come to Court. " C'est une assez mauvaise qualite pour un grand roi, et particulierement en France," says Mademoiselle, with her usual good sense and frankness. The Dauphin, afterwards Louis XIV, was born at Saint- Germain on September 5th, 1638, and was welcomed by Mademoiselle, in fine possessive fashion, as "mon petit mari." Her godfather the Cardinal did more than frown upon her ; he at once clipped her soaring wings by ordering her back to Paris, with a good scolding into the bargain. She, who already saw herself Queen of France, was furiously angry. The King and Queen let her go, not without regret. The Queen tried laughingly to comfort her : " My son is really too small ! You shall marry my brother." But neither King nor Queen had power enough, in the face of Richelieu's stern disapproval, to keep the child to play with her baby cousin at Saint-Germain. During the next three or four years she lived almost entirely in Paris, 58 A PRINCnSS OF THE OLD WORLD visiling the Court not more than half a dozen times a year. ]ly the time she was fourteen she had gravely considered two possible marriages, and was not too sorry that both came to nothing, the little royal husband still holding his place in the background of her heart. Marriage or no marriage, she had always a special tenderness for Louis, Dauphin and King ; the passion of her childhood, lingering on into grown-up life, was not all ambition. Apart from him, and from the one miserable love-affair of her later life, the idea of marriage, for her, was never at all touched with sentiment. She had a great and tolerably just idea of her own importance, and it was difficult to offer her a match that she considered worthy. Her first lover was a Prince of the royal blood, Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Soissons, whose father, Charles de Bourbon, was a son of the first Prince de Condc, the Huguenot hero, by his second marriage with Frangoise- Marie d'Orlcans-Longueville. As a boy of five years old, Henry IV had promised Prince Louis the hand of his youngest baby daughter, Henriette Marie. But she was only a few months old when her father died ; and Queen Marie de Mcdicis had other ambitions for her. Monsieur le Comte, as they called him, would gladly have married Gaston's first wife, the young Duchesse de Montpensier. After her death the Princes became friends, and the Comte de Soissons took up Gaston's quarrel against the King and Richelieu, but did not, like Gaston, find it necessary to submit. He was always in opposition, joining in every con- spiracy, and at last, with the Uucs de Guise and de Bouillon, throwing himself into civil war with the help of Spain. In the intervals of plotting and fighting, an exile from France, plunging deeper in the King's displeasure every day, he kept up a lively correspondence with Monsieur, as well as with Mademoiselle. Having failed to win her mother, he proposed himself as a husband for her ; the fortune was the same, and would have done great things for him. Her CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 59 father was not unwilling, and she, the courtship extending over some years, with a constant tribute of sugar-plums and compliments, grew accustomed to the idea. The King's consent being out of the question, and Mademoiselle being fourteen, M. le Comte asked Monsieur's leave to run away with her. He had friends at Court who would gladly have lent a hand to the adventure ; his mother and most of his relations, as well as his devoted friend Madame de Mont- bazon, stepmother and rival beauty of Madame de Chevreuse. But Gaston dared not consent ; and M. le Comte's courtship came very soon to a tragic end : he was killed in the victorious skirmish of La Marfee, fighting against France, in the summer of 1641. The King forbade any mourning for this traitor Bourbon, but Mademoiselle paid a visit of condolence to his mother and wept secretly with her and his friends over the loss of " un fort honnete homme, doue de grandes qualites." The Comtesse de Soissons believed that she had a super- natural warning of her son's death. As she was walking from one room to another in her chateau of Bagnolet, two carved palms fell from the ceiling at her feet. She was startled, but only thought of having the broken ornaments replaced. When the news came that he had died on that very day, and in the moment of victory over the King's forces, she remembered the little incident. All society talked of the fallen palms, and gave them their full meaning. In the same year Mademoiselle lost the possible husband whom Anne of Austria had offered to her as a substitute for the Dauphin. The Infant Ferdinand of Spain, Cardinal- Archbishop of Toledo, Captain-General of Flanders and Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish forces there, was an extremely handsome and brilliant little man of about thirty, the Queen's favourite brother and the flower of his family. He died of fever in the campaign against Louis XIII, but not without suspicion of being poisoned by his own people. It is said that he was planning a separate treaty with France, to give him the independent sovereignty of Flanders, and III.M-'I 111 I II \ I, \l \K(,iriN li|. ( IXii.M \|;s CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 6i reaching to the knee, where the loose black boots, their tops filled with lace, almost meet them, are striped red and yellow. He wears a slight curled moustache and a little tuft on his chin ; this last fashion, which became so general, was of his own invention. He might be seen standing at a window, as his way was, saying dreamily, "Ennuyons-nous, ennuyons-nous"; and then came the fancy for some diversion, which very often bored the Court sufficiently. One day he was taken with a passion for shaving himself and everybody else. All his officers quickly lost the beards which had been worn since Henry IV, and were left with a moustache and a petit toupet ; this was called la royale, and through the middle years of the seventeenth century hardly a gentleman in France, or indeed in Europe, was to be seen without it. H^las, ma pauvre barbe, Qu'est-ce qui t'a faite ainsi ? C'est le grand roi Louis, Treizifeme de ce nom. Qui toute a dbarbd sa maison. So sang Paris in the streets as the royal officers passed by. The bright and tragic figure of young Henry d'Effiat, Mar- quis de Cinq-Mars, the King's last favourite, the most widely pitied victim of Richelieu's vengeance and of Gaston's self- preserving caution, flashes like a meteor through the last years of the reign. The handsome boy of eighteen, his head a ripple of curls, his mind full of love-making and military ambition, was presented to the King by Richelieu with the intention that he should serve him as a spy. Till now, the King's favourites had been the Cardinal's enemies ; but he flattered himself that he had triumphed over the last of these by driving Mademoiselle de Hautefort from the Court, already free of her rival. Unconscious of the part he was intended to play, Cinq-Mars rushed boldly into the career that the King's favour, stormy and changeable as it was, opened before him. 62 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD lie wn'i at fust m.ulc Master of the VVaitlrobe ; then stcppi'il fidin imc liii,'li placi- to .iiiiillicr till lie was Grand I'lcjueir)- — known as " M. ic Grand " — and till his ambition, boundless as the life of glorious enjoyment which seemed to await his splendid youth, began to reach towards the highest offices in the kingtlom, Constable of I'Vance, or even I'^irst Minister, the Cardinal's inv.did detested life at an end. I'.verybody conspired to the spoiling of Cinq-Mars. He turned the heads of the Court beauties. Princess Marie de Gonzague, one of the three daughters of the Duke of Nevers and Mantua, thought seriously of marrying him when he should have climbed a little higher. When, on the contrary, he fell, she was obliged to beg from Madame d'Aiguillon the return of her letters. She was not, as Alfred de Vigny in his romance represents her, a girl of Henry d'Effiat's own age, but a woman eight years older, a flame of Monsieur's before his second marriage, now a little faded and disappointed, living in Paris on a small fortune, and waiting for a suitable husband. A few years later she became Queen of Poland. King Ladislas, old, fat, and gouty, offered his hand to several ladies in succession, first of all to Mademoiselle, who refused him scornfully. Poor Princess Marie, who was neither young, rich, nor great enough to despise a crown, even that of a /(Zjj barbare, repented heartily of her bargain. The airs and the ambitions of Cinq-Mars enraged the Cardinal, and when he was angry, no one could speak more plainly or scold more terribly. Cinq-Mars learned, to his immense indignation, fur what base uses he had been brought to Court by the great man who now threatened to crush him for disobedience and ingratitude. He resolved to measine his strength against Richelieu's and to ruin the old frientl who had become his enemy. Me dared all, trusting in the King's affection, and really believing, it seems, that he too woukl not be sorry to see the Cardinal's fall. As to the nation, the majorit)- of both high and low certainly hated the EinincHtissivic as an oppressor. It was him that they justly blametl, not the King, for the severe CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 63 laws and heavy taxes which made life miserable at home, while on them were based the sovereign, centralised royal power and the foreign policy of victorious war with Spain and Austria which made France great abroad. The Queen, silent in the background, the nobles not actually dependent on Richelieu, the Princes, among whom the Due de Vendome had lately fled from his tyranny to England, the Parliament of Paris, whose pretensions to some independence he had mercilessly crushed — all would have gladly welcomed peace, and liberty from his iron rule. So grew up at Court, almost with the King's knowledge — ■ for Madame de Motteville goes so far as to say that His Majesty " en 6tait tacitement le chef" — the last and most dangerous of all the conspiracies against Richelieu. Cinq- Mars, believing in his own star and putting his trust in princes, was its moving spirit ; his chief allies were Gaston d'Orleans, eager to seize the occasion of ruining his lifelong enemy, and the Due de Bouillon, who still held Sedan, a centre for discontented and rebellious princes. No doubt the King was the difficulty. He might have no reason to love his Minister ; he might listen to talk against him, and be amused ; but no one could be quite sure that the charm of a young favourite would be strong enough finally to bear him against the tide of all his traditions. The conspirators thought to make themselves safe, therefore, by a secret treaty with Spain. The King of Spain was to send an army into France from the east, to be under the command of Monsieur, with two other seigneurs whose names were not mentioned in the treaty. The Due de Bouillon would thus be enabled to hold his own, and Sedan would be a refuge for Monsieur and his friends, in case Richelieu proved too strong for them. If they succeeded in forcing on his disgrace, one article of the peace between Spain and France, immediately to follow, would be the restoration of all conquests made by the French in the war. Thus the foolish conspirators put themselves hopelessly in the wrong. 64 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD (liven the I wo men, Richelieu ami Louis XIII, and such a pnir (if allies as the Uuc d'Orleans and " M. le Grand," the failure of the plan was a certainty. The Cardinal's spies were equal to their reputation, lieforc many days had passed, the secret treaty with Spain was in his hands. He and the King were both in Provence, both ill, their last da)'s drawinfj near. Instead of disgrace, the Cardinal found triumph over all his enemies, an absolute triumph, [lerhajis the greatest of his life. With the proofs of high treascm laid before him, Louis found himself helpless to save "the amiable criminal" who had trusted his affection so far that he had made no attempt to escape. Cinq-Mars was doomed, and all the more hopelessly because Gaston bought his own safety by a full confession, giving the names of those concerned in the treaty, and renouncing them and all their works. The Due de Bouillon alone escaped, by surrendering Sedan to the King. Cinq-Mars, with his friend M. dc Thou, several years older than himself, who had been guilty of knowing of the treaty and holding his tongue — for he said at his trial, " II m'a cru son ami unique et fidcle, et je ne I'ai pas voulu trahir " — were left to the vengeance of the Cardinal, more powerful, by the King's special mandate, than he had ever been before. He was at this time seriously ill, and had only a few months to live. It was impossible for him to travel in any ordinary way, and when he set out on his last long journey, a royal progress in its dignity, from the south back to Paris, he was carried by twenty-four men in an enormous litter made of wood and lined with crimson and gold. In this travelling house there was room for a table and chair, besides the " magnificent bed" where the dying Cardinal lay; thus he gave audiences, or dictated to his secretary as he was carried along. He was attended by a suite of nobles, cardinalisti-s, and by a large escort of troops. Men went before conveying loads of planks, with which they made an inclined way for carrying the litter into an}- house where His Lminencc chose to stay. Gates of towns, not to mention CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 65 doors and windows of houses, were generally far too small to admit the great structure ; in this case walls were pulled down to make the required entrance. It was out of the question that the Cardinal should be moved, shaken, or dis- turbed in any way. He made all the first part of his journey by water, his travelling litter being placed on board a gorgeous barge to be rowed up the Rhone, while the escort accompanied him, riding on each bank of the river. On a smaller barge, following his own, his young enemies were towed to their trial at Lyons. It was a dramatic and barbarous episode. The Cardinal's cruel arrogance, in making this public boast of his triumph, made a great impression on society. Madame de Motteville, moderate and discreet, expresses the best opinion of the time. " He fastened their boat to his own," she says, " after the same manner, but with no such glory, as the Roman Consuls when they bound to their chariot the captive kings they had conquered. This cruel action, which savoured of paganism, but of which a virtuous pagan would have been incapable, was a dishonour to his life. It showed his contempt for God's law, which forbids to a Christian not only personal revenge, but even any rejoicing over just vengeance. After thus parading his barbarous vanity as far as Lyons, he condemned them both to die upon the scaffold." The long pathetic story of the trial and death of Cinq- Mars and Fran9ois de Thou has often been told. It thrilled France at the time, for the brilliant boy of twenty-two was much better liked than favourites often are. He had many friends, and told his confessor at the last that nothing sur- prised him so much as to find himself forsaken by them all. Only M. de Thou, who might have saved himself, stood by him and died with him. Half France, they say, looked on and wished that the plot had been successful ; but all France, at that moment, could not have saved a victim from Richelieu. Women, by whom Cinq-Mars was universally loved, wept for him. The behaviour of both friends at their death was calm 66 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD ami noble, aiid tiicy will always be remembered, it seems, ralhcr as henics tliaii as traitors to their country. One lias dwelt a little on this traced)', |;)artly because it was the chief talk of man)' months in \(^>42, when Mademoi- selle, a i^irl of fifteen, was fast becomin;^ a personage at Court to be reckoned witli, and j)artly because it had a specially painful effect upon her. It opened her eyes to her father's real character. She heard ])eo[jle say, and she saw for herself, that Monsieur, with a little courage and self-for- Ljetfulness, could liave saved Cinq-Mars and his friend. At least, the complete betrajal, the giving of the confederates' names, need not ha\e been his doing. Terror of Richelieu, degraded expressions of repentance, a panic-stricken climb- ing to safety over the doomed heads of others — all this had been the end of ever)- conspiracy into which Gaston had so lightl)' and willingl)' thrown himself. It makes the whole thing more despicable that the King's only brother was never in any real personal danger. His life would never have been sacrificed to Richelieu's policy. When the King forgave Monsieur and allowed him to return to the Court, his innocent daughter expected to see him at least slightly depressed by the memory of his unlucky allies, " left on the road." Little she knew Gaston. He was gayer than e\'er ; honour and the past were absolutely nothing to him. He supped with Mademoiselle at the Tuileries, to the music of the royal string band, and under- stood nothing of the wondering reproach in his daughter's eyes. Much as she still loved her delightful father, enchanted as she was to be with him again — " I confess," she says, "that I could n(it see him without thinking of them, and that his jo)'ousness saddened me in the midst of my own." The Cardinal-Due, having crushed his enemies, was borne back triumphantl)' to Paris, a dying man. Mven now not satisfied with the completeness of his vengeance, he spent his last weeks in driving away from the Court all those officers who were known to ha\e been friendly with Cinq-Mars, ^^^HH^AHB^^v .^n^^^^^'NJik.'^^^- i^B^^^^^^^^^^I ^^^^^■^ -'5(^1 ^n Wu^ mwl ^^^^^^^^^^1 ^^^H[v -'^KB' V \\^L^V^^^^^H ^^^^^^^^^^V ' '*>r53^^^R ^l^^l '.Ar ^^^ ■V^^^^^K" <^^^^^^^^^H fP^m\ ^E *^P 1 u ^^^H^ \ ^^Bl ^^W I MI'I.N \l. Ill' 1M( !IIJ.1I-;U VU'iW A 1^11. n;, Ml liV lllll.in I- III L II AMIAIUNK CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 67 among them M. de Troisville, or Tr6ville, the famous Captain of Musketeers. It seemed that the King could refuse him nothing now. From the magnificent Palais- Cardinal, where he lay dying, he directed the affairs of a future France, nominating his statesman-pupil Giulio Mazarini, the handsome, sleek Italian, to succeed himself as First Minister. His dying hand was stretched out in an edict to exclude Gaston d'Orleans from the regency, in case of the King's death, and this one, among the many commands given on his death-bed, was quickly carried out. Louis's deep distrust of his brother was not all owing to the Cardinal. Mademoiselle proposed to throw herself at the King's feet when he went in state to the Par- liament for the registration of this Declaration du Roi contre Monsieur, to implore him to stop short of so insulting an ex- tremity. Louis was informed of her intention, and forbade the troublesome scene. The Aminentissime was dead, and France drew a long breath of relief and rejoicing. He had always lived more magnificently than the King, and his funeral, to the satisfac- tion of Paris, was as splendid as his life had been. He lay in state for a week, and all the world came to gaze at the clear-cut, emaciated face. Even after his burial in the Church of the Sorbonne, Paris hardly dared to believe he was dead. The King set his guards at the gates of the Palais- Cardinal, now, by its great owner's will, become the Palais- Royal, and went off to Saint-Germain with a few dry words of regret for the Minister who had made France feared in Europe, and had built up the system of absolute royal authority which lasted just one hundred and fifty years. " II est mort un grand politique." "L'apre et redoutable Richelieu," says his enemy Retz, " avait foudroye plutdt que gouvern6 les humains." Now all the prisoners expected to be released, the exiles hoped to be called home; society was ready, with young princes and princesses at its head, to throw itself into all 68 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD kinds of wild gaieties. Society had to wait some months, liinvexcr, as well as most of the [irisoners anrl exiles, thout^h a few, such as Monsieur and the Due de Vendome with his sons, were allowed to return to the Court. Louis still ruled his kini:;dom from his lincjerinfj death-bed at Saint-Germain, and thout^h Mazarin was outwardly all gentleness, the spirit of Richelieu still governed France through these two. Society, therefore, regarded Richelieu's death as the dawn, and looked forward to that of the King as the sunrise of its day. Those lovely hands of Anne of Austria, so long power- less, were sure to hold the reins lightly ; and as to Mazarin, even if he were to be First Minister, which was thought most improbable, nobody yet feared him. The princes began by despising him. He seemed to them little more than a clever, cringing Italian adventurer. CHAPTER VI " Une Ville inconnue, immense — Paris ! . . . " " Cette ville Aux longs cris Qui profile Son front gris, Des toils freles, Cent tourelles, Clochers greles, C'est Paris ! " " Tous ces noms dont pas un ne mourra, que c'est beau ! " THE STREETS OF PARIS— CORNEILLE— THE THEATRES— THE ACADEMY — THE HOTEL DE RAMBOUILLET PARIS, in Mademoiselle's young days, had not advanced very far beyond the dirt and dangers of the Middle Ages. Though the great seventeenth-century rebuilding, which wa.s to transform the city, had begun, it vi^as still mostly a labyrinth of old, narrow streets, paved with worn stones slippery with the black, stinking, splashing mud for which Paris was notorious. " De meme que la ville est pleine de monde, les rues sont pleines de boue." Only at noonday the sun could shine down into these streets, over which the overhanging stories of high-gabled houses, with many painted signs creaking and swinging, leaned as if they would touch each other. Shops and stalls of every kind were crammed together on a level with the street; dark, cutthroat-looking passages dived under black archways into dens unknown. Here the street wound along under the walls and turrets and past the immense gates of some nobleman's hotel ; there it was shadowed by the height of a church, a forest of Gothic pinnacles, a great tower where 69 70 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD the eternal callins;' ()f the bells, mornin;,,^ noon, and night, almnst (leailcned the other varied clamour, street-cries, talk and quarrelling, rumbling wheels and clattering feet, of the crowds below. As for them, they were of the kind that Captain F"racasse encountered, when he arrived in Paris, about this time, with his good friends the comedians. Coaches of varying dignity, some with running footmen and prancing horses, splendid nobles and beautiful ladies laughing through glass windows from the velvet-lined interior ; others shabby and sober, with leathern curtains to protect some learned doctor or man of business from the rude jokes of passers-by. Waggons loaded with stone, with logs, with wine-barrels, hay, straw, blocking the narrow way ; coachmen and carters shouting and swear- ing furiously. Men on horseback pushing foot-passengers to right and left ; cliaiscs-a-portcurs, either private or on hire. These were very commonly used in Paris, the hired ones being numbered, like cabs ; for women and delicate people could not walk in the streets. Now and then, as Gautier vividly describes it, a herd of horned beasts comes bursting round a corner, plunging with lowered heads into the crowd, terrifying and terrified, with dogs barking at their heels and cudgels whacking their sides. Horses start and rear, and the confusion, worse than ever, is made desperate by the sudden rattle of a drum ; a company of soldiers, tambour en titc, banners fluttering, dashes along on its way from one quarter of Paris to another. Some party of bravos and ragamuffins starts a sham fight in a suddenly opening square, or at the corner of a bridge over the Seine. " Tue, tue ! " they cry, and the silly crowd pushes and runs to see what is the matter. But these quarrelsome wretches are only the leaders of a band of coupe-bourses and tire-laines, who [ily a brisk trade in the melee, and many a fijol, when it is over, has lost his purse lined with money and his cloak lineil with silk. This noisy life flowed out in all its variety on the quays and bridges, es[)ecially the Pont Neuf, white and brilliant in con- CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 71 trast with the blackness of the old streets. This popular playground was a haunt of beggars and horrible "freaks," quack-doctors and dentists, mountebanks and monkeys, bird- fanciers and all kinds of small trades and trickeries. On the parapets, under the eyes of King Henry on his famous horse of bronze, books and papers were sold. Here came the nouvelHstes and the so-called poets, chattering and disputing, with their gazettes, libels, satires, pamphlets, political and society brochures, poems, songs, plays. "Bon ou mauvais, c'etait la " — on the Pont Neuf — " que battait le coeur de Paris populaire." Public opinion was made here — a power against which kings and laws sometimes fought in vain. The most remarkable sight on the bridge, and one of the most curious things in Paris, was the water-tower called La Saniaritaine, with its fountain, clock, and figures worked by machinery. The water flowed into a basin, over which leaned the Woman of Samaria. On the other side stood Our Lord, in conversation with her. These statues were in gilded lead. Above them were an astronomical dial and a clock-face ; showing the course of the sun and the moon, the year, the month, the day, the hour. At certain times, sculp- tured lions rolled their eyes and lashed their tails, music sounded from instruments touched by angels, and one by one appeared the sacred scenes of the New Testament, from the Nativity to the Ascension. But at every hour the sweet chimes of the clock rang silvery along the bridge, and the Jacquemart, lifting his hammer, solemnly struck the bell. From the Pont Neuf, one could look round with King Henry on this small seventeenth-century Paris, all wild romance and gaiety, beautiful in clear light and shadow, the centre of life and thought, la Ville Lmniere even then. The Seine flowed stately from east to west between banks that were picturesque and varied, with gardens and trees and old corners of wall and towers, for the quays did not extend far. There was a thronging life of boats and barges on the river, a great highway, and if the water was dirty enough, there was no lack of colour and bright reflections. 72 A PRINCESS OF THK OLD WORLD On llic riplit bank, from the heavy keep of the Bastille near the i'orte Saint-Antoine, past the Place de Grcve with the new Hotel de Ville on the left, and on the right the now fashioiialile quarter, the Marais, where society entertained itself in the high houses of the Place Roj'ale, built by Henry IV — narrow streets led on to the main artery of Paris, the Kuc Saint-IIonorc-. There, close to the Porte Saint-Honore, stood the new palace built by Cardinal de Richelieu. He demolished, in building it, part of the old city wall, and made Paris very angry. To the north was the quarter of the Markets, farther off still the fortress-prison of the Temple, with an aristocratic neighbourhood of its own, and the streets and lanes leading towards St. Uenis. Nearer the river a congeries of hotels, churches, hospitals, some — such as the famous old Quinze- Vingts — surrounded with walled orchards and gardens, pressed up on the courts and soaring roofs of the old palace of the Louvre. The Tuileries, gay and graceful, ended the buildings on that side. During Mademoiselle's youth, while the Tuileries was still her Paris home, a great building and enlarging went on under Richelieu's orders at the Louvre, and for this reason Louis XHI and his Queen held their court chiefly at Saint-Germain. The splendour of the royal Louvre was dim, at this time, compared with that of the Palais-Cardinal, where Richelieu lived with all the airs of Royalty. Now, and for long after, the space between the Louvre and the Tuileries, united by the new gallery facing the river, was blocked up with streets and tall houses, several of them the hotels of nobles and princes of the blood. Here, next but one to the corner of the old Rue St. Thomas du Louvre, was the school of Paris for politeness and the finer literature, the famous Hotel de Rambouillet. On the left or s(juth bank, the actual town had always been much smaller than on the opposite shore. There was the University, the quarticr Latin, beloved of Bohemians, the many colleges, the Sorbonne, terrible to heretics ; there was tlie beautiful Hotel de Cluny, hired by many famous person- CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 73 ages from the Abbots of Cluny, who did not want it ; there were churches crowded together, and convents and abbeys in- numerable. The ancient Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres covered many acres of the southern faubourg. The Bene- dictine Abbey of the Val-de-Grace, the Queen's favourite foundation, was there, and the great Carmehte Convent so well known in Court and society, where in after years Louise de la Valliere took the veil. There also were palaces with vast gardens, old and new, finished and unfinished ; the palaces of Queen Marguerite de Valois and of the Due de Nevers ; and farther north Queen Marie de Medicis' new palace of the Luxembourg, which after her death in 1642 became the property of her son Gaston d'Orleans. Where Henry's statue stood, his bridge touched the western point of the island city, the heart of old Paris from its earliest foundation ; and turning eastward, looking past the stately Place Dauphine, which he built, one saw in the near distance the towers of Notre Dame, and nearer still, the dreamy grace of the Sainte Chapelle with its beautiful roof springing into the air, the wonderful legacy of St. Louis and the Middle Ages. Round it were grouped the buildings of the Palais de Justice, the " Palais " par excellence of the old city ; once the residence of kings, and now, in the seventeenth century, the Parliament-house of France, its great hall lately rebuilt after the terribly destructive fire of 161 8. Here too were the law courts ; lawyers and clients bustled through the halls and galleries and passages ; men of business and of letters strolled and talked and disputed there. Some of the most fashionable shops of Paris, as we know from Corneille's comedies, were to be found in one of the galleries ; there came the young beauties from the Place Royale, and leaving coach and chair at the entrance, amused themselves and their lively suivantes with purchases of lace and embroidery, while their lovers, close by, made a pretence of turning over and criticising the bookseller's last volume of poems, or choosing smart gloves and ribbons at the mercer's next door. 74 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD All the airs and affectations, the fashionable chatter, the favourite subjects, the manners and customs, the morals and principles, of the society in which Mademoiselle grew up, are wonderfully described for us in those early comedies of Corneille. They are made out of everyday adventures, " k peine romancces." France had never yet had a play-writer who drew his inspiration straight from real life. Pierre Corneille, whose home was at Rouen, only came to Paris for a few months in the year, employed by Cardinal de Richelieu, with other hack poets, to put his rather ordinary ideas into theatrical shape. But he soon grew into greater things; and from being the product of his time, became its leading in- fluence. Corneille's thakrc, popular beyond all precedent, and without any rival to signify, carried forward on different lines the civilising work that L'Astrc'e had begun. Honord d'Urfd, a "little gentleman of Forez," a friend of St. Fran(jois de Sales, divided with Madame de Rambouillet and her salon the honour of leading France out of the worst savagery and corruptness of manners which stained society in the sixteenth century, under the Court of the Valois. He enthroned sentimental passion in the place of violence and brutality. His romance in many volumes kept its popularity almost up to the Revolution ; and in his own time he softened the whole spirit of society. Real life, however, and character worthy of the name, had very little place in his imaginative world. And here comes in the grandeur of Corneille. His moral views and his ideas of humanity were on an infinitely higher plane than those of d'Urfd'. Not passion, but duty, was the power enthroned by him. " Faites votre devoir, et laissez faire aux dieux," cries Horace, the old hero, to the young men as they go out to fight for Rome against Alba. Honour, heroism, self-sacrifice, loyalty to God and to the laws of human society ; generosity to enemies ; the supreme power of will, the possibility and the duty of concjuering a man's own strongest passions ; these were the lessons taught by Corneille to France at this time. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 75 Even in the comedies, light and easy as they are, you find the new reign of self-control ; the tragedies, which were all the rage in Paris during Louis XIII's last years, are from beginning to end heroic in tone. Society found a new in- spiration in them. Men and women, some with sincerity, some merely to follow the fashion, formed themselves on the model of Corneille's heroes and heroines. His influence can be traced in the lives and the doings of many great people of his day. His stateliness and heroic dash had a wonderful effect on minds unsatisfied by love complications and long- drawn-out sweetnesses. It was as if the magnificent stern- ness of old Rome and the chivalry of the Middle Ages had come back into the world together, speaking in that verse of noble quality, with that frank, straightforward simplicity, which thrilled the young ears of Mademoiselle Marie de Rabutin-Chantal and Mademoiselle de Montpensier. If Corneille's plays were a new inspiration for France, they, on the other hand, were inspired by her. " II nous offre une fidele et saisissante peinture de cette France de Richelieu, de cette classe aristocratique qui inaugurait la monarchie absolue et la vie de socidte." So says M. Lanson, a delightful critic and lover of old Father Corneille. Read- ing the plays with this idea, one finds history and politics, as well as manners, shadowed there : a natural consequence of the impressions made upon Corneille's mind by the events passing around him. Writing of mediaeval Spaniards and ancient Romans, he was always a man of his own time, influenced by all the rules and etiquettes and prejudices of his day. His plays had their moral for statesmen, as well as for nobles and great ladies. Richelieu, when he laid orders on his young Academy to condemn Le Cid, was angry with the poet's glorification of Spain, as well as with the bold ignoring of his own laws against the duel. The Eminejitissime had also private and meaner motives, but these show the actuality which was felt by Corneille's con- temporai-ies to exist in every line he wrote. With all its passion for things theatrical, Paris of the 7b A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD earlier seventeenth century had only two theatres. These were both on tlic ri^lit bank, and not very distant from each other. The famous Hotel de Bourgopne, of which a tower still remains, was in the old Rue Mauconseil, in the quarter of the Ilalles, near the Church of Saint-Eustache. Its rival, the Theatre du Marais, was in the Vieille Rue du Temple, not far from the Place Royale. Both streets were dangerous at night, and the audience at both theatres was of the wildest. Until Corneille's plays began to be acted at both, women of the better sort could not attend either ; but by the last year of Louis XIII manners had mended here, as elsewhere. Lc Cid was acted at the Marais in 1637, when in spite of the Cardinal and the Academy Paris went wild with enthusiasm ; " beau comme le Cid" was the expression of the moment. Polycucti appeared at the Hotel de Bour- gogne in the winter of 1642. Thus each theatre could boast of having produced at least one chef-d'ceuvre ; as to the other comedies and tragedies honours were divided. It seems, however, that the Hotel de Bourgogne stood first in public opinion, and had the best claim to be called the fore- runner of the Frangais : " le vrai lieu de la comedie est rilotel de Bourgogne." Neither the one nor the other was built as a theatre ; the companj' of the Bourgogne hired the large hall of the Hotel from the Confraternity of the Passion, who had bought it a century before ; and the famous actor Mondory — who played Rodrigue in Lc Cid — had shown the public the way to a tennis court in the Marais quarter which he had fitted up for his troupe of comedians. Corncille was to be seen at his own representations, with his grave Norman face, long nose, good eyes, hair thin on the top, but curling on his wide collar. He had an anxious, almost appealing look ; the visible self-diffidence so sharply touched by the Academy's absurd, pedantic verdict on Le Cid — the [ilay was improbable, lacked the unities, might very expediently not have been written al all. It was a foolish beginning for the Academy. But after all, these voices had something in them of prophecy. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 77 Corneille's influence on the French literary mind did not last beyond a generation, though the people and a few choice spirits love him to this day. His genius, on its theatrical side, was more Spanish than French. Queen Anne had a passion for his plays, and they were constantly acted at Court, as well as in the houses of great people. It was here, not at the public theatres, which princesses did not attend, that Mademoiselle caught heroic ideas and added more than a dash of high-flown adventurousness to her natural touch of eccentricity. And it may be added that all she learned from "notre vieil ami Corneille," as Madame de Sevign6 called him regretfully, was honest, honourable, and clean. The theatre of Corneille's day was an oblong hall with a platform at the end as stage, approached by a flight of steps, on each side of which sat the musicians. Two pieces of tapestry, drawn to each side, made the curtain, with the royal arms above. There were no seats on the floor of the hall, but down each side ran a double row of galleries, the upper part divided into boxes. These were closely packed with men of fashion and with more or less elegant pr^deuses, as ready to criticise as any literary women of to-day. People of very high rank, social or religious, came masked, or were hidden behind a grated screen ; a cardinal or an abbess was not impossible to find there. The public crammed the lower galleries and covered the floor and climbed on the stage : good citizens of Paris with their wives and families, mixed in a motley crowd of young dandies, soldiers, thieves, " pastry- cooks, poets," cadets de Gascogne, actors, fiddlers, pages, all and each bent on amusing themselves in their own way quite as much as on listening to Corneille. Royal musketeers strutted about and bullied their neighbours. In a distinguished place above the hurly-burly sat members of the new Academy which was to make modern literature, though it began by refusing to elect Corneille. There might be seen — at least, if his Calvinist principles did not keep him away — " the illustrious M. Valentin Conrart," the founder of the Forty Immortals, who, a small group in those early days, 78 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD used to meet at his house before his authority had to give way to that of the ijjreat patron, Richeh'eu. There was ugly little M. ("lodeau, Hisiiop of Venct: anrl (irassc, known at the lliHcl de Ramhouillel as " le nain de Julie," who di\ided his time between verse-writing in Paris and jjreaching in his far- away dioceses. There was M. de Gombauld, a well-known poet in his day; tall, grave, ceremonious, nicknamed by Madame de Rambouillet " le beau Tenebreux." There was M. Chapelain, mean in looks, dressed in old and extra- ordinary clothes, one of the Academy's most learned and active members, to be slain as a poet, in later years, by the satire of ]?oileau. i-Vnd there were more Immortals, often as ridiculous as they were literarj', but respected and run after by the world of their day. The mocking spirit of Gaul showed itself in one of Mon- sieur's diversions. He planned a rival Academy of the most ignorant men he could find ; and it was still quite possible to hit on gentlemen who could hardly read or write. He gave a sum of money to Captain Brulart du Boulay, one of this distinguished band, that he might supply books, paper, and ink for the room in which they were to meet. As none of these were forthcoming, Le Boulay was called to account. He was clever, if not learned. The words " treasurer " and "thief" meant in his opinion the same thing. He frankly owned that the money had gone no further than his own purse. He had to run away from the laughing fury of Monsieur and the rest; but the new Academj' "alia a vau I'eau." People have laughed at the Hotel de Rambouillet and the advanced women whose exaggerated imitatL>rs became les Pri'dcuscs Ridicules. But Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet, was really a remarkable person, and her century owed her a great deal. Her influence and that of her polite and literary salon was at its height in the last years of Louis XIH's reign. At the time, no one could have held such a position as hers who was not a great lady as well as a clever woman, and she was equal to the highest in France, CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 79 the blood royal and a few duchesses only excepted. Her father, Jean de Vivonne, Marquis de Pisani — a Frenchman, in spite of his Italian title — had married Giulia Savelli, a noble Roman, widow of one of the Orsini family ; thus Madame de Rambouillet was connected with Princess Maria Felice Orsini, the unhappy Duchesse de Montmorency. Her husband, the Marquis de Rambouillet, of the ancient family of Angennes, and in his father's lifetime Vidame du Mans, has been overshadowed by his wife's fame. He was a tall, good-looking, sharp-faced man, a courtier and a diplomat, bold, quarrelsome, extravagant. With all this, he was a prince among husbands, and continued all his life to be Madame de Rambouillet's devoted admirer. Everything that she and his pretty daughters did was beautiful in his eyes. His two sons brought sorrow. One died of the plague at eight years old ; the other, known as Marquis de Pisani, became deformed through the carelessness of his nurse, and was the one short and ugly member of the family. He grew up a gallant young fellow and a good soldier, however ; he was a devoted follower of Conde — then Due d'Enghien — and died fighting under him at the battle of Nordlingen. M. de Rambouillet possessed the splendid and almost royal chateau of his name, twenty-five miles from Paris, where Frangois I died. But Madame de Rambouillet cared little for her woods and parks and gardens, except as the scene of the beautiful fetes and surprises with which she amused her friends in summer weather. She lived almost entirely in Paris, busy with her mission of encouraging literature and refining society. The old hStel belonging to the family having been pulled down by Richelieu when he built the Palais-Cardinal, she rebuilt after her own design the Hotel Pisani, her father's old house in the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre. It was known ever after as the H6tel de Rambouillet. The Marquise added to her many talents that of being a clever and original architect. She built her house on a 8o A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD new, dignified, and intelligent i)lan with a view to society and conversation. No more low rooms and dark poky passages, such as had contented the Middle Ages and the Renaissance even in their palaces. High rooms, high windows, high doors, a stately suite of salons opening one into the other, no longer divided by a central staircase. We are told that the Hotel de Rambouillet was the model for builders in the second quarter of the century. Queen Marie de Mcdicis, building her palace of the Luxembourg, sent her architect to take a lesson there. Madame de Rambouillet was a near neighbour of Made- moiselle at the Tuileries, and from one of her large new windows had a view of Mademoiselle's own garden. She also looked into the orchard and garden of the Quinze- Vingts, the great hospital for the blind, and into the court and garden of M. de Chevreuse. He was unneighbourly enough to block out her view by building a projection from his own house, and this was thought the more unkind, as M. de Rambouillet had saved his life, years before, in a skirmish with some personal enemies. But Madame de Rambouillet was not very popular with the old Court world, which affected scorn of her ideas and envied her influence. For her part, she went little to Court, preferring books and civilised talk to intrigues and gossip, coarse jokes and frivolity. But the best of the younger half of society, royal and noble, came to her, and met in her salons the men and women whose only distinction was literary. There, besides the members of the young Academy, every author or person of intelligence was welcomed. There poets read their works and listened to criticism — sometimes hardly worth having, as when Corneille was advised to lock up Polyeucte in a drawer. There the pedantic Menage strutted and boasted, and there clever little Voiture laughed and flirted and amused the company with many impertinences. There the admired "Cavalier Marino" introduced the flowery language of his Adone. His great book, "forty-five thousand lines of word painting," lies before one now as it may have lain on CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 8i Madame de Rambouillet's table ; bound in vellum fresh and strong after nearly three hundred years, the title-page splendidly printed in red and black by Oliviero de Varano — Olivier de Varennes — at Paris, in the Rue St. Jacques, and bearing the revered name of His Most Christian Majesty " Lodovico Decimoterzo, Re di Francia e di Navarra." Within there is a dedication to Queen Maria de' Medici, the poet's especial patron, and a long introductory discourse in French by Chapelain, then a young man. For the Adone was published in 1623, years before Mademoiselle and her contemporaries learned manners at the Hotel de Rambouillet. And Marini was dead, leaving his preciosity as a bad legacy behind him. One of the popular members of the Rambouillet society was Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, a type of the inconsistencies of the time. The violent energy of his family, the obstinate thoroughness which made his grandfather a fighting Huguenot and his sister the reforming Abbess of the famous community of Fort Royal, seems to have led this man from one extreme to another. He was a courtier, a follower of Richelieu, a friend of Monsieur — the combination was difficult — an out- spoken admirer of that stern Augustinian, the disgraced Abbe de St. Cyran ; and finally, tired of compromises, throw- ing his whole soul into the passionate religion of the Port Royalists, he retired to Port Royal des Champs and became one of that band of hermits whose bones were dug up and scattered to the winds in the last years of Louis XIV, now a child learning to walk. It is curious to remember that d'Andilly tried hard for the appointment of tutor to the Dauphin. The Arnauld influence on Louis XIV might have had strange effects from a religious point of view. It was Robert d'Andilly's cousin, Pierre Arnauld de Corbe- ville, a well-known soldier and courtier, Madame de Ram- bouillet's carabin-poete, who one day brought from Dijon a boy of sixteen, Bossuet by name, that he might amuse the society by preaching to it. This sermon, which probably bored Mademoiselle de Montpensier, for she was of the G S2 A TRINCKSS OF THF OLD WORLD saiTic a^e as tlu' preacher and a frequent guest at the Hotel, was nn( yiuim^ lUissuct's first attempt. Me harl prcchotlc since he was twelve years old. Among his listeners may also have been the ga)- and smiling Mademoiselle de Chantal at seventeen, to be married in a few montiis to the Marquis de Sevigne. Older and mt)re critical, there was the romantic and sensitive Madame de Sable. There were also Mademoi- selle de Scudcry and her excellent but insup])ortable brother Georges, with airs of oracle and viatamore. The once beautiful Mademoiselle I'aulet with her mass of red-gold hair, Madame dc Rambouillet's converted protegee, addressed bj- the poets as "adorable lionne," was still an attracti\'e presence, though far from young. She was known among the Precieuses as Partlu'nic, and her exquisite voice in singing to the lute and the theorbo was one of the charms of the Chambre Bleue. Among the great personages of the Court who most fre- quented it were the I'rincesse de Conde with her daughter and eldest son. Its atmosphere was a fine training in manners and intelligence, for the Marquise would endure no lack of either. But Madame la Princesse, the first lady in France after the Queen and Mademoiselle, whose beauty, like Helen's, had once nearly set Europe in flames, was a woman of some real distinction, and knew how to appreciate this bold advance from the coarseness of a world she knew too well. As to refinement and education, her children had a poor example in their father, the first Prince of the blood. Henry I'rince de Conde was a clever, resolute man, but mean in his character, odious in his manners, and dirt}' and neglected in his dress and appearance. None of the Conde men were remarkable for good looks. But the young Louis, Due d'l'lnghien, though short and not reall)- handsome, had the bright wits and the daring, dashing charm of a Mont- moiency. In the winter of 1642 he and his fascinating sister, Anne- Gene\'ieve de Boiubon, were both alread)- married, she to the middle-aged I)ne de Longueville, he to Richelieu's )'oung CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 83 niece, Claire-Clemence de Maille-Brezc, who was still at the Carmelite Convent, playing with dolls and learning to read and write. But the brother and sister continued to be Madame de Rambouillet's most welcome and attractive guests. They were too clever, too clear-minded, to be touched by the later affectations of that artificial society, but they knew how to take the best of it. The Due d'Enghien was Corneille's most sincere admirer, and Bossuet's lifelong friend. It seems that Cardinal de Richelieu viewed the assemblies at the Hotel de Rambouillet with a certain anxiety. If the Marquise and her family were above any suspicion of politi- cal intrigue, it was not so with all her guests. Richelieu once sent Pere Joseph to her on a secret mission, to inquire into what she knew of the views and actions of Madame la Princesse, and to point out that by acting as his spy she might secure certain advantages for her husband. He applied to the wrong person. Madame de Rambouillet told him politely but decidedly that " le metier d'espion" was one which did not suit her. Madame de Rambouillet was a tall, handsome woman with weak eyes and a thin skin. The peculiar features of the famous Chambre Bleue were owing to her dread of light and heat. We owe the best account of that shrine of conversa- tion to Mademoiselle, who described it many years later in her playful little book, La Princesse de Paplilagonie. Made- moiselle, tomboy as she was, and a Princess of the vieille roche, with little respect for the new refinement or care for the new literature — except so far as Corneille touched her heroic side — had a real admiration for the divine Arthenice — an anagram of Catherine — and lingered quite affectionately on the details of her sacred corner. The room was large, and hung with blue velvet ; in former days, red and tawny were the only correct colours. The high windows, from floor to ceiling, opened on a beautiful garden, over the walls of which other gardens made a pleasant green view. In an alcove darkened by screens sat " the Athenian 84 A PRINCHSS OF THR OLD WORLD i;iiil(lcss," tlic mistress fif the Ikjusc ; liere, in proii[)s of two or thric, Ikt inicsts cainc to talk witli her. She was suiroiiiHlcd by portraits nf perjple she loved; as she gazed on these, her very loui< was a benediction. The rarest books lay near her on little tables ; all round about stood crystal \'ases full of the loveliest flowers of each season. It all sounds rather modern; but this was the inner sanc- tuary where the finest minds of Paris and the provinces, what- ever their rank in society, learned to talk and laugh and weep and poetise and criticise and flatter, all with the grace and sparkle of a young age. For Madame de Rambouillet was the leader of a new Renaissance in manners and literature, and men and women of letters owe to her the first real recognition of their dignity. Madame Arvede Barine says truly that "we see at a glance the immense length of road traversed since that day when 'the incomparable Arthenice' chose to invite people on their personal merit alone." It is not very strange, perhaps, that Mademoiselle Julie, her mother's brilliant satellite, delayed from year to year her marriage with the faithful Marquis dc Montausier, impatiently waiting in his beautiful scarlet coat. As Madame de Ram- bouillet grew older, and shrank more from the troublesome rays of the sun, Julie became the active centre of her large hospitality. Probably no woman not actually a great beauty has ever been more universally admired. She was witty and graceful, a perfect dancer, a delightful story-teller, and of a frank, straightforward character. The only persons who dis- liked her were the victims of sharp speeches or practical jokes ; the famous Guirlandc de Julie, of which the manu- script still exists, shows how her crowd of grateful poets honoured Mademoiselle de Rambouillet. The Marquise contented herself with one daughter at home, and disposed of the other four in convents. Partly through Mademoiselle Julie's interest with Madame d'Aiguil- lon, two of these young ladies received abbeys. Claire-Diane. Abbess of Yeres, made a terrible mess of her religious affairs, and her convent became a byword for disorder and CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 85 mismanagement. She was " une fort deraisonnable personne." She spent much of her time in lodgings in Paris, quarrelled violently with her family, and was for some time shut up in a religious house in Paris by order of the Parliament. Louise-Isabelle and Catherine-Charlotte, quiet and well- behaved young women, who took their calling more seriously, were at first nuns under their sister's stormy rule at Yeres, but were afterwards removed to the Abbey of St. Etienne, near Reims. Louise became Abbess there, and in after years her sister succeeded her. The youngest, Angelique- Clarice, was rescued by Madame de Montausier's marriage from a life for which she had no vocation. She came from her convent to take Julie's place at the Hotel de Rambouillet, but did not inherit her popularity. Though very clever and amusing, she was neither pretty nor amiable. Some years later she married the Comte de Grignan, whom the world knows better through his third wife, Frangoise Marguerite de Sevigne. CIIAPTKR VII " Rci)renons la tlansc, Allnns, c'cst asscz : Lc printcmps commence, Lo Rois sunt pas-scs." cTU'Ki' MoruNiNii -im': iii;ath oi- mahamk ok saint-ceorges — MAIiAMK Dt KlESyUE— 1 IIK I AMK.V OI'' GUISE — THE DEATH OF THE K1N(; MADEMOISELLl-:, quick and iiitclliL,'cnt as she was, knew little of life as a si>(]ilt child of fifteen. She knew nothing,', exce[)t by hearsay, of death and of mourn- ing ; and thoucjh there never was a more "real Princess" as to keepiiiL; the rules of Court etiquette, it was impossible for her to feel much grief when Queen Marie de Medicis, her hardly remembered grandmother, died at Brussels in 1642. The King, who had consented to his mother's long exile and had allowed her to die in something very like poverty, insisted on the most formal ceremonies of Court mourning. Mademoiselle, the first Princess of the blood, had to shut herself up for some hot July days in a dark room, entirely hung with black. She found it very dull, for the awkward circumstances — the Cinq-Mars affair being at its height, Monsieur in disgrace and Richelieu all-powerful — frightened away the crowd of courtiers who generally paid their respects on these occasions. Mademoiselle enjoj-ed no ridiculous scenes, no stifled, indecent laughter, no confusion of visitors staggering in (|uitc blind from the daylight, some bowing respectfully to the chairs, others to the bed-posts — comedies (jf mourning such as delighted the Court chroniclers of her century. 86 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 87 In the February after Richelieu's death and Monsieur's return to the Court, Mademoiselle had her first experience of personal grief and of change in her surroundings. The carnival was very gay in Paris that year, the ogre being removed, though his master lingered in melancholy de- cline at Saint-Germain. The gayest event was the marriage of Paul de Clermont, son of Madame de Saint-Georges, who bore his grandmother's title of Montglat, with Made- moiselle de Cheverny, a handsome, black-eyed girl high in Mademoiselle's favour. Both bride and bridegroom were people of some celebrity. The Marquis de Montglat wrote some of the best memoirs of the time, and his wife became a favourite subject of the pen-portraits which were so fashion- able in the years after the Fronde. In Mademoiselle's own portrait of her old friend one finds pleasant memories of the Chateau de Cheverny, " un palais enchante," with all its brilliant diversions. There, under the care of an adoring father, Mademoiselle Cecile had spent the perfectly happy childhood which made her critical of life afterwards. There Mademoiselle had shared her amusements, in the first never- forgotten summer she spent in Touraine. The most constant of women, and by no means blind or stupid, she never gave up a friend because of her faults ; but if certain scandalous histories are true, Madame de Montglat was hardly worthy of her esteem. However, if Mademoiselle had chosen her friends and companions for their strict morality, she would have possessed few indeed. The marriage delighted her, as Madame de Montglat took up her abode at the Tuileries, and was an agreeable addition to the little Court there. But the pleasant arrangement did not last long. The health of Madame de Saint-Georges had been failing all the winter, and the cold mists of February, probably with chills caught at her son's wedding gaieties, brought on inflammation which was very quickly fatal. At the last, the fever and delirium having passed off. Made- moiselle joined the dying woman's family beside her bed. Day had not begun to dawn over the roofs of the city. 88 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD Madame de Saint-Georges had received the Viaticum devoutly, making her peace with God ; and now turned her thoughts, even more than to her own children, to the adopted child who knelt beside her, kissing her with passionate sobs and receiving with the rest a mother's blessing. It was a sad farewell ; for no one knew better than Madame de Saint- Georges in what a world, and to the care of what a father, the Princess's best friend was leaving her. The Marquise had not long been dead when Monsieur, roused by the news at an unnaturally early hour, arrived at the Tuileries. Nervous, excitable, indolent, he was much worried by finding himself, her natural guardian, in charge of a tall young daughter in floods of tears. He hurried her at once out of the palace, with all the cold-hearted horror of death which seems to have belonged to French royalties, and lodged her and her attendants, as a temporary refuge, in his own apartment at the Hotel de Guise. This, afterwards rebuilt and known as the Hotel de Soubise, was a large and curious old house in the quarter of the Temple, on which Monsieur had some claim through his mother-in-law, the Duchesse de Guise ; but it seems to have held many other lodgers, for he could only find room for his daughter and Mademoiselle de Saint-Louis by removing himself to the " Baths " near by. These bathing establishments, of which there were several in Paris, seem to have been something between a Turkish bath, a fashionable club, and an hotel. People spent a night there before and after a long journey ; people took refuge there from troublesome friends, beggars or creditors, or even from the curious eye of the public. There one could be incognito, " servi, choyc," plunged in luxury, obeyed at a sign or a glance by silent servants. Such a lodging suited Mon- sieur well enough. Mademoiselle was not left long at the H6tel de Guise; it was indeed hardly the jilacc for a young girl who had lost her governess. She found time, however, to pay a visit to the Comtesse de Fiesque, an elderly and agreeable widow, much CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 89 out of health, who was living there. This lady had been an intimate friend of Madame de Saint-Georges, and was con- nected, through the family of Guise, with Mademoiselle her- self She had been a lady-in-waiting to her mother, the first Madame, and seems to have had every claim to the vacant appointment. Mademoiselle was aware of this. Having been conveyed from the Hdtel de Guise to a more suitable shelter with the Carmelite nuns of Saint-Denis, she wrote to her father and to the Queen, asking that either Madame de Fiesque or Madame de Tillieres, her sister-in-law, might become her governess. She frankly confesses that she was a little taken in by the result, as she much preferred Madame de Tillieres. She had felt bound to pay Madame de Fiesque the compliment of mentioning her name, with the conviction that she was too old and too ill to be appointed. But Mademoiselle knew little of her sex and her world. When Madame de Fiesque received from Monsieur the offer of the post, her ailments disappeared by magic. Life had still something in store for the invalid old lady ; the education of the first girl in France was worth some nervous exertion. Mademoiselle spent a rather dismal week at the convent, no doubt bored by the various dunces of quality, who, like the Duchesse d'Enghien, were being taught to read and write there. Then a messenger from Monsieur brought her the news of Madame de Fiesque's appointment. She re- ceived it politely, sent her compliments, and desired that she might be fetched the next day. Madame de Fiesque arrived in due course, and was heartily welcomed by her pupil. The regime began peacefully enough. The new governess was a delightful talker, full of stories of the old world she knew well. For a short time Mademoiselle found life easy and pleasant. She had also the companionship of Madame de Montglat, who remained with her at the Tuileries. But the light rule — management, rather — of Madame de Saint-Georges, always gay, indulgent, and respectful, had passed away for ever. Madame de Fiesque found its results 90 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD shockinp;. Her charge was self-willed, independent, haughty, and positive to an unbearable degree. She thought herself grown up, while scarcely out of childhood ; her manners and language were boyish. No sooner had Madame de Fiesque taken the reins really in her hands, than she began to make her spirited pupil feel them. First she made a list of Mademoiselle's jewellery, that nothing might be given away without her leave. Then she took the key of her writing-desk, and insisted on seeing all the letters she wrote and received. She chose to preside over the visits of her young friends, and found fault with the Ihjo^dUlles they talked about. Mademoiselle bore these oppressions at first patiently, and kept her temper until the not unlikely event of a quarrel about Madame de Montglat and her relations. It would have been more in the interests of peace if they had all left the palace at the change of government. Mademoiselle might have been broken- hearted, but Madame de Fiesque would have had the fair start which certainly was denied her. Outbursts of jealousy, complaints on both sides, were the natural consequence. Mademoiselle spoke her mind to her governess " assez re.spectueusement," and was answered with sharpness. Made- moiselle had a cold ; the doctor ordered some medicine, which she declined to take. Then Madame de Fiesque committed the unpardonable offence of treating her as a child ; she locked her up in her room, and gave out that she was ill and must be left alone. Mademoiselle was not long in escaping, and her vengeance was swift. The Comtesse found herself locked up in her cabinet, and had to remain there till a locksmith was fetched, as Mademoiselle, with keen enjoyment, had carried off the key. In these conflicts, however, she was not always or often the victor. Madame de Fiesque appealed to Monsieur, and he sujjported her authority. He sanctioned the rules of life and conduct that she thought it necessary to impose. They seemed to Mademoiselle childish and ridiculous, but she had to accept them and to obey. Slie went one evening against CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 91 orders to visit her grandmother, the Duchesse de Guise, who had returned from exile in Italy. The disobedience was paid for by a week of imprisonment in her room, and this time there was no escaping. Madame de Fiesque particularly disliked going out in the evening ; her pupil, as the spring came on, had a passion for joining the rest of society on the Cours-de-la-Reine, a fashionable promenade planted with four rows of elms by Queen Marie de Medicis, stretching along the river-side beyond the Tuileries gardens. Madame de Fiesque induced Monsieur to command that Mademoiselle should never go to the Cours without his special permission. This meant frequent disappointment ; for the Hotel de Guise was far off, and Monsieur, whose ways were uncertain, not always easy to find. Probably the neighbouring Hotel de Rambouillet was a refuge for Mademoiselle at this time. She found the Marquise " une chose adorable," and even Madame de Fiesque could not see harm in that exalted atmosphere. Some friendly gossip made matters worse between Made- moiselle and her governess by explaining Monsieur's reasons for the appointment. He had not an agreeable recollection of Madame de Fiesque as a leading member of his household in his first wife's time. Apparently she interfered too much ; possibly she told tales, and found it her duty to set Madame against him. Now there was little doubt that coming changes would bring to France Madame d'aujourd'hui, and etiquette would* have obliged Monsieur to offer Madame de Fiesque the same position as before. He was therefore glad to rid himself of a possible critic and spy by giving her the honourable post of governess to his daughter. At this time, tormented by the new worrying discipline, depressed by short and sad visits to Saint-Germain, where Louis Xni lay dying through those spring months of 1643, and where the Queen was too deeply occupied with present and future anxieties to pay her niece much attention. Made- moiselle found life a dismal affair. She was glad to accept the affectionate homage of the Guise family, her mother's 92 A PRINCKSS OF THE OLD WORLD relations, of whom she had seen nothiiiLj since those childish da)'s wiien she tried to ignore any blood of hers that was not royal. Madame de Guise and her family were in the highest spirits, once more established in Paris and free from Richelieu's hated power. licr three younger children were with her at the Hotel de Gui.se ; all of course much older than Mademoi- selle, for Madame de Guise had married again when her eldest daughter, the heiress of the Montpensiers, was quite a child. Mademoiselle de Guise — Marie de Lorraine — was a clever woman of eight-and-twenty. Her two younger brothers, Louis and Roger de Lorraine, known at this time as Chevaliers de Guise and de Joinville, were lively young fellows very ready to fall in love. They were charmed to help in amusing their half-niece. Mademoiselle, and she tried a little match-making on the elder boy's account. It was suggested in the first instance by a certain " assez libre " Madame Martel, an acquaintance of Madame de Guise. It sounded likely enough that the Chevalier — who was afterwards Due de Joyeuse, his brother Roger, then known as Chevalier de Guise, becoming a Knight of Malta — might be a suitable husband for Mademoiselle d'Epernon, Mademoiselle's specially loved cousin and friend, whom she now had the great joy of meeting again among the re- turned e.xiles. There was a little awkwardness at first, Mademoiselle d'Epernon's father and stepmother being " mal avec Monsieur " ; but Monsieur showed his good- nature on this occasion, and did not forbid his daughter the i friendship which brightened the next five years of her life. The consequence of the match-making game was a rather serious flirtation between young Louis de Lorraine and Mademoiselle d'Epernon. He was passionately in love. ■ He gave the strongest proof of devotion that a lover in those days ccjuld give : he visited her when she had the small-pox. I'^or worldly reasons, however, his mother and sister finally persuaded him to give up the marriage, and sunie time later, to Madeinoiselle's keen indignation, CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 93 he married the only daughter and heiress of the Due d'Angouleme. She never forgave the unworthy treatment of her friend, and never spoke of the Due de Joyeuse without coldness and contempt, while his younger brother, a soldier who died unmarried, had her lifelong esteem. And it was for Mademoiselle d'Epernon's sake that she drew back, while still a young girl, from her new friendship with these Lorraine relations. Mademoiselle would certainly have affirmed that first impressions are everything. Lorraine intrigue, Lorraine ambition, Lorraine worldliness and cun- ning ; it was a bad match for the Bourbon temper, rampant from infancy in Mademoiselle. There were exceptions, however. There was a hero in the family, and Mademoiselle loved heroes. She always admired her grandmother's eldest surviving son, the romantic paladin Henry de Lorraine, Due de Guise, a man of nine- and-twenty, who came to Paris at this time from Flanders, leaving his unlucky wife, the Comtesse de Bossu, behind him. The Due de Guise was one of the wildest and most picturesque figures of that wild time. A " tSte folle," a mad hunter after pleasure and adventure of all kinds, rash, daring, generous, this young Lorraine had been for years a terrible annoyance to Cardinal de Richelieu. At fifteen, by one of those scandalous appointments which disgraced the Church, he was made Archbishop of Reims. A cavalier-ecclesiastic in satin and feathers and gold spurs, " petit pr^lat d'une eglise bien militante," the stories told of him were startling, even in that day. Among the women desperately in love with him were two of the Princesses de Gonzague, the learned Anne, afterwards Princess Palatine, and her sister Benedicte, Abbess of Avenay, whose vocation, in spite of Bossuet's flattering remarks, seems to have been no more real than that of the Abbess of Yeres, or of Henry de Lorraine himself His ecclesiastical character only lasted till his father's death. 94 A PRINCESS OF THR OLD WORLD when he gladly resicjiieil tlic archbi.shtjijric aiul begged Richelieu to give him the CDininaml nf an arm)'. It does not seem that he had any dislnyal intentions, but the Cardinal distrusted the whole House of Lorraine too deeply to give M. de Guise any chance of winning distinction as a general. The )'oung man left h'rance in a rage and threw in his lot with the Comle de Soissons and the Due de Bouillon in their armed conspiracy. After the Comte's death, Guise escaped from Sedan in disguise. He would not, as Jjouillon did, negotiate his pardon, but remained in banishment ; and this probablj' saved him from being involved in the Cinq-Mars affair. But Richelieu had him condemned and beheaded in effig)'. Now he flashed back once more to Paris, and all the gay world ran after him. " II fut a lui seul tous les Guise ensemble," says Paul de Rlusset, writing of him among the " e.xtravagants " of the century. He had the daring courage and resoluteness of his great-grandfather Francois, shot by I'oltrot the Huguenot ; the energy and ambition of Henrj' le Balafre, his grandfather, murdered at Blois ; the weaknesses and the eccentricity of Charles, his father. He had all the faults of his qualities, and many more besides, with an extraordinary charm which covered them all. He made a fine sensation in society. "Son cceur alloit voltigeant de passion en passion," says Madame de Motteville, writing of the Due de Guise. His first strong attraction in Paris seems to have been the notorious Madame de Montbazon ; the next, more lasting, was Mademoiselle de Pons ; he tried to persuade the Pope to annul his Memish marriage, that he might marr)- her. But he lived on love-affairs and duels ; laws, for him, were made to be broken ; and being very rich and wildl)' generous, he was one of the most popular men in Paris. He was also one of the handsomest ; with the high nose and eagle look of the Due d'Enghien, his features were finer and his expression singularly sweet. He had so noble an air that princes and great men looked common beside him, and people found it I.ClUIS XIII CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 95 easy to believe that this hero of chivalry, as they called him, was a descendant of Charlemagne. It is not likely that Mademoiselle at her Tuileries saw much of the young man, who was more of a trouble than a joy to the respectable Duchesse de Guise ; but in later years she was on terms of cordial friendship with " mon oncle " and referred to him in many of the difficulties of her life. On the 14th of May, the thirty-third anniversary of his father's death, the sad life and reign of Louis XIII came to an end. Various stories are told of the King's state of mind and of the quaint fancies that took him while he lay patiently waiting for death. He was much occupied with thoughts of his country, for which, it is only fair to say, he had always been ready to sacrifice himself He had formally directed that the Queen should be Regent, and Monsieur, with whom he had been reconciled, Lieutenant-General of the kingdom ; but with the old unconquerable distrust he did his best to cripple the one and the other by appointing a Council whose opinion they were bound to follow. And he specially ex- cepted Madame de Chevreuse from the amnesty which allowed all exiles to return : " C'est le diable, cela ! " His thoughts wandered to the frontier, where his young commander, the Due d'Enghien, was facing the troops of Spain. Eye-witnesses say that he snatched the Queen's fan, crying out for his pistols. " Do you not see," he said, " M. le Due d'Enghien fighting the Spaniards ? Lord, how he drives them ! He has de- feated them, they are all killed or taken prisoners, except a few runaways. Oh ! how right I was to trust him with my army. It was my own choice ; I had opposition enough." He looked solemnly at the Prince de Condd, standing by his bed. " Your son has gained a great victory," he said. Five days after his death, d'Enghien fought and conquered the Spanish army on the plain of Rocroy. It seemed as if the death-bed wanderings of Louis were a distinct prophecy. He gazed much, from his high window in the new Chateau 96 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD of Saint-Germain, at tlic distant towers of Saint-Denis. " I am Koin;^ there for a lons^ stay," he said tranquilly. " But the road is bad ; I shall have a shaky journey." In these last days, too, lie thoucjht of his mother, harshly treated and exiled, and the remembrance troubled him. When the breath was out of the poor suffering body, they sang the Dc Profiindis to music that Louis himself had composed. And then, for the few days between his death and stately funeral, he was left at Saint-Germain with a small cjuard. Of all the Court, only the Due de Vendome and one other gentleman remained in charge of their dead King. The Queen, the young King and his brother, Mon- sieur, all the princes and nobles and great ladies, with their troops of servants and loads of furniture and baggage, hurried pell-mell back to Paris, where crowds waited with acclamation for their new King. There was little pretence of mourning or regret. The enthusiasm was tremendous : " Ce n'ctaient partout qu'applaudissemens et benedictions." After the Royalties were installed at the Louvre, a few Parisians remembered Louis XIII, Ic Juste, and went out to Saint-Germain, " par curiosit6 plutot que par tendresse," to look upon him for the last time. Mademoiselle, his niece, constant of heart and grateful for his unfailing kindness, was one of the very few who sincerely regretted Louis XIII. CHAPTER VIII 1643 "J'ai vu le temps de la bonne r^gence, Temps ou regnait una heureuse abondance, Temps ou la Ville aussi bien que la Cour Ne respirait que les Jeux et I'Amour." LA BONNE REGENCE — THE SUPERIOR OF THE CARMELITES — THE DUG DE BEAUFORT AND THE IMPORTANTS — THE ARRIVAL OF MADAME — THE PRINCESSE DE CONDE AND MADAME DE MONTBAZON — A COLD COLLATION— MAZARIN'S TRIUMPH " TA Reine est si bonne !" I V These words were in everybody's mouth at the beginning of Anne of Austria's regency. She was borne on a wave of popularity into power much more supreme than the dying King had intended. On Monday, the i8th of May, several days before the funeral ceremony, she went in state to present young Louis XIV to the Parliament, and on that occasion her husband's commands were set aside in great measure, and she was given full sovereign authority without any of the limits he had imposed. If she wished for advice from her Council, of which the Due d'Orleans was President and the Prince de Cond6 Vice-President, she could ask for it ; but she was in no way obliged to take it. The little five-year-old King, with his blue eyes and fair curls, dressed in violet velvet, standing up on the throne ; his widowed mother, still beautiful and always stately, wrapped in crape; these two, the centre of a great crowd of all that was noblest, cleverest, worthiest, in the old palace of France, seemed to draw to themselves the adoring con- fidence of the nation. New hope and life were in the air. H 97 98 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD Every one present at that famous stance was enchanted, except a few independent spirits like I'residcnt Barillon, or clear-siglited men such as Olivier d'Ormesson, himself a red- robed member. " Either I am mistaken or they are mis- taken," he says in h\s Jountdl. lie was ready to believe in the Queen's good intentions ; but he realised the difficulties in her way. Few of course in that great assembly would have made Anne absolute ruler of France for her beaux yeicx alone. Each party had its own objects to serve, and each flattered itself that it would influence the Queen in its own way. Among the princes and great nobles, torn by furious jealousies between themselves, each clique wished her to be independent of its rival as well as of the Parliament. The Parliament had no liking for " les grands," and looked for- ward, their power being checked, to recovering the authority and dignity of which Richelieu had done much to deprive it. As to the people of France, the unrepresented millions who only worked and paid taxes, their opinion was not asked. But with them royalty was popular ; they threw up their caps in joyful hope of peace, lighter burdens, and more food. " La Reine est si bonne ! " Paris shouted. " Vive la Regente ! Vive notre petit Roi ! " and the cries rolled away echoing through the provinces. Nobody had any idea at all that in giving the supreme sovereign power into the hands of Anne of Austria they were giving it into those of Cardinal Giulio Mazarini. The Italian had kept discreetly in the background during the last weeks of the late King's life, but his influence with the Queen was already greater than any one knew, and on the very evening of May i8th, on her return to the Louvre, she announced her decision : Mazarin was her First Minister. The Parliament was furious ; it already knew something of Mazarin and his views on government. The Court, at first, was on the whole indifferent, though the Vendome clique, just now predominant, had set its hopes on the royal chaplain, the liishop of Heauvais — marked for all time by CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 99 the brilliant impudence of Retz as " plus idiot que tous las idiots de votre connoissance." The princes and nobles despised the low-born statesman : Richelieu was at least one of themselves, and a great Frenchman, an enemy worthy of drawn swords and risky conspiracies. At first, too, Mazarin with his handsome face and soft manners tried to please them. " Doux et benin," as Retz describes him, he seemed at home to be merely an instrument of the Queen's open- handed generosity, while abroad he carried on the high traditions of Richelieu, encouraging the armies, even if taking to himself some of the credit of the Due d'Enghien's victories. The fact is that during the first weeks of la bonne Regence, society was too passionately bent on personal amusement and personal gain to think about politics at all. The new Minister might govern and tax as he pleased, so long as he did not interfere with their pleasures or the Queen's liberality. Everybody asked for everything, and everybody got what he asked for. Places, pensions, abbeys, bishoprics, governorships, military commands, orders, dis- tinctions, tabourets, precedences, privileges ; but above all things and on every excuse, money ; money from the treasury, money out of the taxes, which these people did not help to pay, and under the load of which France had groaned ever since the coming of Richelieu, absolutism, and foreign glory. La bonne Rigence was not likely to bring peace, with Mazarin at the helm ; nor plenty, with a magnificent but famished pack of men and women, most of them rushing home from exile, clutching and tearing and fighting for every good thing the Court had to bestow. For them, and them alone, the Regency was good and the Queen was kind. She gave with both hands, and the wild crowd took it all, seizing in addition an extraordinary liberty to do as they pleased. For many years society had not been so splendid, so gay. The Court being once more established at the Louvre, and making very light, it seems, of the formal season of mourning, all the grand old hotels were filled up again, and Paris, high loo A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD and low, amused itself as Paris only knows how. The merry summer months were never merrier. Mademoiselle looked init from her Tuileries on hrit^ht L,rardens in sunshine, and listened at ni^iit, mie may he sure, to fashionable moonlight serenades. Once or twice a day she visited the Louvre, to pay her respects to the Queen and to play with the two charming little boys there. Philippe was the prettiest and the most attractive, though Mademoiselle's affection for Louis was constant and loyal. Louis had always something of his mother's Spanish stateliness and a talent for guarding himself from too much famriliarity. One can quite imagine that the attentions of a big, frank, noisy, rather awkward and excitable cousin of sixteen might sometimes annoy a dignified King of five. With girlish enthusiasm. Mademoiselle shared in the new devotion to Anne of Austria. Though she had loved her uncle, she knew that his wife had deserved pity for years of neglect and unkindness, and it was not till later, hurt by the Queen's coldness, and seeing and hearing many things with grown-up eyes and ears, that she began to perceive right and reason in Louis XIH's attempt to restrict the power of the Regency. In the meanwhile, in spite of Anne's indifference, she followed her everywhere like a faithful dog. No inter- ference here from Madame de Fiesque. The Queen was always dt'vote ; according to her faithful Madame de Motteville, she was really religious. Now that she was a widow, she made it her duty to visit all the churches in Paris on their fete-days. On Saturdays she regularly attended high mass at Notre Dame. Making full use of her new liberty, she constantly visited her favourite convents, especially the Abbey of the Val-de-GrAce and the great Carmelite Convent in the Rue St. Jacque.s. Of all the " religious" who inhabited the many convents of Paris, with their immense influence on different sections of society, the Superior of the Carmelites held the most dis- tinguished place. Several remarkable women succeeded each other in this post during the first half of the seven- CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS loi teenth century. They were women who knew Court life by experience and had left the world of their own free will, becoming the teachers, the friends, the counsellors, of society. They inherited the practical good sense, as well as the devotion, of St. Theresa and Madame Acarie. Fashionable sins and difficulties had nothing surprising for them. Their views of life and duty differed to some extent from those of the famous Port Royal. They treated human nature more gently, and made repentance less hard ; thus their influence was wider, if not so stirring and so deep. It was easier, too, for queens and princesses and great ladies of the old world to confide in a woman who knew them by instinct, than in the strong and stern Mere An- gdlique Arnauld, whose orthodoxy was suspected at Court, who made small excuse for sinners and showed them little tenderness. She had, indeed, friends among the great, and for some years her influence went on growing ; but not even the efforts of the Bishop of Langres, when he moved her to a house near the Louvre, arranged the hours of services to suit the Court, and clothed her and her nuns in fine white serge and linen with scarlet crosses, were successful in attract- ing the fashionable world as a whole. It was many years later than this that Mademoiselle visited and appreciated Port Royal. But the great Carmelite Convent was school and home and refuge and comfort to society at large, and to royalty in particular. The venerable Mere Madeleine de St. Joseph, many times Prioress, was the intimate friend and adviser of Queen Marie de M^dicis and all her children. After her death in 1637, one of those highest in the Order was Marie de Lancry (Mademoiselle de Bains), in religion Mere Marie- Madeleine de J6sus, who was also elected Prioress for several years in succession. She, probably, was in authority when Queen Anne visited the Convent in the earlier months of the Regency. At this time she was about forty-five. As a most lovely young girl, her mother had removed her from school at the I02 A PRINCHSS OF THE OLD WORLD Ursulinc Convent to place her at Court, under the care of Marie fie Merlicis. The Queen was very fond of Made- mniselle de Hains, and appointed her Maid of Honour. Kverything was made easy for her, and her brij^htncss and sweetness were as remarkable as her beauty. Lovers abounded ; half the Court with its fierce passions, great soldiers such as the Marechnl de Saint-Luc, great nobles like the Due de Bellegarde, Grand Equerry of France and high in favour with three kings, were at her feet and begged for her in marriage. Her husband would have been a lucky man, for she had a strong mind and a tender, generous heart. Happily for her, perhajis, and thanks to the Queen's protection, she was not forced to accept anybody, but was allowed to follow her own instinct, to escape from a world that had shown her its most worldly side, and to become a novice at the Carmelite Convent. Even here at first, however, she was hardly safe. The Convent was besieged by her admirers, "seigneurs du premier rang," and the Mother Prioress, far from shutting her up, this beautiful girl of twenty, insisted on her seeing and listening to them all. But none of these gorgeous gentle- men was able to change the novice's firm mind. Neither was she shaken by her mother's entreaties and prayers. This was not the fine establishment poor IMadame de Bains had plaimed for her daughter. Away in the depths of France, in the salon of one of those houses where old tradition lingers and tourists cannot yet penetrate, hangs a portrait of Mademoiselle de Bains in her habit as a Carmelite. The dark blue eyes smile from a delicate oval face ; the brow is wide and noble, the nose straight, the mouth small. Her hands, with their long pointed fingers, are crossed conventionally. In spite of a certain stiffness, the unknown artist's fault, it is not hard to believe that she was beautiful. There is even a little humour in the calm face ; one may guess that this nun knew the wurld before she left it. The Order, so much connected with the Court, might CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 103 have been expected to fail in moral courage where royal weaknesses were concerned. But it was not so at all. When the Queen-Regent's friends began to be aware that Cardinal Mazarin's influence was even more personal than political, the Prioress of the Carmelites was among the first fearlessly to warn Anne against the danger of such an infatuation. Mazarin's angry anxiety — for he dared not yet despise his enemies — shows itself in his Italian note- books. " The Superior of the Carmelites spoke against me. Her Majesty wept, and said that if such things were spoken of again, she would go there no more." The Carmelites were not alone. In all the Queen's favourite convents the same voice was heard, and she, still so closely attached to the parti des divots, began to resent all this bold interference and to listen more and more will- ingly to her clever and attractive Minister. She was in a difficult position. Among the princes and nobles there was no real statesman, hardly an honest man. Orleans was popular, idle, and weak ; Conde unpopular, greedy, and mean ; Vendome was worthless. The strongest man, apparently, and the Queen's favourite among them all, was the young Due de Beaufort, his second son. To his care she had given her two children when she was attend- ing on her husband's death-bed ; and in consequence of this and other favours he gave himself the airs of the first Prince of the blood. Throughout that summer, as Mazarin's power advanced, young Beaufort became by quick degrees the moving spirit of the opposition. He was handsome, out- spoken, open-handed, and popular with the Parisians. His devotion to the Queen changed easily into jealous anger, and after a few weeks the plot of the Intportants would have deprived her and relieved France of Mazarin, if he had not been too clever for all his noble enemies. La bonne Regence was not an easy time for the Queen- Regent. She must very soon have realised that she could not reign without the support of a strong Minister. At once I04 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD imperious and indolent, sensitive and easily moved to anger, she had an obstinacy and a political sense which vk-ould have assured the victory of her mind over her heart even if this too had not been concerned. The old friends, those who set themselves against the new influence, whether they were entirely good and loyal, like Madame de Hautefort — so called since her regular appointment as lady-in-waiting — or intriguing and dangerous like Madamp de Chevreuse, newly returned from exile against the late King's wish — each and all were driven in time, though not immediately, from the Court. Madame de Hautefort knew the Queen better than she knew herself, and hated Mazarin, not for political reasons, but because she loved the Queen. Madame de Chevreuse, once so necessary to her royal friend, came back to find Anne changed towards her. She was received graciously, but not on the old terms. The Duchess had not been in Paris a week before her strong influence was thrown secretly on the side of the Importants. Not entirely from resentment on her own account ; this would not have been like Madame de Chev- reuse ; but because she found herself powerless as to her chief object, the promotion of her friends, especially the Prince de Marcillac and the Marquis de Chateauneuf, formerly Keeper of the Seals, but exiled by Richelieu. All the Court gossip from day to day amused Mademoiselle in the intervals of attending the Queen in her visits to churches and convents, and in the evening strolls she allowed herself round the Jardin de Renard, beyond the gardens of the Tuileries. Conspiracies were still working underground, and the young Princess knew nothing about possible explosions in society. She had not even begun to hate Mazarin, and this summer appeared to her the most charming she had ever spent. She was quite unaware of offending any one by friendly visits to Elisabeth de Vendfime, the Due de Beaufort's sister, who was married that summer to Charles-Amedee, Due de Nemours. Madeinuisellc de Vendume was a person of much charm, if CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 105 we are to believe Retz, who was rather seriously in love with her. She was not a great beauty, he says, but like Mademoi- selle de Guise she was " a beauty of quality." She had the air of a princess. She was not clever, grave, and indolent, " avec un petit grain de hauteur. Enfin elle 6tait aimable a tout prendre et en tons sens." Retz, as a young Abb6, saw a good deal of the Vend6me family. Madame de Venddme was very fond of him, and believed, on the authority of the Bishop of Lisieux, that he was to be a great light of the Church. The party of the dhjots made much of him, as if they foresaw that he would be a thorn in the side of Mazarin ; and it was in the course of this year that they persuaded the Queen to have him appointed coadjutor to his unworthy uncle Jean-Francois de Gondi, Archbishop of Paris. Mademoiselle's pleasant visits to the young Duchesse de Nemours, whose married life was to end so tragically a few years later, were cut short by the interference of Monsieur's favourite, the Abbe de la Riviere. Mademoiselle detested him as a mischief-maker, whose business in life was to make quarrels between her father and herself This was one of the earliest of them. Monsieur found it politic, at this time, to keep himself on good terms with the rising Minister. At least. La Riviere, bribed by Mazarin, meant him to do so. The growls of discontent and conspiracy were not too far below the surface to be heard by watchful ears. Mazarin himself was not the only person to be aware that his power, if not his life, was in danger. The name of Vendome was a party signal, and Mademoiselle was forbidden any further intimacy with M. de Beaufort's sister. She was very angry, but her father's authority could not be questioned. One of the earliest excitements of this summer was the arrival in Paris of the Duchesse d'Orldans. The King on his death-bed having forgiven his brother and consented to the marriage, Madame Marguerite started at once for France ; happy, after these years of delay, to rejoin the only man she had ever loved. On the frontier she met with a new offence io6 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD in the cruel condition Louis had made. Before she could be received at Court, she and Gaston were solemnly to confirm tlieir marriage— already twice celebrated — in the presence of the Archbishop of Paris. It was a trial to a proud woman who had rrone through so much for her husband's sake. She almost turned back in her journey, saying there could be no such complaisance where honour was concerned. When she yielded, it was with " une repugnance incroyable." The first person to meet her on French soil was Mademoi- selle, her stepdaughter, who had real sympathy for her at this time. Monsieur met her at Meudon, coldly enough, considering their long constancy, and that very evening they made the required declaration before M. de Paris in pontifical habit, with mitre and crosier, in the chapel of the Chiteau de Meudon. Madame and Mademoiselle de Guise were present with Mademoiselle and a few others at this rather dismal scene. The Duchess wept tears of rage and mortifica- tion. She iiad no longer, says Mademoiselle, the great beauty which once charmed Monsieur, and the style of her dress did not repair the ravages made by years of sorrow. She knew nobody, and French Court life was strange to her. Mademoiselle did all she could to help her, and was at first high in her good graces. Monsieur, as far as his nature allowed, became a model husband. But at Court and in society Madame was a failure. She was proud and un- sociable, though she danced beautifully. Anne of Austria consistently thought her odious. The polite gossips called her "une pauvre idiote": a slander, for she had plenty of intelligence. No one without some wit and character could have ruled Gaston, as she did, for the rest of his life ; and this in spite of bad health and numberless annoyances. Monsieur and Madame set up their little Court at the Luxembourg, which he inherited from his mother, but Made- moiselle kei)t her a[)artinents in the Tuileries under the eye of the (Jueen. It was with the Queen, and as the first I'rincess of the blo(jd royal, that she went to all entertain- CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 107 ments possible in that summer of mourning. She was thus thrown a good deal with the family of Conde, whom she disliked ; and it seems that they — Madame la Princesse and Madame de Longueville, as well as the Due d'Enghien for his neglected wife — resented the tomboy's precedence with loud complaints. At this time, and afterwards, there were public scenes and quarrels on the subject. But deeper excitements were abroad. The political volcano went on throwing up spurts of fire through society. Already the spirit of the Fronde was alive in Madame de Chevreuse and her party. The hnportants did not confine themselves to secret, serious plotting, but began openly to in- sult those who did not oppose the Cardinal. The Princesse de Conde was one of the Queen's most intimate friends, and one who did not, for her part, think it necessary to remonstrate in the matter of Mazarin. He, so far, had shown himself friendly to the Due d'Enghien, and had done his best to secure the support of the Prince de Conde, who was too prudent to oppose him openly. That family, therefore, was high in favour with Anne, and the society of Madame la Princesse became much more agreeable to her than that of more candid friends. The well-known personal quarrel between the Conde and Chevreuse factions meant more than lay on the surface, which only showed a rival beauty's hatred and jealousy of Madame de Longueville. The Due de Longueville, before his second marriage, had been one of Madame de Mont- bazon's many slaves. It was a condition of the marriage that this liaison should cease. The Duchesse de Montbazon, though younger than Madame de Chevreuse, was her stepmother. She had been married about fifteen years to the old Duke, and by this time was known as the worst woman in France. Many im- possible stories are told of her. Retz, who in spite of his own character knew how to admire goodness, said of her, " Je n'ai jamais vu une personne qui ait conserve dans le vice si peu de respect pour la vertu." She was magnificently io8 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD handsome in a colossal style, with the blackest eyes and hair and a dazzlingly white skin. Decked out with pearls and red feathers, she was a sight to startle society. Her speech was more than free, her manners were haughty and disagree- able. She was vain, greedy, and cunning, yet with a certain stupidity, which showed itself in her management of this affair. Most of the men of the day, from the Due d'Orlcans to the Abbe de Ranee, were or had been in love with her, for no woman, when she willed it, could be more attractive. One day, two unsigned love-letters, in a woman's hand, were picked up in Madame de Montbazon's salon. She pre- tended to believe that they had been written by Madame de Longueville to Maurice de Coligny, great-grandson of the Admiral, who had dropped them in leaving the house. Coligny was known to be devoted to Madame de Longueville, his cousin, but no scandal had yet touched her young name. Madame de Montbazon made the most of her discovery, and the story lost nothing as it ran round society. Madame la Princesse was in a tremendous rage. She was more angry than her daughter, who treated the affair with languid contempt. She declared that the honour of her House had been outraged by this insult; and that House,- with its heir winning splendid victories on the frontier, was becoming a national glory. She insisted on immediate apology. The Queen must command it. It was past bear- ing that her daughter should be less considered than the granddaughter of a cook, she said, alluding to Madame de Montbazon's maternal grandfather, La Varenne, who had been viaitre-d hotel to Henry IV. She threatened to retire from the Court if justice was not done without delay. On the other side, the whole party of the Iiiiportauts, led by Madame de Chevreuse, the Due de Beaufort, and the Due de Guise, supported Madame de Montbazon in her refusal to apologise. But Mazarin, who had no wish to ijuarrel with the Condes, so represented matters to the nucen that she promised her protection to Madame de CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 109 Longueville. The furious Duchess was obliged to submit, and even her own friends failed her a little when the real story of the letters came to their knowledge. They were written by Madame de Fouquerolles to the Marquis de Maulevrier. Mademoiselle was present at the Hotel de Conde, with Monsieur and "une excessive quantite de monde," when Madame de Montbazon arrived to make her forced amends. Though Mademoiselle liked none of the family, she felt it due to her own position, as princess and cousin, to stand by them now. And she was quite as well amused as any of the smart crowd there. She looked on while " Madame de Montbazon, much dressed, entered the room with a very proud air. Having drawn near to Madame la Princesse, she read from a paper tied to her fan the excuses which had been prescribed to her." The apology was cleverly drawn up: it was the joint work of Madame de Chevreuse and Mazarin. It confessed nothing and asked no pardon ; simply stating that the lady was innocent of any slander or calumny, and would never fail in respect for the Princess or in esteem for the virtue and merit of Madame de Longueville. It was read with amazingly bad grace, according to Mademoiselle, and she had nothing better to say of the Princess's reception of it. Her manner was majestic, as usual, but extremely short and cold. In deference to the Queen's command, she said, she received Madame de Montbazon's assurance that the publishing of this m^chancet^ was no doing of hers. After which the Duchess left the Hotel de Cond^ with what dignity she might, and she and her whole party determined on a swift revenge. She had a foretaste of this in a lucky opportunity of annoying the Queen. One evening in August, a few days after the affair of the letters. Mademoiselle arranged a picnic with Madame de Chevreuse and others under the cool trees of the Jardin de Renard. She invited the Queen and Madame la Princesse. The open-air supper was ready, MO A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD wlien Mamade de Montbaznn, unexpected, marched in upon tin- company. Madame la I'rinccsse would not sit down with her. Marjamc dc Montba/.on refused to go. Two or three mortal iiours, Mademoiselle declares, were spent in ari^umeiit, wiiile the huiii^'ry i^uests waited impatiently. At last the Queen, M.idemoiseile, and all her party walked away without any supper. Madame de Montbazon's in- solence was such that she remained, and ate up the collation prejiarcd for the Queen. One fears it must have been a cold collation and a little the worse for the delay. It proved, however, to be the last supper Madame de Montbazon was to eat in Paris for a long time. Queen Anne was not the woman to take such conduct patiently, and a royal order, the very next day, exiled the Duchess to one of her country houses. All this embittered the cabal of the Importants, and Mazarin, who like his great forerunner was well served by spies, f(nmd himself in danger of his life. His movements were watched by a band of young men whose object was to be rid of the new tyranny of this new Cardinal for once and for all. Behind them were the women, still more dangerous, who inspired them ; Madame de Chevreuse was not afraid of a crime or of its consequences. Mazarin waited till September, and then struck hard. The Due de Beaufort was arrested, and imprisoned at Vin- cennes. His father and the rest of his family retired to the Chateau d'Anet, and afterwards fled to Italy. The other conspirators escaped in various directions. Madame de Chevreuse, bitterly disappointed, was exiled once more to Touraine, where she and her friends continued those plots which never ceased till the outbreak of civil war. Meanwhile, society danced through gay months to the music of its violins. The young Princess at the Tuileries, grown very tall and very handsome, had her own string band and gave balls where everybody flirted but herself. There were also duels, in defiance of Richelieu's law and the Queen -Regent's anger. The Due de tiuise fought CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS iii Maurice de CoHgny in the Place Royale, Madame de Longueville, fair and indifferent, looking on from behind a curtain. Coligny was beaten and disarmed, so that he never recovered the disgrace. This led to a desperate quarrel between the Houses of Orleans and Guise and the House of Conde. It was all fresh diversion for Paris, slipping merrily on from la bonne R^gence into the years that led up to the Fronde. CHAPTER IX I 644- I 648 "la Princess, king-descended, decked with jewels, gilded, drest . , . All my walls are lost in mirrors, whereupon I trace Self to right hand, self to left hand, self in every place. Self-same solitary figure, self-same seeking face. Then I have an ivory chair high to sit upon. . . . There I sit uplift and upright, there I sit alone." HENRIETTA OF ENGLAND— THE PRINCE OF WALES— A BALL AT THE PALAIS ROYAL — MADEMOISELLE'S VOCATION — THE SAUJON AFFAIR— THE EVE OF THE FRONDE MADEMOISELLE'S youngest aunt, the unhappy Queen Henrietta of England, arrived in France in the late summer of 1644. Ill from hardship and anxiety, she stayed two months at Bourbon for the sake of the waters. Having gone through this cure, she travelled to Paris. Her brother Gaston had already joined her, and Mademoiselle met her at Bourg-la-Reine, being sent in state in one of the royal coaches. They dined and slept at Mont- rouge, and the next day, the Sth of November, the Queen made her entry into Paris. All the Court, driving and riding, met her with great ceremony outside the Faubourg St. Jacques. The little King placed her on his right hand in his coach, the Queen Regent being opposite, and two Princes, Monsieur and the Due d'Enghien, the hero of many victories, at the portieres. The other Royalties followed in their splendid coaches, and the procession was escorted by guards, musketeers, men-at- arms, and a crowd of young nobles on horseback, all dressed in different colours and gorgeous with gold and silver lace. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 113 The Due de Guise and his brothers were among the most brilliant of the company. The absence of the First Minister was noticed by some among the enthusiastic crowd who thronged the streets. Perhaps the end of the English struggles was already clear to Mazarin's diplomatic eye. But Henrietta did not give him a thought, probably. Her heart must have been warmed by this welcome from Paris, her father's great town, to Henry's youngest child. The memory of Paris might be short and its fancy capricious, but it did not forget Henry. Many in this crowd remem- bered his tragic death-day, while she was still in her cradle. They remembered very well too the departure for England of the pretty and sparkling Princess of sixteen. Of her life since then they knew little, or of rights and wrongs, politics and wars, in King Charles's foggy and muddy and heretic island. Their own Parliament had not begun fighting for its privileges, though the signs of the times, to prudent men, were already ominous, Paris saw what England had done for Henriette-Marie, and loved England none the better, as it cheered her through the streets to her refuge in the old palace where she was born. Every one pitied this poor Queen, says Mademoiselle, for her state was deplorable in spite of the Baths of Bourbon. She was an old woman at thirty-five, thin and brown, with hardly a trace of beauty left. Madame de Motteville, with a more flattering touch, adds a remark on Henrietta's fine eyes and well-shaped nose. There never was much to be said for her mouth ; " not beautiful by nature, the thinness of her face made it look large." But Queen Anne's lady finds many pleasanter things to say about Henrietta. She describes her as brilliant, agreeable, easy and pleasant in society ; so gay by nature that she could laugh and joke in the midst of tears, generous and liberal in spite of her present distress. In short, a Frenchwoman of the best kind, who had been compelled, for her misfortune, to live among an alien people. The Queen of England was established with her house- I 114 A TRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD hold at the- Louvre, where she received the honours due to a Oucen .iiul a dauLjhter nf l'"rancc, iiichidinf; a large pension from the Kiii;^. Somr months before, the I'Vcnch Court had removed to Ihc I'alais Royal, which Anne found more convenient than the Louvre. Thus Mademoiselle had her aunt for a near neighbour, and visited her assiduously. It seems at first glance natural and touching that Henri- etta should have entertained her young niece with stories of that ICngland where she had certainly left her heart, un- kindly as it treated her. The sweetness of life in the green island, where the sun shone sometimes, after all ; the beauty and richness of the country, the goodness of the people ; and last, not least, the charming qualities of her eldest son. " I wish you could see him," said Henrietta ; and Made- moiselle had no difficulty in guessing the thought behind the wish. This explained all the raptures, a little exaggerated, about the horrid country which had treated one French princess so ill. Mademoiselle, small blame to her, realised the situa- tion keenly, and was little inclined, from the first, to sacrifice herself and her great fortune for the good of the unlucky House of Stuart. She played with the idea, however. "If the Prince of Wales had been a modern Cid," says Madame Arvcde Barine, " la Grande Mademoiselle — her whole life proves it — would joyfully have flung away prudence. She would have married him and gone off with him 'to conquer their kingdom.' " But Charles was not a hero of Corneille, and had no power to stir his cousin's imagination. He came to France in the summer of 1646, and Mademoi- selle saw him first in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where the Court was then staying. His mother presented him formally to the King and Queen, Mademoiselle and Madame la J'rincessc. He was a swarthy lad of sixteen, tall for his age, and passably good-looking. It was unfortunate that he could not speak or understand a word of French. This defect made him silent and awkward, and the good-natured M \\>\ Ml >\ -M.I I I'l Ml i\ I n N >|Kk I K -'.i A MIMA ' I \H: HV CF, I I lU I CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 115 Court, doing all it could to welcome and amuse the exiled boy, found him dull company. Queen Henrietta watched with painful interest the impression he made on Mademoi- selle. She assured her niece that Charles was already in love with her ; that he talked of her without ceasing, and could hardly be restrained from following her about all day. Mademoiselle listened with more politeness than faith. The winter in Paris was very gay, and the Prince of Wales was everywhere in attendance on his cousin. He certainly did his best, at an awkward age, to please his mother and to forward his own fortunes. On the whole. Mademoiselle was not displeased with him. " When I went to see the Queen of England," she writes, "he always led me to the coach, and whatever the weather might be, he kept his hat off as long as I was present ; he showed me civility even in the least things." She specially remembered one evening when she was going to a ball given in her honour by Madame de Choisy, whose husband was her father's Chancellor. She was really treated, that night, as the future Queen of England. Henrietta Maria came from the Louvre to the Tuileries on purpose to superintend her dress and the arranging of her beautiful hair : she was an authority on these matters. Prince Charles held the light, while his mother dressed her niece " with all imaginable care." His petite oie, which meant hat and feathers, stockings, gloves, sword-knot, and other ribbons, was of Mademoiselle's colours, scarlet, white, and black. Mademoiselle drove first to the Palais Royal, an invariable rule, to show herself to the Queen. At Madame de Choisy's door she found the Prince waiting to hand her from the coach. While she lingered, before going into the ballroom, for a finishing touch to her hair, he was again there to hold the light. By some sort of miracle, as it appeared to her, he understood that evening everything she said to him. Charles had a good deal of mother-wit, though not fully developed till later. It was another pleasant surprise, that night, to find him ii6 A PRINCHSS OF THE OLD WORLD at luT i)\vn floor when slu- rctiiiiicd. Such "open j^'allantry " wa'^ niiuh talked of, ami at this time, certainly, Maflcmoiselle liked the ICiij^lish \>uy well eiiout;h. lUit slie never had any serious intention of committing herself as to the future. There are reasons for regretting this. If Mademoiselle, instead of remaining an eccentric old maid among princesses, had married Charles II, she would have escaped a great deal of the rather unjust ridicule which has hung about her name from her own day to this. Her best qualities, too, would have made her a more popular Queen of England than Henrietta Maria, and would have given her more influence with her husband than the Portuguese Catherine ever had. Neither King nor people could have ignored Anne-Marie- Louise d'Orleans. Some characteristics which the French smiled at would have attracted the English, and suggest, in fact, those of many a well-born Englishwoman. Mademoiselle's " single- mindedness and simple, plain-spoken directness, her love of animals and field-sports and country life, her faithfulness to her friends, kindness to her dependents, interest in the common people, all united with a serene conviction of her own su[)eriority, and a passion for dignity and state ; a character above smallness and very impatient of it, yet narrow in view and eagerly interested in gossip"; none of this can be called un-English. Moral and loyally religious, yet never bigoted ; a little like Queen Elizabeth, both in her childish vanity and her passionate patriotism : the history of England might have been altered, if Mademoiselle, with whom marriage was chiefly a political matter, had not seen an imperial crown hovering within her reach. She has left us a picture of the occasion on which she began to feel a distinct scorn for her unlucky boy-lover. Rum(jurs had reached her that the I"3mperor Ferdinand III, whose wife had lately died, was looking to the Queen- Regent for consolation ; also that the whole of Austria wished him to marry the young Duchesse dc Montpensier. These reports seem to have been eijually nonsensical with CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 117 that which gave her to Philip IV of Spain, the husband of her aunt Christine, who died in 1644. But the French Court talked about them, the Abbe de la Riviere made use of them to flatter Mademoiselle, and she, always gobe-mouche on her romantic and ambitious side, did not disbelieve them. They confirmed her strong feeling that she was destined for one of the three highest thrones in Europe — Austria, France, or Spain. She had already refused the crown of Poland, and she affected to despise Princess Marie de Gonzague, of the Cond^ faction, who had accepted it. England with its dying royalty seemed hardly worth a thought now. One of the chief gaieties of the winter of 1646 was an Italian play at the Palais Royal, followed by a beautiful ball. Mademoiselle, at nineteen, in the height of good looks and good spirits, cut a splendid figure on this occasion. They began to dress her, she says, three days before. " My gown was a mass of diamonds, with tufts of scarlet, white, and black ; I wore all the crown jewels, as well as those that remained to the Queen of England. No one could be better or more magnificently dressed than I was that day, and I found plenty of people who knew how to tell me assez a propos that my fine figure and air, my white skin, and the glory of my fair hair adorned me no less than the priceless gems that glittered on my person." The witness of Madame de Motteville, always trustworthy, bears out Mademoiselle's fine description. She dwells specially on the wonderful bouquet Mademoiselle wore on her head, in which great diamonds and great pearls were scattered among the flowers, an enchanting union of the beauty and the riches of nature. Out of this bouquet sprang three long feathers, scarlet, white, and black, which drooped upon her neck. Madame de Motteville, contrary to the usual view, observes that a beautiful woman thus adorned looks more beautiful still. But it might be true of Mademoi- selle, who possessed rather " the air of great beauty " than the real, supreme thing. MS A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD riic li.ill was licUl in the large saloon built by Cardinal de Richelieu as a theatre. At the end nf this saloon there was a liirone raised (in three steps, with a canopy, meant for royal spectactors of play or ball. Neither little King Louis nor his cousin Prince Charles would sit on this throne. Mademoiselle therefore reigned from it alone, with the two royal boys at her feet. She enjoyed the position amazingly, and her flatterers had plenty to say about it. She had never, they assured her, apjieared more entirely in her right place, and this tem[)orary throne could only foreshadow one more licrmanent. " While I sat there," she says, " with the Prince at my feet, my heart, as well as my ejes, regarded him dc haul en bas. My intention was to marry the Emperor, which seemed at that time likely enough." Charles pleased her no better when he returned to France a few years later as King of England. The young man had no more to say than the boy " point de douceurs," though his cousin gave him every opportunity. She also found him stupid about his own affairs : in 1649, it would have been more strange if his prospects had seemed to Charles worth chattering about. She was finally repelled by the bad taste he showed when dining with the Queen-Regent. He refused ortolans, and " flung himself on an enormous piece of beef and a shoulder of mutton, as if there was nothing else." Thus "our mutton-eating King " missed his chance of the great Montpensier fortune. The impetuous, ill-balanced character of the girl, with her rather anomalous position between the Queen-Regent's and Monsieur's authority, and her obstinate fancy for an imperial marriage, dragged her into several scrapes at this time. She was beginning the wildest and most restless period of her life, and she began it by proposing to become a Carmelite. Surely never was vocation so imaginary ,is that of Mademoiselle. She had heard that I'ertlinand III was verj- devout, and it ainjeared to her that his wife's habits ought to conform to his own. She therefore threw herself so earnestly into all CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS irg kinds of religious practices that she was, as it were, converted in spite of herself. The childish play became reality, and took such possession that for one whole week she forgot its original object, and could neither sleep nor eat for longing to be a nun. Her people were alarmed by her excitement, and thought she was going to be dangerously ill. She herself did not dislike the idea of dying at such an exalted moment. Luckily for herself and the Carmelites, she was obliged to consult her father before taking any serious step. Monsieur was very angry, both with her and the " bigotes," whom he blamed for this new fancy. Mademoiselle submitted at once, not without a secret relief. As she says of herself, she was not a demoiselle given to long prayers or meditations, which usually sent her to sleep. Three days later she was ready to join the Court in laughing at her own extravagance. The Saujon affair was more serious. M. de Saujon, a rather crazy officer on service in Flanders, whose sister was of Madame's household, set some intrigues on foot with the view of privately forwarding Mademoiselle's marriage with the Emperor, or failing him, with his brother, the Archduke Leopold — chiefly famous for an enormous pair of ears. If Mademoiselle knew anything of these undignified proceed- ings on her behalf, she treated them carelessly as " chimeres," and the news of Saujon's arrest, one of his letters having been intercepted, only startled her a little. It was left for the ever-busy Abbe de la Riviere to warn her of her own disgrace with the Queen-Regent and Monsieur. They were naturally furious, for Saujon was supposed, with or without Mademoiselle's knowledge, to have been concerned in a plot for carrying her off and marrying her to the Archduke with- out anybody's consent. In Cardinal Mazarin's view. Mademoiselle was cognisant of the whole affair, and he, standing silent and amused in the background of her stormy interview with the Queen, had done his best to blacken her conduct in Anne's sight. Having been summoned to the Palais Royal, she found her- self in the presence of her father, her aunt, the Cardinal, and 120 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD the Abbe dc la Riviere, who had already roused her pride by advising her to submit and ask pardon. Strong, she says, in her innocence, she moved forward to salute the Queen, who received her with a cold and angry air. Mademoiselle stepped into a window, and from that point of vantage, above the level of her judges, heard and answered the Queen. Anne said, very sharply, " Your father and I are aware of your meddlings with Saujon and his fine plans." Mademoiselle answered, " Would Your Majesty do me the honour of telling me what you mean, for I am curious to know ?" "You know very well," said the Queen. " He is in prison for your sake, and the whole affair is your doing." To this Mademoiselle answered with spirit that it was no fault of hers if M. de Saujon was neither prudent nor lucky. " We know," the Queen went on, " that Saujon has planned to marry you to the Archduke, telling you that he will be Sovereign of the Low Countries, with a great deal of other nonsense that you have accepted as truth. The Archduke is the lowest of men, and the worst match you could possibly find." Mademoiselle was silent. " Answer," said the Queen. Her niece then observed that if Saujon had really planned anything so silly and ridiculous, a prison did him too much honour : a mad-house was a fit abode for him. And as to herself, she was not usually supposed to have lost her senses ; which must however be the case, if she had really left such a question as that of her marriage to be settled by M. de Saujon. She added a few words of sharp reproach to the Queen for neglecting her interests in comparison with those of other people, and reminded her very coolly of the gtati- tude she owed to Monsieur. The Queen was both angry and, amazed. Turning to Monsieur and the Cardinal, she cried out, " What assurance! She pretends to know nothing of the whole affair." " It needs little assurance to speak the truth," said Made- moiselle. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YEARS 121 "Very fine!" said the Queen. "The man is attached to your service, and as a recompense you lay his head on the block." To which Mademoiselle retorted, in words intentionally pointed, " At any rate, he will be the first." The interview lasted a long time, the Queen scolding and Monsieur blustering, while Mademoiselle more than held her own, and Cardinal Mazarin, as she was well aware, laughed at her ready and insolent replies. At length she was allowed to go. She departed victorious, in her own opinion, and highly excited. " That evening," says Madame de Motteville, " the Queen did me the honour to say that if she had such a daughter of her own she would banish her for ever from Court and shut her up in a convent." This worthy woman, who had heard all the vacarme from an adjoining room, had the courage to take Mademoiselle's part, at least as far as concerned the reproaches she had showered on her father. Everybody knew that the lazy and selfish Gaston did not treat his daughter justly, that he neglected her interests and lived on her fortune. Madame de Motteville found herself in some slight disgrace with the Queen, however, for defending the troublesome girl. Partly for Mademoiselle's sake and partly for her own, with the Abb^ de la Riviere as a go-between and some help from the Cardinal, she set herself to patch up a reconciliation between the Luxembourg and the Tuileries. After two or three weeks this was accomplished, and included the Palais Royal, where Mademoiselle, who had been ill of fever in the interval, was received, though very coldly, by the Queen. Saujon was set free not long afterwards, and the Court, which had sympathised heartily with Mademoiselle, had its last laugh over the affair. In the summer, tired of Paris and impatient of the Court, Mademoiselle dashed off independently into the country. She stayed first at her own house of Bois-le-Vicomte — Richelieu's exchange for Champigny — and went on from 122 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD there to visit her old friends M. and Madame de Montglat, who received lier " with joy and magnificence." From Montglat she proceeded to the ChAteau de Pont-sur-Yonne, where she was entertained by Madame Bouthillier, m'e de Bragelonne, wife of Louis XIII's Finance Minister, and aunt of her friend Mademoiselle de Rancd-. She was en- chanted with this place : its terraced gardens, fountains, canals, avenues, and the splendid interior full of all sorts of luxury ; the river flowing at the foot of the hill on which M. le Surintendant had built his house: Mademoiselle en- joyed it all. She danced, she rode ; the prettiest boat in the world was at her service — in vain, for she always hated the water. But the great charm of this visit to Pont was a first acquaintance with Mademoiselle de Neuville, a young and pretty relation of Madame Bouthillier's who acted as the daughter of the house. The two girls took an instant fancy to each other. Mademoiselle de Neuville, as Madame de Frontenac, is a familiar and often annoying figure in Mademoiselle's later history. She was recalled to Paris by Monsieur, in the middle of August, to rejoice with the Court over the victory of Lens, gained by Louis de Bourbon, now Prince de Conde. Made- moiselle detested him and cared little for his victories, but appeared dutifully at the solemn thanksgiving service at Notre Dame. Thus the day of the first barricades of the Fronde — August 26th, 1648 — found her in Paris. The Court had hardly returned from listening to the Te Deum laudamus for French success abroad, when the citizens were taking up arms on behalf of two members of the Parliament, leaders of the recent debates in opposition to the Crown, arrested in that very hour by order of Mazarin. The " wind of the Fronde " was already blowing, and the four years' civil war had begun. PART II THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 1648-1652 CHAPTER I 1648 " Un vent de Fronde S'est lev6 ce matin, Je crois qu'il gronde Contre le Mazarin. Un vent de Fronde S'est lev^ ce matin." THE CAUSES OF THE FRONDE — FATHER VINCENT — MONSIEUR LE COADJUTEUR— THE RIOT AT SAINT-EUSTACHE— A POPULAR PRINCESS — RETZ AT THE PALAIS ROYAL — THE JOURN^E DES BARRICADES THE growing unrest in Paris, during those years of the Regency, ran side by side with the growing hatred of Mazarin. As the glory of tax-laden France flamed abroad, her misery at home went on deepening. All France felt the strain, but the nation generally had no idea of actual rebellion. Much of its intelligence, indeed, as after-events seem to show, thought the war-game worth the candle. The depth of the people's faith and endurance, suffer as they might, was almost unfathomable. Starvation and robbery seemed a part of the scheme of things ; there was little or no revolutionary feeling in the air. Any actual anger with the new burdens was mainly confined to Paris. The whole affair of the Fronde is sometimes treated very lightly as the reactionary selfishness of a few foolish magis- trates, the last convulsion of the dying Middle Ages, the last struggle of individualism and darkness against expansion and future glory, of the old order against the new. It was all this, but it was more too, especially in the spirit of its earlier time. Perhaps those who view it thus are rather blind admirers of Richelieu and Mazarin and all their works. 125 126 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD It seems possible, while admittiiit; the many private interests and selfish motives that set Paris in a blaze just then, to catch a c;limpsc (if the real feeling that united hi^h and low, taxed and untaxed, in hearty hatred of the sleek, greedy, clever Cardinal. It must be remembered that he was "a shameless thief" of public money ; that while millions were beinc; poured into his private coffers, as modern French historians remind us, the soldiers on the frontier were dying of hunger as well as the crushed peasants in the provinces, and even the Court was in serious difficulties. No more gifts or favours were to be had from the Queen-Regent; she could not even keep her own household and her guests in comfort. One remembers the story of Louis XIV as a child, badly fed and sleeping in ragged sheets. One re- members too how Retz, visiting the Queen of England at the Louvre in the winter of 1648, found her shivering, with no wood to make a fire, her pension having been stopped when Mazarin found that the English alliance meant Crom- well instead of the Stuarts. For by this time, married to Queen Anne or not — a question which the latest researches leave unsettled — Mazarin was all-powerful, and those old friends who had tried to warn the Queen against her in- fatuation were scattered and silent. But it cost Anne her own personal power and the love of the people. Never, since the days of the League, had politics and religion been so mixed up in Paris as they were at this time. Since the revival under St. I-'ran^ois de Sales and Cardinal de Bcrulle, the general influence of the Church, if not her actual [lower, had greatly increased. The religious orders were reformed and multiplied by private piety ; scandals were becoming rarer, at least to outward view. The parochial clergy on the whole were good, and the parish churches were crowded. Popular preachers, sometimes grotesque enough, such as the famous Pcre Andre, drew large audiences. Vincent de Paul, now growing old, still went about in the streets and lanes of the city, comforting the poor and CARDINAL MAZARIN AFTER A I'ORTRAir liV MIGN'ARD THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 127 directing the charity of the rich. He founded philanthropic societies ; and Cardinal Mazarin found " ce bonhomme " a thorn in his side as to Church patronage. Mazarin was ready to sell for a good price, with no regard to the character of the buyer, every abbey, bishopric, or benefice that he could not bestow upon himself But there existed a Council of Conscience to advise the Queen on these matters, and Father Vincent was its most active member. It was a struggle between him and Mazarin, as long as Anne's religious scruples continued to be a little stronger than her personal devotion to the Cardinal. The opposition at this time included most of the good people in Paris, clergy or laity, whether they took up arms openly or not. The spirit which was abroad had so much right and reason, that with a leader of unselfish genius it might have changed French history. But this leader was not forthcoming. Archbishop de Gondi was a lazy, good-natured sensualist. His brilliant nephew and Coadjutor, consecrated as Arch- bishop of Corinth, had all the genius, but not the character required. He was a most active ecclesiastic, a dashing soldier of the Church, a popular preacher, taking an immense interest in his own sermons and their effect. He had no morals, of course, but he knew and respected goodness when he saw it. His political action is not, it seems, to be entirely explained by ambition. He hated Mazarin, and he wanted to be a Cardinal ; so far selfishness led him. But he had also a great love of adventure, and of showing off as a hero before the world. And he was by no means without pity for the sufferings of the people. From one motive or another he visited much in the poorest parts of Paris. His charities were large, and Father Vincent himself did not know more of the populace, its troubles and its character and its catch-words, than Paul de Gondi, afterwards Cardinal de Retz, the notorious " Monsieur le Coadjuteur." Dark, small, vivacious, Italian by descent, with his helpless hands, fiery temper, and undeniable charm, he was a favourite 128 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD with many clever men and almost all women. P'rom the early days of the I'Vonde, he had Mademoiselle's respect and hearty sympathy, lie and she, with the leading Parlia- ment men, were at this time the most popular people in Paris. Mademoiselle had already some experience of riots, and enjoyed them. She had seen bands of people marching in the streets, beating drums and fluttering flags, to excite the citizens against one of Mazarin's early taxes. This was a tax on the height of houses which had been built, contrary to old regulations, outside the city walls. They were measured by the toise, a six-foot rule, from which the tax was known as the toist'. There was open resistance, and the Court had to hurry back to Paris from Rueil in the heat of July, that little King Louis might quiet things down by holding a lit de Justice. This was still effective in 1644. In the following year Mademoiselle had been amused to see what the market-folk of Paris could do in defence of their rights or their fancies. The great parish church of Saint-Eustache, then the largest in Paris next to Notre Dame, was much beloved by its population of the quarter of the Halles. The old cure. Merlin by name, died, and the Arch- bishop of Paris appointed a certain M. Poncet in his place. But there was opposition. A young M. Merlin, nephew of the late cure-, declared that his uncle had intended to resign in his favour. The parishioners assembled in crowds to take his part ; they had loved their old priest, and were resolved that his nephew should succeed him. A body of city guards was sent to disperse the crowd in the interest of Poncet, whose appointment was perfectly legal. " Cette canaille," says Mademoiselle, " seized the church and sounded the tocsin." They barricaded the church and the streets round it ; they challenged the passers-by, and any one who did not reply " Merlin " to their " Qui vive ? " was soundly beaten. This state of things lasted three days, and the house of Chancellor Seguier was in danger of being pillaged, because he, a parishioner, but a man of law, dared to back up the THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 129 Archbishop's appointment. The people began to barricade the markets, and the disturbance was looking very serious when the fish-women sent a deputation to the Palais Royal. They represented that the Merlins had been their curds " de pere en fils ! " The Queen-Regent — very weakly, society thought — decided that they must have their way, and a royal messenger carried the joyful news to Saint-Eustache. " Upon which," says Olivier d'Ormesson, "they sang a Te Deum and shouted, ' Vive le roi, la reine et M. Merlin !' In the even- ing they made bonfires in the streets ; even persons of con- dition." After this, says Mademoiselle, all was calm in the parish. But she was sorry that so droll a farce could not have lasted longer. It is easy to see that Mademoiselle drove back from Notre Dame to her dinner at the Tuileries in an impatient temper, and ready to fling herself recklessly enough into any kind of new excitement. She was on cold terms with the Queen- Regent ; she disliked Mazarin ; she hated the Condd faction, just now so triumphant. Monsieur had injured her dignity by his indifference as to her marriage, and though this quarrel had been made up, she had other serious complaints against him. Madame, with her girl-babies, her ill-health, and her griev- ances, was nothing but a bore to a lively, wilful stepdaughter of twenty-one. Mademoiselle did not care much for her aunt the Queen of England, though Henrietta, on her side, had not ceased to court the haughty girl for her son. Madame de Guise, her grandmother, was still in favour, and she always admired the Due de Guise, who after many romantic adven- tures was now a prisoner at Naples, his adored Suzanne de Pons being shut up, to avoid further complications, in the Paris convent of the Filles de Sainte-Marie. Mademoiselle was angry with Mademoiselle de Guise and her brother the Due de Joyeuse for their disloyalty to her most beloved friend Mademoiselle d'Epernon, at this time living in her father's southern province, but very soon to take the final step from which her friend's affectionate heart suffered so keenly. i^o A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD Altogether, and with the constant, unloved presence of Madame de I'"ics(]iic, life was as dull as it could reasonably bo for a princess of immense Hirtune, living at the Tuileries. It is not wonderful that the news of the disturbances in Paris filled Mademoiselle with restless joy. Everybody knew old Councillor Ikoussel, the most popular of the two arrested members. President de Blancmesnil, though less beloved, was a conspicuous figure in opposition to the Cardinal. Plainly, important events were in the air, and Mademoiselle ordered her coach to drive to the Luxembourg. Passing along the Quai du Louvre, in the hot August afternoon, she saw companies of guards under arms. Clatter- ing on across the Pont Neuf, past Henry's statue, with the Island to her left where the furious Parliament was sitting, she must have narrowly missed meeting the Coadjutor, en rochet et camail, on his way to mediate between the Vieux Palais and the Palais Royal. With the cathedral towers in view, where the echoes of Condc's Te Dcum had hardly died away, Mademoiselle in her coach with her running footmen found her passage blocked by an angry crowd and by chains across the streets. Then Henry's grandchild had a charm- ing experience, never forgotten and often repeated in those stormy years. " The people of Paris have always loved me," she says, " because I was born and brought up there. This has given them more liking and respect for me than they generally feel for persons of my quality; and therefore, when they saw my footmen, they lowered their chains." It was characteristic of those wild men and women, with their thin, tanned faces, to forget their griefs for a moment as the gay blue-eyed Princess, with her commanding Bourbon nose and masses of fair curls, pranced proudly by. Having paid her visit of ceremony to Madame, Made- moiselle drove to the Palais Royal, where she found every- body "en grande rumeur." Again she seems to have missed the Coadjutor, whose interview with the angry Queen would have added very much to the amusement she found in the THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 131 whole affair. But nobody, indeed, seems to have taken it very seriously at first. Neither the Queen-Regent, nor Monsieur, nor the Cardinal, knew the Parisians as Retz knew them; this is undoubtedly true, even if his enemies were right when they accused him both of fomenting and exaggerating the disturbances. On that first day the Marechal de la Meilleraye, who at the head of his troops had seen the armed people rushing, the closed shops, the chains and barricades, and had heard the threatening shouts of the angry mobs, was the only man who stood by Retz in the Queen's cabinet. The Archbishop and the soldier were followed to the palace by a great crowd yelling, " Broussel ! Broussel ! " Retz has taken an immortal revenge on Anne of Austria by his description of that half- ludicrous, half-tragic scene. At first sight it seems odd that the Queen's surprise at the bold attitude of Paris and the Parliament should have been as great as her anger ; for the quarrels between the royal authority and that of the Magistracy had been growing more serious for some months past. The refusals of the Parlia- ment to register the King's financial edicts were no new thing. Throughout this year the struggle, though not noisy, had been very obstinate, and in order to resist new taxes more effectually, or rather to hold on to the power of resist- ing them, the Parliament had sketched out a kind of con- stitution, strengthening its own authority and limiting that of the King. Mazarin yielded in one or two points, but he would not go far, and the arrest of Broussel and Blancmesnil was the consequence. The triumph of the English Parliament was an object- lesson which did not apply, after all, though it encouraged French politicians at this time. The French Parliament had great dignity of its own, but none of the popular rights of an elected body. It was an assembly of judges, lawyers, councillors, magistrates, hereditary and irremovable. This character was largely owing to the famous tax called la paulette, invented by M. Paulet, father of the famous beauty, 132 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD and imposed with general approval by Henry IV and Sully. It was paid by members of I'arliament only, and gave them and their descendants a right to their seats. Thus the authorit)' of Parliament was no more really popular than that iif the King, and it did not really follow that the voice of I'arliament was the voice of the people. Both the Queen and the Court were inclined to believe that the rising in Paris was not genuine, but had been en- gineered by agitators for their own ends. Mazarin probably knew better, as he stood smiling by. Anne's high, sharp falsetto rings from the pages of Retz down the centuries. " It is revolt to imagine revolt. Ridiculous tales invented by those who desire it. The King's authority will soon settle it." While her angrj' eyes rest on the Coadjutor, Mazarin is at her sht)ulder with his soft voice. " Would to God, Madame, that everybody was equally sincere with M. le Coadjuteur. He fears for his flock, he fears for the city, he fears for Your Majesty's authority. 1 am persuaded that the danger is not what he thinks ; but his scruples are most praiseworthy." The Queen changes her tone ; the Coadjutor replies with an air of such profound and foolish respect that the Abbd de la Riviere actually thinks he is in earnest ; and so the comedy goes on, while the mob howls outside the palace and threatens to break in. Monsieur pretends to be angry and strolls out to talk to some one, whistling with more than his usual indolence. The Due de Longueville looks sad and is really delighted. M. de Villeroy, on the contrary, keeps a cheerful face and believes the State to be on the edge of a precipice. " Bautru and Nogent cracked jokes, and to amuse the Queen acted old Hroussel's nurse (he was eighty) exciting the people to sedi- tion." M. de la Meilleraye flies into a rage. Chancellor Seguier speaks well and frankly. M. de Guitaut, muttering between his teeth, is challenged by Mazarin and bluntly says, " My advice is, give them the old rascal Broussel, dead THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 133 or alive." On which the Coadjutor murmurs that the first course would be neither pious nor prudent, and brings on himself once more the violent anger of the Queen. Flush- ing scarlet she cries, " I understand you, Monsieur le Coad- juteur ! You wish me to set Broussel at liberty. I would rather strangle him with these two hands — and those who " it seemed as though she would have taken Retz by the throat, if the Cardinal had not stepped forward to soothe her. After this Her Majesty became more reasonable, and Retz went forth, scattering benedictions right and left, to promise the people Broussel's freedom if they would go peaceably home. By his own account, the errand nearly cost him his life, and this was only the beginning of things. Exquisite indeed would have been Mademoiselle's enjoy- ment of such a scene. But if she missed it, there were soon plenty of compensations. All the wild noise of the tumultuous streets, through which M. le Coadjuteur and the Marechal de la Meilleraye made their dangerous way, could be heard from the windows of the Tuileries. It died down gradually, and the people went home. A night under arms, in the Marshal's opinion, would have seen Paris sacked ; another day, and not one stone of the city would have been left upon another. The Court took counsel with itself Distrusting Retz and fearing his influence, it resolved to carry matters with a high hand. Far from setting the prisoners free, it decided to assert the royal authority and to subdue rebellious Paris by military force. The next morning all the centre of Paris from the Pont Neuf to the Palais Royal was to be strongly garrisoned by the King's guards. But the news of these things, running in secret channels, reached the Coadjutor in his palace by Notre Dame. He heard that the Court was laughing at him, that everybody knew the sedition was his doing, that his pretence of calming the people was nothing but humbug. Retz had no principle, and it is not wonderful that he resolved to punish the Court. 134 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD Certainly, between him and Mazarin, Paris was in bad hands at this time. If "the devil possessed the Palais Royal," he had also a titjht grij) on the Archbishop's palace. By mid- night Rctz had made his plans for being master of Paris before noon. He cared not at all for Parliament and the prisoners ; he had some feeling, perhaps, for the dragooned people in the streets; but personal pique was at the bottom of it. This was not the beginning of his grievances against the Court. If the Queen and Mazarin had chosen to assure themselves of Retz, Paris might have been spared a good deal of misery. The people's rising on the 27th of August was in great measure the Coadjutor's doing, and he frankly confesses it in his marvellous Memoirs. It was by his orders and arrange- ment that the royal troops were resisted at their first move- ment in the morning. His friend, M. d'Argenteuil, posted with twenty men near the Porte de Nesle, was ready to drive off a special company of Swiss guards sent to make sure of it. The rattle of this company's drums as they marched along the street by the Tuilerics woke Mademoiselle. She threw herself out of bed and ran to the window. Presently they came back, not quite so cheerful, with wounded men dragging behind. The Princess at her high window had never seen such a sight before, and it filled her with " pity and terror." It was her first experience of actual war. She was glad to believe that the soldiers had soon given an account of " ces coquins" at the Tour de Nesle. Retz says, however, that Argenteuil, disguised as a mason, with his twenty men, had killed twenty or thirty Swiss, captured their colours, and sent the rest flying. Thus, with Mademoiselle at her window and the roll of the royal drums — Et r'li, et r'lan, Rclan tamplan, tambour battant — began the f:\.mous J aurnic lics Barricades. All Paris was in a blaze. Everybody was armed. Made- moiselle laUL'hed to sec men with swords who did not know CARDINAL DE RETZ THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 135 how to hold or manage them. Children of five or six ran about with poniards in their hands. All the old weapons of the League, unused since Henry Ill's days, even rusty lances as old as the English wars, were fetched out and sharpened. In two hours, Retz declares, there were twelve hundred barricades in Paris, bristling with arms and waving with flags. The streets not barricaded were closed with heavy chains. People who knew Paris most intimately as "le sejour des delices et des douceurs," hardly recognised their city. The first fury of the people fell on Chancellor Seguier. The Queen had desired him to go to the Vieux Palais early in the morning, to endeavour to stop the disorder by a royal message to the Parliament. His way was through the very heart of the city, and it was plainly a dangerous mission, but Seguier, with many faults, was not a man to shrink from his duty. He started in his coach, accompanied by his brother, the Bishop of Meaux, and in spite of his wishes by his daughter, the Duchesse de Sully — daughter-in-law of the famous Duke, and one of Mademoiselle's early companions. The drive was one of fearful excitement. Everywhere encountering chains and barricades, opposition and insult, the Chancellor's coach floundered from street to street through crowds that went on thickening. When he reached the Pont Neuf, three or four " grands pendards " climbed on the coach and threatened to kill him unless Broussel was instantly released. They were shaken off, but the bridge was impassable, and he ordered his coachman to try for the Pont Notre Dame, by the Quai des Augustins, past the hotel of the Duo de Luynes, son of Madame de Chevreuse, who had married a Seguier, his cousin. At first the crowd here was thinner, and the Chancellor decided to leave his coach and go on foot to the Palais. But the people began to run and cry, " To arms ! to arms ! Kill him ! kill him 1 " and it was with the greatest difficulty that he and his companions escaped into the Hotel de Luynes. The mob burst in after them, but they luckily had time to hide in a 136 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD cupboard. The Chancellor, giving up all hope, confessed himself to his brother the Bishop and prepared for death. After long and terrible suspense, a strong guard was sent to bring him back to the Palais Royal; but the return was difficult enough. The mob fired at the coach, killing several soldiers ; a spent ball struck Madame de Sully on the shoulder and hurt her seriously. The I'arliament, sitting since the small hours, took the news of all thi.s with supreme indifference. They had much more important matters to discuss, they observed. Some went so far as to saj- that if the Chancellor was killed he had deserved his fate. The next spectacle in the streets was the march through of a hundred and sixty members of Parliament in their official robes, headed by two Presidents, M. Mole and M. de Mesmes. Chains were lowered and barricades opened before them. Escorted by an enormous crowd which cheered them all the wa)', they arrived at the Palais Royal and demanded an audience of the Queen. She was prepared to receive them. The Queen of England was with her, urging patience and peace by her own bitter past experience. Several Princesses were present, among them Mademoiselle. I-'rom her own account, she had a little conversation with one of the deputies as they stood in the royal presence. "I did not know him," she says, "but he talked to me very freely." They had already begun "k fronder M. !e Cardinal," and this deputy, perhaps, felt a gleam of royal sympathy. The Queen-Regent was very angry with the Parliament and the people ; the Seguier incident appeared to her a most serious insult to the royal authority. The King's power and his people's love must both be extinct, she argued, if his Chancellor could be so villainously attacked in the streets of Paris. Madame de Motteville declares that her royal mistress spoke with dignity and good sense in answer to the free and earnest words with which President Mole demanded the liberation of Plancmesnil and Ikoussel. Retz shows us a THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 137 furious woman losing her self-control. According to him, the Queen threw all responsibility for the present state of Paris on the Parliament, left the room and violently banged the door. There is something comic in the whole scene. The Parlia- ment, thus snubbed, begins to march downstairs. After a few hesitating steps, it turns back, and finds Monsieur, always agreeable, loitering in the grand cabinet. The Presi- dent de Mesmes exhorts him so pathetically that he consents to admit twenty members into the chambre grise, where they find the Queen. The President begins to plead with her, to draw a terrible picture of the mad city with arms in its hands. She will not listen, but flings away angrily into the gallery. Then Cardinal Mazarin advances on the scene. He pro- poses to give up the prisoners, if the Parliament will cease its factious attempts to resist and to limit the royal authority. This proposal needs more length and solemnity of debate than can be attained at the Palais Royal, with an anxious mob howling without. The Parliament therefore sets out in procession on its return to the Vieux Palais, arranging to return with its answer in the afternoon, and to meet the Due d'Orleans, now a mediator between itself and royalty. But the Parliament reckoned without Paris. In those roaring streets, through which it had marched so triumph- antly an hour before, it was now received with howls of rage and disappointment. Chains and barricades no longer yielded it free passage. It was expected to bring back the liberty of Father Broussel ; it could only announce foolish negotiations. In the Rue St. Honor6 the mob pushed so furiously on the Presidents and their company, with such terrifying threats and bitter reproaches, that many of them tried to escape for their lives, losing themselves in the crowd ; but their official robes made this difficult. Mathieu Mole, the First President, kept his head and his courage, even when a fierce cook, at the 138 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD head of two hundred men, attacked his sacred person with a halberd. "Turn back, traitor!" cried the cook. "Unless you wish to be massacred, bring us Broussel, or else the Mazarin and the Chancellor as hostages." The intrepid President assured the crowd that he had done everything possible and would now return to do more. He called his companions together, and with the slow, majestic tread of injured dignity he led them back to the Palais Royal, through a running fire of" insults, threats, execrations and blasphemies." The crowd declared that if the Queen would not set the prisoners free, they would tear him, Presi- dent Mole, in a thousand pieces. The palace gates opened once more to admit " les longues robes," a string of distracted, frightened, exhausted, and very hungry men. Hours had passed, and the sitting had begun with daylight. They had had no breakfast. The Queen, with a touch of pity for this unfortunate Parliament, sent them meat, bread, and wine, and thus revived they set to work to deliberate on the royal terms. While they were doing this. Monsieur and several princesses begged the Queen on their knees to be less inflexible; even the Cardinal joined his entreaties to theirs. The Parliament, having deliberated, presented its decision to the Queen. It was ready to cease all obnoxious delibera- tions till after the Feast of St. Martin, on condition that the prisoners were immediately set free. With a bad grace, and only because of the alarming state of the city, the Queen accepted these terms, and the Parliament, proud and vic- torious, sure of the future, once more marched forth into the streets with news to calm the wild passions there. But Paris raged all through that day and night, with cries of hatred against the Queen and Mazarin. The next day, Councillor Broussel having been brought into the city, the people carried him shoulder-high through the streets to Notre Dame, and demanded a Te Deum. The little old man himself, however, escaped to his own house, where many fashionable folks hurried to visit him. THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 139 The riots went on for two more days, and it needed a decree of the magistrates to demolish barricades and re-open shops. The Queen was furious, the Cardinal was terrified ; the Court, mostly anti-Mazarin, laughed at these signs of the times. Mademoiselle, then gloriously amused, shrugged her shoulders when she looked back upon it all. There were worse days to come. chapti:k II 1649 " Ix>rsc|iie Vigcan quitta la Cour, I>t:s Jcux, Ics Graces, les Amours Entrcrent dans Ic monastcre. Lairc la lairc, Ion Icre, Lairc la laire, Ion la." MAr)f:.MOISEl,LE n'KI'ERNON — MADEMOISKI.I.K DU VIGEAN AND THE GREAT CONOf; — MAZARINA11ES AND FRONDEURS — MADEMOISELLE'S AMDITION IN those early struggles of the Fronde Mademoiselle began already to cnjo)' the discomfiture of her enemies ; but a deeper interest in her life, at this time, was the final resolve of her dearest friend to take the veil. After the Joyeuse match had fallen through, it had been suggested to Cardinal Mazarin that Mademoiselle d'Epernon should marry Prince Casimir of Poland, released from his cardinalate as his brother's heir presumptive. Following the King's example, he had applied to the French Court for a wife. Mazarin was at this time planning a marriage between his niece, Laura Mancini (afterwards Duchesse de Mercceur), and the Due de Candale, the Due d'Epernon's son. The French nobility, especially those of royal blood, were not yet quite ready to absorb the numerous Italian nieces whom Mazarin had brought to France, and I\I. d'Epernon hesitated. However, a prospective crown for his daughter might have induced him to accept a Mancini for his son. 'I'he Pnlish proposal pleased Mademoiselle's romantic mind. The luniJcror P'crdinaiul, it was true, had married again ; hut he had a son, the King of Ilungar)-, "a hopeful prince," who now seemed a likely match for herself. Germany 140 THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 141 and Poland, she observed, were next door to each other ; therefore she and her bonne amie might almost spend their days together. However, Mademoiselle's matrimonial plans were doomed to misfortune. Mademoiselle d'Epernon received the pro- posal as an honour, but without any intention of accepting it, and indeed the story of Princess Marie de Gonzague's experi- ences as Queen of Poland was enough to frighten any civilised Frenchwoman. Mademoiselle remarked that her friend " preferred the crown of thorns to that of Poland." If Madame de Motte- ville is right, Mademoiselle d'Epernon had cared little more for the duchy of Joyeuse than for the Polish kingdom. Her heart had been given, once for all, to that Chevalier de Fiesque, son of Mademoiselle's governess, who fell at the siege of Mardyck in 1646. The young man was a Knight of Malta, and therefore not likely to marry. The " tender and honest friendship" between these two had seemed to the Court very extraordinary, and Mademoiselle d'Epernon's re- solve to leave the world was attributed by many to the Chevalier's death. Mademoiselle can hardly have been ignorant of this love-affair, to which she never alludes. It may have been purposely concealed from her, or she may have regarded it with high scorn as a sentimental weakness beneath her notice. For the Chevalier himself she has words of sincere praise : " le plus sage et le plus devot gentilhorame de la cour." It was in that same year that Mademoiselle d'Epernon, leaving Paris for the south with her father and stepmother, had told Mademoiselle of her ideas for the future. Kneel- ing by the Princess's bed, in the moment of farewell, she confided to her that she meant to become a Carmelite. With many tears and loving reproaches. Mademoiselle tried to change her fixed mind. But nothing she could say was of any avail. She could only respect her friend's confidence and rest her hopes on the Polish marriage. They wrote to each other twice a week. After two years, in the autumn of 142 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD 1648, Mademoiselle's enjoyment of the public troubles was iiitcTiiiptod by the news that Mademoiselle fl'ICpernon, traxcJliiiL; with her stepmother, f>n [ircteiice of bcin;:,' ill, to the Haths of ]?ourbon, hail thrown herself into a Carmelite convent at Hourcjes. As usual in such a case, Madame d'Epernon's tears and prayers were worse than useless. Mademoiselle was very anc^ry. The letter she received did not improve matters, beinj; written " in a monastic style, full of sermons and compliments." She missed the tender frankness of old days. She was still more annoyed to find that her friend's destination was the great Paris convent, which they had formerly agreed in disliking, for no better reason than because Madame la I'rincesse was often there. " But I ought not to have been surprised," she says ; " when one renounces the world, that is to say, one's relations, one's friends, a crown, and one's self, the rest is nothing." She afterwards acknowledged that Mademoiselle d'Epernon was right. The great convent had many advantages over the smaller ones : the house was large, the air was good, the community was numerous — young women of wit and quality, who had left the world because they knew and despised it ; " so good nuns are made." And after all, both being in Paris, they could often see each other. The first meeting was painful. Mademoiselle's anger had changed to a passion of love and grief. She sobbed for two hours. Her friend behaved with what some people might call firmness ; to Mademoiselle it seemed " la dernlcre cruautc," and she found it hard to bear being lectured on her pitiable state of mind. The whole scene, perhaps her whole story, suggests that the new Carmelite was a rather cold-blooded person. Mademoiselle with her strong natural feeling touches one more, though it may be true, as she bitterly confesses, that indeed she ought to have rejoiced for her friend, so much the happier of the two. Writing long afterwards, in her crowded solitude among the woods of Saint- Fargeau, she concluded the sad little story as her THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 143 constant heart dictated: " Quant a I'amiti^ que j'ai pour elle, elle durera autant que ma vie." It was not many months since a sadder heart than Made- moiselle d'Epernon's had taken refuge with the Carmelites. The flattering jargon of the day gave most fashionable women credit for beauty ; one may safely guess that very few could really claim that supreme gift. There are many witnesses to prove that Mademoiselle Marthe du Vigean was one of these. She was the younger daughter of that tiresome gentleman whom Mademoiselle, once upon a time, innocently conveyed to the Chiteau de Richelieu. Her mother, always the Duchesse d'Aiguillon's friend and slave, had by this influence been able to push herself and her two girls in a society hardly theirs by right of birth, the family of Vigean being " peu de chose." The sisters danced in Louis XIII's ballet at the Louvre, when Mademoiselle was eight years old. The elder one, Anne de Fors du Vigean, was made for success in life, and attained it brilliantly. She was pretty, gentle, insinuating, ambitious. Mademoiselle thought her bourgeoise and tracassiere. Her first marriage to M. de Pons was no great things, but he died when she was still quite young, and her second marriage with the young Due de Richelieu, Madame d'Aiguillon's nephew, though it displeased his aunt, and even if he was the poor fool Mademoiselle calls him, gave her an assured position at Court for the rest of her life. " Marton, la douce pucelle " — so the excellent Conrart wrote of her — was in every way a finer being than her sister. She was as proud as she was lovely ; incapable of scheming in her own interest or any other. For a few months, when she was seventeen, a brilliant destiny seemed to open before her : the Due d'Enghien, at nineteen, fell passionately in love with her. But Cardinal de Richelieu still reigned, and he had arranged to put the finishing point on his power by marrying his niece into the royal family. The Prince de Conde, too, saw his advantage in this match between his son and Mademoiselle de Maille-Breze. So 144 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD the Due d'Enghien was married in 1641 to the wife he consistently made miserable. The love affair went on for several years, before the eyes of the Court ; but not the most evil of tongues could find a word to say against Mademoiselle du Vigean. Everybody knew that she was the only woman the great Condi- ever really loved. His passion for her carried him to the length of doing his best, after Richelieu's death, to get his marriage with Claire-Clcmence annulled by the Pope, that he might marry her. His mother and sister, to their own discredit and the Queen's displeasure, did their best in his cause. But his father and Mazarin were against him, and Marthe du Vigean remained beyond his reach. At last the hero of many victories resolved to give up this most desired of all his conquests. There was no middle course for him, and he became as cold and distant as he had been passionate. The Court watched the change with interest, and at least two men of high birth and character, who had been held back by the terror of Conde, came forward and offered marriage to Mademoiselle du Vigean. She would listen to no one. After some months of disil- lusion and despair, having burnt Condi's letters and his portrait, she determined to leave the world she cared for no longer. It was not a new idea to her, though she had never willingly encouraged it. One day, we are told, St. Vincent de Paul came to visit Madame du Vigean, who was ill. When he left the house, Mademoiselle Marthe attended him politely to the door. Father Vincent looked into the lovely face, perhaps already wearing the spiritual look of those who are not to find their happiness here, and said, " Made- moiselle, you are not made for the world." Marthe answered hastily that she had no turn for the religious life. Fearing the power of his saintliness, she begged him not to pray that she might change her mind. He went away without another word. What his prayers may have been, nobody knows. But when at twenty-four, " gaillarde et ri^solue," l.nri>, I'KiNi !•: in. i uniik THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 145 the Carmelites received her, the Marquis du Vigean in his fury threatened to kill not only that whole community, but all missionary priests as well. When Mademoiselle visited her cousin at the convent, in the autumn of 1648, Soeur Marthe de J^sus might be seen kneeling through many hours, motionless and ecstatic, in the high silent choir. " And I would not change my con- dition," she said, " to be empress of all the world." It is as a man of twenty-seven, his fame as a soldier made, the romance of his life over, that the great Conde marches on the scene of the Fronde. Madame de Motteville's portrait of him about this time is not altogether attractive. That haughty and rather mocking air of superiority to all the world, which disgusted Mademoiselle in the whole family, had become accentuated in the new Prince since the days when he learned manners at the Hotel de Rambouillet. Soldiering had roughened and flattery had spoilt him ; his young wife was nothing to him ; no flirtation or intrigue held him long. The fainting-fit which marked his final parting with Mademoiselle du Vigean was the last sign of deep feeling Cond^ ever showed. He now mocked at gallantry and renounced balls, though his dancing was of the best. " He was not handsome," says Madame de Motteville : "the shape of his face was ugly. His eyes were blue and quick and proudly glancing. His nose was aquiline ; his mouth was very disagreeable, large, with projecting teeth ; but in his whole countenance there was something striking and grand, the high look of an eagle. He was not tall, but his figure was perfect. He danced well, and had an agree- able air, a haughty bearing, and a fine head. His looks depended much on careful dressing, curling, and powdering ; but he neglected himself . . . his face being long and thin, this negligence was a great disadvantage to him. It was caused by the loss of Mademoiselle du Vigean ; after she entered the convent, he was utterly indifferent to everything." L 146 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD Conclc might be indifferent to Court and Parliament alike, but neither of them was by any means indifferent to him. lioth were anxious to secure the support of the great Cap- tain. During that autumn of constant doubt and alarm, between flights of the Court from Paris, hasty returns, struggles with the Parliament becoming ever more difficult under the shadow of threatened riots, the Queen-Regent and ^TazariIl tried to flatter Conde by asking his advice in their difflculties. The Prince gave cautious answers advising moderation. Her Majesty had better not come to extremi- ties with the Parliament, he thought, though she must of course maintain the King's authority. Mazarin was dis- satisfied with this sort of reply, and the arrest of the Comte de Chavigny, son of M. Bouthillier and governor of Vin- cennes, for his sympathies with the opposition, was partly caused by suspicion of Conde. In the fierce parliamentary debates of October, however, Conde was with the Duke of Orleans on the royal side. " My name is Louis de Bourbon, and I will do nothing to shake the crown." With the army of France at his back, Monsieur le Prince made this answer to the friends and relations who invited him to join their constantly strengthening cabal against Mazarin. Paris was seething with hatred of the Cardinal. The streets were full of mazarinadcs, songs and pamphlets full of ridicule, insult, and abuse, not only of Mazarin himself, but of "Dame Anne" the Queen. All through that autumn a spark would have been enough to set Paris once more in a blaze of street fighting. And the great were throwing in their lot with the small. The Cardinal was blamed for every personal disappointment of every man or woman who wanted anything. It was a mere chance that Monsieur was not even then at the head of the P'rondeurs ; he had been furious that the Abbe de la Riviere had been refused the Cardinal's hat which was promised to the Prince de Conti ; and it was rather cowardice than loyalty that still kept him true, after a THE WARS OF THE FRONDE 147 fashion, to the King his nephew. Relations between the Luxembourg and the Palais Royal were painfully strained. The party of the Fronde- — a word borrowed from the leather sling and stones with which children used to fight each other in the ditches of Paris — was very far from being confined to those who honestly supported the claims of the Parliament. Nearly all the clergy of Paris were influenced by M. le Coadjuteur, to whom his uncle the Archbishop gave a free hand. Among the princes and nobles who openly or secretly took the same side were the Due de Beaufort, not long escaped from his prison at Vincennes, and now once more the darling of the people ; the Due and Duchesse de Longueville, followed blindly by the Prince de Conti ; the Prince de Marcillac, who had quarrelled with the Court because the Queen would neither give his wife a tabouret nor his coach the right of entry into the courtyard of the Louvre, and who now made use of his love-affair with Madame de Longueville to entangle her and her family — Cond6 excepted — in the hopeless confusion of the Fronde. Mademoiselle's opinions were openly expressed, and the relations between her and the Regent did not improve. Anne had never liked her wilful, outspoken niece, and she was now almost too impatient of her wrong-headedness to treat her with civility. Since the Saujon affair she had con- sidered her brouillonne, a tiresome, meddling, unmanageable girl, on whom reasons of state had little influence, and who occupied herself a great deal too much with her own pre- cedence and her own future. The Queen's stiff Spanish ideas were offended by Mademoiselle's " vivacity, which deprived her actions of the gravity necessary to a person of her rank." The presence of this indiscreet Princess at Court must have been like a high fresh wind blowing through all dissimulations, diplomacies, and small etiquettes. She was a constant annoyance to the Queen, who yet could not possibly ignore her ; a girl of royal birth, possessed, as Madame de Motteville says, of " beauty, wit, riches, and virtue." When the Court slipped away that autumn to Rueil, and 148 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD afterwards to Saint-Germain, from the unfriendly spirit in Paris, Mademnisellc was much offended that she alone, of all the royal family, had no summons to accompany it. Madame la I'rincesse carried off her grandson, the Due d'Enghien ; Monsieur sent for Madame and her little girls, without a word to his eldest daughter. She and Philippe, the little Monsieur, ill of small-pox at the Palais Royal, were the only royalties left in Paris. She thought it her duty, however, to follow the Queen, and found herself a rather unwelcome guest at Saint-Germain. She was happier indeed in Paris, where th& frondcurs welcomed her in the streets. Still, at this time, she took no active part in politics. She did not at all care to throw herself into the arms of Madame de Longueville's party, or to make common cause with the canaiiU. Also her own revived ambition of years seemed to make an understanding with Mazarin desirable. These people — her father, the Queen-Regent, the Cardinal — had not cared to interest themselves in marrying her to the Emperor. They were ready to throw her and her fortune away on the Prince of Wales, who would never, as far as appearances went, be King of England. She would show them who it was they were treating in this cavalier manner. She would marry Louis XIV, and as a popular Queen of France she would touch the best that life could offer. In the region of Mademoiselle's lofty conceptions, a difference of eleven years in age mattered not at all. At the same time, political ends set aside, she had now and always a real affection and reverence for the stately little King. Cardinal Mazarin was clever enough to play with the idea; he favoured it, indeed, to a certain extent ; and it was her final loss of faith in him which threw Mademoiselle violently and definitely on the side of the Fronde. CHAPTER III 1649 "Que vous nous causez de tourment Facheux Parlement ! Que vos arrests Sont ennemis de tous nos interests ! Le Carnaval a perdu tous ses charmes ! Tout est en armes, Et les amours Sont effrayes par le bruit des tambours. " La guerre va chasser I'amour, Ainsi que la cour ; Et dans Paris La peur bannit et les jeux et les ris. Adieu le bal, adieu les promenades, Les serenades ; Car les amours Sont effrayes par le bruit des tambours." A ROYAL FLIGHT — THE PARLIAMENT AND THE PRINCES— THE ADVEN- TURES OF MADAME DE MOTTEVILLE — THE BLOCKADE OF PARIS — THE COMTE AND COMTESSE DE MAURE ON the eve of the Feast of the Three Kings, January 5th, 1649, Mademoiselle supped with her stepmother at the Luxembourg. Monsieur was in bed with an attack of gout, a frequent resource of his when public affairs were too troublesome. The quarrels between the Court and the Parliament as to taxes and prerogatives became each day more serious, and Paris was angry and uneasy. " Point de Mazarinl" was the one cry in the streets. The Queen had taken counsel with her brother-in-law ; a great resolution had been arrived at suddenly, and Gaston, who hated all these worries, lay in bed thinking about it. Some one of the household told Mademoiselle that they were all going away the next morning. 149 I50 A PRINCESS OF THE OLD WORLD "And Monsieur in this state!" she cried. "Impossible!" and went laughing to his room with the news. His only answer was to wish her a good night. She flew to Madame, who, absorbed by her health and her babies, apparently knew and cared little about the matter. They talked it over, however, and agreed that Monsieur's silence was suspicious. Mademoiselle drove back later to the Tuileries through streets only disturbed by the merry- making of the festival. At the Palais Royal, that same evening, "Dame Anne" was playing Twelfth Night games with her little boys and Madame de Motteville. Two or three ladies — Madame de la Trcmouille, Madame de Gramont, Mademoiselle de Beau- mont — whispered that there was something in the wind. The Queen surprised her people a little by sending for her chief equerry, M. de Beringhen, before she went to bed. But her perfect calmness and naturalness deceived them all. Her immediate attendants, Madame de Motteville, her sister Mademoiselle Bertaut, and another lady, enjoyed the remains of the ro)'al supper as usual, talked of bagatelles, said good night to the gentlemen in waiting and the captain of the guard, and went to bed without any real suspicion of the early waking in store for them. The Queen only trusted those few on whom she depended for escorting the royal family out of the city of Paris — no longer, in her view and that of Mazarin, to be trusted with the guardianship of its King. " Between three and four in the morning," says Made- moiselle, " I heard a loud knocking at my door. I guessed what it meant, woke my women, and sent them to open it. M. de Comminges appeared. I asked him, ' Am I not to go?' He answered, 'Yes, Mademoiselle. The King, the Queen, and Monsieur await Your Royal Highness at the Cours. Here is a letter from Monsieur.' I took it and pushed it under my pillow. I said, ' It was not necessary t(j add Monsieur's orders to those of the King and Queen.' lie begged me to read it ; it was only to require my speedy