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

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

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

Although still young, Rochefoucauld had renounced enterprises in which the heart is alone concerned. No longer engrossed with love, he was wholly given up to ambition; and in order to avenge himself of the Queen and Mazarin, who had not in his opinion evinced sufficient generosity towards him to satisfy this later passion, he did not hesitate to fling himself headlong into partisan intrigue and strife which ended in civil war. To render himself the more formidable, he was above all desirous of securing to his party the master-mind of Condé; and as Madame de Longueville enjoyed the entire confidence of her favourite brother, and had great influence with him, the natural result was that in due course La Rochefoucauld made persistent love to the lovely Duchess. Seduced by the chivalrous manners and romantic antecedents of his youth, and yielding partly to the occasion, partly to the obstinate persistence of the suit, and some little perhaps to the maternal blood in her veins, Madame de Longueville at length surrendered her heart to the daring aspirant. She could no longer plead early youth as an excuse, for she had already numbered twenty-nine summers, and was only distant by a very small span from that formidable epoch in woman’s life which a discriminating writer of the present day has happily termed the crisis. That turning point in the Duchess’s career was destined to prove fatal to her, and the crisis was exactly such as that of which, in the case of another celebrated woman, M. Feillet has given a lucid analysis—the crisis brought about by an irresistible passion. Let us beware of hastily applying to Madame de Longueville that maxim of her cynical lover: “Women often think they still love him whom they no longer really love. The opportunity of an intrigue, the mental emotion to which gallantry gives birth, natural inclination to the pleasure of being beloved, and the pain of refusing the lover, together persuade them that they cherish a genuine passion when it is nothing more than mere coquetry.” Better had it been both for herself and for us to believe that she had only so loved.

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

CHAPTER II.

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

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

Let us now relate briefly what we know of Madame de Longueville from the moment of our last mention of her up to the commencement of 1648. There is nothing recorded which can authorise the supposition that before the close of 1647 Madame de Longueville had ever passed the limits of that noble and graceful gallantry which she saw everywhere held in honour, the praises of which she heard celebrated at the Hôtel de Rambouillet as well as at the Hôtel de Condé, in the great verse of Corneille and in the turgid effusions of Voiture. At the time of the duel between Guise and Coligny, in 1644, she had seen her twenty-fifth summer. Each succeeding year seemed only to enhance the power of her charms, and that power she delighted in exhibiting. A thousand adorers pressed around her. Coligny was, perhaps, nearest to her heart, but had not, however, touched it. But one cannot, with impunity, trifle with love. That tragic adventure of the eldest of the Châtillons perishing, in the flower of his youth, by the hand of the eldest of the Guises was quickly echoed by song and romance through every salon, and cast a gloom upon the destiny of Madame de Longueville, and gave her, at an early period, a fame at once aristocratic and popular, which prepared her wonderfully to play a great part in that other tragi-comedy, heroic and gallant, called the Fronde. The glory of her brother was reflected upon her, and she responded to it somewhat by her own success at Court and in the salons. She acquired more and more the manners of the times. Coquetry and witty talk formed her sole occupation. Her delicate condition not permitting her to accompany M. de Longueville to Münster, in June, 1645, she remained in Paris. It was the place above all others in which she delighted, and whether her heart had received some slight wound, or whether it was still entirely whole, it is clear that she was not very glad nor greatly charmed to find herself, after her accouchement in the spring of 1646, under the cold, grey sky of Westphalia, again beside a husband who was not, as Retz says, the most agreeable man to her in the world. It is not difficult to divine the feelings with which that petted beauty of the Hôtel de Rambouillet must have left Corneille, Voiture, and all the elegancies and refinements of life, to take up her abode at Munster amongst a set of foreign diplomatists only speaking German or Latin. To her it was doubly an exile, for her native soil was not merely France—but Paris, the Court, the Hôtel de Condé, Chantilly, the Place Royale, the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre.[44] However, there was nothing for it but to obey the marital summons, and to set off with her step-daughter, Mademoiselle de Longueville, who was already more than twenty years of age. The Duchess quitted Paris on the 20th of June, 1646, with a numerous escort under the command of Montigny, lieutenant of M. de Longueville’s guards. The entire journey from Paris to Munster was a continual ovation. The Duke went as far as Wesel to meet her. Turenne, who then commanded on the Rhine, treated her to the spectacle of an army drawn up in order of battle, and which he manœuvred for her amusement. Was it on that occasion that the great captain, well known to have been always impressionable to female beauty, received the ardent impulse which was renewed at Stenay in 1650, and which, graciously but prudently acknowledged by Madame de Longueville, always remained a close and tender tie between them? On the 22nd of July she made her triumphal entry into Munster. During the entire autumn of 1646 and the winter of 1647 she was really the Queen of the Congress. Her beauty and grace of manner won homage equally from the grave diplomatists as from the great commanders who were there assembled.