The nobility, who, from the beginning of February, had begun to assemble in order to take part in the expulsion of Mazarin, now held their meetings in the monastery hall of the Cordeliers, where might be seen collected together as many as eight hundred princes, dukes, and noblemen, heads of the most considerable houses in France, all partisans of Condé. As this numerical strength of the ennobled classes, together with the multiplicity of titles among them, is somewhat startling to a youthful English student, it may be well to remark that France had, in fact, three aristocracies in the course of her annals from the Crusades to the reign of Louis XIV. After the time of Louis XI., the representatives of the first, or old feudal aristocracy, the descendants of the men who were in reality the King’s peers, and not his actual subjects, were few and far between. These were the holders of vast principalities, who maintained a kind of royal state in their own possessions, and kept high courts of judicature over life and limb in the whole extent of their hereditary fiefs. In the long English wars, from Crécy to Agincourt, the great body of them disappeared, and only here and there a great vassal was to be seen, distinguished in nothing from the other nobles, except in the loftiness of his titles and the reverence that still clung to the sound of his historic name. The second aristocracy arose among the descendants of the survivors of the English and Italian wars. They claimed their rank, not as coming down to them from the tenure of almost independent counties and dukedoms, but as proprietors of ancestral lands, to which originally subordinate rights and duties had been attached. Mixed with those, we saw the Noblesse of the Robe, as the great law officers were called, who constituted a parallel but not identical nobility with their lay competitors. The third aristocracy was now about to make its appearance, the creation of Court favour, and badge of personal or official service—possessors of a nominal rank without any corresponding duty—a body selected for ornament, and not for use—and incorporating with itself, not only the marquis and viscount, fresh from the mint of the minister or favourite, but the highest names in France.
The aristocracy of the sword, and of ancient birth, had itself to blame for this degradation. Great alterations in manners or government—such as give a new character to human affairs—always seem brought about by some strange relaxation of morals, or atrocity of conduct, which makes society anxious for the change. The unfortunate custom in France which gave every male member of a noble family a title equivalent to that of its chief, so that a simple viscount with ten stalwart and penniless sons gave ten stalwart and penniless viscounts to the aristocracy of his country, had filled the whole land with a race of men proud of their origin, filled with reckless courage, careless of life, and despising all honest means of employment by which their fortunes might have been improved. Mounted on a sorry steed and begirt with a sword of good steel, the young cavalier took his way from the miserable castle on a rock, where his noble father tried in vain to keep up the appearance of daily dinners, and wondered how in the world all his remaining sons and daughters were to be clothed and fed, and made his way to Paris. There he pushed his fortune—fighting, bullying, gambling, and was probably stabbed by some drunken companion and flung into the Seine. If he was lucky or adroit enough, he stabbed his drunken friend and pushed him into the stream; and, after a few months of suing and importunity, obtained a saddle in the King’s Guards, or a pair of boots in the Musqueteers. At this time it came out that in twenty years of the reign of Louis XIII. there had been eight thousand fatal duels in different parts of the realm. Out of the duels which were daily carried on, four hundred in each year had ended in the death of one of the combatants. When the fiercest of English wars is shaking every heart in the kingdom, there would be wailing and misery in every house if it were reported that four hundred officers had been killed in a year. Yet these young desperadoes were all of officer’s rank, and the quarrel in which they fell was probably either dishonourable or contemptible. Men fought and killed each other for a word or a look, or a fashion of dress, or the mere sake of killing. Where morality is loosened to the extent of a disregard of life, we may be sure the general behaviour in other respects is equally to be deplored. There was great and almost universal depravity in the conduct of high and low. Vice and sensuality found refuge and protection even in the presence of princesses and queens. People residing in remote places heard only of the gorgeous licence in which the great and powerful lived. They knew them only during their visits to their ancestral homes as worn-out debauchees from the great city, who brought the profligacy of the purlieus of the Louvre into the peaceful cottages of the peasantry on their estates. It was, indeed, so much the fashion to be wicked, that a gentleman was hindered from the practice of his Christian or social duties by the fear of ridicule. The life of man, therefore, and the honour of woman were held equally cheap; and the blinded, rash, and self-indulgent nobility laid the foundation, in contempt of the feelings of its inferiors and neglect of their interests, for the terrible retribution which even now at intervals might be seen ready to take its course.
CHAPTER IV.
THE DUCHESSES DE LONGUEVILLE AND DE CHEVREUSE AND THE PRINCESS PALATINE IN THE LAST FRONDE.—RESULTS OF THE RUPTURE OF THE MARRIAGE PROJECTED BETWEEN THE PRINCE DE CONTI AND MADEMOISELLE DE CHEVREUSE.
We must now revert to Condé’s heroic sister. Having glanced somewhat hastily at the brilliant part played by Madame de Longueville in the two first epochs of the Fronde, the war of Paris and that which illuminated the prison of Condé, we are now about to follow her through the third and last period, which commences from the deliverance of the Princes, in February, 1651, and only ends with the war of Guienne, in August, 1653;—the longest, the most disastrous, and at the same time most obscure epoch of the civil war. It will be necessary to strip the mask from more than one illustrious actor in it, exhibit the reverse of the most showy medals, and the shadows which everywhere mingle with glory, genius, and even virtue itself. The character of the Duchess de Longueville has its charming, its sublime aspects; but, alas! it is far from being irreproachable. In dwelling upon the least favourable portion of her life, we shall often do well to remember that the errors of great minds sometimes subserve their perfection, by the beneficent virtue of the remorse to which they give rise, and that the sister of the Great Condé must probably have felt in all its fulness the vanity of ambition and of false grandeur, all the bitterness of guilty passions, in taking an early farewell of them, to resume the austere path of duty, to return, in fine, to Carmel and ascend to Port Royal.
Madame de Longueville had remained at Stenay with Turenne for some time after her brother’s and husband’s liberation, both occupied in disengaging themselves from the engagements which they had contracted with Spain for the deliverance of the Princes, and with negotiating a truce calculated to clear the way for the much-desired general peace. Recalled by the pressing instances of her family, she had quitted Stenay on the 7th of March, before the completion of her work. On arriving in Paris “universal applause greeted her heroic deeds.” Monsieur had hastened to pay her a visit with Mademoiselle Montpensier, and a train of ladies of the highest distinction. She went afterwards that same day to present her homage to their Majesties, from whom she met with the most gracious reception. That moment was, unquestionably, the most brilliant of her whole career. In 1647, after the embassy to Munster, her return to France and its Court had been also a veritable triumph, as we have attempted to show; but the power of her house and the glory of her brother constituted nearly all the merits of it. She only contributed thereto the influence of her wit and beauty. After Stenay, the éclat which surrounded her was in some sort more personal. She had just displayed eminent qualities which raised her almost to the level of Condé. In Normandy she had exhibited herself as an intrepid adventuress, and a skilful politician in the Low Countries. When, during the imprisonment of her two brothers and her husband, her sister-in-law, the Princess de Condé, had been forced at Bordeaux to recognize the royal authority, she discovered that the destinies of her house had devolved upon her. She had become the head of a great party. She had treated as from power to power with Spain; her word had appeared a sufficient guarantee to the Archduke Leopold and to the Count de Fuensaldagne. She had held in hand such commanders as Turenne, La Moussaye, Bouteville; and when, after the battle of Rethel, she seemed to be on the very verge of destruction, she had succeeded in recovering the advantage, and in contributing more than any one else to the deliverance of the Princes, thanks to the profound negotiations carried on in her name by the Princess Palatine. Whilst statesmen estimated her capacity, the multitude admired her courage and constancy. She was, in short, in possession of that political rôle with which La Rochefoucauld had dazzled her gaze in order to conceal his own designs:—a glittering chimera which, mingling itself with that of love, had seduced that ardent and haughty soul of hers. She was then the idol of Spain, the terror of the Court, one of the grandeurs of her family. We shall soon see whether she can better sustain this new ordeal than she did the first, at the close of the year 1647.
The Fronde gathered the fruit of its skilful conduct during the month of January, 1651. It was that faction which, silencing its old animosities and promptly extending its hand to the partisans of Condé, had extricated him from prison, in order to acquire and place at its head, together with the King’s uncle, the lieutenant-general of the Kingdom, the first prince of the blood, the victor of Rocroi and Lens, the hero of the age. It carried everything before it—at Court, in parliament, upon the public places; it had proscribed and put to flight Mazarin; it held Anne of Austria a captive in her palace; already even it had penetrated into the cabinet in the person of the aged Chateauneuf, in whom ambition cherished beneath the snows of winter the vigour of youth, and whose capacity was scarcely inferior to his ambition. The moment had arrived for accomplishing the work already begun, and for putting into execution the plan determined upon between the Princess Palatine and Madame de Chevreuse.
Those two strong-minded women had conceived the idea of a grand aristocratic league which should seat the Fronde upon an union of all the interests which it comprised, close the avenues of France and the Court to Mazarin, and under the auspices of the Duke d’Orleans and the Prince de Condé form a government into which the friends of both should enter, the most accredited representatives of every fraction of a party. Further, the basis of this plan was that of a double marriage: on the one side between the young Duke d’Enghien and one of the Duke d’Orleans’ daughters, on the other between the Prince de Conti and the daughter of Madame de Chevreuse.[64] This latter marriage might be accomplished immediately. Condé had accepted the proposition without any difficulty. Madame de Longueville, far from opposing it at Stenay, had embraced the idea of it with so much ardour that, in a letter to the Palatine of the 26th of November, 1650, after having weighed the different resolutions to be taken, she stops at this latter, and concludes thus: “this, therefore, is what we must stick to.” That marriage was, in short, of a supreme importance: it gave the house of Condé to the Fronde for ever, and the Fronde to the house of Condé; for the Fronde was then Madame de Chevreuse. She disposed, by her daughter, of the Coadjutor, who in his turn disposed of the Duke d’Orleans, and by him of the parliament. It was Madame de Chevreuse who, in 1650, had emboldened Mazarin to lay his hand upon Condé, in making him see that he might strike that bold stroke with impunity, since she answered to him for the secret connivance of the Duke d’Orleans and the parliament, who were alone able to oppose it. Here, Mazarin had committed an immense blunder: seeing himself delivered from Condé, by the aid of the Fronde, having nothing more hostile to cope with than the latter, he had imagined himself able to turn round upon it, and had treated Madame de Chevreuse very cavalierly, who, growing cold towards the Cardinal, and no longer finding it to her account to serve him, had lent an ear to the propositions of Condé’s friends, and had procured his release from prison, reconciling to him the Duke d’Orleans and the parliament, which at first she had stirred up against him. She brought, moreover, to the house of Condé the most politic mind of the Fronde, an audacity towering to the height of his designs, a consummate experience, with the support of her three powerful families, the houses of de Rohan, de Luynes, and Lorraine. She rendered sure the alliance of the Duke d’Orleans and the Prince de Condé, and completed the ruin of Mazarin by constructing a strong government which probably might have succeeded ultimately in triumphing over the affection of the Queen. She held in hand a statesman bred in the school of Richelieu, and whom she judged capable of replacing Mazarin, the former Keeper of the Seals—Châteauneuf, already a member of the Cabinet. She believed herself certain of acquiring De Retz by means of the Cardinal’s hat. She had not the least objection to make to the elevation of the friends of Condé, and she was ready to favour the ambition of La Rochefoucauld, for whom formerly, in 1643, she had so greatly importuned the Queen and Mazarin. Add to all this, that on quitting the citadel of Havre, the young Prince de Conti had not beheld the lovely Charlotte de Lorraine without being smitten with her charms, and he himself strongly desired that marriage. Who, then, prevented it? Who broke off the contracted engagement? Who struck at and wounded by the self-same blow the Palatine and Madame de Chevreuse? Who restored them both and for ever to the Queen and Mazarin? Who destroyed the Fronde by dividing it? We shall find out by-and-by, but let us merely say just now that it was the rupture of that marriage which again shuffled the cards and changed the face of the situation. In pitting against himself those who had so powerfully succoured him in his misfortune, Condé ought at least to have drawn closer to the Court and had a serious understanding with the Queen; but he tergiversated, and at the end of some months of that wavering policy, he found himself standing unmasked between the Court and the Fronde, both equally discontented with him, repeating and exaggerating the blunder committed by Mazarin. The greatest error during the course of a revolution is to believe that the support of either of the parties who are in actual collision may be dispensed with. At the close of a revolution the attempt to dominate may be tried; during the crisis a choice must be made. Mazarin had fallen through having tried to dominate the Fronde and Condé at one and the same time; Condé lost himself in thinking to dominate the Fronde and the Court.
It is an historical problem very difficult to solve, as to who was the author of the rupture of the marriage projected between the Prince de Conti and Mademoiselle de Chevreuse. We are well inclined to believe that that individual at any rate was the chief author of the rupture to whom it was the most profitable. The Queen and Mazarin, who from his place of retirement governed her with as absolute a sway as ever, saw from the first the danger which threatened them from such an alliance, entirely unexpected as it was by both. The negotiations between Madame de Chevreuse, while Condé was prisoner, and Madame de Longueville at Stenay, had been conducted by the Palatine with such consummate skill and perfect secrecy that neither the Queen nor Mazarin had the slightest suspicion of them. When the rumour reached the ears of the Cardinal in his retreat at Bruhl, near Cologne, he broke out against Madame de Chevreuse with a violence the coarseness of which even was an involuntary homage rendered to the profound ability of Marie de Rohan. The Queen showed herself warmly opposed to it, and the ministers were ordered to thwart in every way the projected alliance. They began, therefore, to negotiate with Condé. As a result of these negotiations he obtained in exchange for his government of Burgundy that of Guienne, one of far greater importance; he was even led to indulge a hope that Provence would be given to the Prince de Conti instead of Champagne and La Brie, and the port and fortress of Blaye to La Rochefoucauld in augmentation of his government of Poitou, although there was not the slightest intention of fulfilling that hope. So states the Duchess de Nemours, the enemy of the Fronde and the Condés, and who, having given herself to the Court party, must have well known its intentions. De Retz likewise doubts not that the Queen combated an alliance so evidently opposed to her interests. Madame de Motteville, the Queen’s close friend, avows it. In short, it is certain, and we have hereupon the irrefragable testimony of Madame de Motteville, that when the Queen had succeeded in gaining over Condé, she caused Madame de Chevreuse to be informed “that she desired that such marriage should not take place, because it had been concerted for objects inimical to the royal interests. This command was the cause of all these propositions falling through and that they were no more spoken of.”