Political Women, Vol. 1

by active 1840-1883 Sutherland Menzies

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

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

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

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

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

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

She detested her stepmother, whose faults her strong common-sense led her easily to scan, without her own vulgar and commonplace mind being capable of comprehending the Duchess’s great qualities. It was impossible less to resemble each other. The one adored grandeur even to the romantic and the chimerical, the other was entirely positive and matter-of-fact, and absorbed with her own interest, especially in those relating to her property. Alienated from the Fronde through the jealous hatred she bore towards her stepmother, who in turn liked her almost as little, and probably also did not take pains enough to manage her, Mademoiselle turned towards the Queen, and strove to gain over her father to the same party. Therein she succeeded by degrees. The Duke de Longueville could not overtly separate himself from Condé, and at first promised him all he required; then he shut himself up in Normandy, and there followed a dubious line of conduct which neither compromised him with the Court party nor that of Condé. But he recalled his wife peremptorily, and sent her a mandate to rejoin him. That mandate was pressing and threatening, and it terrified Madame de Longueville. She knew that her husband had been informed of everything, and that he was wholly given up to the influence of his daughter. She feared ill-treatment; she felt certain at least that once in Normandy she would no more quit it, and that her time would be passed between an aged, irritated husband, and an overruling step-daughter, who would apply themselves in concert to retain her in the solitude of a province, and perhaps to make her expiate in confinement her bygone triumphs. The idea of the sorrowful life which awaited her in Normandy produced very nearly the same effect upon her as the thought of a second imprisonment upon the mind of Condé. She sought for a means of avoiding that which was to her the worst of all evils; there was an assured though dangerous one—war, which would prevent her from repairing to Normandy, under the pretext more or less specious that she could not abandon her brother. Such was the design she formed within herself and very soon resolved upon adopting, and the fresh negotiations which La Rochefoucauld proposed thwarted her doubly. Should those negotiations prove successful they would deprive her of the only pretext she had for not rejoining her husband in Normandy, and she thought it strange that it was La Rochefoucauld who would expose her to that peril. From that moment doubtless angry explanations took place between them. She perceived that La Rochefoucauld was wearied of his sacrifices, that he wished to reconcile himself with the Court, repair his fortunes, and taste the sweets of peace; whilst in the eyes of the superb princess the paramount consideration with him, for whom she had done so much, ought to have been never to forsake her, should they both together rush to certain ruin. But La Rochefoucauld was no longer wound up to a tone so lofty, worthy of the Great Cyrus and of their chivalrous love of 1648, and the haughty Madame[71] was deeply wounded at the discovery. Nevertheless, she was not insensible to what there was of reasonable in La Rochefoucauld’s advice, and not to incur the entire responsibility of the part which her brother might take, she consented to follow her sister-in-law, the Princess de Condé, and her nephew, the Duke d’Enghien, into Berri, one of Condé’s governments:—a journey which moreover had the advantage of separating her from her husband. She set out, therefore, on the 18th of July for Bourges, taking with her the elder of her two sons, the younger, Charles de Paris, born in 1649, not being able to bear the fatigue of the journey. M. de Longueville recalled her from Berri as he had from the capital, and he insisted on the return of his son in terms so forcible that she was compelled to comply, so far as the boy was concerned. Thenceforward, being alone and exposing only herself, without breaking with M. de Longueville, and by using all her wit to colour her disobedience, she eluded his orders, remained in Berri, forming in the depth of her heart the most ardent desire for war, but calm in appearance; sometimes accompanying the Princess de Condé to Montrond, at others making somewhat lengthened visits to the Carmelite convent at Bourges. And thus she awaited the issue of the negotiations, counselled and carried on by La Rochefoucauld, which should decide her destiny.

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

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

That majority had been declared on the 7th of September in a Bed of Justice, with all the customary pomp. As the first Prince of the blood did not think it possible to be present at it in safety, during that evening the Queen in her indignation had whispered these significant words to De Retz: “Either M. le Prince or I must perish.”[72]