“Or,” retorts Medon, the male interlocutor, “politicians to vary the excitement! How I hate political women!
“Alda. Why do you hate them?
“Medon. Because they are mischievous.
“Alda. But why are they mischievous?
“Medon. Why?—why are they mischievous? Nay, ask them, or ask the father of all mischief, who has not a more efficient instrument to further his designs in this world than a woman run mad with politics. The number of political, intriguing women of this time, whose boudoirs and drawing-rooms are the foyers of party spirit, is another trait of resemblance between the state of society now and that which existed at Paris before the Revolution.”
In another place, however, the same judicious and usually discriminating writer is betrayed into giving—more from conjecture, it would seem, than close acquaintance with the facts of her life—an historically false and singularly unjust estimate of Madame de Longueville’s character.
“Alda. Women are illustrious in history, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused. * * * Of those which have been handed down to us by many different authorities under different aspects, we cannot judge without prejudice; in others there occur certain chasms which it is difficult to supply; and hence inconsistencies we have no means of reconciling, though doubtless they might be reconciled if we knew the whole, instead of a part.
“Medon. But instance—instance!
“Alda. Do you remember that Duchess de Longueville, whose beautiful picture we were looking at yesterday?—the heroine of the Fronde?—think of that woman—bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious!—who made rebels with a smile; or if that were not enough, the lady was not scrupulous,—apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was too much! And then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous philosopher Arnauld,[3] when he was denounced and condemned, and from motives which her worst enemies could not malign, secreting him in her house, unknown even to her servants—preparing his food herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence not only defied danger (that were little to a woman of her temper), but endured a lengthened trial, all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continued self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. Now, if Shakespere had drawn the character of the Duchess de Longueville, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both situations:—for the same being, with the same faculties and passions and powers, it surely was: whereas in history, we see in one case a fury of discord, a woman without modesty or pity; and in the other an angel of benevolence, and a worshipper of goodness; and nothing to connect the two extremes in our fancy.
“Medon. But these are contradictions which we meet on every page of history, which make us giddy with doubt or sick with belief; and are the proper objects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher.”