With a true eye for the refined and the beautiful, and that honestly sympathetic nature without which it is impossible to discriminate between what is noble and what is mediocre, still Mrs. Jameson, in the above reflections upon the character of Madame de Longueville, was obviously led to draw hasty and erroneous conclusions either from a superficial glance at detached passages in the Duchess’s extraordinary career with regard to the dates of which she is widely in error, or others during which her conduct and actions were but too easily susceptible of misrepresention and distortion at the hands of partisan writers. Such unjust judgment would most probably be formed by accepting anecdotes, like those contained in Tallemant’s scandalous chronicle or Bussy Rabutin’s “Letters,” as historic truths; or by placing implicit faith in every statement made by De Retz or La Rochefoucauld, given as both were to exaggeration and over-colouring, and whose object, moreover, was not so much to tell the truth as always to exalt themselves, sometimes by its suppression, at others by downright falsification.
Without attempting to extenuate the errors of Madame de Longueville, moral or political, it has been the author’s endeavour to reconcile the apparent contradictions in her character, imputed in the passage above cited, by assigning the different incidents, which have doubtless caused an intelligent woman to falter in her judgment, to their proper place in the order of time. For as, during the Olympian contests, swift-footed Spartan boys, to typify the transmission of Truth, ran with a lighted torch, and, as each fell breathless, another took up the flambeau and bore it on, bright and rapid, to the goal, so should the light of History be passed steadily and carefully from hand to hand, and its sacred flame—the Truth—be kept ever burning clearly onward in the course of time.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] The Jansenist.
CHAPTER II.
THE DUCHESS DE CHEVREUSE.
Side by side with the two great statesmen, Richelieu and Mazarin, the clever, daring, vivacious, charming Marie de Rohan occupied a more elevated position, and certainly played a more extended part, than any other of the political women who were her contemporaries during the stirring times of the first half of the seventeenth century.