Even the insignificant wife of Condé whom no one—not even her husband—had counted as worthy of notice, had reached the front rank at a bound by the upheaval of Bordeaux; yet La Grande Mademoiselle, who possessed the spirit and the energy of a man, was peremptorily ordered by her father and forced to follow Anne of Austria from province to province suppressing insurrections.
In the many months which Mademoiselle considered as unworthy of note in her memoirs, the only period of time well employed by her was passed in an attack of smallpox, which she received so kindly that it embellished her; she said of it: "Before then my face was all spotted; the smallpox took that all away."
Mme. de Longueville's alliance with Spain had cost France the invasion of the Archduke Leopold and de Turenne. In 1650 the Court went to the siege of Bordeaux and Mademoiselle was compelled to accompany the Queen and to appear as an adherent of the King's party; but before she set out upon her distasteful journey she wrote a letter to the invader (the Archduke Leopold) which she was not ashamed to record and which contained a frank statement of her opinion:
Your troops are more capable of causing joy than fear. The whole Court takes your arrival in good part, and your enterprises will never be regarded as suspicious. Do all that it pleases you to do; the victories that you are to win will be victories of benevolence and affection.[149]
Let us remember the nature of those victories of "benevolence and affection" before we form an opinion. Time has veiled with romance the manœuvres which the amazons of the Fronde made to excite the masses to rebellion, but the legend loses its glamour when we consider the brutal ferocity of the armies of the seventeenth century and the abominations practised in the name of glory. The women who shared the life of the generals of the Fronde were travesties of heroines, devoid of the gentler instincts of woman; there was nothing good in them; their imaginations were perverted, they incited their followers to cruelty, and playing with tigerish grace with the love of men, they babbled musically, in artful and well-turned sentences, of the questions of the day, and mocked and wreathed their arms above their heads when their victims were dying.
The Court arrived at Libourne 1st August and remained there thirty days. The weather was very warm, and the Queen secluded herself in her apartment and forced Mademoiselle to sit at her side working on her tapestry. Mademoiselle fumed; she was imprisoned like a child while all the ladies of France were engaged in military service. To add to her mortification, she felt that the Queen had taken a false step and that all Paris was laughing at the Court. Sitting in the Queen's close rooms, Mademoiselle reflected bitterly on her position. She had again entered into collusion with Saujon. The Emperor was for the second time a widower, and Mademoiselle had re-employed the services of her old ambassador. She had sent Saujon to the Emperor to make a second attempt to arrange a marriage. But she had not renounced the King of France, and one of her confidential friends had opened her eyes to the real character of her enterprise. Until then it had seemed natural enough that she should make efforts to establish herself in life; but through the officious indelicacy of her friend she had learned that she was pursuing two husbands at once. One of the objects of her pursuit was a man of ripe age, doubly widowed, the husband of two dead wives; the other a child of tender years,—and neither one nor the other would consent to marry her. She was glad to be far from Paris, where every one knew and pitied her. She burned incense to all her gods and prayed that civil war might keep the Parisians too busy to remember her. Her grief and shame were at their height when the scene changed. Monsieur awoke; Retz had worked a miracle. By means of his peculiar method, acting upon the principle of humanity's susceptibility to intelligent suggestion, Retz had persuaded Monsieur that he, Monsieur, was the only man in France fit to mediate between the parties; after long-continued series of efforts his clerical insinuations had aroused Gaston from his torpor, and one evening when the Queen, flushed and irritable, and Mademoiselle, dejected but defiant, sat at their needlework Gaston entered the dim salon and announced his importance. The trickster of the pulpit and of the slums had managed to infuse a little of his own spirit into the royal poltroon, and for the first time in his political career Gaston displayed some of the characteristics of a man. In an hour Bordeaux knew that the Prince d'Orléans had arrived in Libourne as the accredited mediator of the parties. The politicians fawned at his feet, and Anne of Austria rose effusively to do honour to Monsieur le Prince d'Orléans. By order of the Regent all despatches were submitted to Gaston, who passed upon them as best he could.
Mazarin rose to meet the situation; he was not bewildered by Retz's tactics; he affected to believe that Monsieur must be consulted upon all matters, and by his orders Monsieur's tables were littered with documents. Mazarin multiplied occasions for displaying his allegiance to the royal arbiter. Mademoiselle met the change in her situation joyfully, but calmly. It was the long-expected first smile of fortune; it was the natural consequence of her birth; things were entering their natural order; but she was observant and her mémoirs show us that she valued her incense at its real worth. While the political world bent the knee before Monsieur Mazarin fortified his own position. He sat with the ladies in the Queen's salon, he betrayed a fatherly solicitude in Mademoiselle's future and, as he acted his part, his enthusiasm increased. One day when he was alone with Mademoiselle he assured her that he had prayed long and earnestly for her establishment upon one of the thrones of the world. Sitting at her tapestry, Mademoiselle listened and averted her head to hide her anger. Mazarin, supposing that he had aroused her gratitude, exposed all his anxiety. Mademoiselle did not answer. At last, astonished by her silence, he cut short his declamation. Mademoiselle counted her stitches and snipped her threads; Mazarin watched her impassive face. After a long silence she arose, pushed aside her embroidery frame, and turning to enter her own apartment, she said calmly: "There is nothing upon earth so base that you have not thought of it this morning." Mazarin was alone; he sat with eyes fixed upon the floor, smiling indulgently, wrapt in thought; he was not angry,—he was never visibly excited to anger; but he did not return to the subject. Mademoiselle had resented his overtures because she had made known her projects freely and he had promised her a king, not an emperor. She reported the Cardinal's conduct to Lenet: "The Cardinal has promised me, a hundred times, that he would arrange to have me marry the King[150]—but the Cardinal is a knave!" The Queen said with truth that Mademoiselle was becoming a rabid Frondeuse. Mademoiselle had her own corps of couriers, who carried her the latest news from Paris; her court was larger than the Regent's. When Bordeaux was taken the people saw nothing and talked of nothing but Monsieur's daughter. Mademoiselle exultantly recorded her triumph: