Temps où la ville aussi bien que la cour
Ne respirait que les jeux et l’amour.
Une politique indulgente
De notre nature innocente
Favorisait tous les désirs
Tout dégoût semblait légitime;
La douce erreur ne s’appélait point crime,
Les vices délicats se nommait des plaisirs.”
Very pleasant and entertaining the world of society was then; and seasoned as it was with even unusual spice of malice and spite, scandal was rife. Among others, the stepmother of Madame de Chevreuse, Madame de Montbazon, who was married to the old Duc de Rohan, was a past-mistress in the gentle art of making mischief; and where the material was insufficient, she manufactured it without scruple. In this way she nearly succeeded in bringing a rift into the love-harmonies of Henri de la Rochefoucauld and his adored Madame de Longueville, by means of sheer, brazen lying, alleging that certain letters of Madame de Longueville, which had been found, had dropped from the pocket of Coligny. It was a pitiful fabrication, and Madame de Montbazon—of whom de Retz, in his Memoirs, says “I never saw any person showing in her vices less respect for virtue”—did not come out of it with very flying colours, for all her best efforts at effrontery, and she received an order from Mazarin to retire to Tours. The letters, in effect, proved to be not those of Madame de Longueville at all; and the pocket they dropped out of, was not Coligny’s. It was altogether an affair of another pair of lovers.