Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/27

Rh Estampes, shows her to us with her hair dressed in the fashion of Anne of Austria, no longer in her first youth, the face full, with a double chin, and a gentle, tranquil ex- pression. The lower part of the face, however, is scarcely agreeable, and the whole together has nothing that claims marked attention. It is in her mind that we must seek for the delicate and charming traits that distinguished her.

The principal figure around whom Madame de Motteville's narrative unfolds itself is that of the queen, Anne of Austria, her mistress. The author does not pique herself on being either a politician or an historian ; she is a woman who relates that which she has seen with her own eyes or learned from the best-informed persons. Very sensible and very safe as she was, the most honourable men among the initiated and the talented (such as de Retz calls the Estrées and the Senneterres) liked to talk with her. She was usually in the cabinet, that is to say, the royal withdrawing-room; she makes it her centre, and dwells more willingly on the scenes there presented to her observation. Nevertheless, she does not neglect, as occasion offers, more extended narratives, such, for instance, as the episode on the English Revolution, which she gathered from the lips of the Queen of England herself and made into a separate narrative. She also enlarges on the revolution in Naples, which took place about the same time. "This is a fragment which I let drop as I go my way," she says of one of these chance episodes: "it will find its place with others of the same nature; and as it will not be treated with more order or connection it will also not have more value." The sound judgment of Madame de Motteville, which led her to consult as to these remote matters none but good witnesses and also made those most worthy of confidence like to speak of them openly with her, gives to these accessory parts and