Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/28

6 to these hors-d’œuvres more interest than she ventures to claim.

She begins by an abridged narrative of the queen's life from her arrival in France to the death of Louis XIII. and the Regency. But the original part of these Memoirs is that which starts from the latter period and treats only of what passed within sight of the writer. When she returns to Court in 1643 Madame de Motteville describes to us the different personages on the stage, the divers cabal interests; she shows herself to us in the midst of those great intrigues as a simple spectator seated in a corner of the best box and perfectly disinterested. " I thought only of amusing myself with what I saw, as at a fine comedy played before my eyes in which I had no interest." "Kings' cabinets," she says elsewhere, "are theatres in which are being played continually the pieces that all the world is thinking about: some are simply comic; others are tragic, the greatest events of which are caused by trifles." Present at all these things with a clear-sighted mind and a spirit never bitter, and at first taking interest in them merely to escape tedium, she had, very early, a resource that came to her from her family—that of writing; the moments that other women took for cards or promenades, she spent in locking herself in and making notes of all she had seen and heard, to be used at a later day.

The first period of the regency of Anne of Austria is exhibited and clearly shown by Madame de Motteville in a manner that makes us present with her. All the old friends of the queen have returned, after an exile more or less long; each of them expects the same favour as before, and they do not at first perceive that the Anne of Austria whom they had left oppressed by Richelieu, without children, and Spanish at heart, was now a mother, devoted to the in-