Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/29

Rh terests of the young king, and a queen wholly French. Neither do they perceive that her heart is already won by Mazarin, and that she has chosen him, from affection and laziness, as the minister who is to release her from business and make her reign. Madame de Senecé, Madame de Chevreuse, Madame de Hautefort on returning to Court have therefore much to learn, much to divine. Many of these exiles of other days no sooner think they have again grasped Fortune than they provoke to their own detriment her caprice and inconstancy. "Here, then, is the Court, very grand and beautiful, but much embroiled," says Madame de Motteville, who cannot help enjoying the spectacle. "Each is thinking of his own designs, his own interest and cabaL The cardinal, of a suave, shrewd mind, goes about working to win to himself all parties." But a goodly number, feeling sure of their ground, resisted all his advances. Madame de Motteville shows us, in this interior view, the unexpected reverses from which resulted new downfalls for the presumptuous and for those who played the "Important." Apropos of Madame de Hautefort, whose firmness without gentleness and "mind attached to her senses" harshly resist the queen, Madame de Motteville lets us see the whole of her own court morality, a temperate but not relaxed morality. "We may give our advice to our masters and our friends," she thinks, "but if they are determined not to follow it we ought to enter into their inclinations rather than follow our own, when we do not see essential evil in them and when the things themselves are not important."

The quality of Cardinal Mazarin's cleverness, his dissimulation, the grace and delicacy of his play, that cabinet spirit in which he excelled and which " set going so many great engines" are rendered with fidelity and to the life by a person who, without reason herself to speak well of him,