Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/31

Rh On the occasion of the arrival of a Swedish ambassador (September, 1646), Madame de Motteville shows us the first idea received in France of Queen Christina, and, while making herself the echo of that extraordinary eulogy, she adds a touch of light and gentle irony, as sometimes happens with her. "Fame," she says, is a great talker, she is fond of passing the limits of truth ; but truth has much force ; it does not long leave a credulous world in the hands of deception. Some time, later, it was known that the virtues of this queen were middling; she had no respect for Christians; and if she practised morality it was more from fancy than feeling."

Thus speaking, Madame de Motteville, who is always essentially a woman, gently avenges her sex, outraged somewhat by the brusque and fantastic manners of that eccentric queen.

"Fame a great talker" reminds me of one of the graces of Madame de Motteville's style; a simple style, rather incorrect in its arrangement of sentences, retouched perhaps in various places by the editor, but excellent and wholly her own in the essentials of language and expression. She has many of those pleasing metaphors which brighten the texture. Wishing, for example, to say that kings never see evils and danger until at the last extremity, because they are hidden from them by a thousand clouds, "Truth," she remarks, "which poets and painters represent naked, is always dressed up in a hundred ways before kings ; and never did a worldly woman so often change her fashions as truth when she enters a royal palace." Apropos of the cardinal's hat promised for years to the Abbé de la Riviere, favourite, and suddenly claimed by the Prince de Condé for his brother the Prince de Conti, she says that "Discord has flung a crimson apple into the cabinet." Pointing to