Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/34

12 them only through the respect due to their name, who can enjoy the quiet, tranquil life of a good citizen with means, who have enough to live on and are not poisoned by ambition. That is where all reasonable souls should seek for true happiness, obscure, it is true, but tranquil and innocent." This desire for private life reappears in her frequently, with a tone of sincerity that cannot be misunderstood.

She likes, in these Memoirs of hers, to moralize, to give serious reflections which she enforces by agreeable quotations; she is fond of citing Spanish or Italian poets, sometimes Seneca, but oftener Holy Scripture. These reflections have been thought too long and too frequent, which may be true of the latter part of the Memoirs; but as a general thing she knows how to mingle them with the circumstances that inspired them. In certain very fine pages on the character, schemes, and talents of Cardinal Mazarin she shows him to us (during a stay he made in Paris, May, 1647) as shutting himself up to work, and leaving the greatest men in the kingdom waiting in his antechamber unable to reach him. Murmurs resounded on all sides; but the door opened, the minister came out, and all were silent :

" When he got into his coach to go away, the courtyard of the Palais-Royal was filled with cordons bleus, great seigneurs, and persons of that quality, who, by their eager manner, seemed only too happy to have looked at him solely from a distance. All men are by nature slaves to fortune ; and I can say that I never knew a person at Court who was not a flatterer, some more, some less. The self-interest that blinds us misleads and betrays us on occasions which concern ourselves ; it makes us act with more sentiment than intelligence ; quite often it happens that we are ashamed of our weaknesses; but they are not perceived