Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/37

Rh results of favour, but she confines herself to jesting about it with light and smiling irony. There is nothing in these Memoirs of Madame de Motteville that recalls those other Memoirs, so distinguished but so bitter, of Madame de Staal-Delaunay, lady-in-waiting to the Duchesse du Maine; the situation however was very different. Madame de Motteville was in a great and real Court, beside a queen who, with a mind of ordinary compass (though accommodating and agreeable), had a noble and generous heart and paid for services with esteem. If one must find an historical parentage for Madame de Motteville, I find it more in the Memoirs of the wise chamberlain Philippe de Commines, whom she likes to quote, recalling at times the results of his sound and judicious experience.

Her own Memoirs become more serious and take a loftier historical character the farther they advance into the period of civil agitations and the troubles of the Fronde. Madame de Motteville judged them rightly, and while ascribing to herself only the role of a timid woman, she makes reflections which one could wish had been made at the time by many men. The long conversations in private which she had with the Queen of England had enlightened her as to the real tendency of perils which often, in their beginning, seem no more than a gust. Noting with vigorous justice the illusion of the Parliament people, and their insatiable exactions which caused them to reject all preliminary offers of compromise and conciliation, she boldly declares that "the corruption of men is such that to make them live according to reason they must not be treated reasonably, and to make them just they must be treated unjustly." She points to men of property who, by obstinately shouting against taxation and those who abused it, were aiding turbulence and lending support to malcontents, which often happened.