Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/39

Rh as disease and pestilence the false love which, had seized that seditious populace for a moment.

Madame de Motteville is not a blind royalist ; she believes in the right of kings, but also in the justice which is its law, and which God, she thinks, often inspires in kings, and has done so almost always in this kingdom of France. Her ideal of a monarch is Charles V. On the day when Parliament relied on I forget which ordinance of Louis XII. to demand that "no one shall be put in prison without being brought twenty-four hours later before his native judges," she cannot help remarking that this article guaranteeing individual security, as we should say, " was agreeable to all France. The love of liberty," she adds, " is strongly imprinted in nature. The wisest minds, which, until then, had disapproved of the doings of this Assembly, could not in their hearts, hate this proposition; they blamed it apparently, because it was impossible to praise it before the world, but in point of fact they liked it and could not help respecting such boldness and wishing it success." We see that Madame de Motteville would have made a fairly liberal royalist; but this woman of intelligence and good sense, who was present at such terrible scenes, and relates them, is never the dupe of grand words nor of appearances; she mingles with them observations such as do honour to historians and are not disavowed by politicians. " When subjects revolt," she says, " they are pushed into it by causes of which they are ignorant, and, as a usual thing, what they demand is not what is needed to pacify them" She points out to us these very magistrates (the parliament), who had been the first to stir up the people, amazed to find it turning against them and not respecting them. " They knew them- selves to be the cause of these disorders, but they could not have remedied them had they wished to do so, for when the