Page:Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her court.djvu/40

18 people meddle with ordering there is no longer any master ; each man for himself endeavours to be one." We may look at home to-day, and ask ourselves if this is not still our history.

But I remind myself that I chose the subject of Madame de Motteville in order to distract my mind for a moment mine and my reader's if possible from the painful spectacle of our present dissensions [Dec. 1, 1851], and I do not wish to fall back to them by allusions which they supply but too freely.

Madame de Motteville ran some danger in Paris during the first Fronde. Not being able in the early days of 1649 to follow the fugitive queen to Saint-Germain, and wishing to rejoin her soon after, she was arrested, with her sister, at the Porte Saint-Honore* by a furious mob, and was forced to take refuge on the steps of the high altar at Saint-Roch, where some of her friends, hastily summoned, came to her rescue. She joined the queen a little later and quitted her again at certain times; for this distinguished woman was not, as she tells us humbly, an amazon or a heroine ; it was with difficulty that she rose above the terrors or even the inconveniences of her sex. Present or absent, however, her fidelity never failed. When peace was re-established, she resumed beside the queen the habits of her regular, gentle, serious life, which suited her so well. Her virtue, her delicate integrity in that world of treachery and ambush, exposed her, even to the last, to certain cavillings, over which her prudence and calmness, supported by the esteem of the queen-mother, enabled her to triumph. Religion took deeper and deeper hold on a soul made to welcome it and naturally ordained to it. This enlightened and submissive religion has dictated to her in these Memoirs certain pages, which are as charming as they are solid and sensible, on