Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/100

86 as does the fact that neither the fatigues of her long journeys, nor the ills of her rigorous fortune, have wrought any change in her natural magnanimity, nor, which is still more extraordinary, in her beauty.

Behold the seeming!—see now the reality. Madame de Chevreuse was then forty-three years of age. Her beauty, which had been tried by so many fatigues, was still surviving, but was beginning to decline. Her love for admiration still existed, but in a weaker degree, while her taste for politics took the lead. She had seen the most celebrated statesmen in Europe; she knew almost all the courts, with the strength and the weakness of the different governments, and she had gained in her journeyings a vast experience. She hoped to find Queen Anne such as she had left her, disliking business and very willing to let herself be guided by those for whom she had a particular affection; and as Madame de Chevreuse believed herself the first affection of the queen, she thought to exercise over her the two-fold ascendency of friendship and of talent. More ambitious for her friends than for herself, she saw them already recompensed for their long sacrifices, everywhere replacing the creatures of Richelieu, and at their head as prime minister, him for whom she had separated herself from the triumphant cardinal and had endured an imprisonment of ten years. She did not attach much importance to Mazarin, whom she did not know, whom she had never seen,