Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/11



the most admired of Victor Cousin's works are his "Studies of the Illustrious Women and the Society of the Seventeenth Century;" and of these none has excited so much attention as his "Life of Madame de Chevreuse." In this charming biography, which certainly reads very much like a romance, the author claims the merit of a scrupulous and exact adherence to the truth of history. He controverts many received opinions and forces the reader to abandon many established hypotheses, but he does it upon the incontestable evidence of cotemporary writers and of documents that, were supposed to be lost or not known to exist. Among these are a hitherto unknown memoir of Richelieu concerning the secret affairs of 1633, which produced the imprisonment of Châteauneuf, keeper of the seals; the unpublished examinations of La Porte and the Abbess of Val-de-Grâce in 1637; the autograph Carnets of Mazarin, explained and developed by the evidence of his secret police, and