Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/110

96 misfortunes which she had drawn upon herself. I entreated her to consider of what fickleness she would be thought capable, and what interpretation would be given to this fickleness, should she prefer Cardinal Mazarin to Madame de Chevreuse. This conversation was long and stormy; I saw clearly that I had incensed her." However, he went to meet the duchess on the road to Brussels, and encountered her at Roye. Montagu had preceded him. La Rochefoucauld came in the name of the queen; Montagu in the name of Mazarin. This was no longer the brilliant Montagu, the friend of Holland and of Buckingham and the impassioned cavalier of Madame de Chevreuse, age had changed him also; he had turned devotee, and he entered the church a few years after. He still remained attached to the object of his former adoration; but before all else, he belonged to the queen, and consequently, to the interests of Mazarin.

He came to place the homage of the prime minister at the feet of Madame de Chevreuse, and to strive to ally the old and the new favorites. La Rochefoucauld, always eager to assume a prominent character together with the air of a great politician, asserts that he "entreated Madame de Chevreuse not to attempt to rule the queen at first, but simply to endeavor to regain the place in her heart and affections of which she had been deprived, and to place herself in a position some day to protect or to destroy the cardinal, according to circumstances and his future course of conduct." Madame de Chevreuse wished also to hear the counsels of another of her friends—less illustrious but more devoted—that Alexandre de Campion, whom she had known two years before at Brussels, and who,