Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/118

104 thus: "The one who had conceived the greatest hopes was the Duke de Beaufort; he had long been warmly attached to the queen. She had just given him a public token of her esteem by confiding the Dauphin and the Duke d'Anjou to his care on the day that the king received the extreme unction. The Duke de Beaufort, on his part, availed himself of this distinction and of his other advantages to bring himself into favor by affecting to believe that she was already firmly established in the government. He was large, well-made, enduring, and skilled in all kinds of exercises; he was haughty and audacious, but artificial in every thing and very unreliable; his wit was heavy and unpolished, though he often attained his ends through the artifice of his blunt manners; he was envious and malicious, and his valor, though great, was unequal." Retz does not, like La Rochefoucauld, accuse Beaufort of artifice, but he represents him as a presumptuous egotist of marked incapacity: "M. de Beaufort had not even comprehended the idea of great designs, he had only aspired to them; he had heard them discussed among the Importants and had retained some of their jargon, and this, mixed with the expressions which he had borrowed verbatim from Madame de Vendôme, formed a language which would have disfigured even the good sense of a Cato. His own was dull and scanty, and was also rendered more obscure by his conceit. He fancied himself able, and this it was that made him seem artful, for it is well known that he had not mind enough for intrigue. He possessed much personal courage, more, in fact, than often belongs to a blusterer." This portrait, exaggerated as it is after the manner of Retz, is nevertheless tolerably faithful; but at the beginning of the regency in 1643, the faults of the Duke de