Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/17

Rh enemy encountered in turn by Richelieu and by Mazarin. The reader will easily divine that we speak of Madame de Hautefort and of Madame de Chevreuse.

Need we add that we do not intend to trace here fancy portraits, and that if we sometimes seem to recount romantic adventures, it is in conformity with all the rigor of the laws of history. These sketches, though fanciful in appearance, are worthy of the fullest confidence, and will soon be acknowledged as resting upon the testimony of approved cotemporary witnesses, or upon authentic documents as reliable as new, which will bear the scrutiny of the most exacting critic.

We commence with Madame de Chevreuse. She dates further back in the seventeenth century than does Madame de Hautefort—she at least precedes if she does not excel her. It must also be said that she filled a more lofty station, and played a more conspicuous part, and that her name belongs as much to the history of the politics as of the society of her age.

Madame de Chevreuse in truth possessed almost all the qualities of a great politician, a single one was wanting, and it was the one precisely without which all the others ran to waste—she did not know how to propose to herself a just aim, or rather she never chose one for herself; it was another that chose for her. Madame de Chevreuse was a woman in the fullest sense—in this was her strength, and also her weakness. Her first impulse was love, or rather gallantry, and the interests of the one whom she loved became her chief aim. Here lies the solution of the prodigies of sagacity, adroitness and energy which she displayed in vain in the pursuit of a chimera, which