Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/20

6 and also in the picture of, which represents her as a widow and aged. We feel in this last portrait that her dazzling beauty has passed away, but that acuteness, dignity, vivacity and grace are still surviving.

Marie de Rohan belonged to that ancient and illustrious family, the issue of the first sovereigns of Brittany, which, with its different branches, without counting its alliances, spread itself over, and long possessed, a considerable part of Brittany, dividing itself almost equally between the Catholic and the Protestant party in the sixteenth, and the commencement of the seventeenth centuries, zealously obeying royalty, and holding it in check by turns, and whose hereditary traits, strongly marked in both sexes, were loftiness of soul, bravery, and constancy. At the, two women, after enduring all the rigors of famine with the meanest of the soldiers, and subsisting like them upon horseflesh, chose rather to remain as prisoners in the hands of the enemy than to sign the articles of capitulation. These were the mother and the sister of the celebrated Duke de Rohan, one of our greatest warriors before Condé, and unquestionably our greatest military writer before Napoleon. The wife of this same defended Castres against the Marshal de Thémines. During the lapse of centuries, this noble house has not ceased to produce heroines of a resolute spirit, as well as beauties more brilliant than severe. In this respect, she whose history we are about to trace, showed no degeneracy from her race, she was truly of the blood of the Rohans.

She was daughter of Hercules de Rohan, Duke de