Page:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin.djvu/76

62 to the consequences which may result from them. . . . Believe that I desire so ardently to return, that I would overlook many things to do so; but there are some that stop me with so much reason, that it is absolutely necessary that I should still remain where I am. I feel the inconveniences of this exile too deeply to refrain from ending them as soon as I can see light. Meanwhile, it is better to suffer than to perish."

Thus vanished the last hopes of a sincere reconciliation between two persons who were at the same time attracted towards and repelled from each other by insurmountable instincts; who knew each other too well not to fear each other, or to confide in the promises of which neither was sparing without exacting binding pledges which neither could nor would be given. At Tours, two years before, Madame de Chevreuse had chosen rather to take for the second time the road to exile than to risk her liberty; at London, too, she preferred to endure the miseries of exile, and to consume the last days of her beauty in privation and fatigue if she might but remain free, with the hope of wearying fortune by the force of courage, and of making the author of her sufferings pay dearly for them.

In the middle of the year 1639, Marie de Medicis, weary of the wandering life that she was leading in the Netherlands at the mercy of the Spanish government, which had lavished promises on her in the hope of gaining her over to their party, and, on seeing her impotence, had then forsaken her, resolved to go to ask an asylum of her daughter, the Queen of England. Could the latter have refused this to her mother, aged, sick, and reduced to the last extremity? The pitiless Richelieu accuses Madame de Chevreuse of having supported and seconded the resolution of Queen Henriette.