Note 183 — LETTERS TO MADAME DE GRIGNAN[11] FROM 1671 TO 1690. (continued 4)

To estimate the skillfulness of the panegyrist, it is proper to know the soil on which he labored. The life of Madame de Longueville presented the Abbé Roquette with strange circuitous roads to measure, before he brought her to the way of salvation, whither he conducted her. She was one of the three ladies of whom Cardinal de Mazarin said to Don Louis de Haro: “We have three, among others, who create greater confusion than arose at the tower of Babel.” Like Madame de Chevreuse and La Palatine, the part she took in the intrigues of the minority of Louis XIV. is notorious; like them, she united the triumphs of beauty to the success of factions, and the love of business to the love of amours. Voiture represents her as already serious and political, when, at an early age, she appeared at the Congress of Munster, where her husband presided over the French embassy. The Fronde began; her artifices and blandishments seduced the sage Turenne, when he came at the head of the Spaniards to give battle to the French. Beloved, not much in the style of a brother, by the Prince de Conti, she made him the chief of the Frondeurs, and general of the insurgents, thus opposing him to her other brother, the great Condé, who commanded the army of the court. It was she who afterward dragged this hero into the civil war, and joined him to the Spaniards. She long wandered as a heroine, or as Cardinal de Retz said, who had himself been her lover, as a fugitive adventurer. She went alternately, commanding or intriguing, to Holland, Flanders, Dieppe, Stenay, Montrond, Bordeaux. In 1649 she reigned in the Hôtel-de-ville of Paris, and did what no one had ever done before, nor will perhaps do after her, she lay-in there; and that at a time when this hotel served as a palace to the court, as the seat of government, and as the head-quarters of the army. Two of her lovers, the Count de Coligny and the Duke de Nemours, were killed in a duel. The first fought by her orders, in her quarrel, and under her inspection. The Duke de la Rochefoucault, who had long loved her, was betrayed by her, both as a friend and as a lover. When the peace of the Pyrénées had brought back the princes to France, it was found that age prescribed repose to her, at the same time that the state of affairs obliged her to it. She endeavored at first to escape it, by forming a party for Voiture’s sonnet against Benserades. But these little contests of wit were insipid, in comparison with those she had been engaged in. Nothing remained for her but devotion; and as a character and a party were always essential to her, she became the protectress of the Jansenists at court, and, what is more, mediatrix between them and Rome. For it was Madame de Longueville who in 1668 mediated the theological transaction which suspended the debates of the Formulary, and which was called the peace of Clement IX. Singular woman! who had the art of making herself conspicuous while working out her salvation, and of saving herself on the same plank from perdition and from ennui. It was asserted at the time, that she died for want of food, and there is no doubt she practiced the most rigid austerities. “Though naturally delicate,” says Madame de Maintenon, “she never relaxed in the practice of self-denial.” There is a life of this lady in two volumes by Villefore, which is said to be well written.