MADAME DE LONGUEVILLE COQUETS WITH THE DUKE DE NEMOURS.

His determination to unsheath the sword once taken, CondÉ put his plans into execution without throwing one glance behind him. Having collected together in Berri his family and chief supporters, he distributed amongst them the several parts they had to play in their common enterprise. After this, accompanied by La Rochefoucauld, he went to take possession of his new government of Guienne, and there raise the standard of insurrection, leaving in Berri his wife and son, his sister, the Prince de Conti, the Duke de Nemours, with the President ViolÉ and others whom he nominated to important functions. He had placed his brother at the head of affairs there, and given the military command to the Duke de Nemours. But the result of these arrangements was disappointing to him. The Duke de Nemours undoubtedly possessed the most brilliant courage, but he had neither the talents nor the steadiness of a general. Still absorbed with his passion for Madame de ChÂtillon, who, as has been said, had long retained him in the party of peace, he found in Berri a counter-attraction in Madame de Longueville who drew him towards that of war; and it would seem that he occupied himself more with paying court to the lovely lady than of raising and arming soldiers and making Berri a focus of resistance, both political and military; for very speedily the Prince de Conti and he were reduced to defend themselves in Bourges instead of being able to operate in the open and make any advance. The new Minister ChÂteauneuf showed himself worthy of the confidence of Madame de Chevreuse and the Fronde. He made the Queen understand that it was necessary to combat the revolt foot to foot from its very first step, and he persuaded her to march herself with the young King into Berri at the head of a strong army. He nobly inaugurated the new ministry by that measure, which had two objects: the one direct and immediate, to strangle the insurrection at its birth; the other still more important, to set royalty at liberty far from Duke Gaston and the Parliament. The city of Bourges, which had shown so much enthusiasm on CondÉ’s arrival, opened its gates to the King and ChÂteauneuf. The strong tower which defended the city, offering no resistance, was taken without a blow being struck, and instantly demolished. The Princess de CondÉ, her son, Madame de Longueville, Conti, and Nemours were forced to take refuge hastily in the citadel of Montrond. On learning that Palluan was advancing on that fortress, Conti and Nemours not wishing that the precious pledges confided to their charge should incur any risk, left the Marquis de Persan in Montrond, and with what remained to them of their faithful troops escorted the Princess, her son, and Madame de Longueville as far as Guienne, which they reached by the end of the month of October.

It was during that rapid journey and their very brief sojourn in Berri that certain obscure relations, it would appear, were formed between the Duke de Nemours and Madame de Longueville, the report of which reaching Bordeaux, exaggerated probably by interested and malevolent underlings, wounded La Rochefoucauld and drove him to a violent rupture. A loyal and confiding explanation might have sufficed to disperse a cloud, such as at times will obscure the most settled friendships. La Rochefoucauld brewed a storm out of it which, thanks to his Memoirs, has sent its echoes down to posterity. His separation from Madame de Longueville was marked by an eagerness which excites the suspicion that he had longed for it.[77] He ought at least to have stopped there, but hurried away by an implacable resentment, he accused her, or caused her to be accused by CondÉ, of having wished to betray his interests to serve those of the Duke de Nemours, giving her even to understand that “if a like prepossession took her for another, she was capable of going to the same extremities if that person desired it.”[78] The accusation is yet more absurd than odious. The Duke de Nemours was not the least in the world a party chief; he was a friend of CondÉ, whose fidelity could only be shaken through his love for Madame de ChÂtillon. To detach him from Madame de ChÂtillon was therefore to give him wholly to CondÉ. Moreover, Madame de ChÂtillon, like La Rochefoucauld, was for peace, she had won over the Duke de Nemours to it, and both together urged CondÉ thereto. To carry off the Duke de Nemours from such conspiracy and to seduce him to the war party, was to serve the interests of CondÉ like as his sister intended. Thus the principal and the dominant motive of Madame de Longueville’s conduct was just the opposite of that which La Rochefoucauld imputed to her. Let us add further that she had always had a rivalry of beauty with Madame de ChÂtillon, and that her vanity was not sorry to humiliate a rival whom she did not tolerate by depriving her for a few days of a lover of whose attachment the latter fancied herself perfectly secure. Love and the senses had nothing to do with it in this matter. The gratification of the senses, it has already been remarked, did not ensnare her; she was proof against their surprises. Previously the Duke de Nemours had addressed his ardent homage to her, but all the attractions of his handsome person and his lofty bearing had made no impression upon her, and she only bestowed a thought on the amiable Duke when she had some interest to forward by reviving such conquest. And this is not an opinion hazarded at a venture; it is furnished us by a person thoroughly well informed, and who had no affection for Madame de Longueville; the testimony therefore is the more valuable: “M. de Nemours[79] previously had not much pleased her, and notwithstanding the attachment he appeared to entertain for her, as well as all the good qualities and grand airs of which he could boast, she had found nothing charming about him save the pleasure he showed himself desirous of giving her by abandoning Madame de ChÂtillon for herself, and that which she had of depriving a woman whom she did not like of a friend of so much consequence.” Now how far had this liaison of a few days gone? Bussy is the only contemporary who offers any reply to this question in the cynical light of his Histoire amoreuse des Gaules. But who would accept that satire literally? It proves only one thing, the unfortunate notoriety which the imprudence of Madame de Longueville derived from the Memoirs of La Rochefoucauld published in 1662. Before those Memoirs saw the light, not a word is anywhere to be found on a point as obscure as it is delicate. After, Bussy was delighted to repeat La Rochefoucauld, and Madame de Longueville has thus fallen into the scandalous chronicle.

Let us abstain from defending her; although even we should be convinced that she knew where to stop in that dangerous game of coquetry, she is not the less culpable in our eyes both towards La Rochefoucauld and herself, and we do not hesitate to say that she went so far as to deserve the calumny. Doubtless she was justly hurt by the incertitude of La Rochefoucauld, who, after having plunged her into civil war in 1648 with no other motive than that of his own interest, would have made her abandon it in 1651 through the same motive still; which at one moment impelled her towards the Fronde, at another brought her back to the Court, at the will of his fickle hopes, and linked her with Madame de ChÂtillon for the purpose of engaging CondÉ in negotiations the success of which involved their separation and procured her a prison in Normandy. Yes—she had grave cause of complaint against La Rochefoucauld. She might have quitted him, it is true, but not for another. She had only one means of covering, of almost condoning the single error of her life, which was to maintain faithful to it, or to renounce it for virtue and Heaven. And it is just that which Madame de Longueville appears to have done, if that sad and rapid episode had remained unknown; but there is no favourable shade for those personages who appear in the glaring front of the stage of this world; their slightest actions do not escape the formidable light of history: the weakness of a moment is recorded as an irredeemable error against them. That of Madame de Longueville, fugitive as it may have been, dubious even as it was, sufficed to tarnish a fidelity until then victorious over so many trials; it needed to be atoned for by the sincere conversion which was speedily about to follow it, and by five-and-twenty years of the severest penitence; and still further it forces us to place Anne de Bourbon, in the record of great sentiments and exalted loves, above Heloise and Mademoiselle de la ValliÈre.

At any rate the assurance is consoling that this error, which we have attempted neither to conceal nor extenuate, is the single one perceptible in the private life of Madame de Longueville. But let us turn aside from these wretched instances of feminine fragility in one of the loftiest minds, in order to follow CondÉ and the march of events in Guienne.

We will first, however, by a brief retrospect, endeavour to render the shifting phases of the two Fronde wars more capable of being easily followed.

Dating from the arrest of Broussel, nothing could exceed the rapidity of events; the wheel of fortune had turned with such terrific mobility for those of her favourites who sought to attach themselves to it. The revolt had, in fact, broken out on the 26th of August, 1648; in January, 1649, the Court withdrew to Saint Germain, at the risk of never re-entering Paris; in April, the sword of CondÉ imposed the treaty of Saint Germain, and the King returned in October. Mazarin shortly afterwards believed himself strong enough to arrest, in January, 1650, CondÉ, Conti, and Longueville. A year after that bold coup d’État he was himself obliged to flee (February, 1651) from his enemies, and quit France. At the end of eight months, Mazarin returned with an army to the aid of royalty; but it required two years of negotiations, intrigues, and patient waiting, it needed the errors which the indecision of the Duke d’Orleans brought about, the rash violence of CondÉ, urged onwards by his sister, it required, indeed, the entire ruin of France ere the Cardinal could, after having led the young King by the hand to the very gates of his capital, resume that place in the Louvre which he had sagaciously abandoned.

It is difficult to narrate occurrences in their proper order during this period: intrigues, broken promises, pledges given to two different parties at the same time, such were the smallest misdeeds of all these princes and prelates. As one step further in wrong-doing, they entered into negotiations with the foreigner, and invited armies across the frontier which devastated the provinces. And through what motives? Gondy wished to avenge his former mistress, whom Conti had rejected, and whom an agent of CondÉ, Maillard the shoemaker, had publicly insulted. CondÉ’s pretensions were nothing less than dragging at his heels a squad of governors of towns and provinces who, at his summons, would be ever ready to raise the standard of revolt and to impose the will of their leader upon the head of the state, whether Minister, Queen, or King. Orleans would not yield one jot to his young cousin of the blood-royal, CondÉ; Madame de Longueville feared the severity of an outraged husband. The civil war, in forcing her to flee from one end of France to the other, or abroad, could alone delay her return to Normandy, her re-establishment beneath the conjugal roof, towards which she had conceived such an aversion.

CondÉ accused Gondy in the Parliament chamber of being author of a factum condemning severely the Prince’s conduct. La Rochefoucauld, getting Gondy between two doors, treacherously seized, and was about to strangle him, had not the son of the first President, M. de Champlatreux, come to the rescue, at the very moment that one of the bullies in CondÉ’s pay had drawn his dagger to despatch him.

Two days afterwards (17th of September) the King had attained his thirteenth year, and one day beyond; and by the ordonnance of Charles V. became of age and capable of governing for himself.

A change of ministry—ChÂteauneuf being recalled to head the Council and MolÉ to the Seals—deprived CondÉ of all hope of imposing the conditions of a reconciliation; therefore, as has been said, at a Council held at Chantilly with his chief adherents, Conti, and the Dukes de Nemours and La Rochefoucauld, he determined to set out for Berri. The impartial student who examines the conduct of the Prince de CondÉ is at this juncture compelled to draw an indictment against him, under pain of belying his conscience and the truth; he must concede that CondÉ rashly engaged in civil war, and exerted himself to drag France into it, solely because he could not endure any authority above his own. He was desirous of being first in the State, of disposing at will among his creatures of honours, dignities, strongholds, and governments. On such conditions, he would have consented to let Mazarin, Orleans, De Retz, or any other, govern the realm, for the administration of which he felt himself that he had neither the slightest inclination nor the smallest capacity (October, 1651).

The Fronde is reputed, not without reason, to have been one of the most interesting as well as diverting periods in French history; that in which the volatile and frivolous vivacity of the national character shone with irresistible comicality. How striking was the contrast between it in its main features and the great Civil War waged at the same time in our own country! Yet the Fronde had its serious—terrible aspect, too, in the wide-spread misery it entailed upon France, as may be seen from the valuable statistical researches of M. Feillet. That writer cites the following passage from the record of an eye-witness of what he describes:[80]—“No tongue can tell, no pen describe, no ear may hear that which we have seen (at Rheims, ChÂlons, Rethel, &c). Famine and death on all sides, and bodies unburied. Those remaining alive pick up from the fields the rotten oat-straw, and make bread of it by mixing it with mud. Their faces are quite black; they have no longer the semblance of human beings, but that of phantoms.... War has placed every one on an equality; nobility lies upon straw, dares not beg, and dies.... Even lizards are eaten, and dogs which have been dead perhaps some eight days.... Moreover, in Picardy, a band of five hundred children, orphans, and under seven years of age, was met with. In Lorraine, the famished nuns quitted their convents and became mendicants: the poor creatures gave themselves up to be dishonoured for the sake of a morsel of bread. No pity, no remorse. An execrable and sanguinary war upon the weak. In the heart of the city of Rheims, a beautiful girl was chased from street to street for ten days by the licentious soldiery; and as they could not catch her, they killed her by shooting her down. In the vicinity of Angers, Alais, and Condom, upon all the highways of Lorraine, women and children were indiscriminately outraged, and left to die drenched in their blood.”

What could be more diverting? The Duke de Lorraine—that restless knight-errant who preferred amusing himself with civil war to the quiet enjoyment of his throne—amused the noble ladies of his acquaintance with a recital of these pleasant incidents; his gallant army, he said, was quite a providence for the old women....

After further pursuing his appalling statistics of the misery and horrors inflicted by the Fronde at a later date, M. Feillet remarks:—“And yet, notwithstanding all this suffering, which we have only cursorily sketched, at Court nothing else was thought of but fÊtes and diversions; for the young and brilliant bevy of Mazarin’s nieces had come to increase the circle of beauties whom the youthful King and his gay courtiers vied with each other in paying homage to, and entertaining. The warm attachment of Louis for more than one of his Minister’s nieces, and especially Marie de Mancini, is well known. In imitation of their Sovereign, the youthful nobility and a large portion of the city gallants plunged into unrestrained dissipation—intervals of licentiousness ever succeeding like periods of turbulence and anarchy. Such heartless indifference to the sufferings of the people on the part of the King and his Court evoked the following couplet, which was put into the mouth of Louis by a contemporary pamphleteer:—

“Si la France est en deuil, qu’elle pleure et soupire;
Pour moi, je veux chasser, galantiser et rire.”

But we are somewhat anticipating events, and therefore return to them in the order of time.