Villefore has written the life of Madame de Longueville, and it is not our intention to re-write it. We have only wished to penetrate into the intimacy of a lofty spirit, that inspires us with an especial interest, by the aid of the most reliable documents that history can employ—confidential correspondences, in which hearts, opening themselves far from the eye of the public, involuntarily reveal characters, that is to say, the truest causes of human events. In order to procure such documents, we have delved, with the perseverance of passion, in libraries public and private, and have succeeded in laying hands upon a very great number of unpublished letters, which have elucidated for us many obscure points in the life of Mme. de Longueville, of that of Condé, her brother, of their most celebrated contemporaries, male and female.

In default, then, of every other merit, this production will at least have that of offering to the reader things hitherto unknown, or scarcely perceived: for example, the interior, for the first time opened, of that great convent of the Carmelites of the Rue Saint Jacques, which served as an asylum to so many wounded hearts, where Mlle. de Bourbon was, as it were, brought up, and wished, at fifteen years of age, to bury her beauty and her genius; the graceful pastimes of her youth at the Louvre, at the hôtel de Rambouillet, at Chantilly, at Ruel, at Liancourt; her charming friends, her brilliant and valiant adorers; the skilful and too little appreciated politics of her father; the military education, and also the first loves of Condé; above all, that pure and touching Mlle. Du Vigean, worthy object of the tenderness of a hero, whom we have in some sort found again, whom we dare to put by the side of Mlle. de La Vallière.

For more than fifteen years, in our hours of leisure, we have dreamed of a work the most foreign to our ordinary labors, which has attracted us, and attached us by its very contrast. The great men, and particularly the great writers, of the seventeenth century, are almost our contemporaries; but the women were then not less remarkable than the men, and scarcely any of them, except Mme. de Sévigné, Mme. de La Fayette, and a very few others, are known; whilst there were everywhere, at the court and in the salons of Paris, in the brilliant country-seats of the aristocracy, and in the austere retreats of religion, women of great spirit and great heart, who doubtless knew not how to write like professional authors, who nevertheless wrote much, because it was the mode of the times, who would not write in a mediocre manner, with the thoughts and sentiments on which they had been nourished. We have therefore amused ourselves in searching for, and we have succeeded in discovering a literature wholly feminine, three-quarters unknown, which does not seem to us unworthy of having a place by the side of the manly literature in possession of universal admiration. Hence the project of a gallery of illustrious females of the seventeenth century, upon the model of the illustrious men of Perrault. We have given the first page of such a history in Jacqueline Pascal;⁠[1] and this is probably the last. Age is coming on; the heavens are growing dark; and we owe ourselves to more serious thoughts, to a great cause which we have heretofore served with the ardor and the energy of youth, which to-day, compromised by some, betrayed by others, claims our last efforts, and our highest devotion.⁠[2] Nevertheless, we shall not regret the moments that we have given to these studies, somewhat light, if they can increase the knowledge of, and a taste for the most admirable epoch of our history, of that powerful French society of the seventeenth century, which is the more admired the more it is seen under its different aspects; when France was a spectacle to the nations, and marched at the head of humanity, when philosophy was an honor, as well as poetry and the arts, the religious spirit and the military spirit; when Descartes divided public esteem with Corneille and Condé; when Mme. de Grignan studied him with a passionate vivacity; when Bossuet and Arnauld, Fénelon and Malebranche, openly declared themselves his disciples. So that, to speak truly, at that common focus of the great and the beautiful, our literary predilections and our philosophic faith are tied to each other in an intimate manner, and reciprocally vivify each other.

But if the seventeenth century has more than ever our admiration, we guard ourselves from the too much accredited error that confounds that century with the reign of Louis XIV. Surely Louis XIV. is for us also a great king. He had, what is rarest in the world, grandeur in character; that is his immortal glory. Moreover, he was reserved, attentive, laborious, capable of a firm and persistent course; but, it must be said, he was profoundly selfish, and loved his person and his family much more than France. He was radically deceived in the only two enterprises that originated in his own will,—the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the wars of the Succession. He left France humiliated, enfeebled, discontented, and already full of the germs of revolutions; whilst Henry IV., Richelieu, and Mazarin had transmitted it to him covered with glory, powerful and preponderant abroad, tranquil and satisfied at home. Louis XIV. terminates the seventeenth century: he did not inspire it, and he is far from being its perfect representative. It was under Henry IV., under Louis XIII., and under Queen Anne, that were born, formed, and even developed, the great statesmen and the great warriors, as well as the greatest writers of either sex, those even, like Madame de Sévigné and Bossuet, whose career was most prolonged. The influence of Louis XIV. made itself felt sufficiently late. He took the reins of government only in 1661, and at first he followed his times, and did not control them; he truly appeared himself, only when he was no longer guided by Lyonne and Colbert, the last disciples of Richelieu and Mazarin. It was then that, governing almost alone and superior to all around him, he placed everywhere the impress of his taste, in politics, in religion, in manners, in arts, and in letters. He substituted in every way simplicity for naïveté, nobility for grandeur, dignity for force, elegance for grace: he effaced characters, and polished, as it were, the surface of souls; he eradicated great vices and great virtues; he put the purely literary, and consequently the somewhat inferior school of Racine and Boileau in the place of that great school of virtue, politics, and war, instituted by Corneille; as heirs to Descartes, Pascal, and Bossuet, he gave Massillon, Fontenelle, and Voltaire—the true children of the end of the seventeenth century. After Madame de Sévigné, that rival of Molière, formed, like him, from 1640 to 1660, appeared Mme. de Maintenon, the model of the common-place, with her agreeable small-talk, Mme. de Coylus, Mme. de Stael, and Mme. Lambert. Add to that, as we have already said, the wholly gratuitous revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when Protestants, subdued, but protected, rivalled in zeal the Catholics for the service of the state, and when their most illustrious families were by degrees converted; add especially, the deplorable wars undertaken by Louis XIV., with a ministry of court clerks and generals, in order to put the crown of Spain on the head of his grandson, when in exchange for his pretensions, and without drawing the sword, he might have given Belgium to France; and you have the end of a reign that little resembles its beginning; for the beginning comes from a wholly different genius—from that genius which inspired Henry IV., Richelieu, and Mazarin, dictated the Edict of Nantes, the treaty of Munster, and that of the Pyrenees, the Cid, Polyeucte, and Cinna, the Discours de la Méthode, and the Provinciales, Don Juan, and the Misanthrope, and the most pathetic sermons of Bossuet. It is genius that we recall, and glorify everywhere in this work; because to our eyes it is the genius itself of France at the epoch of her true greatness.

If the public receives these studies somewhat favorably, we shall offer to it their sequel; we will exhibit also Mme. de Longueville during the Fronde, and after her conversion, from 1649 to 1680. It is certainly not the least beautiful part of the seventeenth century.

V. Cousin.

December 15, 1852.