Truly we may smile to hear the author of the Mémoires and the Maximes say in the portrait which he has left us of himself: “Ambition does not move me ... I have virtuous sentiments ... I can keep a secret, and I have less difficulty than others in keeping to myself what has been told me in confidence.... I love my friends, and my love is of such a nature that I would not hesitate to sacrifice my interests to theirs.” Segrais was hard to suit with eulogy, or he had not read the above passages, when he said that La Rochefoucauld never praised himself.⁠[67] Madame de Longueville would have recognized La Rochefoucauld by the following traits: “I am not incapable of avenging myself if I have been offended, and when it concerns my honor to resent an injury committed against me; on the contrary, I should be sure that duty would perform so well in me the office of hatred, that I would pursue my revenge with greater vigor than another.” The true portrait of La Rochefoucauld is that which has been drawn by Retz.⁠[68] “There has always been something indescribable in M. de La Rochefoucauld: he took pleasure in intrigues at an early age, and at a time when he did not trouble himself with little things, never a weakness with him, and at a time, too, when he was unacquainted with great ones, which were not his forte; he never had much capacity for business ... his views were not sufficiently extended ... he always had an habitual irresolution ... he was never a warrior, though a very good soldier; he was never of himself a good courtier, although he had the best intention to be one; he was never a good party man, though all his life a partisan.... All these things, together with his Maximes, which do not exhibit much faith in virtue, and his policy which has always been to withdraw from business with as much impatience as he engaged in it, makes me conclude that he would have done much better to have known himself, and to have passed, as he might have done, for the most polished courtier, and for the most civil man in common life which his century produced.”

As to Madame de Longueville, she is certainly far from being perfect, and perhaps she would have been less loved had she been so; but amid the follies into which passion plunged her, we feel at least that interest is nothing to her. The defect of which she continually accuses herself, is the desire of pleasing and of appearing. The only injury which she committed against La Rochefoucauld was that momentary display of giddiness and coquetry during the journey from Guyenne. This was her real stain. All the rest of her conduct in the Fronde is explained and easily defended when viewed as we have indicated.

Besides, no one’s conduct in the Fronde should be regarded in too serious a light, for the Fronde was not a serious affair;⁠[69] it was a series of intrigues, in which no one had any other object than interest, vanity, love of importance, with gallantry, and pleasure. Princes thought only of themselves, of increasing their authority and their fortune; and to this end, they went by turns from one party to another according to events and to the daily changes around them. Condé, the prominent person in the drama, and the only one who with his rival Mazarin merits a place in history, despised at bottom all parties; but in the end he fixed his mind upon a place incompatible with royal grandeur. His natural inclination was to the side of the Court: the Fronde, properly speaking, and the parliament were odious to him, and he never served them except with great disrelish. His chief spring of action was war, for which he had a genius; and this it was which, after much deliberation and hesitation, finally carried him away. The parliament, forgetting its part and its duties, was agitated by young lords—burlesque tribunes. The people of Paris were set in commotion: they were excited against the Court; but as soon as serious reforms and a convocation of the States-General were talked of, the parliament took alarm, and receded as well as the opposing party.⁠[70] The only use of the Fronde, in the admirable economy of our history, has been to strengthen the royal power, to make every one sensible of its absolute necessity, and to promote, perhaps to excess, the work of Louis XI., of Henri IV., and of Richelieu. Under the League, two great opinions, two great causes, were in hostility. The League also produced minds, stamped characters, was a school of politics and of war, and formed the strong men of the first half of the seventeenth century. The Fronde is in our annals an episode without grandeur; it formed no one, either a warrior or a statesman; the nation took very little part in it, because it felt that in it no great interest was at stake; it was a pastime for gentlemen, for wits, and belles. To the ladies especially the Fronde belonged: they were at once its motive power and its instruments, its most interested actors; and among them Madame de Longueville played the most conspicuous part.

IV.

We should be tempted to be more severe towards the faults of more than one kind into which she was drawn by her sad connection with La Rochefoucauld if she herself had felt less remorse, if her repentance had not been so long and so severe. Her errors began at the close of 1647, or during the first months of 1648—they did not extend beyond 1652; her remorse ceased only with her life in 1679. Madame de Longueville was roused to reflection in 1653: she became converted in the middle of the year 1654. At this period she was thirty-five years of age, and in all the splendor of her beauty. For a long time yet she might have enjoyed the pleasures of life and of the world. She renounced them to devote herself unreservedly and forever to God. During twenty-five years, in Normandy, among the Carmelites, and at Port-Royal, she lived only for duty and repentance, seeking to become dead to every thing that had formerly occupied her life—the cares of her beauty, the tendernesses of the heart, the graceful employments of the mind. But in the dress of hair-cloth as well as in fashionable attire, among the Carmelites and at Port-Royal as well as at the hôtel de Rambouillet and in the Fronde, she preserved what she could never lose—an angelic face, a mind charming in the most extreme negligence, with a certain loftiness of soul and character. This third and last epoch of the life of Madame de Longueville, will here be presented as fully as the subject demands: therein we shall see, in all its truth, a devotion continually increasing, and more and more scrupulous, sometimes reducing her to the most pitiful condition, sometimes elevating her to an admirable grandeur; as, for example, in her struggles, after the death of her husband, with her brother Condé, in regard to her two sons, and in the defence which she undertook of persecuted Port-Royal.

We do not think that we debase Mademoiselle de Lavallière by comparing with her Madame de Longueville. It is true that the loves of Mademoiselle de Lavallière move us in a very different manner from those which we shall have to relate. In setting aside the circumstance of royalty, which in this case forms the disagreeable side, and which is always somewhat injurious to true and disinterested love, Louis XIV. was much better calculated to please than La Rochefoucauld; he was much younger and much more handsome; he was, or appeared to be, a great man and a hero. He adored Mademoiselle de Lavallière at once with an impetuous ardor and with the most delicate tenderness, and his passion continued for a long time. Mademoiselle de Lavallière loved the king as she would have loved a simple gentleman. It is this which gives her a separate place among the favorites of Louis XIV., and places her far above Madame de Montespan, and especially above Madame de Maintenon. It cannot be denied that Madame de Longueville loved with the same disinterestedness and the same abandonment; but her affection was ill bestowed, but she mingled with it wit and vanity, but she became giddy and coquettish. Thus far the comparison is entirely against her. But, besides, she was far superior to Mademoiselle de Lavallière. She was incomparably more beautiful and more intellectual. Her soul was also more proud. At the least suspicion of change in the affection of Louis XIV., she would have fled from the court; while Mademoiselle de Lavallière remained in it some time, in the presence of her proud, triumphing rival, thinking that by force of humility, of patience, and of devotion, she would reconquer the heart that she had lost. And then, what better could she do than to enter a cloister? Would she not have rendered herself contemptible by remaining in the world, by giving to society the spectacle of a favorite of the king consoling herself, like Madame de Soubise, for the inconstancy of her royal lover, in the enjoyment of a fortune sadly acquired and shamefully preserved! In entering the convent of the Carmelites, Mademoiselle de Lavallière did no more than she was compelled to do. There is in the conversion and retirement of Madame de Longueville something more free and more unusual, and to glorify her penitence, nothing is wanting but the voice of Bossuet. If the incomparable orator who had consecrated to God Louise de La Miséricorde, and who, at a later period, had made his words equal in greatness to the actions of Condé, if his voice had been heard at the celebration of the obsequies of Anne de Bourbon, Christian letters would have counted another masterpiece, of which the funeral oration of the Princess Palatine may give us some idea, and the name of Madame de Longueville would be surrounded with an immortal halo.