husband during adversity, and the
zeal she showed for his interests and for those of her son during the
Guienne campaign, ought to compensate for the misfortune of not having
been able to merit, by more eminent virtues, a more brilliant and widely
celebrated reputation."

Here, then, it seems incumbent upon us to divine, from the _facon de
parler_ of that day, what were _the eminent virtues_ which the Princess
de Conde needed to deserve the esteem of her husband; or to ask whether
tried fidelity, courage, devotedness, were not then ranked among the
eminent virtues. They were so, no doubt; and it is probable that what
Madame de Motteville understands by those words, was the eminence of
qualities peculiar to the women, who more than ever in her day derived
from them a species of celebrity which closely resembled glory--the
eclat of beauty, wit, grace, intrepidity, and power of charming; in a
word, that which was possessed in so high a degree by a Madame de
Longueville, a Madame de Chevreuse, a Marie de Hautefort, and a
Mademoiselle du Vigean.

Whatever might have been the personal merit of the wife of the great
Conde, did the little she had justify the wretchedness of her destiny?
No: some beauty, wit, virtue, courage, a timid disposition perhaps, an
unpretending virtue, a courage even mediocre, easily overthrown, and
which needed the pressure of circumstances and danger for its
development,--in all this there was nothing to invoke the ire of the
implacable sisters.

In contemplating her truly deplorable existence, afflicted from its
beginning to its end by every kind of grief and humiliation, one can
scarcely resist the idea of the ascendency of an invincible fatality,
making her a victim of the irresistible force of events and destiny. The
woes of Claire de Breze commenced in her earliest childhood. At the time
of her marriage to the Duke d'Enghien she had lost her mother some six
years, that parent having died in 1635. What befell her infancy,
abandoned to the neglect of a fantastic and libertine father, ruled even
before his widowhood by a mistress, the wife of one of his lacqueys,
whom he killed one day during a hunting match in order to get him out of
the way; of a father who, Tallemant tells us, carelessly remarked, when
his daughter's marriage was agreed upon--as though she belonged to some
one else--"They are going to make a princess of that little girl!"

She was destined, nevertheless, to have her hour of