d capable of reducing them to order and
unity. The dynasty, in fact, which reigned at Madrid at that juncture
had passed from incapacity to impotence, and henceforward there only
remained to Spain her _law of succession_ to rescue her from her
abasement. The miserable Charles II. was then making and unmaking his
will continually--sometimes indicating a prince of Bavaria as his
successor, at others a prince of the house of Austria. At last he chose,
as has been said, a grandson of Louis XIV., in the hope of interesting
France in the preservation of the duality of the monarchy. Two years
afterwards one half of Europe was in arms to hurl the youthful Philip
from his throne.

[14] Memoirs of Count de Rebenac's Embassy to Spain in 1689, MS. No.
63, fol. 224, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

CHAPTER II.

THE PRINCESS DES URSINS.

THE MARRIED LIFE OF MARIE ANNE DE LA TREMOUILLE--SHE BECOMES THE CENTRE
OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN ROME.

AMONG the heroines of the Fronde there were certainly lofty minds and
strongly tempered souls to be found; but, when the French nation
remitted to those Erminias and Hermengildas the care of its destiny upon
some grave emergency or decisive occasion, those very women so
conspicuous for their generous impulses, delicate tastes, and unsparing
self-abnegation, only profited by their possession of power to
inaugurate a policy the record of which has remained branded with
opprobrium in history as a treason to their country. The bare
remembrance, indeed, of those sterile agitations proves the first rock
upon which the memory of the Princess des Ursins suffered shipwreck. In
the brilliant daughter of the Duke de Noirmoutier, heiress of a name
mixed up with all the struggles of that epoch, we behold a last survivor
of the Regency, and the dramatic vicissitudes of a life devoted to the
pursuit of political power, have blinded the mental vision of posterity
to the grandeur of a work of which that eminent woman was the principal
instrument. Proud and restless, as largely dominated as any other of her
sex by the vivacity of her preferences and her dislikes, but full of
sound sense in her views and in the firmness of her designs, the skilful
adviser of a King and Queen of Spain has not received at the hands of
posterity the merit due to an idea pursued with a wonderful perseverance
amidst obstacles which would have daunted men even of the strongest
resolution. Because her public car