e Hotel de Longueville disguised
as a doctor, his features being concealed by an ample wig. M. Singlin
strove to fix limits to the ardour by which Madame de Longueville was
carried away, he counselled her to remain in the outer world, to which
her husband and children bound her, and in which her salvation, he said,
might be as surely accomplished by exacting more vigilance than it would
be found necessary to exercise in the retirement of the cloister.

Madame de Longueville's piety had been generally subordinated to the
vicissitudes of a very agitated existence. Her primitive tendency to
devotion was rekindled on every occasion that she experienced a trouble,
a disenchantment, or any failure of courage. In 1651, when she had been
somewhat compromised by the homage of the Duke de Nemours, she had
retired to the Carmelite convent at Bourges; then towards the end of her
sojourn in Guienne she had sought refuge among the Benedictines at
Bordeaux. But all these gleams of repentance vanished so soon as some
caprice of fortune came to reawaken, by the hope of fresh success, her
natural inclination for political intrigue and pleasure. On accompanying
her husband to Normandy she appeared wholly resolved not to allow
herself to be engrossed by anything save her eternal welfare. However,
it appears that her desire to abstain henceforward from all political
intrigue was looked upon incredulously for several years; since, in
1659, at the time of the Treaty of the Pyrenees being signed, Mazarin,
replying to Don Louis de Haro, who required that the French Minister
should restore Conde "to all his birthrights," still placed, as we have
noticed, Madame de Longueville among the feminine trio, who, said he,
"would be capable of governing or of overturning three great kingdoms."
Yet Mazarin yielded, and Conde returned to France.

The long and rigid penitence which she imposed upon herself, and which
Madame de Motteville characterised by the expressive term--"very
august," restored to her somewhat of that importance which she was
desirous of renouncing through humility. But the world is ever
distrustful on the score of a repentance which has some tinge of
ostentation about it. One historian remarks that "the Duchess de
Longueville being unable to dispense with intrigues, after she had
renounced those of love and politics, found sufficient to satisfy her in
devotion." This sentence, read aright, would mean that the schisms of
Catholicism ga