ght over to her party the support of Spain,
together with her own long experience. She was then nearly fifty years
old. Age and sorrow, it is true, had dimmed the lustre of her beauty;
but she was still abounding in attraction, and her firm glance, her
decision, her quick and accurate perception, her dauntless courage and
genius, were yet entire. She had there also found a last friend in the
Marquis de Laigues, captain of the Duke d'Orleans' guards, a man of
sense and resolution, whom she loved to the end, and whom, after the
decease of the Duke de Chevreuse in 1657, she linked probably with her
own destiny by one of those "marriages of conscience"[4] then somewhat
fashionable. It was not our purpose to follow her step by step through
the last civil war, and so plunge the reader into the labyrinth of the
Fronde intrigues. Suffice it to say, therefore, that she played therein
one of the most prominent parts. Attached, heart and soul, to that
faction and its essential interests, she steered it through all the
shoals and quicksands which encircled it with incomparable skill and
vigour. After having so long enlisted the support of Spain, she knew the
proper moment to effect a timely separation from it. She always
preserved her great influence over the Duke de Lorraine, and it is not
difficult to recognize her hidden hand behind the different and often
contrary movements of Charles IV. She had a principal share in the three
great movements which mark and link together the entire history of the
Fronde between the war in Paris and the peace of Ruel. In 1650 she was
inclined to prefer Mazarin to Conde, and she ventured to advise laying
hands on the victor of Rocroy and Lens. In 1651--an interval of
incertitude for Mazarin, who very nearly ensnared himself in the meshes
of his own craftiness and a too-complicated line of conduct--a great
interest, the well-founded hope of marrying her daughter Charlotte to
the Prince de Conti, brought her back once more to the Conde party, and
hence the deliverance of the imprisoned Princes. In 1652, the
accumulated blunders of Conde brought her back again and for ever to
Anne of Austria and Mazarin. She did not endorse De Retz's foolish idea
of constructing a third party during the revolt, nor dream of a
government shared between Conde and Mazarin, with a worn-out parliament
and the fickle Duke d'Orleans. Her politic instinct told her that, after
an intestine struggle so long sustained, a solid a