nd durable power was
the greatest necessity of France. Mazarin, who, like Richelieu, had
never opposed her but with regret, sought for, and was very glad to
follow her advice. She passed over, therefore, with flying colours to
the side of royalty, served it, and in return received its services.
After Mazarin, she predicted the talent in Colbert, before he was
appointed to office; she laboured at his elevation and the ruin of
Fouquet: and the proud but judicious Marie de Rohan gave her grandson,
the Duke de Chevreuse, the friend of Beauvilliers and Fenelon, to the
daughter of a talented burgess--the greatest financial administrator
France ever had. Thenceforward she readily obtained all she could desire
for herself and for her family; and thus having reached the summit of
renown and consideration, like her two illustrious sister-politicians,
Madame de Longueville and the Princess Palatine, she finished in
profound peace one of the most agitated careers of that stormiest of
epochs--the seventeenth century.

[4] See "Memoirs of Brienne the Younger," tom. ii. chap. xix., p.
178. "Le Marquis de Laigues qui certainement etoit mari de
conscience de la Duchesse."

It is said that the Duchess also, towards the close of her earthly
pilgrimage, felt the influence of divine grace, and turned heavenwards
her gaze, wearied with the changefulness of all sublunary things. She
had seen successively fall around her all whom she had either loved or
hated--Richelieu and Mazarin, Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria, the Queen
of England, Henrietta Maria, and her amiable daughter the Duchess
d'Orleans, Chateauneuf, and the Duke of Lorraine. Her fondly loved
daughter had expired in her arms, of fever, during the miserable war of
the Fronde. He who had been the first to lure her from the path of
duty--the handsome but frivolous Holland--had ascended the scaffold with
Charles I.; and her last friend, much younger than herself, the Marquis
de Laigues, had preceded her to the tomb.

Arrived at length but too clearly at the conviction that she had given
up her mind to chimeras and illusions, and seeking self-mortification
through the same sentiment which had brought about her ruin, the
once-haughty Duchess became the humblest of women. Renouncing all
worldly grandeur, she quitted her splendid mansion in the Faubourg St.
Germain, built by Le Muet, and retired into the country--not to
Dampierre, which would have only too vividly recalled