softly
closed the curtains, "I do assure you, Madame," she said, "that if I had
served God with as much attachment and devotion as I have your Majesty
all my life, I should be a great saint." And, raising her eyes to the
crucifix, she added, "Thou knowest, Lord, what I have done for her." The
queen let her go to the convent where Mademoiselle de la Fayette had
taken refuge ten years before. Madame d'Hautefort left it ere long to
become the wife of Marshal Schomberg; but the party of the Importants was
dead, and the power of Cardinal Mazarin seemed to be firmly established.
"It was not the thing just then for any decent man to be on bad terms
with the court," says Cardinal de Retz.

Negotiations for a general peace, the preliminaries whereof had been
signed by King Louis XIII. in 1641, had been going on since 1644 at
Munster and at Osnabriick, without having produced any result; the Duke
of Enghien, who became Prince of Conde in 1646, was keeping up the war
in Flanders and Germany, with the co-operation of Viscount Turenne,
younger brother of the Duke of Bouillon, and, since Rocroi, a marshal of
France. The capture of Thionville and of Dunkerque, the victories of
Friburg and Nordlingen, the skilful opening effected in Germany as far as
Augsburg by the French and the Swedes, had raised so high the reputation
of the two generals, that the Prince of Conde, who was haughty and
ambitious, began to cause great umbrage to Mazarin. Fear of having him
unoccupied deterred the cardinal from peace, and made all the harder the
conditions he presumed to impose upon the Spaniards. Meanwhile the
United Provinces, weary of a war which fettered their commerce, and
skilfully courted by their old masters, had just concluded a private
treaty with Spain; the emperor was trying, but to no purpose, to detach
the Swedes likewise from the French alliance, when the victory of Lens,
gained on the 20th of August, 1648, over Archduke Leopold and General
Beck, came to throw into the balance the weight of a success as splendid
as it was unexpected; one more campaign, and Turenne might be threatening
Vienna whilst Conde entered Brussels; the emperor saw there was no help
for it, and bent his head. The house of Austria split in two; Spain
still refused to treat with France, but the whole of Germany clamored for
peace; the conditions of it were at last drawn up at Munster by MM.
Servien and de Lionne; M. d'Avaux, the most able diplomatist that Fr