ne,
Duchesse de Montpensier, is forgotten, or rather was never remembered; but
the great name of MADEMOISELLE, _La Grande Mademoiselle_, gleams like a
golden thread shot through and through that gorgeous tapestry of crimson
and purple which records for us the age of Louis Quatorze.

In May of the year 1627, while the Queen and Princess of England lived in
weary exile at Paris,--while the slow tide of events was drawing their
husband and father to his scaffold,--while Sir John Eliot was awaiting in
the Tower of London the summoning of the Third Parliament,--while the
troops of Buckingham lay dying, without an enemy, upon the Isle of Rhe,--
while the Council of Plymouth were selling their title to the lands of
Massachusetts Bay,--at the very crisis of the terrible siege of Rochelle,
and perhaps during the very hour when the Three Guardsmen of Dumas held
that famous bastion against an army, the heroine of our story was born.
And she, like the Three Guardsmen, waited till twenty years after for a
career.

The twenty years are over. Richelieu is dead. The strongest will that ever
ruled France has passed away; and the poor, broken King has hunted his
last badger at St. Germain, and meekly followed his master to the grave,
as he had always followed him. Louis XIII., called Louis Le Juste, not
from the predominance of that particular virtue (or any other) in his
character, but simply because he happened to be born under the
constellation of the Scales, has died like a Frenchman, in peace with all
the world except his wife. That beautiful and queenly wife, Anne of
Austria, (Spaniard though she was,)--no longer the wild and passionate
girl who fascinated Buckingham and embroiled two kingdoms,--has hastened
within four days to defy all the dying imprecations of her husband, by
reversing every plan and every appointment he has made. The little prince
has already shown all the Grand Monarque in his childish "Je suis Louis
Quatorze," and has been carried in his bib to hold his first parliament.
That parliament, heroic as its English contemporary, though less
successful, has reached the point of revolution at last. Civil war is
impending. Conde, at twenty-one the greatest general in Europe, after
changing sides a hundred times in a week, is fixed at last. Turenne is
arrayed against him. The young, the brave, the beautiful cluster around
them. The performers are drawn up in line,--the curtain rises,--the play
is "The Wars of the Frond