te Madame," as the dashing young abbes called
her when she renounced the world. Thither she drew the beautiful
Longueville also, and Heaven smiled on one repentance that seemed sincere.
There they found peace in the home of Angelique Arnould and Jacqueline
Pascal. And thence those heroic women came forth again, when religious war
threatened to take the place of civil: again they put to shame their more
timid male companions, and by their labors Jesuit and Jansenist found
peace.

But not such was to be the career of our Mademoiselle, who, at twenty, had
tried the part of devotee for one week and renounced it forever. No doubt,
at thirty-five, she "began to understand that it is part of the duty of a
Christian to attend High Mass on Sundays and holy days"; and her
description of the deathbed of Anne of Austria is a most extraordinary
jumble of the next world and this. But thus much of devotion was to her
only a part of the proprieties of life, and before the altar of those
proprieties she served, for the rest of her existence, with exemplary
zeal. At forty, she was still the wealthiest unmarried princess in Europe;
fastidious in toilette, stainless in reputation, not lovely in temper,
rigid in etiquette, learned in precedence, an oracle in court traditions,
a terror to the young maids-of-honor, and always quarrelling with her own
sisters, younger, fairer, poorer than herself. Her mind and will were as
active as in her girlhood, but they ground chaff instead of wheat. Whether
her sisters should dine at the Queen's table, when she never had; who
should be her trainbearer at the royal marriage; whether the royal Spanish
father-in-law, on the same occasion, should or should not salute the
Queen-mother; who, on any given occasion, should have a _tabouret_, who a
_pliant_, who a chair, who an arm-chair; who should enter the King's
_ruelle_, or her own, or pass out by the private stairway; how she should
arrange the duchesses at state-funerals: these were the things which tried
Mademoiselle's soul, and these fill the later volumes of that
autobiography whose earlier record was all a battle and a march. From
Conde's "Obey Mademoiselle's orders as my own," we come down to this: "For
my part, I had been worrying myself all day; having been told that the new
Queen would not salute me on the lips, and that the King had decided to
sustain her in this position. I therefore spoke to Monsieur the Cardinal
on the subject, bringing forward