r to promote his own
interests, believed that he should inspire her with a desire of ruling
the princes her brothers."[3]

[3] Mad. de Motteville, vol. ii. p. 17.

Such being the sordid motives of her wooer, the oft-repeated lines,
therefore, which he wrote with his own hand behind a portrait of the
Duchess must be construed with a considerable abatement of their poetic
ardour:--

"Pour meriter son coeur, pour plaire a ses beaux yeux,
J'ai fait la guerre aux rois, Je l'aurais faite aux dieux."[4]

[4] At a later period, after he had lost his sight from a
pistol-shot received at the combat of the Porte St. Antoine during
the Fronde, and had quarrelled with the Duchess, he parodied his own
distich,--

"Pour ce coeur inconstant, qu'enfin Je connais mieux,
J'ai fait la guerre au roi; J'en ai perdu les yeux."

Such a dissembler then was the coldly ambitious, egotistical, clever
Duke de la Rochefoucauld--a man capable of sacrificing everybody to his
own interests. Madame de Longueville, such as we have depicted her,
could not help being the instrument of a man of like character. M.
Cousin seems to have arrived at that conclusion, since, in designating
that princess as _the soul of the Fronde_, he acknowledges "that she
troubled the state and her own family by an extravagant passion for one
of the chiefs of the _Importants_, become one of the chiefs of the
Fronde." But M. Cousin is very nearly silent touching the Prince de
Conti, of whom the Duchess was the sole motive-power on all occasions,
and he merely says that this young prince submitted to be led by his
sister in order to stand upon an equal footing with his elder brother
whilst waiting for a cardinal's hat.

Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, born in 1629, was eighteen years of
age in 1647. He had good intellect and a not unpleasant countenance; but
a slight deformity and a certain feebleness of constitution rendering
him unfit for the army, he was early destined for the church. He had
studied among the Jesuits at the college of Clermont with Moliere, and
his father had obtained for him the richest benefices, and demanded a
cardinal's hat. While waiting for this hat dignity, Armand de Bourbon
was living at the Hotel de Conde, partly an ecclesiastic, partly a man
of the world, passing his days with wits and men of fashion, and greedy
of every species of success. The glory of his brother filled him with
emulation, and he drea