d
refuge and protection even in the presence of princesses and queens.
People residing in remote places heard only of the gorgeous licence in
which the great and powerful lived. They knew them only during their
visits to their ancestral homes as worn-out debauchees from the great
city, who brought the profligacy of the purlieus of the Louvre into the
peaceful cottages of the peasantry on their estates. It was, indeed, so
much the fashion to be wicked, that a gentleman was hindered from the
practice of his Christian or social duties by the fear of ridicule. The
life of man, therefore, and the honour of woman were held equally cheap;
and the blinded, rash, and self-indulgent nobility laid the foundation,
in contempt of the feelings of its inferiors and neglect of their
interests, for the terrible retribution which even now at intervals
might be seen ready to take its course.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DUCHESSES DE LONGUEVILLE AND DE CHEVREUSE AND THE PRINCESS
PALATINE IN THE LAST FRONDE.--RESULTS OF THE RUPTURE OF THE MARRIAGE
PROJECTED BETWEEN THE PRINCE DE CONTI AND MADEMOISELLE DE CHEVREUSE.

WE must now revert to Conde's heroic sister. Having glanced somewhat
hastily at the brilliant part played by Madame de Longueville in the two
first epochs of the Fronde, the war of Paris and that which illuminated
the prison of Conde, we are now about to follow her through the third
and last period, which commences from the deliverance of the Princes, in
February, 1651, and only ends with the war of Guienne, in August,
1653;--the longest, the most disastrous, and at the same time most
obscure epoch of the civil war. It will be necessary to strip the mask
from more than one illustrious actor in it, exhibit the reverse of the
most showy medals, and the shadows which everywhere mingle with glory,
genius, and even virtue itself. The character of the Duchess de
Longueville has its charming, its sublime aspects; but, alas! it is far
from being irreproachable. In dwelling upon the least favourable portion
of her life, we shall often do well to remember that the errors of great
minds sometimes subserve their perfection, by the beneficent virtue of
the remorse to which they give rise, and that the sister of the Great
Conde must probably have felt in all its fulness the vanity of ambition
and of false grandeur, all the bitterness of guilty passions, in taking
an early farewell of them, to resume the austere path of duty, to
return,