ochefoucauld had
dazzled her gaze in order to conceal his own designs:--a glittering
chimera which, mingling itself with that of love, had seduced that
ardent and haughty soul of hers. She was then the idol of Spain, the
terror of the Court, one of the grandeurs of her family. We shall soon
see whether she can better sustain this new ordeal than she did the
first, at the close of the year 1647.

The Fronde gathered the fruit of its skilful conduct during the month of
January, 1651. It was that faction which, silencing its old animosities
and promptly extending its hand to the partisans of Conde, had
extricated him from prison, in order to acquire and place at its head,
together with the King's uncle, the lieutenant-general of the Kingdom,
the first prince of the blood, the victor of Rocroi and Lens, the hero
of the age. It carried everything before it--at Court, in parliament,
upon the public places; it had proscribed and put to flight Mazarin; it
held Anne of Austria a captive in her palace; already even it had
penetrated into the cabinet in the person of the aged Chateauneuf, in
whom ambition cherished beneath the snows of winter the vigour of youth,
and whose capacity was scarcely inferior to his ambition. The moment had
arrived for accomplishing the work already begun, and for putting into
execution the plan determined upon between the Princess Palatine and
Madame de Chevreuse.

Those two strong-minded women had conceived the idea of a grand
aristocratic league which should seat the Fronde upon an union of all
the interests which it comprised, close the avenues of France and the
Court to Mazarin, and under the auspices of the Duke d'Orleans and the
Prince de Conde form a government into which the friends of both should
enter, the most accredited representatives of every fraction of a party.
Further, the basis of this plan was that of a double marriage: on the
one side between the young Duke d'Enghien and one of the Duke d'Orleans'
daughters, on the other between the Prince de Conti and the daughter of
Madame de Chevreuse.[1] This latter marriage might be accomplished
immediately. Conde had accepted the proposition without any difficulty.
Madame de Longueville, far from opposing it at Stenay, had embraced the
idea of it with so much ardour that, in a letter to the Palatine of the
26th of November, 1650, after having weighed the different resolutions
to be taken, she stops at this latter, and concludes thus: "_this,