d her
thus to hurry her brother into civil war, and herself with him.

Let us remember:--Anne de Bourbon exhibited extraordinary contrasts in
her character, entirely opposite qualities which, developing themselves
in turn according to circumstances, gave a particular impress to
different periods of her life. She derived from nature and the Christian
education she had received a delicate and susceptible conscience, a
humility in her own eyes and before God that would have made her an
accomplished Carmelite; and at the same time she was born with that
ardour of soul which is termed ambition, the instinct of glory and of
grandeur. This instinct, which was also that of her house and her age,
soon obtained the mastery on emerging from her pious adolescence, and
when she despaired of overcoming her father's resistance to the serious
desire she had manifested of burying herself, at fifteen, in the convent
of the Rue St. Jacques, with her already formidable beauty and the
nascent desire to shine and to please. That desire was at once Madame de
Longueville's strength and weakness, the principle of her coquetry amid
the amusements of peace, as of her intrepidity in the midst of war and
danger. Once condemned to live in the world, she transferred the dreams
of glory which she dared not realise for herself, to gild her brother's
wreath of laurel,--that Louis de Bourbon, almost of the same age as
herself, the cherished companion of her infancy, so witty, so generous,
so bold, that he was at once a friend and a master, and the idol of her
heart, before another object had usurped the place or after he had
abandoned it. In the first and the last portion of her life, which are
incomparably the best, she referred everything to Conde, and Conde had a
confidence in her altogether boundless. The suspicious and penetrating
Mazarin had very early formed that opinion of her, and in the _carnets_,
to which he has confided his very inmost feelings, he depicts her with
the pen of an enemy, but of an enemy who knew her well. "Madame de
Longueville," says he, "has entire power over her brother. She desires
to see Conde dominate and dispose of all favours. If she is prone to
gallantry, it is by no means that she thinks of doing wrong, but in
order to make friends and servitors for her brother. She insinuates
ambitious ideas into his mind to which he is already only too much
inclined." If, in 1648, she became violently enraged against her
brother, it