on this point in accordance with Madame de
Motteville. Without doubt the marriage of the Prince de Conti with
Mademoiselle de Chevreuse was far from meeting with universal approval.
The prudes of the Hotel de Rambouillet, and Mademoiselle de Scuderi in
particular, protested strongly against such an alliance. The old outrage
was remembered which, in 1643, Madame de Montbazon, aided by Madame de
Chevreuse, had dared to perpetrate upon Madame de Longueville; the
audacious manners of the mother also, which seemed to have been
inherited by the daughter; the equivocal reputation of the latter, the
suspected and almost public _liaison_ which she carried on with De Retz.
Vain objections!--which Madame de Longueville could not allege, for she
perfectly well knew all that when at Stenay she had authorised the
Palatine to pledge her word for hers. Other reasons for her conduct must
therefore be sought, and the reasons can only be those which her enemies
have given, and in the foremost place the jealousy of influence, the
desire of retaining over her younger brother, the Prince de Conti, an
empire that Charlotte de Lorraine would, infallibly, have deprived her.

That irreparable error, in bringing about the perilous position in which
Conde speedily found himself, necessarily led Madame de Longueville to
the commission of another error, in some sort compulsory, and which was
the complement of the first; it is certain that more than anyone else
she incited her brother to take the resolution he ultimately determined
upon adopting. La Rochefoucauld says so, and all contemporary writers
repeat the same. We will merely make this essential remark: Madame de
Longueville had at first very readily entered into the reconciliatory
plans of Conde and La Rochefoucauld, and into their negotiations with
the Court; it was only when those designs had failed, when towards the
month of June negotiation had given place to violence, when she saw her
brother surrounded by assassins, liable at any moment to fall under the
blows of Hocquincourt, or to be flung again into the dungeons of
Vincennes, it was then that trembling with fear and indignation, and ill
as she was in health, she rushed to Saint-Maur; and that, finding there
the flower of the aristocracy and the army assembled, she felt her
warlike ardour of 1649 and 1650 rekindle. She thought that nothing could
resist on the field of battle the victor of Rocroy and Lens, seconded by
Turenne, who at St