enay had shown such a lively and tender attachment for
her, and the sentiment of which she had never ceased to treat with all
the exquisite tact of which she was capable. She had also great
confidence in Spain, which was at her feet, and lavished upon her every
kind of deference. She urged, therefore, Conde to fling further
perfidious and useless negotiations to the winds, and to appeal to the
fortune of arms.

But to these different motives, the force of which Madame de Longueville
summed up the value with the authority of her intelligence and
experience, was joined another still more potent over her heart, and
which had been the original mainspring of her resolutions and conduct.
La Rochefoucauld alone has no right to impute it to her as a crime. For
ourselves, we do not hesitate to make it known upon the evidence of
irrefragable testimony; for we are not composing a panegyric of Madame
de Longueville, but narrating certain passages of her life, in which
that of the seventeenth century, with its grandeurs and its miseries, is
so completely identified; and if we feel a sincere admiration for the
sister of the great Conde, that admiration does not close our eyes to
her errors. It is not unseemly to admire a heroine whose lofty qualities
are mingled with weaknesses which remind us of her sex. It is, moreover,
the first duty of history, such as we understand it, and desire to have
it understood, not to stop at the surface of events, but to seek for
their causes in the depths of the soul, in human passions and their
inevitable consequences.

As has been already said, Madame de Longueville did not love her
husband. Not only was he greatly her senior, but there was nothing about
him that responded to the ideal which that illustrious disciple of the
Hotel de Rambouillet had formed for herself, and which she pursued in
vain through guilty illusions, until that which she sought and found at
its very source--no longer in the school of Corneille and of
Mademoiselle de Scuderi, but in that of her Saviour, in the Carmelite
convent and at Port Royal. Never was woman less prone to gallantry by
nature than Anne de Bourbon; but, as we have just remarked, her heart
and her imagination created in her the necessity of pleasing and of
being beloved; and it was that want, early cultivated by poetry,
romances, and the theatre, and somewhat later corrupted by the example
of the society in which she lived, which lured her far from the domesti