.

Let us abstain from defending her; although even we should be convinced
that she knew where to stop in that dangerous game of coquetry, she is
not the less culpable in our eyes both towards La Rochefoucauld and
herself, and we do not hesitate to say that she went so far as to
deserve the calumny. Doubtless she was justly hurt by the incertitude of
La Rochefoucauld, who, after having plunged her into civil war in 1648
with no other motive than that of his own interest, would have made her
abandon it in 1651 through the same motive still; which at one moment
impelled her towards the Fronde, at another brought her back to the
Court, at the will of his fickle hopes, and linked her with Madame de
Chatillon for the purpose of engaging Conde in negotiations the success
of which involved their separation and procured her a prison in
Normandy. Yes--she had grave cause of complaint against La
Rochefoucauld. She might have quitted him, it is true, but not for
another. She had only one means of covering, of almost condoning the
single error of her life, which was to maintain faithful to it, or to
renounce it for virtue and Heaven. And it is just that which Madame de
Longueville appears to have done, if that sad and rapid episode had
remained unknown; but there is no favourable shade for those personages
who appear in the glaring front of the stage of this world; their
slightest actions do not escape the formidable light of history: the
weakness of a moment is recorded as an irredeemable error against them.
That of Madame de Longueville, fugitive as it may have been, dubious
even as it was, sufficed to tarnish a fidelity until then victorious
over so many trials; it needed to be atoned for by the sincere
conversion which was speedily about to follow it, and by five-and-twenty
years of the severest penitence; and still further it forces us to place
Anne de Bourbon, in the record of great sentiments and exalted loves,
above Heloise and Mademoiselle de la Valliere.

At any rate the assurance is consoling that this error, which we have
attempted neither to conceal nor extenuate, is the single one
perceptible in the private life of Madame de Longueville. But let us
turn aside from these wretched instances of feminine fragility in one of
the loftiest minds, in order to follow Conde and the march of events in
Guienne.

We will first, however, by a brief retrospect, endeavour to render the
shifting phases of the two Fronde wars more c