ime of the "raining" and reigning influence of such things: and somehow
one succumbs a little even now to her as the Queen of that bevy of fair,
frail, and occasionally rather ferocious ladies of the Fronde feminine.
(The femininity was perhaps most evident in Madame de Chevreuse, and the
ferocity in Madame de Montbazon.) Did not Madame de Longueville--did not
they all--figuratively speaking, draw that great philosopher Victor
Cousin[152] up in a basket two centuries after her death, even as had
been done, literally if mythically, to that greater philosopher,
Aristotle, ages before? But the governor of Our Lady of the Guard[153]
says to her many of these things which that very Aramis delighted to
hear (though not perhaps from the lips of rivals) and described,
rebuking the callousness of Porthos to them, as fine and worthy of being
said by gentlemen. The Great Cyrus himself "comes to lay at her
Highness's feet his palms and his trophies." His historian, achieving at
once advertisement and epigram, is sure that as she listened kindly to
the _Death of Caesar_ (his own play), she will do the same to the Life
of Cyrus. Anne Genevieve herself will become the example of all
Princesses (the Reverend Abraham Adams might have groaned a little
here), just as Cyrus was the pattern of all Princes. She is not the
moon, but the sun[154] of the Court. The mingled blood of Bourbon and
Montmorency gives her such an _eclat_ that it is almost unapproachable.
He then digresses a little to glorify her brother, her husband, and
Chapelain, the famous author of _La Pucelle_, who had the good fortune
to be a friend of the Scuderys, as well as, like them, a strong "Heroic"
theorist. After which he comes to that personal inventory which has been
referred to, decides that her beauty is of a celestial splendour, and,
in fact, a ray of Divinity itself; goes into raptures, not merely over
her eyes, but over her hair (which simply effaces sunbeams); the
brightness and whiteness of her complexion; the just proportion of her
features; and, above all, her singularly blended air of modesty and
gallantry; her intellectual and spiritual match; her bodily graces; and
he is finally sure that though somebody's misplaced acuteness may
discover faults which nobody else will perceive (Georges would like to
see them, no doubt), her extreme kindness will pardon them. A
commonplace example of flattery this? Well, perhaps not. One somehow
sees, across the rhetoric, the