use they were already possessed by
the families of Rohan and of Bouillon. It is extraordinary to consider
what powerful effects such trumpery causes could have, but it is a
fact that the desolating and cruel wars of the Fronde largely depended
upon jealousies of the _carrosse_ and the _tabouret_. La
Rochefoucauld's support of the rebellion frankly and openly was based
upon it.

La Rochefoucauld brings the first part of his "Memoires" down to 1649.
In the second part he begins again with 1642, being very anxious to
show, to his own advantage of course, what the conditions were at
court after the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII., and in particular
to define the position of Mme de Chevreuse, the great intriguer and
seductress of the French politics of the age. The charm of this lady,
who was no longer young, faded before that of the Duchess of
Longueville, one of the most ambitious and most unscrupulous women who
ever lived. She was the sister of the Prince de Conti, and from the
time when her celebrated relations with La Rochefoucauld began, her
influence engaged him in all the unplumbed chaos which led to civil
war. When this finally broke out, however, in 1648, the Duke is found
once more on the side of the young king and his government, that is to
say, of Cardinal Mazarin.

Through the "universal hubbub wide of stunning sounds and noises all
confused," we can catch with difficulty the accents of literature, at
first indeed vocal in the midst of the riot, and even stimulated by
it, as birds are by a heavy shower of rain, but soon stunned and
silenced by horrors incompatible with the labour of the Muses. The
wars of the Fronde made a sharp cut between the heroic age of
imaginative literature and the classical age which presently succeeded
it, and offer in this respect a tolerable parallel to the civil wars
raging in England about the same time. It is specious, but convenient,
to discover a date at which a change of this kind may be said to
occur. In England we have such a date marked large for us in 1660;
French letters less obviously but more certainly can be said to start
afresh in 1652. It is tolerably certain that in that year Pascal, Retz
and the subject of our inquiry simultaneously and independently began
to write. Up to that time there is no reason to believe that La
Rochefoucauld had given himself at all to study, and we possess no
evidence that up to the age of forty he was more interested in the
existenc