THE LADY'S MAGAZINE AND MUSEUM OF THE BELLES-LETTRES, FINE ARTS, MUSIC, DRAMA, FASHIONS, &c. IMPROVED SERIES, ENLARGED. APRIL, 1835. UNDER THE DISTINGUISHED PATRONAGE OF HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE DUCHESS OF KENT. MEMOIR OF THE DUCHESSE DE LONGUEVILLE. "Oh! woman, woman! thou hast vast facilities Especially for bringing those abilities The Duchesse de Longueville was a princess of that branch of the royal house of Bourbon, of which Mr. Canning declared, "that it was neither an elder branch, nor a younger branch, but a branch of laurel:" she was sister to the great Condé, the hero of Rocroi, who has been, by the partial voice of history, accounted the greatest among a line of heroes, every one of which, it is to be owned, were superior to him in faith, honour, and moral virtue. Condé was not only the hero of victorious fields, but the hero of a faction, being the leader of the Fronde: a combination of the aristocracy, that shook the throne of France during the minority of Louis XIV. The Duchesse de Longueville was a partisan of her brother in this feud, and was ready to make any sacrifice to promote his interests. warm Very early in life, Condé gave his sister in marriage to his intimate friend and near relative, the Duc de Longueville. This high-spirited lady loved her husband, it is true; still her brother's party was the first object of her heart, VoL. VI.No. 4. this was probably done in the giddy presumption of an untamed spirit; and in the restless consciousness of superior talents, she flung about fire-brands in sport. At that time she neither knew nor cared for the miseries that civil war inflicted on her country; and she threw all the energies of her character into this rebellion of the Fronde. Among her other conquests, she bewitched the celebrated Duc de Rochefauldcault into complete forgetfulness of all his philosophy and worldly wise maxims. The Duc de Rochefauldcault speaks spitefully enough against love, and the influence of women, in his celebrated apothegms; and yet never did man more completely submit to be persuaded out of his own determinations by a woman. He was, in principle, against the Fronde; but in hopes only of a smile from his 2 fair tyrant, he engaged in war against his sovereign, as he himself acknowledges in this celebrated couplet, which he wrote, with a diamond, on a window “To gain her heart and please her sparkling eyes, I've warred with kings, and would have scaled the skies." This couplet is from a now forgotten French tragedy, and is thus in the original "Pour satisfaire son cœur, pour plaire a ses beaux yeux, Jar fait le guerre aux rois, je l'aurois faite aux Dieux." At the battle of St. Antony, at the gate of Paris, so called, he received a severe wound in the face; by this misfortune he lost his sight for some months: all owing to the seducements of a sorceress, who loved her own husband, and cared not a straw* for the fools she made of her lovers. Another of her exploits was to prevail on the great Turenne, then a very young man, to revolt with the army of which he was general; but the soldiers stood firm to the king, and Turenne quitted his command like a fugitive; and then found, to his bitter mortification, that the beautiful duchess made a jest of his passion. Another warlike noble forgot his duty to his king, by surrendering up to the Duchess de Montbazon the royal fortress, the impregnable Peronne,† with this billet-" Peronne belongs to the fairest of the fair." Such was the effect of expiring chivalry in the last civil war raised by the French aristocracy. For years was the Duchesse de Longueville the heroine of the civil war of the Fronde; a faction that seems to have raised itself in rebellion in the very wantonness of mischief; and the battles at the barriers of Paris were in the spirit of a barring out of school-boys, and carried on in the same spirit of fun and glee. The only ostensible pretence for rebellion was the supposed passion of the queen-regent for Cardinal Mazarine, whom, it was said, she had married. The Parisian troops, after sallying out of the city, were, if they returned beaten, received with peals of laughter; they were chiefly hot-headed young nobles of Straw was the party badge of the Fronde, tied with blue ribbons. Celebrated in the romance of " Durward." the Fronde and their followers, who made war on the royal forces like the heroes of the Iliad, caring for nothing but their own individual prowess, and fighting without order or discipline. If defeated, they consoled themselves by making satirical epigrams and sonnets. Taverns were the tents where they held their councils of war; and their military movements were resolved on, amidst singing, laughing, and shouting. Such was the war of the Fronde, in which no person was serious, and no one knew what he was fighting for, excepting that the king's colours were white, and the Prince de Condé's were blue. In the midst of all this confusion, the fair Longueville found herself in her element: she felt great pleasure in directing the whirlwind according to her own caprices, and in making the greatest and bravest men in France play as many fantastic tricks as so many apes, in the hopes of pleasing her. The Duc de Longueville, her husband, regretted that his native country should be involved in all the perplexities of an unsettled government: he was true to the cause of Condé, but he endeavoured to persuade that hero to come to terms with the court; and when Condé, in a fit of passion, would have summoned the English, then under the sway of the formidable Cromwell, to have invaded France, Longueville prevailed on him to relinquish a resolution that would have made him a traitor to France, as well as a rebel to the king. The Duc de Longueville was a very estimable character, as may be gathered from the answer he made his dependants, who wished him to prosecute some neighbouring gentlemen, who had followed their game over his domains. "I shall do no such thing," he replied; "for I would rather have friends than hares." It was the Duchesse of Longueville, who being obliged, in some of the reverses of her party, to retire with the duke to one of his châteaus in the country, was asked how she meant to amuse herself; whether with books or walking, embroidery or gardening? “Oh! with none of these things," she said, "for I hate innocent pleasures." She was greatly ledges. changed afterward, as she herself acknow Don Louis de Hars, when he met Cardinal Mazarine, in order to conclude the treaty of the Pyrenees, expressed his astonishment to him, that one young woman, like the Duchesse de Longueville, had it in her power to disturb the tranquillity of a great kingdom. "Alas!" replied Mazarine, "your excellency talks much at your ease upon these matters. The Spanish ladies meddle in no intrigues, but those of gallantry; it is not so in France, where we have there three women, capable of either governing or embroiling three great kingdoms: these are, Madame de Longueville, the Princess Palatine, and the Duchesse de Chevreuse." The first sorrow experienced by this brilliant and volatile genius effected an entire change in her heart. After the death of her noble-minded husband, the world became a desert and a blank to her, though in the full zenith of her beauty. She resolved never to give him a successor, and abandoned herself to despair. Her aunt, the Duchesse de Montmorency that celebrated lady, who consecrated her life to the memory of the hero she had lost, through the sanguinary revenge of Richelieu-had retired into a convent, and was abbess of the Ursuline nuns at Moulins. This excellent princess went to console her unhappy niece, and by her example and soothing tenderness, taught her to form a hope in the life to come, and to repent of all her wayward caprices-her giddy freaks and idle triumphs of talent and beauty with which she had promoted strife and mischief, instead of using her influence in the cause of peace and virtue. Madame de Longueville retired to the convent of Port Royal, to pray for the soul of her accomplished and beloved husband; in this retirement the innocent pleasures she had so flippantly despised were the solace of her life; she became much attached to gardening, and would frequently hold long consultations respecting the welfare of her flowers with an old man, a great professor of that art. Once he said to her, "What would the world say, if they saw your highness familiarly talking with a gardener?' "The world would say I was much changed," replied Madame de Longueville, with a sigh. The piety of the beautiful Longueville had nothing sour or fanatic in it-she devoted her revenues to doing good; among other beneficent acts, she was the munificent patroness of learned men, struggling with difficulties. The court sneered at her conversion, and called her a Jansenist; yet those who knew her were convinced of the sincerity of her conversion. The war of the French, in which she took so conspicuous a part, lasted from 1649 to 1654. It was the last struggle of the French aristocracy against the crown. In the clever historical romance, lately published by Mr.James, we find a graphic description of the great Condé, the beloved brother of this princess. [The Princes of Condé and Conti and the Duc de Longueville, were arrested by the captain of the queen's guards, being taken by surprise in the palace, and hurried off to the castle of Vincennes. Almost all the nobles of their party fled from Paris, in a panic, the day of their arrest. Mary de Bourbon, duchess of Longueville, made her escape into Normandy, accompanied by sixty horsemen, and declared she would raise once more the standard of civil war. Luxemburg and Bouillon did the same in Burgundy and the south of France; and Turenne, instigated by his passion for the duchess, proceeding into Champagne, avowed himself the partisan of the princess.] "I now found myself alone in a little ante-chamber, and, as it had but one other door, of course I advanced towards it, and entered the next room with. out ceremony. Here, seated at a table, which was covered with pots of beautiful carnations, sat a young man, of about five or six and twenty, busily tending and arranging his flowers. He was alone, though I heard voices in a chamber beyond; and from the whole appearance of the apartment, the neglect and poverty of the furniture, and the simplicity of the young man's own attire, I might have imagined he was some attendant of the prince's, had he not looked up; as he did so, however, the eagle-eye could not be mistaken, and I felt I must be in the presence of the great Condé. "He was neither very tall nor very strongly made; but there was the promise of extraordinary activity in every limb. His features were slightly aquiline, and in general good, without being very striking. But his eye was, indeed, remarkable. It was deep set, it is true, and not particularly large; but there was a light, and a keenness, and an intensity in its slightest glance, that is quite un |