he obtained permission from the king to marry him, but the
combined efforts of the queen and the princes of the blood caused this
to be rescinded, and Lauzun was imprisoned in Pignerol. After many years
Mademoiselle purchased his release by making over a great part of her
immense possessions to Louis' bastard, the Duke du Maine, and secretly
married her lover, who was not only younger than herself, but a
notorious adventurer. He was basely ungrateful, and she separated from
him before her death. Her memoirs, which are voluminous, contain a
minute history of her singular life, written with not a little egotism,
but with all the vivacity and individuality of savour which characterise
the best work of the time. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about them
is that, although entirely occupied with herself and her fortunes,
Mademoiselle does not appear either to exaggerate her own merits, or to
disguise her faults. She photographs herself, which is not common.
Valentin Conrart, a man of letters, who figures repeatedly in the
history of the time, who was the real founder of the Academy, who
published but little in his lifetime, and who has only recently been the
subject of a sufficient study, left memoirs of no great length, but of
value in reference to the Fronde. The Marquis de Montglat, of whom not
much is known, wrote important military memoirs of the latter portion of
the Thirty Years' War, and of the campaigns between France and Spain,
which continued until the peace of the Pyrenees.

[Sidenote: La Rochefoucauld.]

The Memoirs of La Rochefoucauld[257] would have assured him a
considerable place in the history of literature, even had he never
written the _Maxims_, and the singular fate of these Memoirs would have
deserved notice even had they been far less intrinsically interesting in
matter and style than they are. The seventeenth century was the palmy
time of literary piracy, and this piracy was facilitated not merely by
the absence of any international copyright, but by the common habit of
circulating books in manuscript long before their appearance in print.
They were thus copied and re-copied, and the number of unauthorised
duplicates made it impossible for the author to protect his work. Not
unfrequently the difficulties of authors were increased by the custom
(inherited from the middle ages) of simultaneously or rather
continuously transcribing different works in the same large notebook,
without any very scrupulou