t others
from the coadjutor's pen, is sufficiently faithful, but at the
commencement of the Regency, the defects of the Duke de Beaufort had not
fully declared themselves, and were less conspicuous than his good
qualities. Some few days before her husband's death, Anne of Austria had
placed her children under his charge--a mark of confidence that so
elated him that the young Duke conceived hopes which his impetuosity
hindered him from sufficiently disguising. Indeed, these were presumed
upon so far as to give offence to the Queen; and, as the height of
inconsistency, he committed at the same time the egregious folly of
publicly enacting the led-captain in the rosy chains of the handsome but
decried Duchess de Montbazon. It was only, however, by slow degrees that
the Queen's liking for him abated. At first, she had proposed to confer
upon him the post of Grand-Ecuyer, vacant since the death of the
unfortunate Cinq-Mars, which would have kept him in close attendance
upon her, and was altogether a fitting appointment--for Beaufort had
nothing of the statesman in him; with little intellect and no reticence,
he was also averse to steady application to business, and capable only
of some bold and violent course of action. The Duke had the folly to
refuse this post of Grand-Ecuyer, hoping for a better; and then,
altering his mind when it was too late, he solicited it only to incur
disappointment.[5] The more his favour diminished, the more his
irritation increased, and it was not long ere he placed himself at the
head of the Cardinal's bitterest enemies.

[4] La Rochefoucauld.

[5] Mazarin himself has furnished this fact, otherwise unknown, in
one of his diaries (_Carnet_, pp. 72, 73). The Cardinal-Minister was
in the habit of jotting down the chief events of each day in these
small memorandum books (_Carnets_), which he kept in the pocket of
his cassock.

Madame de Chevreuse hoped to be more fortunate in securing the
governorship of Havre for a very different sort of person--for a man of
tried devotedness and of a rare and subtle intellect--La Rochefoucauld.
She would thereby recompense the services rendered to the Queen and
herself, strengthen and aggrandize one of the chiefs of the
_Importants_, and weaken Mazarin by depriving of an important government
a person upon whom he had entire reliance--Richelieu's niece, the
Duchess d'Aiguillon. The Cardinal succeeded in rendering this
manoeuvre abortive