he Fronde, priority of
notice among the bevy of the Cardinal's fair political opponents.

Some time in the month of August, 1619, Anne Genevieve de Bourbon-Conde
first saw the light in the donjon of Vincennes, where her parents had
been kept State prisoners for three years previously. She was the eldest
of the three children of Henry (II.) de Bourbon-Conde, first prince of
the blood, and of that Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency, "the beauty,
perfect grace and majesty of her time."[1] The lovely Montmorency on
coming to Court in her fifteenth year had sorely troubled the heart of
the amorous soldier-king, Henry of Navarre, who had married her in 1609
to his nephew of Conde with the covert hope of finding him an
accommodating husband; but the latter, alike defiant and uxorious, made
the jovial Bearnois plainly understand that he had wedded the blooming
Charlotte exclusively for himself. The _gaillard_ monarch, however, at
length grew so deeply enamoured that the prince, perceiving there was
too much cause to fear the result of the constant assiduities of his
royal uncle, fled precipitately with his young wife from France, only to
return thither after tidings reached him of the great Henry's
assassination. To the fair Montmorency's very decided proclivity to
gallantry was to be attributed--if we may believe the scandal-loving
Tallemant des Reaux--her long confinement, by the Regent Marie de'
Medici's consent, within the gloomy fortress of Vincennes, rather than
any reason of State for her sharing her husband's imprisonment. In fact,
it was believed that the jealous prince procured her incarceration
simply to keep her out of harm's way.

[1] Lenet.

Deriving from her mother the threefold gifts of grace, beauty, and
majesty, the fair Bourbon inherited also, it must be owned, a share of
that princess's inclination to _l'honnete galanterie_. The restriction
to a _share_ should be noted; for at no period of her heydey, not even
during the licence of the Fronde, could Anne Genevieve be accused of
having--as Madame de Motteville tells us the Princess de Conde
had,--adorers "in every rank and condition of life, from popes, kings,
princes, cardinals, dukes, and marshals of France, down to simple
gentlemen."

The mind and heart, however, of Anne de Bourbon, although predestined,
alas! eventually to culpable passion, seemed at first but little
inclined to the gay world--with all its blandishments and seductions,
or even t