to decry her in every
way to him, and sought even to persuade him that his sister was not
attached to him as she made it appear, and that she had promised the
Duke de Nemours to serve him at his expense; whilst Madame de
Longueville had never dreamed in any way of separating Nemours from
Conde, but only from her, Madame de Chatillon, purposely to engage him
more deeply in Conde's interests, in the light that she understood them.

Madame de Longueville's policy was very simple, and it was the true one,
the Fronde once admitted. Assuredly, it would have been better alike for
Madame de Longueville, for Conde, and for France not to have entered
upon that fatal path by which the national greatness was for ten years
arrested, and through which the house of Conde very nearly perished;
but, after having embraced that sinister step, no other alternative
remained to a firm and logical mind than to resolutely pursue its
triumph. And that triumph, in Madame de Longueville's eyes, was the
overthrow of Mazarin, a necessary condition of the domination of Conde.
Such was the end pointed out to her by La Rochefoucauld when engaging
her in the Fronde at the beginning of 1648, and she had never lost sight
of it. It was to attain it that she had flung herself into the Civil
War, and that she had ended by dragging therein her brother; that,
worsted at Paris in 1649, she had striven in 1650 to raise Normandy;
that she had risked her life, braved exile, made alliance with a foreign
enemy, and unfurled at Stenay the banner of the Princes. In 1651, she
had advised the resumption of arms, and now she maintained the
impossibility of laying them down, and that, instead of losing himself
in useless negotiations with the subtle and skilful Cardinal, it was
upon his sword alone that Conde should rely. She thought him incapable
of extricating himself advantageously from the intrigues by which he was
surrounded, and therefore urged him towards the field of battle. She had
always exercised a great sway over him, because he knew that her heart
was of like temper to his own; and if passion had not blinded him, he
would have rejected with disdain the odious accusations they had dared
to raise against her, as he had done in 1643, in the affair of the
letters attributed to her by Madame de Montbazon: he would have easily
recognised that Madame de Chatillon, Nemours, and La Rochefoucauld would
not have joined to blacken her in his eyes, as a vulgar creature e