uchess, who bore him eight children. La Rochefoucauld's "Memoires"
open abruptly with these words:--"I spent the last years of the
Cardinal's administration in indolence," and then he begins to
discourse on the audacities of the Duke of Buckingham (pleasingly
spelled Bouquinquant) and his attacks on the heart of the Queen of
France. We gather that although the English envoy can have had no
personal influence on the future moralist--since Buckingham was
murdered at Portsmouth in 1628, while La Rochefoucauld did not come to
court till 1630--yet the young Frenchman so immensely admired what he
heard of the Englishman, and so deliberately set himself to take him
as a model, that our own knowledge of Buckingham may be of help to us
in reproducing an impression of La Rochefoucauld, or rather of the
Prince de Marcillac, as he was styled until his father died.

After describing the court as the youth of seventeen had found it, he
skips five years to tell us how the Queen asked him to run away with
her to Brussels in 1637. History has not known quite what to make of
this amazing story, of which La Rochefoucauld had the complacency to
write more than twenty years afterwards--

"However difficult and perilous this adventure might seem to me, I may
say that never in all my life have I enjoyed anything so much. I was
at an age (24) at which one loves to do extravagant and startling
things, and I felt that nothing could be more startling or more
extravagant than to snatch at the same time the Queen from the King
her husband, and from the Cardinal de Richelieu who was jealous, and
Mlle d'Hautefort from the King who was in love with her."

He tells the story with inimitable gusto. But he tells it just as an
episode, and he hurries on to the death of Richelieu in 1642, as
though he were conscious that up to his thirtieth year his own life
had not been of much consequence.

Even in that age of turbulent extravagance, the Prince of Marcillac
was known, where he was known at all, merely as a hare-brained youth
who carried the intolerance and insolence of amatory youth past the
confines of absurdity, and it is amusing to find Balzac, who was
twenty years his senior, and who was buried in the country, describing
him--surely by repute--as the type of--

"These gentlemen who chatter so much about the empire and about the
sovereignty of ladies, and have their heads so stuffed with tales and
strange adventures, that they grow to believe tha