La Grande Mademoiselle

La Grande Mademoiselle, appalled, beside herself, unmindful of her glory and her dignity, crying out wild orders to the people who blocked her way, fled from Paris in a hired coach driven by a common coachman. She did not breathe freely until the scene of her triumphs lay far behind her, and even then, the appearance of a cavalier, however peaceable, caused her new terror; she prayed, she trembled; a more piteous retreat was never made!

But the adventures of the route distracted her thoughts. She was masked, travelling as "Mme. Dupré," a woman of an inferior order. She dined with her fellow-travellers in public rooms, talked freely with common people, and faced life on an equality with the canaille. For a royal personage such experience had savour. One day in the kitchen of an inn a monk talked to her long and earnestly of the events of the day and of Mademoiselle, the niece of Louis XIII., and her high feats. "Yes!" said the priest, "she is a brave girl; a brave girl indeed! She is a girl who could carry a spear as easily as she could wear a mask!"

Mademoiselle's journey ended at the château of a friend, who welcomed her and concealed her with romantic satisfaction; being as sentimental as the shepherdesses of Astrée, it pleased the chatelaine to fancy that her guest was in peril of death and that a price was set upon her head. She surrounded Mademoiselle with impenetrable mystery. A few tried friends fetched and carried the heroine's correspondence with Condé. Condé implored her to join the legion on the frontier; he wrote to her: "I offer you my places and my army. M. de Lorraine offers you his quarters and his army, and Fuensaldagne¹⁶⁴ offers you the same."

Mademoiselle was wise enough to refuse their offers; but she was homeless; she knew that she must make some decisive move; she could not remain in hiding, like the princess of a romance. Monsieur was at Blois, but he was fully determined that she should not live with him.

When Préfontaine begged him not to refuse his daughter a father's protection, he answered furiously: "I will not receive her! If she comes here I will drive her back!"

Mademoiselle determined to face her destiny. She was alone; they who loved her had no right to protect her. She had a château at Saint Fargeau, and she looked upon it as a refuge.

Again the heroine took the road, and she had hardly set foot upon the highway when the King's messenger halted her and delivered a letter from his royal master.

Louis XIV. guaranteed her "all surety and freedom in any place in which she might elect to live." Mademoiselle, who had trembled with fear when the King's messenger appeared, read her letter with vexation; she had revelled in the thought that the Court was languishing in ignorance of her whereabouts.

She had gone fast and far and accomplished twenty leagues without a halt, when such a fit of terror seized her that she hid her head. Had she been in Paris, the courtiers would have called her seizure "one of the attacks of Monsieur." It was an ungovernable panic; despite the King's warrant she thought that the royal army was at her heels, and that the walls of a dungeon confronted her. Her attendants could not calm her. The heroine was dead and a despairing, half-distracted woman entered the Château of Saint Fargeau. She said of her arrival:

"The bridge was broken and the coach could not cross it, so I was forced to go on foot. It was two o'clock in the morning. I entered an old house – my home – without doors or windows; and in the court the weeds were knee-high… Fear, horror, and grief seized me, and I wept."

Let her weep. It was no more than she deserved to do as penalty for all the evil that she had brought about by the Fronde. Four years of a flagitious war, begun as the effort of conscientious patriots, under pressure of the general interest, then turned to a perambulating exhibition of selfish vanities and a hunt for écus which wrecked the peace and the prosperity of France!

In one single diocese (Laon) more than twenty curés were forced to desert their villages because they had neither parishioners nor means of living. Throughout the kingdom men had been made servile by physical and moral suffering and by the need of rest; borne down by the imperious demands of worn-out nature, they loathed action. The heroes of Corneille (of the ideal "superhuman" type of the heroes of Nietzsche) had had their day and the hour of the natural man – human, not superhuman – had come.

Five years later, when Mademoiselle returned to Paris, she found a new world, with manners in sharp contrast with her own. It was her fate to yield to the influence of the new ideal, when, forgetting that a certain degree of quality "lifts the soul above tenderness," she yielded up her soul to Lauzun in romantic love. Some day, not far distant, we shall meet her in her new sphere.