Then there was Clemence de Maille, purest and noblest of all, niece of Richelieu and hapless wife of the cruel ingrate Conde, his equal in daring and his superior in every other high quality.  Married a child still playing with her dolls, and sent at once to a convent to learn to read and write, she became a woman the instant her husband became a captive; while he watered his pinks in the garden at Vincennes, she went through France and raised an army for his relief.  Her means were as noble as her ends.  She would not surrender the humblest of her friends to an enemy, or suffer the massacre of her worst enemy by a friend.  She threw herself between the fire of two hostile parties at Bordeaux, and, while men were falling each side of her, compelled them to peace.  Her deeds rang through Europe.  When she sailed from Bordeaux for Paris at last, thirty thousand people assembled to bid her farewell.  She was loved and admired by all the world, except that husband for whom she dared so much,—­and the Archbishop of Taen.  The respectable Archbishop complained, that “this lady did not prove that she had been authorized by her husband, an essential provision, without which no woman can act in law.”  And Conde himself, whose heart, physically twice as large as other men’s, was spiritually imperceptible, repaid this stainless nobleness by years of persecution, and bequeathed her, as a life-long prisoner, to his dastard son.

Then, on the royal side, there was Anne of Austria, sufficient unto herself, Queen Regent, and every inch a queen, (before all but Mazarin,)—­ from the moment when the mob of Paris filed through the chamber of the boy-king, in his pretended sleep, and the motionless and stately mother held back the crimson draperies, with the same lovely arm which had waved perilous farewells to Buckingham,—­to the day when the news of the fatal battle of Gien came to her in her dressing-room, and “she remained undisturbed before the mirror, not neglecting the arrangement of a single curl.”

In short, every woman who took part in the Ladies’ War became heroic,—­ from Marguerite of Lorraine, who snatched the pen from her weak husband’s hand and gave De Retz the order for the first insurrection, down to the wife of the commandant of the Porte St. Roche, who, springing from her bed to obey that order, made the drums beat to arms and secured the barrier; and fitly, amid adventurous days like these, opened the career of Mademoiselle.

II.

THE FIRST CAMPAIGN.

Grandchild of Henri Quatre, niece of Louis XIII., cousin of Louis XIV., first princess of the blood, and with the largest income in the nation, (500,000 livres,) to support these dignities, Mademoiselle was certainly born in the purple.  Her autobiography admits us to very gorgeous company; the stream of her personal recollections is a perfect Pactolus.  There is almost a surfeit of royalty in it; every