card is a court-card, and all her counters are counts.  “I wore at this festival all the crown-jewels of France, and also those of the Queen of England.”  “A far greater establishment was assigned to me than any fille de France had ever had, not excepting any of my aunts, the Queens of England and of Spain, and the Duchess of Savoy.”  “The Queen, my grandmother, gave me as a governess the same lady who had been governess to the late King.”  Pageant or funeral, it is the same thing.  “In the midst of these festivities we heard of the death of the King of Spain; whereat the Queens were greatly afflicted, and we all went into mourning.”  Thus, throughout, her Memoirs glitter like the coat with which the splendid Buckingham astonished the cheaper chivalry of France:  they drop diamonds.

But for any personal career Mademoiselle found at first no opportunity, in the earlier years of the Fronde.  A gay, fearless, flattered girl, she simply shared the fortunes of the court; laughed at the festivals in the palace, laughed at the ominous insurrections in the streets; laughed when the people cheered her, their pet princess; and when the royal party fled from Paris, she adroitly secured for herself the best straw-bed at St. Germain, and laughed louder than ever.  She despised the courtiers who flattered her; secretly admired her young cousin Conde, whom she affected to despise; danced when the court danced, and ran away when it mourned.  She made all manner of fun of her English lover, the future Charles II., whom she alone of all the world found bashful; and in general she wasted the golden hours with much excellent fooling.  Nor would she, perhaps, ever have found herself a heroine, but that her respectable father was a poltroon.

Lord Mahon ventures to assert, that Gaston, Duke of Orleans, was “the most cowardly prince of whom history makes mention.”  A strong expression, but perhaps safe.  Holding the most powerful position in the nation, he never came upon the scene but to commit some new act of ingenious pusillanimity; while, by some extraordinary chance, every woman of his immediate kindred was a natural heroine, and became more heroic through disgust at him.  His wife was Marguerite of Lorraine, who originated the first Fronde insurrection; his daughter turned the scale of the second.  But, personally, he not only had not the courage to act, but he had not the courage to abstain from acting; he could no more keep out of parties than in them; but was always busy, waging war in spite of Mars, and negotiating in spite of Minerva.

And when the second war of the Fronde broke out, it was in spite of himself that he gave his name and his daughter to the popular cause.  When the fate of the two nations hung trembling in the balance, the royal army under Turenne advancing on Paris, and almost arrived at the city of Orleans, and that city likely to take the side of the strongest,—­then Mademoiselle’s hour had come.  All her sympathies