Ybar, one of the most resolute men of the party, she encouraged the remnant of the Importants in France, and stirred up everywhere the fire of sedition. Passionate, yet always mistress of herself, she preserved a smooth brow in the midst of tempests, at the same time displaying an indefatigable activity in surprising the weak sides of the enemy. Availing herself equally of the Catholic and the Protestant parties, sometimes she meditated a revolt in Languedoc or an invasion in Brittany; sometimes, at the least symptom of discontent manifested by any important personage, she labored to detach him from Mazarin and to win him to her cause. In 1647, her piercing eye discerned in the heart of the Congress of Munster some signs of a misunderstanding between the French ambassador, the Duke de Longueville, and the prime minister, which in fact was with difficulty arranged, and to her belongs the mournful honor of having from that time founded too just hopes on the ill-regulated ambition and the variable temper of the Duke d'Enghien, quite recently become Prince de Condé.[1]
Time advanced, the Fronde broke forth; and the ardent duchess rushed again from Brussels in 1649, and brought to her friends the support of Spain and of her experience. She was then nearly fifty years of age. Years and sorrows had tri-
- ↑ Bibliothèque Mazarine, French Letters of Mazarin, letter of September 28, 1645, to the Abbé de La Rivière, folio 453, But the most important paper of all, which throws much light on all the intrigues of Madame de Chevreuse in 1646 and 1649, and also on the state of public sentiment in France on the eve of the Fronde, is a memoir of a Spanish agent, whom we have already met in the affair of the Count de Soissons, the Abbé de Mercy,—a memoir addressed to the Government of the Netherlands, in which he shows all that Saint-Ybar, and more especially Madame de Chevreuse, might do against Mazarin if they were better sustained. This piece is entitled: "Memoire sur ce qui s'est négocié et traité au voyage de l'abbé de Mercy en Hollande entre lui, le comte de Saint-Ybar et Madame la Duchesse de Chevreuse." The memoir is dated September 27, 1647, and is signed P. Ernest de Mercy. It forms a portion of the official papers of the Spanish Secretary of State which are to be found at Brussels, in the general archives of the kingdom of Belgium.
