worse; the lovely La Vallière walked through sin to saintliness, and poor Marie de Mancini through saintliness to sin; Voiture and Benserade and Corneille passed away, and Racine and Molière reigned in their stead; and Mademoiselle, who had won the first campaigns of her life and lost all the rest, died a weary old woman at sixty-seven.
Thus wrecked and wasted, her opportunity past, her career a disappointment, she leaves us only the passing glimpse of what she was, and the hazy possibility of what she might have been. Perhaps the defect was, after all, in herself; perhaps the soil was not deep enough to produce anything but a few stray heroisms, bright and transitory;—perhaps otherwise. What fascinates us in her is simply her daring, that inborn fire of the blood to which danger is its own exceeding great reward; a quality which always kindles enthusiasm, and justly,—but which is a thing of temperament, not necessarily joined with any other great qualities, and worthless when it stands alone—But she had other resources,—weapons, at least, if not qualities; she had birth, wealth, ambition, decision, pride, perseverance, ingenuity; beauty not slight, though not equalling the superb Longuevilles and Chevreuses of the age; great personal magnetism, more than average cultivation for that period, and unsullied chastity. Who can say what these things might have ended in, under other circumstances? We have seen how Mazarin, who read all hearts but the saintly, dreaded the conjunction of herself and Condé; it is scarcely possible to doubt that it would have placed a new line of Bourbons on the throne. Had she married Louis XIV., she might not have controlled that steadier will, but there would have been two Grand Monarques instead of one; had she accepted Charles II. of England, she might have only increased his despotic tendencies, but she would easily have disposed of the Duchess of Portsmouth; had she won Ferdinand III., Germany might have suffered less by the Peace of Westphalia; had she chosen Alphonso Henry, the House of Braganza would again have been upheld by a woman's hand. But she did none of these things, and her only epitaph is that dreary might-have-been.
Nay, not the only one,—for one visible record of her, at least, the soil of France cherishes among its chiefest treasures. When the Paris butterflies flutter for a summer day to the decaying watering-place of Dieppe, some American wanderer, who flutters with them, may cast perchance a longing eye to where the hamlet of Eu stands amid its verdant meadows, two miles away, still lovely as when the Archbishop Laurent chose it out of all the world for his "place of eternal rest," six centuries ago. But it is not for its memories of priestly tombs and miracles that the summer visitor seeks it now, nor because the savant loves its ancient sea-margin or its Roman remains; nor is it because the little Bresle winds gracefully through its soft bed, beneath forests green in the sunshine, glorious in the gloom; it is not for the memories of Rollo and William the Conqueror, which fill with visionary shapes, grander than the living, the corridors of its half-desolate château. It is because these storied walls, often ruined, often rebuilt, still shelter a gallery of historic portraits such as the world cannot equal; there is not a Bourbon king, nor a Bourbon battle, nor one great name among the courtier contemporaries of Bourbons, that is not represented there; the "Hall of the Guises" contains kindred faces, from all the realms of Christendom; the "Salon des Rois" holds Joan of Arc, sculptured in marble by the hand of a princess; in the drawing-room, Père la Chaise and Marion de l'Orme are side by side, and the angelic beauty of Agnes Sorel floods the great hall with light, like a sunbeam; and in this priceless treasure-house, worth more to France than almost fair Normandy itself, this gallery of glory, first arranged at Choisy, then transferred hither to console the solitude of a weeping woman, the wanderer finds the only remaining memorial of La Grande Mademoiselle.
