Political women Author:Elizabeth Stone Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. THE DUCHESS DE LONGUEVILLE. Having rapidly summarised the fate and fortunes of the leading male actors who figured in the Fronde, we will now gl... more »ance briefly at the closing scenes in the careers of the fair politicians whom we have seen playing such brilliant and prominent parts in that curious tragi-comedy. To high-born French women—princesses and duchesses— the revolt of the Fronde especially belonged. They were at once its main-springs, its chief instruments, its most interested agents ; and among them Madame de Longueville, who enacted the most conspicuous part, was by its events the most ill-treated of all. We have seen her the heroine—or, perhaps the adventuress—of the civil war, rushing into dangers and mixing herself up in intrigues of every kind, in order to serve the interests of another. She was not a consummate politician like the Palatine, for she had no real business tact. Her true character and the unity of her life should be sought where they were really shown—in her devotion to him whom she loved. It is there—in that devotion wholly and always the same, at once consistent, yet absurd, and very touching even in its downright follies. All her eccentric movements were attributable to the restless and fickle spirit of La Rochefoucauld. Solely occu-- pied with his own interests, it was he who drew her intothe vortex of party politics and civil war, with a view to his own self-aggrandisement. It was for love of him that she sacrificed domestic peace, repose, and reputation. At Bordeaux Madame de Longueville had at first enjoyed the same popularity as that which she had acquired in Paris at the commencement of the first Fronde. Upon that section of the second Fronde which had its head-quarters in the South, the Duchess, after its chief, the Pr...« less