by Miss Pardoe.
Originally published in Ainsworth's Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance (Chapman and Hall) vol.4 #20 (Sep 1843).
Part II.
Thus, then, the duke departed, baffled and dissatisfied; and Madame de Mazarin, when she had ascertained that he was fairly on his way to the place of his destination, lost no time in applying for an audience of the king, to whose presence she was conducted by the Princess of Baden, when the justice of her case appeared to Louis so unequivocal, that he consented, without hesitation, to her proposal of opening the process. M. Colbert, however, created such numerous delays, and professed so much repugnance to the scandal which must ensue, from the disclosures that would inevitably take place during the progress of the transaction, and for which all Paris was agape, that Madame de Mazarin, who felt that she was exhausting her energies and undermining her health by a personal participation in a struggle in which she could not individually effect any good result, returned to her convent, and left the care of her interests to her legal advisers and relatives.
The unfortunate lady failed not, however, during her audience of the sovereign, to make him conscious of the gratuitous insult offered both to herself and to Madame de la Porte, by her removal, without reason, to another religious house, after she had been so affectionately received and welcomed by the kinswoman of her husband; and although Louis was so punctilious, where he had once passed his word, that he would not sanction her return to Chelles until the close of the duke's sojourn in Brittany, Monsieur de Mazarin had no sooner announced his immediate arrival in the capital, than the chivalrous monarch dispatched a couple of the royal carriages to St. Mary's, to convey the duchess and her attendants once more to the protection of Madame de la Porte; thus by a considerate condescension, never anticipated by either party, restoring to the abbess the honour of her house, and to Madame de Mazarin, the comfort of a congenial asylum and the society of a valued and respected friend, while the arrangement was, moreover, so judiciously timed, that the caléche of the duke passed through the gates of Paris precisely on the same day that those of Chelles once more closed upon the duchess.
It was only a few days subsequent to this event, and the fluttered and flattered community were still busied in commenting among themselves upon the high honour which had accrued to them, from the apparition of the royal carriages at their door, and the restoration of their noble inmates, when the three ladies were grouped together, as already described, in the parlour of the abbess.
The rebuke which was addressed by the holy superior to the laughter-loving Madame de Courcelles was neither long nor stern; for the espiègleries of the pretty countess never involved either suffering or sorrow, and were therefore easily forgiven; but the duchess was more than usually dejected, for she had so thoroughly habituated herself to the peaceful monotony of the convent, that she looked forward with dread to the next mandate of her imperious lord; and even the playful delinquency and attempted penitence of Madame de Courcelles had failed to elicit a smile from her unhappy friend, who, absorbed by her own saddening reflections, and almost unconscious of the presence of her companions, was silently pursuing her monotonous occupation, when the door opened, and a lay-sister, half bewildered by terror, entered the room, and presented a letter to the abbess. At the same moment, the clatter of horse-hoofs upon the pavement of the area before the convent could be distinctly heard through the open portal; and the sound was at once so unseemly and so unusual, that as it fell upon her ear, the duchess rose hastily from her seat, and with a pale cheek and quivering lip, approached the superior, and exclaimed, in a voice which despair had rendered firm—
"What says the missive, holy mother? Am Ito be driven like a culprit to a new dungeon?—am I called to undergo a new trial? Do not seek to delay your tidings, or to tamper with my anxiety. It is for me that your walls are desecrated by the presence of armed men!—they are many, and they seek me! Mother!"—and as she spoke, she sank upon her knees—"will you indeed abandon me to insult and injury like this?"
"Never!" said the abbess, rising proudly from her seat, and extending her hand to the noble suppliant. "Rise, Hortense Mancini!—let the guilty kneel! Am I to be braved, like an infant, at the head of my own community? Did I not receive you from the hands of the king, scarce a week back?—and shall I suffer you to be dragged, like a felon, from beneath my roof?—Never, by all the saints! Duchess of Mazarin, this letter was indeed brought by your unworthy husband. He is without, at the head of sixty mounted followers; and the paper which I hold in my hand is an order from the Archbishop of Paris for his admission into the convent, that in the event of your refusing voluntarily to accompany him to the capital, he may be enabled to remove you by force."
"Thus I am lost indeed!" murmured Madame de Mazarin, wringing her hands, and then burying her face in her spread palms.
"Again I say 'no!'—a thousand times, 'no!'—You are and shall be safe," said the abbess, with dignity. "My nephew may wear a ducal coronet, and invest my house, as though it were a beleaguered city, but we are still in possession of the citadel, and even while he dreams that his purpose is effected, we will convince him of its failure!"
"M. le Due," interposed Madame de Courcelles, who, even at that moment of anxiety, could not restrain her buoyancy of spirit—"M. le Due is fated to be unfortunate in his dreams, holy mother; for only a few months back, he waited upon the king, and informed his majesty that he had been honoured by a visit from the angel Gabriel, who had charged him to inform his royal master that he must forthwith part from Madame de la Valli¢re; whereupon, Louis, who does not understand raillery on so delicate a point, replied that the angel had also appeared to himself, and more than hinted that M. de Mazarin was a madman."
"Peace, daughter!" said the abbess, sternly; "the story is out of taste as well as season, when told at such a time, and to two of the duke's kinswomen."
"Was it not enough," wept Madame de Mazarin, as she flung herself upon a seat, "that the perseverance of M. de Mazarin, combined with circumstances which controlled my unhappy destiny, should have eventually enabled him to secure my hand, even after the cardinal, my uncle, had declared that he would rather bestow it upon his valet? Was it not enough that he became at once the master both of myself, for whom he had long either felt or feigned a passion without bounds, and of the eleven millions which formed my dowry, but must he still, after blighting my youth and dissipating my fortune, pursue me even here with his unrelenting tyranny? Oh, madam—mother! shew me some method of escape from this monstrous, this hateful vassalage, alike of body and of spirit, or my heart will break!"
"Calm yourself, daughter," said the abbess; "none enter here save by my good pleasure; and I forbid all ingress to the duke, your husband. Even M. de Paris will, I am sure, admit that I owe this refusal to my self-respect, when he learns that M. de Mazarin has approached my threshold in the character of a trooper, rather than in that of a noble."
The superior was interrupted by the entrance of a second lay-sister, who, scared almost out of her ordinary respect, exclaimed, hurriedly—"His highness the duke is impatient for entrance, holy mother; he says that he will remain without no longer, and has ordered sister Therese to unbar the door!"
"Let sister Therese obey him at her peril!" said the abbess, peremptorily. "How now! have ye yet to learn your duty, that ye cannot await my good pleasure in all things? You will ring in the midnight mass for this sinful disrespect, sister Clotilde! and now retire, and school your spirit into the calm befitting your vocation."
The rebuked and discomfited nun withdrew, as she was commanded, silent and abashed, with her hands meekly folded before her, and her eyes rivetted to the ground, and the abbess, as the door closed, drew two ponderous keys from her girdle and held them towards the duchess.
"Kinswoman," she said, as composedly as though the usual tranquillity of her existence had suffered no interruption—"here are the keys of the holy Abbey of Chelles. You are abbess for to-day, and none shall question your authority. I exact only that you shall see and expostulate with M. de Mazarin at the grate."
The heart of the duchess was too full for thanks, but as she received the precious keys, she raised to her lips the hand by which they were presented, and then, with a flashing eye and a burning cheek, she beckoned to Madame de Courcelles to attend her, and left the room.
Great was the astonishment of the duke, when, on entering the hall of the convent, where he was still separated from the interior of the building by an iron grating, he found himself in the presence, not of his aunt, the abbess, but of his wife and her friend, both of whom were waiting to receive him behind this impenetrable screen."
"Permit me, M. le Duc, to welcome you back from Brittany," said the duchess, struggling to preserve the appearance of a composure which she was far from feeling; and her greeting was by a joyous "Soyez le bien-venu, M. le Duc!" from the clear voice of Madame de Courcelles, to whom the whole proceeding appeared so bizarre and original, that she was rather amused than dismayed.
"I have not come hither to bandy compliments, duchess!" was the abrupt reply. "Are you prepared to accompany me forthwith to Paris?"
"By no means. My intention is to remain at Chelles, under the protection of your good and pious aunt."
"I will permit no such folly! Is a woman of your rank to live for ever immured within four walls, like a bourgeoise who has taken the veil, to invest her insignificance with dignity? I come armed with the sanction of the metropolitan archbishop to enter the convent at my good will and pleasure; and should you rebel against your duty as a wife, and oppose my wishes for your immediate departure hence, I am prepared to compel the compliance which I cannot induce; and I at once declare that I will avail myself of the authority of M. de Paris."
"I resist his authority," said the duchess, quietly.
M. de Mazarin laughed the low, bitter laugh of ignoble triumph. "As you please. I shall, then, compel your submission! Where is the lady abbess?"
"You see her before you. What is your pleasure?"
"Nay, nay, I will brook no fooling—I am in no mood for women's jests. Let the abbess come forward and give me entrance, according to the orders of the archbishop."
"Again I say that I am abbess for the day, M. de Mazarin, and that I hold the keys!" said the duchess, whose courage rose with the conviction of her impunity. "We had no sooner learnt that you had come to this holy house booted and spurred, at the head of a band of troopers, than your pious kinswoman, whose peaceful avocations unfit her for the brawlings of intemperate passion and the outpourings of selfish tyranny, resigned to me the onerous duties of her station—and I will do no discredit to her trust. For shame, sir!—did you think to kidnap a noble lady, as you would have carried off the daughter of a churl? Had you so little respect for the woman who might twice have worn a crown,[1] had her uncle been a worse Christian or a weaker patriot as to seek to drag her through the country, like a convicted felon?"
"Madame de Mazarin, I insist upon immediate admission!" exclaimed the duke, in a voice half choked with passion.
"Ingress or egress shall none have throughout the day!" was the reply of the duchess. "Persist no longer in your disgraceful purpose, for you will fail—Oh, Charles!" she continued, in extreme emotion, as her woman's heart suddenly gave way, and the tears fell in a shower on her pale cheeks—"how bitterly have you hitherto misused your power! Chance made me yours when I was yet a child; and the flowers of my bridal wreath had not yet withered, when I was summoned to strew them over my uncle's corse! You might have made me all that you would, had you then acted kindly towards me, for I loved you—and where a young, pure woman loves, and is beloved in turn, she knows no wish, no will, no law, no happiness, save his in whom she has bound up her hope! But you sported with my tenderness—you treated my affection as a jest—and in your infatuated selfishness, you taunted me with having wronged you, and thus taught me, in the honest, unsuspecting days of my girlhood, that crime and dishonour could come between a wife and him whom she had vowed to cherish and to love throughout existence! This was the first wrong you did me, duke, and it was a bitter one! Had you been a man, you would have expiated the evil by a lifetime of devotion and high-hearted confidence—but you were incapable of aught so noble! And what has your career since been? Have I not seen, from year to year, the princely fortune bequeathed to me by my uncle lavished upon the base and the unworthy?—menials elected into friends, and equals treated as menials?—my son robbed of his birthright, and myself even of that pure and and unsullied name, which was the best dowry that Hortense Mancini, wealthy as she was, could bring to a man of honour! Again I say, fie on you sir—fie on you!—away! and repent that you should ever so have fallen beneath the contempt of the woman who had sworn and hoped to love you, that you were compelled to stoop to the ignominy of kidnapping your own wife!"
"Strike on!" was the calm reply; "and meanwhile, we will retire and pray for you." And leaving the duke still in the same attitude of impotent fury, the duchess swept haughtily through a door which led to an inner apartment, and disappeared, while Madame de Courcelles, awed, for once, into gravity, bent her head to the infuriated noble, and signing the cross upon her forehead, followed her in silence.
1. Proposals were made to the Cardinal Mazarin for the hand of his beautiful niece and heiress both from the King of England and the Duke of Savoy.