Mademoiselle's crisis covered a period of six months; when she reappeared patches adorned her face and powder glistened in her hair. She said of her awakening: "I recovered my taste for diversions, and I attended the play and other amusements with pleasure, but my worldly life did not obliterate the memory of my longings; the excessive austerity to which I had reduced myself was modified, but I could not forget the aspirations which I had supposed would lead me to the Carmelites!" Not long after she emerged from her religious retreat politics called her from her frivolity. Political life was the arena at that hour, and it is not probable that the most radical of the feministic codes of the future will restore the power which women then possessed by force of their determined gallantry, their courage, their vivacity, their beauty, and their coquetry. The women of the future will lack such power because their rights will be conferred by laws; legal rights are of small importance compared to rights conferred and confirmed by custom. The women of Mademoiselle's day ordered the march of war, led armies, dictated the terms of peace, curbed the will of statesmen, and signed treaties with kings, not because they had a right to do so, but because they possessed invincible force. Richelieu, who had a species of force of his own, and at times wielded it to their temporary detriment, planned his moves with deference to their tactics, and openly deplored their importance. Mazarin, who dreaded women, wrote to Don Luis del Haro: "We have three such amazons right here in France, and they are fully competent to rule three great kingdoms; they are the Duchesse de Longueville, the Princesse Palatine, and the Duchesse de Chevreuse." The Duchesse de Chevreuse, having been born in the early century, was the veteran of the trio. "She had a strong mind," said Richelieu,[109] "and powerful beauty, which, as she knew well how to use it, she never lowered by any disgraceful concessions. Her mind was always well balanced." [Illustration: DUCHESSE DE CHEVREUSE]