Retz completed the portrait: "She loved without any choice of objects for the simple reason that it was necessary for her to love some one; and when once the plan was laid it was not difficult to give her a lover. But from the moment when she began to love her lover, she loved him faithfully,--and she loved no one else." She was witty, spirited, and of a very vigorous mind. Some of her ideas were so brilliant that they were like flashes of lightning; and some of them were so wise and so profound that the wisest men known to history might have been proud to claim them. Rare genius and keen wits which she had trained to intrigue from early youth had made her one of the most dangerous politicians in France. She had been an intimate friend of Anne of Austria, and the chief architect of the Chalais conspiracy. After the exposure of the conspiracy, Richelieu sentenced her to banishment for a term of twenty-five years, and no old political war-horse could have taken revenge sterner than hers. She did not rest on her wrongs; her entrance upon foreign territory was marked by the awakening of all the foreign animosities. Alone and single-handed, the unique Duchess formed a league against France, and when events reached a crisis she had attained such importance in the minds of the allies that England, though vanquished and suing for peace, made it a condition of her surrender that the Duchesse de Chevreuse, "a woman for whom the King of England entertained a particular esteem," should be recalled to France. Richelieu yielded the point instantly; he was too wise to invest it with the importance of a parley; he recalled the woman who had convened a foreign league against her own people, and eliminated the banishment of powerful women from his list of penalties. He had learned an important political lesson; thereafter the presence of the Duchesse de Chevreuse was considered in high diplomatic circles the one thing needful for the even balance of the State of France. After the Spanish intrigue, which ended in Val de Grâce, the Cardinal, fearing another "league," made efforts to keep the versatile Duchess under his hand, but she slipped through his fingers and was seen all over France actively pursuing her own peculiar business. (1637.)