The Palatine Princess, Anne de Gonzague, was a ravishingly beautiful woman endowed with great executive ability. "I do not think," said Retz, "that Elizabeth of England had more capacity for conducting a State." Anne de Gonzague did not begin her career by politics. When, as a young girl, she appeared in the world of the Court, she astonished France by the number and by the piquancy of her adventures. She was another of the exalted dames who ran upon the highways disguised as cavaliers or as monks. No one was surprised no matter when or where he saw Anne de Gonzague, though she was often met far beyond the limits of polite society. Fancy alone--and their own sweet will--ruled the fair ladies of those heroic days. During five whole years Anne de Gonzague[111] gave the world to understand that she was "Mme. de Guise, wife of Henri de Guise, Archbishop of Rheims" (the same Henri de Guise who afterward married Mme. de Bossut). Having passed for "Mme. de Guise" sixty months, the Lady Anne appeared at Court under her own name "as if nothing had happened," reported Mademoiselle. Whatever may have here "happened," Anne de Gonzague reappeared at Court as alluring as in the flower of her first youth; and, as the _Chronicle_ expressed it: "had the talent to marry herself--between two affairs of womanly gallantry--to the Prince Palatine,[112] one of the most rabidly jealous of gentlemen," because, as the pious and truthful Bossuet justly remarked, "everything gave way before the secret charm of her conversation." When nearly thirty years of age she obeyed the instincts of her genius and engaged in politics, with other politically inclined ladies, including Mme. de Longueville, whose only talent lay in her blonde hair and charming eyes. Despite the poverty of her mental resources, Mme. de Longueville was a natural director of men, and she was but one of a very brilliant coterie. The prominent and fiery amazons of the politics of that epoch are too historically known to require detailed mention. They were: the haughty, dazzlingly superb, but too vicious and too practical in vice, Montbazon; the Duchesse de Chatillon (the imperious beauty who had her hand painted upon a painted lion whose face was the face of the great Condé), and many others who to the measure of their ability played with the honour and the lives of men, with Universal Suffrage, and with the stability of France, and who, like La Grande Mademoiselle, were called from their revelries by the dangers which threatened them.