LA ROCHEFOUCAULD 416 From a steel engraving. PRINCE DE CONDÉ 420 DUC D'ORLÉANS 422 LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE THE YOUTH OF LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE CHAPTER I I. Gaston d'Orléans--His Marriage--His Character--II. Birth of Mademoiselle--III. The Tuileries in 1627--The Retinue of a Princess--IV. Contemporary Opinions of Education--The Education of Boys--V. The Education of Girls--VI. Mademoiselle's Childhood--Divisions of the Royal Family. In the Château of Versailles there is a full-length portrait of La Grande Mademoiselle,--so called because of her tall stature,--daughter of Gaston d'Orléans, and niece of Louis XIII. When the portrait was painted, the Princess's hair was turning grey. She was forty-five years old. Her imperious attitude and warlike mien befit the manners of the time of her youth, as they befit her Amazonian exploits in the days of the Fronde. Her lofty bearing well accords with the adventures of the illustrious girl whom the customs and the life of her day, the plays of Corneille, and the novels of La Calprenède and of Scudéry imbued with sentiments much too pompous. The painter of the portrait had seen Mademoiselle as we have seen her in her own memoirs and in the memoirs of her companions. Nature had fitted her to play the part of the goddess in exile; and it had been her good fortune to find suitable employment for faculties which would have been obstacles in an ordinary life. To become the Minerva of Versailles, Mademoiselle had to do nothing but yield to circumstances and to float onward, borne by the current of events. In the portrait, under the tinselled trappings the deep eyes look out gravely, earnestly; the thoughtful face is naively proud of its borrowed divinity; and just as she was pictured--serious, exalted in her assured dignity, convinced of her own high calling--she lived her life to its end, too proud to know that hers was the fashion of a bygone age, too sure of her own position to note the smiles provoked by her appearance. She ignored the fact that she had denied her pretensions by her own act (her romance with Lauzun,--an episode by far too bourgeois for the character of an Olympian goddess). She had given the lie to her assumption of divinity, but throughout the period of her romance she bore aloft her standard, and when it was all over she came forth unchanged, still vested with her classic dignity. The old Princess, who excited the ridicule of the younger generation, was, to the few surviving companions of her early years, the living evocation of the past. To them she bore the ineffaceable impression of the thought, the feeling, the inspiration, the soul of France, as they had known it under Richelieu and Mazarin.