“All that is most agreeable in our court is imitated from the Palais Royal and the Louvre. “‘Whitehall is but the shadow of a shadow,’ says Fareham, in one of his philosophy fits, preaching upon the changes he has seen in Paris and London. And, indeed, it is strange to have lived through two revolutions, one so awful in its final catastrophe that it dwarfs the other, yet both terrible; for I, who was a witness of the sufferings of Princes and Princesses during the two wars of the Fronde, am not inclined to think lightly of a civil war which cost France some of the flower of her nobility, and made her greatest hero a prisoner and an exile for seven years of his life. “But oh, my dear, it was a romantic time! and I look back and am proud to have lived in it. I was but twelve years old at the siege of Paris; but I was in Madame de Longueville’s room, at the Hôtel de Ville, while the fighting was going on, and the officers, in their steel cuirasses, coming in from the thick of the strife. Such a confusion of fine ladies and armed men—breast-plates and blue scarves—fiddles squeaking in the salon, trumpets sounding in the square below!” In a letter of later date Lady Fareham expatiated upon the folly of her sister’s spiritual guides. “I am desolated, _ma mie_, by the absurd restriction which forbids you to profit by my New Year’s gift. I thought, when I sent you all the volumes of la Scudèry’s enchanting romance, I had laid up for you a year of enjoyment, and that, touched by the baguette of that exquisite fancy, your convent walls would fall, like those of Jericho at the sound of Jewish trumpets, and you would be transported in imagination to the finest society in the world—the company of Cyrus and Mandane—under which Oriental disguise you are shown every feature of mind and person in Condé and his heroic sister, my esteemed friend, the Duchesse de Longueville. As I was one of the first to appreciate Mademoiselle Scudèry’s genius, and to detect behind the name of the brother the tender sentiments and delicate refinement of the sister’s chaster pen, so I believe I was the first to call the Duchesse ‘Mandane,’ a sobriquet which soon became general among her intimates.