But it is in the Princess's own Memoirs that the curious epopee must be read; and to which a dry abridgment does injustice. Whether she hold council of war with her fair _Marechales de Camp_, without allowing the men folks to give her their ready cut-and-dried advice,--whether she be thrust into Orleans through the gap of an old gateway, and, covered with mud, be seen carried along its streets in an old arm-chair, laughing heartily,--or when hastening to arrest the massacre at the Hotel de Ville, she stops to look at Madame Riche, the ribbon-vendor, talking in her chemise to her gossip, the beadle of St. Jacques, who has nothing on but his drawers,--the reader is always reminded that he sees and hears the granddaughter of Henry IV.--a Parisian with a touch of the princess in all she says and does, and he cannot help asking himself momentarily whether it be all incorrigible frivolity, or some quaint species of natural heroism which speaks and acts thus strangely. Heroic or frivolous, Mademoiselle expiated her pranks by an exile of four years in her manor of Saint-Fargeau. The rupture with her father, who drove her out of doors, and denied her permission to take refuge under any other roof he owned, her consequent wanderings, at times not a little affecting, and at others comical, when directing her steps towards her place of banishment, her arrival at the ruinous chateau which has neither doors nor windows, and which is haunted by ghosts, and the attempts to embellish the tumble-down place, and people it with gaiety, animation, and life, are so many scenes to which the piquant style of Mademoiselle gives singular attractiveness. Whilst avenues were being planted and a theatre built, matrimonial negotiations went on as briskly as ever, and pretenders to her hand abounded--the Elector of Bavaria, the Duke of Savoy, the nephew of the Duke of Lorraine, the Duke de Neuborg. The reception of M. de Neuborg's envoy, an honest Jesuit, who draws out of his pocket victoriously two portraits of his good lord, ogles Mademoiselle as long as he could, and talks "goguette" to her for a whole hour, is one of the most amusing farces anywhere to be met with. Unluckily, the farce was not worth the candle in the opinion of certain judges, and all the diversions of Saint-Fargeau did not prevent our princess from regretting with all her heart that pompous Court of Versailles in which the young Louis was giving such graceful ballets, brilliant carousals, and piquant masquerades. The masquerades of 1657 carried the day over the political aims of 1652, and the fair exile experienced a vivid longing to be once more received into favour at the court of her royal cousin.