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She readily perceived, therefore, that the perpetual delay of favours ever promised, ever deferred in the instances of the Vendômes and La Rochefoucauld, were so many artifices of the Cardinal, and that she was his dupe. This conviction put the spirited partisan upon her mettle.
She endeavours to strengthen the hands of the Vendômes; she tries to win over every member of the house of Lorraine; she has already gained the Duke de Guise, and through him she strives to carry away from me the Duke d'Elbeuf."
"Nothing discourages Madame de Chevreuse; she entreats the Vendômes to have patience, and sustains them by promising a speedy change of scene." "Madame de Chevreuse never relinquishes the hope of displacing me.
On returning to Court, one of her earliest steps was to withdraw her friend and protégé, Alexandre de Campion, from the service of the Vendômes, and place him in a suitable position in the Queen's household.
The King, satisfied with this trial, allowed him to go and prove his valour at the sieges of Digmude and Courtrai. All the staff officers recognised soon in his conversation, his zeal, his methods, a worthy rival of the Vendomes. They wrote charming things of him to the Court.
She reckoned upon the Vendômes, upon the Duke d'Epernon, upon La Vieuville, her old companions in exile in England; upon the ill-treated Bouillons, upon La Rochefoucauld, whose disposition and pretensions were so well known to her; upon Lord Montagu, who had been her slave, and at that moment possessed the entire confidence of Anne of Austria; upon La Châtre, the friend of the Vendômes, and Colonel-General of the Swiss Guards; upon Treville, upon Beringhen, upon Jars, upon La Porte, who were all emerging from exile, prison, and disgrace.
The Bouillons were of little less importance than the Vendômes. The Duke was a politician and a soldier of the first class, capable of conducting a government or leading an army, and who had only one sentiment or thought in heart and head the aggrandisement of his house.
The eager concurrence of the aristocracy could not be doubted for a moment; which ever regretted its old and turbulent independence, and whose most illustrious representatives, the Vendômes, the Guises, the Bouillons, and the La Rochefoucaulds were strenously opposed to the domination of a foreign favourite, without fortune, of no birth, and as yet without fame.
The Minister parried the blow aimed at him by the Duchess by dint of address and patience, never refusing, always eluding, and summoning to his aid his grand ally, as he termed it Time. Before the return of Madame de Chevreuse he had found himself forced to win over the Vendômes, and to secure them in his interest.
He did not dare return to France until after the Cardinal's death; and, as may well be imagined, he came back breathing the direst vengeance. Against the ambition of the Vendômes Mazarin skilfully opposed that of the Condés, who were inimical to the aggrandisement of a house too nearly rivalling their own.
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