Victor Cousin 
Secret History of the French Court Under Richelieu and Mazarin [PDF ebook] 
Or, Life and Times of Madame De Chevreuse

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Among the most admired of Victor Cousin’s works are his Studies of the Illustrious Women and the Society of the Seventeenth Century; and of these none has excited so much attention as his Life of Madame de Chevreuse. In this charming biography, which certainly reads very much like a romance, the author claims the merit of a scrupulous and exact adherence to the truth of history. He controverts many received opinions and forces the reader to abandon many established hypotheses, but he does it upon the incontestable evidence of cotemporary writers and of documents that were supposed to be lost or not known to exist.