In the preface to his Madame de Chevreuse: Nouvelles études sur les femmes illustres et la société du XVIIe siècle, the nineteenth-century French philosopher Victor Cousin (1868) noted that two women stood out among Cardinal Mazarin's many enemies at the French court: Madame de Chevreuse and Madame de Hautefort. In contrast to the bad press they had received, Cousin's meticulous research led him to discover “two heroines who opposed Richelieu and Mazarin, the two most interesting actresses of the great drama of 1643.” Cousin's good intentions aside, he then went on to spend some ten pages listing all the pejoratives that contemporaries, historians, and novelists in later years had used to describe Marie de Rohan, “the schemer.” Most people are familiar with her image as a seductress thanks to Alexandre Dumas, whose The Three Musketeers features the duchess of Chevreuse as Richelieu's enemy, Anne of Austria's friend, and the lover of one of the musketeers, Aramis.

Marie de Rohan, duchess of Chevreuse (1600–1679) spent a significant portion of her seventy-nine years in cities in numerous European kingdoms that were sometimes at war with each other. Her travels from one European city to another shed light on early modern noblewomen's interest in journeying within and across borders for political reasons.