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On his return, that victorious young soldier found royalty humiliated, the Parliament triumphing and dictating laws to the Crown; the Duke de Beaufort, with whom he once thought of measuring swords in defence of the honour of his sister, freed from his prison in Vincennes, and master of Paris by aid of the populace who idolized him; the vain and fickle Abbé de Retz transformed into a tribune of the people; the Prince de Conti into a generalissimo; M. de Longueville under the guidance of his wife and La Rochefoucauld; and the feeble Duke d'Orléans fancying himself almost a King, because he saw the Queen humiliated, and because the Frondeurs, cunningly flattering his self-love, were treating him like a sovereign.
Dissatisfied with the deliberations of the Hôtel de Ville, he caused it to be carried by assault by the populace, who killed several of the échevins. The Fronde, however, was approaching its last agony. Divided amongst themselves by selfish interests, and outwearied with endless intrigues, the majority of the Frondeurs only awaited a fitting opportunity of treating with Mazarin.
The two gentlemen traveled by byways in order not to encounter the Mazarinists scattered about the Isle of France, and also to escape the Frondeurs, who were in possession of Normandy and who never failed to conduct captives to the Duc de Longueville, in order that he might ascertain whether they were friends or foes.
She had not passed the first flush of youth when her mother contracted a second marriage with the Chevalier Renaud de Sevigne, whose name figures among the frondeurs as the ardent friend of Cardinal de Retz, and later among the devout Port Royalists.
Without any unity of action or aim, and by turns excited and dismayed by the examples that came to them from England, the Frondeurs had to guide them no Hampden or Cromwell; they had at their backs neither people nor army; the English had been able to accomplish a revolution; the Fronde failed before the dexterous prudence of Mazarin and the queen's fidelity to her minister.
The abbe, in the ordinary dress of the time, was standing on the threshold of the shop which stood between Saint Roch and the Rue des Frondeurs when he saw that the Rue Saint Honore was filled with a crowd and he could not go out. "What is the matter?" he asked Madame Ragon.
In my own mind I saw little chance for the lovers, for I thought it inevitable that the Court and the Princes would draw together again, and that whether Cardinal Mazarin were sacrificed or not, the Frondeurs of Paris would be overthrown, and that Darpent, whose disinterestedness displeased all parties alike, was very likely to be made the victim.
I remember it was on that evening that I first heard the name Frondeurs, or Slingers, applied to the speechifiers on either side who started forward, made their hit, and retreated, like the little street boys with their slings. I was to hear a great deal more of that name. It was not till after supper that I heard the cause of M. de Solivet's visit.
"Cardinalists or Frondeurs, what matters it? Let us meet again as capital seconds in a duel, devoted friends in business, merry companions in our ancient pleasures." "And whenever," added Athos, "we meet in battle, at this word, 'Place Royale! let us put our swords into our left hands and shake hands with the right, even in the very lust and music of the hottest carnage."
You see the state and condition the Frondeurs were in at this juncture, when they could not move one step but to their own disadvantage.
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