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It forgot Louis the Thirteenth, the Regency, and the Fronde, and only remembered that its monarch was the grandson of Henry the Fourth, when it witnessed in his reign the culmination of the French monarchy, and the splendid intellectual development with which it was simultaneous. And that brilliant day of Mazarin's triumph was shadowed by no eclipse.
The Queen, transported with joy, extended her hand to him saying "Give me your hand on that, and the day after to-morrow you are a cardinal, and moreover the second amongst my friends." A few days afterwards, De Retz and Madame de Chevreuse had raised the entire Fronde against the Prince de Condé.
Gaston was sent into honourable exile, to his castle in the beautiful town of Blois, and the Cardinal-Archbishop, the evil spirit of the Fronde, was received with apparent cordiality, and began to entertain hopes of supplanting his rival; but when he had fallen into disrepute with the citizens, he was quietly carried off to Vincennes, and left to meditate on his plots and schemings within the bars of his solitary apartment.
She always preserved her great influence over the Duke de Lorraine, and it is not difficult to recognize her hidden hand behind the different and often contrary movements of Charles IV. She had a principal share in the three great movements which mark and link together the entire history of the Fronde between the war in Paris and the peace of Ruel.
By the time peace was signed at Munster he had become a soldier well proved in the most desperate war which had been fought since Europe accepted Christianity. To the great action of the Thirty Years' War there soon succeeded the domestic commotion of the Fronde.
Delighted to see you again, and to be no longer at Rueil, where you and your damned companions made me pay ransom. Fronde! still Fronde! accursed Fronde! Oh, what grudges! Why, monsieur, have your antipathies survived mine? If any one had cause to complain, I think it could not be you, who got out of the affair not only in a sound skin, but with the cordon of the Holy Ghost around your neck."
Whilst supping, that is, while eating the fish, washed down with bad ale, Monk got Athos to relate to him the last events of the Fronde, the reconciliation of M. de Conde with the king, and the probable marriage of the infanta of Spain; but he avoided, as Athos himself avoided it, all allusion to the political interests which united, or rather which disunited at this time, England, France and Holland.
In pitting against himself those who had so powerfully succoured him in his misfortune, Condé ought at least to have drawn closer to the Court and had a serious understanding with the Queen; but he tergiversated, and at the end of some months of that wavering policy, he found himself standing unmasked between the Court and the Fronde, both equally discontented with him, repeating and exaggerating the blunder committed by Mazarin.
The Duke of Orleans, chagrined and humiliated, retired to Blois. The king soon held what was called a bed of justice, in which, instead of granting a general amnesty, he denounced the princes Condé and Conti, and other of the prominent leaders of the Fronde, as traitors to their king, to be punished by death. These doomed ones were nobles of high rank, vast wealth, with thousands of retainers.
That same echo was the ruin of De Retz's hopes, who only so passionately desired to become a cardinal in order to succeed to Mazarin. Shortly afterwards the division between Condé and the Old Fronde was declared, and Condé applied himself to form an intermediate party, a new Fronde, which became sufficiently powerful to disquiet Madame de Chevreuse and the Coadjutor.
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