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"To Monsieur de Chanleu, who commands your troops at Charenton. I say your troops, for I presume that you gentlemen are Frondeurs?" "Yes, almost," said Aramis. "We are for the king and the princes," added Athos. "We must understand each other," said the duke.
It is a most interesting population to examine in detail, made up of honest, skilful Parisian artisans, frondeurs at heart, jesting with everything, but terribly ticklish on the point of honour. "They ask us to 'hold out'," exclaims the laundress of the rue de Jouy; "as if we'd ever done anything else all our lives!" These people were capable of the prodigious. They have achieved the miraculous!
Mazarin had succeeded Richelieu, and to escape the anger of the Frondeurs, he, with the regent and the two princes, Louis XIV and the Duc d'Anjou, fled to the refuge of Saint Germain-en-Laye. In company with Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who had been rudely awakened from her slumbers in the Luxembourg, they took a coach in the dead of night for Saint Germain.
Instead of defending himself, and Madame de Longueville, he accuses Condé of having "adroitly increased the suspicions of the Frondeurs against his sister and La Rochefoucauld, firmly believing that so long as they held that belief, they would never discover the true cause of the postponement of the marriage." And what was that true cause?
M. Dumas is much happier in his delineations of Frondeurs and Mazarinists than of Puritans and Cavaliers; and his account of Charles the First, and of the scenes prior to his execution, is horribly Frenchified.
Beaufort waited on the Prince and was well received, but I could not gain admittance. On the 14th the Prince de Conde went to Parliament and demanded that a committee might be appointed to inquire into the attempt made on his life. The Frondeurs were not asleep in the meantime, yet most of our friends were dispirited, and all very weak.
The Duc d'Orleans took such delight in conversing with me that, on De Goulas, one of his secretaries, telling him that all the foreign officers took mighty umbrage at it, he pulled him up very sharply, and said, "Go to the devil, you and your foreign officers. If they were as good Frondeurs as Cardinal de Retz, they would be at their posts, and not tippling in the taverns of Paris."
The consequence of all this was a great, thick cloud, wherein the Frondeurs themselves were at last involved; but which they burst with a thunderclap.
The Frondeurs occupied what is now the Faubourg St. Antoine: the royalists the heights of Charonne. It was a stubborn and bloody contest. The armies were led by the two greatest captains of the age, and fought under the eyes of their king, who with the queen-mother watched the struggle from the eminence now crowned by the cemetery of Père la Chaise.
Under the Restoration he would certainly have repaired the fortunes of a great and noble family so brilliant even as far back as 1100, centuries before they took the French title for the Rusticoli had given a pope to the church and twice revolutionized the kingdom of Naples so illustrious again under the Valois; so dexterous in the days of the Fronde, that obstinate Frondeurs though they were, they still existed through the reign of Louis XIV. Mazarin favored them; there was the Tuscan strain in them still, and he recognized it.
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