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This excited the Importants to fever heat and a plot was formed, with Mme. de Chevreuse as the leader, to assassinate the cardinal. Shortly after this, Coligny, as champion of the cause of Mme. de Longueville, challenged the Duc de Guise to a duel.
I dined almost every day with Cardinal Mazarin, who liked me the better because I refused to engage myself in the cabal called "The Importants," though many of the members were my dearest friends.
That same day, Mazarin could understand that a new era had arisen for him, more brilliant and more secure than that of 1643, after the defeat of the Importants, and that that sterile and sanguinary halt upon the road of reform and the civilising march of monarchy known in history under the name of the Fronde was at last and for ever terminated.
The cabal of "The Importants" was put to flight and dispersed, and it was reported over all the kingdom that they had made an attempt against the Cardinal's life, which I do not believe, because I never saw anything in confirmation of it, though many of the domestics of the family of Vendome were a long time in prison upon this account.
In declaring its adhesion to Mazarin at the commencement of the Regency, the House of Condé had drawn upon itself the hatred of the party of the Importants, though that enmity scarcely rebounded upon Madame de Longueville.
To a loveliness at once so graceful and dazzling that it was pronounced to be angelic, Madame de Longueville added great intelligence, a most noble heart, and was a person of all others whom it behoved the Importants to conciliate; for her natural generosity of character had disinclined her to side with the party of repression, and thereby had even given some umbrage to the Prime Minister.
M. de Beaufort knew little of affairs of moment but by hearsay and by what he had learned in the cabal of "The Importants," of whose jargon he had retained some smattering, which, together with some expressions he had perfectly acquired from Madame de Vendome, formed a language that would have puzzled a Cato.
From Spain she went to England, organizing there the French exiles into a strength which frightened Richelieu; thence to Holland, to conspire nearer home; back to Paris, on the minister's death, to form the faction of the Importants; and when the Duke of Beaufort was imprisoned, Mazarin said, "Of what use to cut off the arms while the head remains?"
The Importants, a party made up of adventurers and a large number of the nobility, were making themselves felt more and more; they were opposed to Richelieu and Mazarin, and Mme. de Chevreuse became their chief and instigator.
IT is necessary, at this juncture, to have a just idea of the general position of political affairs in France, as well as of the attitude of the faction known as the Importants, who were then most active in opposing the government of Mazarin, in order to understand clearly the gravity of an incident which otherwise in itself might seem to be of little consequence.
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