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Updated: June 1, 2025
The Italian regiments of Mazarin were with the army; there were scarcely any other troops in Paris save the regiments of the guards, the colonels of which were nearly all devoted to the Importants. The Queen herself had not yet renounced her former friendships. Her prudent reserve even was wrongly interpreted.
He was not then covered with the disgrace of the Importants, though he shared it to a certain extent; and he did not cease to be, or seem to be, very much attached, not to the government, but to the person of the Queen. He looked continually for some great favour at her hands.
No one could have been better informed as to his exact position than the Cardinal: and the plans of the Duchess and the chiefs of the Importants developed themselves clearly under Mazarin's sharp-sightedness either by their incessant and elaborately-concerted intrigues with the Queen, to force her to abandon a minister to whose policy she had not yet openly declared her adhesion, or, should it prove necessary, treat that minister as De Luynes had done the last Queen-mother's favourite d'Ancre, and as Montrésor, Barrière, and Saint-Ybar would have served Richelieu.
About this time occurred the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII., and the Importants, flocking to Paris to regain their rights and to share in the spoils of the new regency, began to make themselves felt. The leaders expected great favors from Anne of Austria who had been forced into obedience by the cardinal, but she was a great disappointment to them.
La Rochefoucauld constitutes himself especially the champion of Madame de Chevreuse's innocence, and declares himself thoroughly persuaded that she was ignorant of Beaufort's designs. After the historian of the Importants, that of the Frondeurs holds very nearly the same arguments.
She would thereby recompense the services rendered to the Queen and herself, strengthen and aggrandize one of the chiefs of the Importants, and weaken Mazarin by depriving of an important government a person upon whom he had entire reliance Richelieu's niece, the Duchess d'Aiguillon. The Cardinal succeeded in rendering this manoeuvre abortive, without appearing to have any hand in it.
M. Cousin seems to have arrived at that conclusion, since, in designating that princess as the soul of the Fronde, he acknowledges "that she troubled the state and her own family by an extravagant passion for one of the chiefs of the Importants, become one of the chiefs of the Fronde."
Thus the people of Paris were shown that the queen had both the will and the power to punish, and the fickle population, who would the day before have shouted in honour of Beaufort, were delighted at seeing that the royal authority was once again paramount in Paris. The other members of the party of Importants either fled or were arrested.
Madame d'Hautefort left it ere long to become the wife of Marshal Schomberg; but the party of the Importants was dead, and the power of Cardinal Mazarin seemed to be firmly established. "It was not the thing just then for any decent man to be on bad terms with the court," says Cardinal de Retz.
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.
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