[36] Carnet, iv. p. 3.
[37] Mémoires, vol. i. p. 185.
[38] Châteauneuf held the seals from March, 1650, when Mazarin went into voluntary exile, until April, 1651. He died in 1653, at the age of seventy-three.
[39] “Allontanar Cheverosa che fà mille cabelle.” Mazarin’s Carnet, iii. 81, 82.
CHAPTER VI.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE QUARREL BETWEEN THE DUCHESSES DE LONGUEVILLE AND DE MONTBAZON.—FATAL DUEL BETWEEN THE DUKE DE GUISE AND COUNT MAURICE DE COLIGNY.
As has been said, the 2nd of September, 1643, had been truly a memorable day in the career of Mazarin, and, indeed, in the annals of France; for it witnessed the confirming of the royal power, shaken to its base by the deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII., and the ruin of that dangerous faction the Importants. The intestine discords which threatened the new reign were thus forced to await a more favourable opportunity for development. They did not raise their heads again until five years afterwards—on the breaking out of the Fronde, in which they showed themselves just the same men as ever, with the same designs, the same politics, foreign and domestic; and after raising sanguinary and sterile commotions, re-appeared only to break themselves to pieces once more against the genius of Mazarin and the invincible firmness of Anne of Austria.
Mazarin, therefore, who soon found himself without a rival in the Queen’s good graces, continued steadily to carry on within and without the realm the system of his predecessor, and royalty, as well as France, reckoned upon a succession of halcyon years, thanks to the re-union of the Princes of the blood with the Crown, to the tactics and personal conduct of the Prime Minister, and to his political sagacity, seconded by the military genius of the Duke d’Enghien. The imprudence of Madame de Montbazon and her lover Beaufort in the affair of the dropped letters had the effect of increasing Mazarin’s power incalculably, and that at the very moment that a splendid victory gained by the young Duke d’Enghien had made him and his sister paramount at Court—paramount by a popularity so universal that it almost made the Queen and her minister their protégés rather than their patrons.