MADAME DE LA VALLIÉRE
FROM A STEEL ENGRAVING
The Maréchal de la Motte demanded a colonelcy for himself and favours for his friends. Every one wanted something, and all felt that whatever was to be had must be had at once; the time was coming when the nation would have nothing to bestow.
A document now before me contains sixteen names; the greatest names of France.[139] The owners of those names betrayed the King for the people because they hoped to gain honours and benefits by their treason. They would have betrayed the people for the King had they hoped to gain more from the King than from the people. The nobility had taken the position held by certain modern agitators; they resorted to base means because they were at an extremity. Like the farmers of France, the nobles had been ruined by the egotism of the royal policy.
They had been taught to think that they could not stand alone. Richelieu had prepared for an absolute monarchy by making them dependent upon the King's bounty; he had habituated them to look for gifts. This fact does not excuse the sale of their signatures, but it explains it. They knew that they had lost everything, they knew that the time was at hand when, should all go, as they had every reason of believing that it would go, the Government would have favours to bestow; they knew that their only means of speculation lay in their signatures. They were not base hirelings,—their final struggle was proof of that! they were the "fools of habit"; Richelieu had taught them to beg and they begged clamorously with outstretched hands, and not only begged but trafficked.
When they demanded honours and favours they did nothing more than their hierarchical head had habituated them to do. So much for their sale of signatures. The fact that they had resolved to make a supreme fight, not for independence,—they had no conception of independence,—but against an absolute monarchy,[140] explains the Fronde of the Princes. At the other end of the social ladder the mobility, or riff-raff, had taken the upper hand, dishonoured the people's cause, and made the Parisians ridiculous.
Driven to arms by their wrongs, lured by the magnetic eloquence of the skilled agents of political egotists, led by a feverish army of men who held their lives in their hands, and commanded by women who played with war as they played with love, the soldiers of the Fronde wandered over the country encamping with gaily attired and ambitious coquettes, and with ardent cavaliers whose gallant examples fretted their own enforced inaction. They were practical philosophers, moved by the instinct which sends the deer to its sanctuary. "Country" and "Honour" had come to be but shibboleths: they, the Frondeurs, were of a race apart from the stern regulars who blocked the capital under Condé, and when the time to fight came they ran, crying their disgust so loud that the whole country halted to listen. The public shame was unquestionable, and the national culpability, like the culpability of the individual, was well understood; the cry of "treason" aroused a general sense of guilt. Certain of the men of France had been faithful to the country from the beginning; the nation's statesmen, notably the magistrates, had acted for the public good; but in the general accusation Parliament, like all the other factors of the Government, was branded; its motives were questioned, and the names of honest men were made a by-word.
Passing and repassing, in and out of all the groups and among all the coteries, glided the Archbishop's coadjutor; now in the costume of a cavalier, bedizened with glittering tinsel, now in the lugubrious habit of his office. When dressed to represent the Church he harangued the people wherever he chanced to meet them; the night-hawks saw him disguised and masked running to the dens of his conspirators. Whatever else he was doing, he found time to preach religion, and he never missed a gathering of pretty women.
Meanwhile the price of bread had tripled; the Revolution had reached the provinces, and the generals had signed a treaty of alliance with Spain. This was paying dear for the violins of the heroines of the Hôtel de Ville!