I. The Beginning of Trouble—Paris and the Parisians in 1648—II. The Parliamentary Fronde—Mademoiselle Would Be Queen of France—III. The Fronde of the Princes and the Union of the Frondes—Projects for an Alliance with Condé—IV. La Grande Mademoiselle's Heroic Period—The Capture of Orleans—The Combat in the Faubourg Saint Antoine—The End of the Fronde.
I
Few political crises have left, either upon participants or upon witnesses, impressions as diverse as the impressions left by the Fronde. As examples of this fact take Retz (whose Mémoires are the epopee of revolutionary Paris), Omer Talon, the Queen's friend, M. de Motteville, La Rochefoucauld, duke and peer, Gaston d'Orléans, de Beaufort, Anne de Gonzague, Mme. de Chevreuse, and all the messieurs and mesdames whose ways of thinking we know. They furnished the divers views of the Fronde from which we gain our knowledge of that event, and as they deduced their impressions from the effect which the Fronde had upon their personal interests or sympathies, and from their mental conditions, it is difficult to form an independent or a just idea. Versatile and brilliant imaginations have left kaleidoscopic visions of a limited number of very plain realities, and as the only means of giving uniformity and sequency to a narrative which, though it covers various periods, is circumscribed by certain limits, is to make a selection from the many means of study furnished by a voluminous mass of documents, I have detached from history nothing but the facts which were connected with the life of the person around whom I have woven this narrative.
By relating everything concerning La Grande Mademoiselle and by showing her actively engaged in her daily pursuits when the Fronde took shape and during the war, I have hoped to make visible to the reader at least one figure of the most confused of all the harassed epochs of our modern history.
Mademoiselle's point of view may not have been one of the best, but it had at least one merit: it was not the point of view of an ordinary observer. The Fronde was La Grande Mademoiselle's heroic period, and her reasons for embracing the cause were fit for the fabric of a romance. She intended to marry, and a marriage appropriate to her high station required the veiling smoke of the battle-field and the booming music of great guns. She entered the army and played her part with such spirit that, according to her own story, she wondered to the end of her days how she could have committed so many follies. These pages are written to explain the mental condition which evolved not only La Grande Mademoiselle's follies but the follies of many of her countrymen.
It is evident from the memoirs on record that Mademoiselle did not expect a revolution, but in that respect she was as clear-sighted as her contemporaries; no one looked for any change. Four years had passed since the people raised the barricades, and all that time Paris had growled its discontent. Neither the Regent nor the courtiers had cared to ask what the canaille were thinking. The curés had been driven from the devastated country parishes to beg bread and shelter in the monasteries, and the industrious French people who had always been neat and merry lay in rags on their sordid beds, dying of famine because the usurers of the State—the national note-holders—had seized their tools and confiscated all means of paying the labourer.
In 1644 the people invaded the Palais de Justice and noisily protested against the new tax. They ordered Parliament to take their threats to the Queen. The Queen refused to remit the tax, and the city immediately assumed the aspect which it habitually wore on the eve of revolution. Groups of men and women stood about the streets, the people were eager and excited,—they knew not why. Business was suspended. The shopkeepers stood on their doorsteps. The third night after the Queen refused to listen to the appeal of the people, the milk-soup boiled over! Bands of men armed with clubs descended from the faubourgs, crowded the streets of Paris, and, to quote an eye-witness, "they gave fright enough to the city where fear and like emotions were unknown." After a few hours the crowd dispersed and the city became calm. But the road was clear, the canaille had found the way; they knew that it was possible to arm with clubs, or with anything that they could handle, and surge into the streets against the Crown. From that hour forerunners of the approaching storm multiplied. Parliament openly sustained the demands of the people. In Parliament there were natural orators whose denunciations of the causes of the prevailing misery were brilliant and terrible. The people's envoys accused the Regency of permitting the abuses, the injustice, and the oppression which had wrecked the peace of France. They persisted in their protestations, and the Majesty of the Throne could not silence them. At the solemn sessions of the beds of justice and in the Queen's own chambers they presented their arguments, and with voices hoarse with indignation, and with hands raised threateningly toward heaven they cried their philippics in the Queen's ears. Seated beside his mother the child-king looked on and listened. He could not understand the meaning of all the vehement words, but he never pardoned the voices which uttered them. The Court listened, astonished.
Mademoiselle weighed the words of the people, she paid close attention, but her memoirs do not speak of the revolts of public opinion. She was as unconscious of their meaning as the Queen,—and to say that is to tell the whole story. Only sixty years before that time the barricades of the League had closed the streets of Paris, and only ten years before the theatre lovers had witnessed a comedy called Alizon, in which one of the ancient leaguers had fixed such eyes upon the King as our Communardes fixed upon the Versaillais. No one had forgotten anything! The Parisians had kept their old arms bright; they were looking forward to a time when arms would be needed; yet the Regent thought that when she had issued an order commanding the people not to talk politics she had provided against everything.
The nation's depths, as represented by the middle classes, had found a new apostle in the person of a member of the Parliament, "President Barillon." Barillon had been a pillar of the Government, but his feelings had changed. Mme. de Motteville, who was in warm sympathy with the Regent, wrote bitterly of his new opinions. She said: