We no longer understand what it means to love truly the theatre. According to the gazette of Loret, the opening piece was a pastoral, "half gay, half moral." Mademoiselle loved this sort, slightly out of fashion; Segrais has preserved an agreeable reminiscence of a summer's evening passed in the forest, with the natural background of high trees, listening to an ancient "Amaryllis" repolished and arranged for the stage by some penny-a-liner.
Mademoiselle loved, what is more, everything pertaining to the theatre from tragedy to trained dogs. One reads in a little squib written by her as a pastime,[14] and printed for the diversion of her friends, "Comedians are essentials—at least for the French and Italians. Jugglers, rope dancers, buveurs d'eau, without forgetting marionettes and bell players, dogs trained to leap, and monkeys as examples to our own; violins and merry-andrews and good dancers." This skit should not be taken too seriously, but it well accords with the account left us by an eye-witness of one of the representations at Saint-Fargeau. The piece was called Country Pleasures, an operetta. The greatest applause fell neither to the Goddess Flora, nor to the "melancholy lover," but to two children disguised as monkeys, and executing songs with the "cadence which belongs to those animals."
Twice a week, the pleasures and cares of Saint-Fargeau were varied by the arrival of messengers bringing letters and gazettes. News not to be trusted to the post was received through guests from Paris or by special messengers. The news consisted mainly of political events, but it fell to the exiles to discover the springs and to draw the morals from the facts. This talent of divining, possessed in a high degree by the Parisians, has never passed the banlieue. It cannot be carried away.
Mademoiselle herself had never attained the art. Even at the Tuileries she used to say: "I can never guess anything." Once in her place of refuge, she comprehended nothing of the real significance of passing events. For those who were not Provincials there was nothing clearer than the conduct of the Court of France, after its return to the capital. Mademoiselle had fled from the Tuileries October 21, 1652. The next day the young King held a Lit de Justice, in which the Parliament was forbidden to occupy itself with the general affairs of the kingdom. Banishments and pursuits immediately commenced, but the gazettes hardly referred to them. From their pages one might have gathered that Paris was entirely absorbed in its pleasures.
The post of November brought to Saint-Fargeau description of the first Court ball and some lines on a new Lit de Justice (November 13th), in which the Prince de Condé and his adherents had been declared criminals "de lèse majesté." The December number of the Gazette gave news of the arrest of Retz, who had rallied before the end of the Fronde, and the account of a great marriage with enumeration of gifts and names of donors, exactly as in our modern journals. The January number was made interesting by the accounts of the several successes of Turenne over Condé and the Spanish troops, and by the news of the death of an ancient aunt of Mademoiselle who had been in retreat for seven or eight years. The necrological article took a larger space in the gazette of Loret than that absorbed by the warlike and political news together.
The third of the following month the revolutionary era was closed by the triumphal return of Mazarin. Louis XIV. travelled three leagues to meet him,
Encor qu'il fait un temps étrange Temps de vent, de pluie et de fange,
and took him back in his own carriage to the Louvre, where a sumptuous festival, fireworks, and homage, more or less sincere, from the crowds of courtiers, awaited him.
The attention of the Parisians was at once directed to a grand ballet with mechanical devices and changes of scene, danced three times by the King and the flower of his nobility,[15] before a public analogous to that of the free representations of July 14th in Paris. Places were reserved for the Court and its guests, who really made part of the spectacle, but otherwise all entered who desired. The crowd besieged the doors to see what will probably never again be witnessed: a monarch sufficiently sure of his prestige to dare to pirouet, costumed as a mythological divinity, or stagger as a thief who had drunk too much, before the canaille of his capital.