Conde assembled his forces encamped around Paris: he intended to fortify himself at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne, hoping to be supported by the little army which had just been brought up by Duke Charles of Lorraine, as capricious and adventurous as ever. Turenne and the main body of his troops barred the passage. Conde threw himself back upon Faubourg St. Antoine, and there intrenched himself, at the outlet of the three principal streets which abutted upon Porte St. Antoine (now Place do la Bastille). Turenne had meant to wait for re-enforcements and artillery, but the whole court had flocked upon the heights of Charonne to see the fight; pressure was put upon him, and the marshal gave the word to attack. The army of the Fronde fought with fury. “I did not see a Prince of Conde,” Turenne used to say; “I saw more than a dozen.” The king’s soldiers had entered the houses, thus turning the barricades; Marshal Ferte had just arrived with the artillery, and was sweeping Rue St. Antoine. The princes’ army was about to be driven back to the foot of the walls of Paris, when the cannon of the Bastille, replying all on a sudden to the volleys of the royal troops, came like a thunderbolt on M. de Turenne; the Porte St. Antoine opened, and the Parisians, under arms, fringing the streets, protected the return of the rebel army. Mdlle. de Montpensier had taken the command of the city of Paris.

For a week past the Duke of Orleans had been ill, or pretended to be; he refused to give any order. When the prince began his movement, on the 2d of July, early, he sent to beg Mdlle. not to desert him. “I ran to the Luxembourg,” she says, “and I found Monsieur at the top of the stairs. ‘I thought I should find you in bed,’ said I; ‘Count Fiesque told me that you didn’t feel well.’ He answered, ‘I am not ill enough for that, but enough not to go out.’ I begged him to ride out to the aid of the prince, or, at any rate, to go to bed and assume to be ill; but I could get nothing from him. I went so far as to say, ‘Short of having a treaty with the court in your pocket, I cannot understand how you can take things so easily; but can you really have one to sacrifice the prince to Cardinal Mazarin?’ He made no reply: all I said lasted quite an hour, during which every friend we had might have been killed, and the prince as well as another, without anybody’s caring; nay, there were people of Monsieur’s in high spirits, hoping that the prince would perish; they were friends of Cardinal de Retz. At last Monsieur gave me a letter for the gentlemen of the Hotel, leaving it to me to tell them his intention. I was there in a moment, assuring those present that, if ill luck would have it that the enemy should beat the prince, no more quarter would be shown to Paris than to the men who bore arms. Marshal de l’Hopital, governor of Paris for the king, said to me, ‘You are aware, Mdlle., that if your troops had not approached this city, those of the king would not have come thither, and that they only came to drive them away.’ Madame de Nemours did not like this, and began to argue the point. I broke off their altercation. ‘Consider, sir, that, whilst time is being wasted in discussing useless matters, the prince is in danger in your faubourgs.’” She carried with her the aid of the Duke of Orleans’ troops, and immediately moved forwards, meeting everywhere on her road her friends wounded or dying. “When I was near the gate, I went into the house of an exchequer-master (maitre des comptes). As soon as I was there, the prince came thither to see me; he was in a pitiable state; he had two fingers’ breadth of dust on his face, and his hair all matted; his collar and his shirt were covered with blood, although he was not wounded; his breastplate was riddled all over; and he held his sword bare in his hand, having lost the scabbard. He said to me, ‘You see a man in despair; I have lost all my friends; MM. de Nemours, de la Rochefoucauld, and Clinchamps are wounded to death.’ I consoled him a little by telling him that they were in better case than he supposed. Then I went off to the Bastille, where I made them load the cannon which was trained right upon the city; and I gave orders to fire as soon as I had gone. I went thence to the Porte St. Antoine. The soldiers shouted, ‘Let us do something that will astonish them; our retreat is secure; here is Mdlle. at the gate, and she will have it opened for us, if we are hard pressed.’ The prince gave orders to march back into the city; he seemed to me quite different from what he had been early in the day, though he had not changed at all; he paid me a thousand compliments and thanks for the great service he considered that I had rendered him. I said to him, ‘I have a favor to ask of you: that is, not to say anything to Monsieur about the laches he has displayed towards you.’ At this very moment up came Monsieur, who embraced the prince with as gay an air as if he had not left him at all in the lurch. The prince confessed that he had never been in so dangerous a position.”

The fight at Porte St. Antoine had not sufficiently compromised the Parisians, who began to demand peace at any price. The mob, devoted to the princes, set themselves to insult in the street all those who did not wear in their hats a tuft of straw, the rallying sign of the faction. On the 4th of July, at the general assembly of the city, when the king’s attorney-general proposed to conjure his Majesty to return to Paris without Cardinal Mazarin, the princes, who demanded the union of the Parisians with themselves, rose up and went out, leaving the assembly to the tender mercies of the crowd assembled on the Place de Greve. “Down on the Mazarins!” was the cry; “there are none but Mazarins any longer at the Hotel de Ville!” Fire was applied to the doors defended by the archers; all the outlets were guarded by men beside themselves; more than thirty burgesses of note were massacred; many died of their wounds, the Hotel de Ville was pillaged, Marshal de l’Hopital escaped with great difficulty, and the provost of tradesmen yielded up his office to Councillor Broussel. Terror reigned in Paris: it was necessary to drag the magistrates to the Palace of Justice to decree, on the 19th of July, by seventy-four votes against sixty-nine, that the Duke of Orleans should be appointed “lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and the Prince of Conde commandant of all the armies.” The usurpation of the royal authority was flagrant, the city-assembly voted subsidies, and Paris wrote to all the good towns of France to announce to them her resolution. Chancellor Seguier had the poltroonery to accept the presidency of the council, offered him by the Duke of Orleans; he thus avenged himself for the preference the, queen had but lately shown for Mole by confiding the seals to him. At the same time the Spaniards were entering France; for all the strong places were dismantled or disgarrisoned. The king, obliged to confront civil war, had abandoned his frontiers; Gravelines had fallen on the 18th of May, and the arch-duke had undertaken the siege of Dunkerque. At Conde’s instance, he detached a body of troops, which he sent, under the orders of Count Fuendalsagna, to join the Duke of Lorraine, who had again approached Paris. Everywhere the fortune of arms appeared to be against the king. “This year we lost Barcelona, Catalonia, and Casale, the key of Italy,” says Cardinal de Retz. “We saw Brisach in revolt, on the point of falling once more into the hands of the house of Austria. We saw the flags and standards of Spain fluttering on the Pont Neuf, the yellow scarfs of Lorraine appeared in Paris as freely as the isabels and the blues.” Dissension, ambition, and poltroonery were delivering France over to the foreigner.

The evil passions of men, under the control of God, help sometimes to destroy and sometimes to preserve them. The interests of the Spaniards and of the Prince of Conde were not identical. He desired to become the master of France, and to command in the king’s name; the enemy were laboring to humiliate France and to prolong the war indefinitely: The arch-duke recalled Count Fuendalsagna to Dunkerque; and Turenne, withstanding the terrors of the court, which would fain have fled first into Normandy and then to Lyons, prevailed upon the queen to establish herself at Pontoise, whilst the army occupied Compiegne. At every point cutting off the passage of the Duke of Lorraine, who had been re-enforced by a body of Spaniards, Turenne held the enemy in check for three weeks, and prevented them from marching on Paris. All parties began to tire of hostilities.

Cardinal Mazarin took his line, and loudly demanded of the king permission to withdraw, in order, by his departure, to restore peace to the kingdom. The queen refused. “There is no consideration shown,” she said, “for my son’s honor and my own; we will not suffer him to go away.” But the cardinal insisted. Prudent and far-sighted as he was, he knew that to depart was the only way of remaining. He departed on the 19th of August, but without leaving the frontier: he took up his quarters at Bouillon. The queen had summoned the Parliament to her at Pontoise. A small number of magistrates responded to her summons, enough, however, to give the queen the right to proclaim rebellious the Parliament remaining at Paris. Chancellor Seguier made his escape, in order to go and rejoin the court. Nobody really believed in the cardinal’s withdrawal; men are fond of yielding to appearances in order to excuse in their own eyes a change in their own purposes. Disorder went on increasing in Paris; the great lords, in their discontent, were quarrelling one with another; the Prince of Conde struck M. de Rieux, who returned the blow; the Duke of Nemours was killed in a duel by M. de Beaufort; the burgesses were growing weary of so much anarchy; a public display of feeling in favor of peace took place on the 24th of September in the garden of the Palais-Royal; those present stuck in their hats pieces of white paper in opposition to the Frondeurs’ tufts of straw. People fought in the streets on behalf of these tokens. For some weeks past Cardinal de Retz had remained inactive, and his friends pressed him to move. “You see quite well,” they said, “that Mazarin is but a sort of jack-in-the-box, out of sight to-day and popping up to-morrow; but you also see that, whether he be in or out, the spring that sends him up or down is that of the royal authority, the which will not, apparently, be so very soon broken by the means taken to break it. The obligation you are under towards Monsieur, and even towards the public, as regards Mazarin, does not allow you to work for his restoration; he is no longer here, and, though his absence may be nothing but a mockery and a delusion, it nevertheless gives you an opportunity for taking certain steps which naturally lead to that which is for your good.” Retz lost no time in going to Compiegne, where the king had installed himself after Mazarin’s departure; he took with him a deputation of the clergy, and received in due form the cardinal’s hat. He was the bearer of proposals for an accommodation from the Duke of Orleans, but the queen cut him short. The court perceived its strength, and the instructions of Cardinal Mazarin were precise. The ruin of De Retz was from that moment resolved upon.

The Prince of Conde was ill; he had left the command of his troops to M. do Tavannes; during the night between the 5th and 6th of October, Turenne struck his camp at Villeneuve St. Georges, crossed the Seine at Corbeil, the Marne at Meaux, without its being in the enemy’s power to stop him, and established himself in the neighborhood of Dammartin. Conde was furious. “Tavannes and Vallon ought to wear bridles,” he said; “they are asses;” he left his house, and placed himself once more at the head of his army, at first following after Turenne, and soon to sever himself completely from that Paris which was slipping away from him. “He would find himself more at home at the head of four squadrons in the Ardennes than commanding a dozen millions of such fellows as we have here, without excepting President Charton,” said the Duke of Orleans. “The prince was wasting away with sheer disgust; he was so weary of hearing all the talk about Parliament, court of aids, chambers in assembly, and Hotel de Ville, that he would often declare that his grandfather had never been more fatigued by the parsons of La Rochelle.” The great Conde was athirst for the thrilling emotions of war; and the crime he committed was to indulge at any price that boundless passion. Ever victorious at the head of French armies, he was about to make experience of defeat in the service of the foreigner.

The king had proclaimed a general amnesty on the 18th of October; and on the 21st he set out in state for Paris. The Duke of Orleans still wavered. “You wanted peace,” said Madame, “when it depended but on you to make war; you now want war when you can make neither war nor peace. It is of no use to think any longer of anything but going with a good grace to meet the king.” At these words he exclaimed aloud, as if it had been proposed to him to go and throw himself in the river. “And where the devil should I go?” he answered. He remained at the Luxembourg. On drawing near Paris, the king sent word to his uncle that he would have to leave the city. Gaston replied in the following letter:—

“MONSEIGNEUR: Having understood from my cousin the Duke of Danville
and from Sieur d’Aligre, the respect that your Majesty would have me
pay you, I most humbly beseech your Majesty to allow me to assure
you by these lines that I do not propose to remain in Paris longer
than till to-morrow; and that I will go my way to my house at
Limours, having no more passionate desire than to testify by my
perfect obedience that I am, with submission,
“Monseigneur,
“Your most humble and most obedient servant and subject,
“GASTON.”

The Duke of Orleans retired before long to his castle at Blois, where he died in 1660; deserted, towards the end of his life, by all the friends he had successively abandoned and betrayed. “He had, with the exception of courage, all that was necessary to make an honorable man,” says Cardinal de Retz, “but weakness was predominant in his heart through fear, and in his mind through irresolution; it disfigured the whole course of his life. He engaged in everything because he had not strength to resist those who drew him on, and he always came out disgracefully, because he had not the courage to support them.” He was a prey to fear, fear of his friends as well as of his enemies.

The Fronde was all over, that of the gentry of the long robe as well as that of the gentry of the sword. The Parliament of Paris was once more falling in the state to the rank which had been assigned to it by Richelieu, and from which it had wanted to emerge by a supreme effort. The attempt had been the same in France as in England, however different had been the success. It was the same yearnings of patriotism and freedom, the same desire on the part of the country to take an active part in its own government, which had inspired the opposition of the Parliament of England to the despotism of Charles I., and the opposition of the French Parliaments to Richelieu as well as to Mazarin. It was England’s good fortune to have but one Parliament of politicians, instead of ten Parliaments of magistrates, the latter more fit for the theory than the practice of public affairs; and the Reformation had, beforehand, accustomed its people to discussion as well as to liberty. Its great lords and its gentlemen placed themselves from the first at the head of the national movement, demanding nothing and expecting nothing for themselves from the advantages they claimed for their country. The remnant of the feudal system had succumbed with the Duke of Montmorency under Richelieu; France knew not the way to profit by the elements of courage, disinterestedness, and patriotism offered her by her magistracy; she had the misfortune to be delivered over to noisy factions of princes and great lords, ambitious or envious, greedy of honors and riches, as ready to fight the court as to be on terms with it, and thinking far more of their own personal interests than of the public service. Without any unity of action or aim, and by turns excited and dismayed by the examples that came to them from England, the Frondeurs had to guide them no Hampden or Cromwell; they had at their backs neither people nor army; the English had been able to accomplish a revolution; the Fronde failed before the dexterous prudence of Mazarin and the queen’s fidelity to her minister. In vain did the coadjutor aspire to take his place; Anne of Austria had not forgotten the Earl of Strafford.—Cardinal de Retz learned before long the hollowness of his hopes. On the 19th of December, 1652, as he was repairing to the Louvre, he was arrested by M. de Villequier, captain of the guards on duty, and taken the same evening to the Bois de Vincennes; there was a great display of force in the street and around the carriage; but nobody moved, “whether it were,” says Retz, “that the dejection of the people was too great, or that those who were well-inclined towards me lost courage on seeing nobody at their head.” People were tired of raising barricades and hounding down the king’s soldiers.