The second phase of the wars of the Fronde became a more serious matter. Turenne, won over by the court, was given command of the royal forces and moved against Condé. The two armies, after indecisive battles, raced to Paris and fought for its possession outside the Porte St. Antoine. The Frondeurs occupied what is now the Faubourg St. Antoine: the royalists the heights of Charonne to the east. It was a stubborn and bloody contest. The armies were led by the two greatest captains of the age, and fought under the eyes of their king, who with the queen-mother watched the struggle from the eminence now crowned by the cemetery of Père la Chaise. “I have seen not one Condé to-day, but a dozen,” cried Turenne, as victory inclined to the Royalists. The last word was, however, with the Duke of Orleans: while he sat hesitating in the Luxembourg, the Grande Mademoiselle ordered the guns of the Bastille to be turned against Turenne, and the citizens opened the gates to Condé. Again his incorrigible insolence and brutality made Paris too hot for him, and with the disaffected princes he returned to Flanders to seek help from his country’s enemies. It was a fatal mistake, and Mazarin was not slow to turn it to advantage. He prudently retired while public feeling was won over to the young king, who was soon entreated by the Parlement and citizens to return to Paris. When the time was ripe, Mazarin had the Duke of Orleans interned at Blois, Condé was condemned to death in contumacio: De Retz was sent to Vincennes. Ten councillors of the Parlement were imprisoned or degraded, and in three months Mazarin returned to Paris with the pomp and equipage of a sovereign. It was the end of the Fronde, and of the attempt of the Parlement, a venal body[133] devoid of representative basis, to imitate the functions of the English House of Commons. The crown emerged from the contest more absolute than before, and Louis never forgot the days when he was a fugitive with his mother, and driven to lie on a hard mattress at the palace of St. Germain. In 1655 the Parlement of Paris met to prepare remonstrances against a royal edict: the young king heard of it while hunting at Vincennes, made his way to the hall of St. Louis booted[134] and spurred, rated the councillors and dissolved the sitting.
The years following on the internal peace were a period of triumphant foreign war and diplomacy. Mazarin achieved his purpose of marrying the Infanta of Spain to his royal master; he added to and confirmed Richelieu’s territorial gains and guided France at last to triumph over the Imperial House of Austria. On 9th March 1661, after handing Louis a code of instructions for future guidance and commending his ministers to the royal favour, the great Italian, “whose heart was French if his tongue were not,” confronted death at Vincennes with firmness and courage. Mazarin was, however, a costly servant, who bled his adopted country to satisfy his love for the arts and splendours of life, to furnish dowries to his nieces, and to exalt his family. His vast palace (now the Bibliothèque Nationale), with its library of 35,000 volumes, was furnished with princely splendour. He left 2,000,000 livres to found a college for the gratuitous education of sixty sons of gentlemen from the four provinces—Spanish, Italian, German and Flemish—recently added to the crown, in order that French culture and grace might be diffused among them; they were to be taught the use of arms, horsemanship, dancing, Christian piety and belles-lettres. A vast domed edifice was raised on the site of the Tour de Nesle, and became famous as the college of the Four Nations. It was subsequently expropriated and given by the Convention to the five learned academies of France, and is now known as the Institut de France.
CHAPTER XV
THE GRAND MONARQUE—VERSAILLES AND PARIS
THE century of Louis XIV., whose triumphs have been so extravagantly celebrated by Voltaire, saw the culmination and declension of French military glory, literary splendour, and regal magnificence. Never did king of France inherit a more capable and patriotic generation of public servants, trained as they had been under the two greatest administrators the land had ever seen; never did king grasp the sceptre with more absolute and unquestioned power. “L’Etat c’est moi,” if not Louis’ words, were at least his guiding principle. Gone were the times of cardinal dictators. When the ministers came after Mazarin’s death to ask the king whom they should now address themselves to, the answer came like a thunderbolt: “To me!” and the Secretary for War, with affrighted visage, hastened to the queen-mother, who only laughed. Alone among his colleagues Mazarin knew his king, and warned them that there was enough stuff in Louis to make four kings and one honest man.