The Fronde and Mazarin—A Brittany Manor—Borrowed Locks—The Flight to St Germains—A Gouty Duke—Across the Channel—The Evil Genius—The Scaffold at Whitehall—Starving in the Louvre—The Mazarinade—Poverty—Condé’s Indignation—The Cannon of the Bastille—The Young King.
“Vive Mazarin!—Vive la Fronde!” It was to these cries, resounding on all sides, that Ninon returned to her home, and she found it all very disconcerting; if only on the score of the havoc the long contention between the Court and the Parliament was to make in the society of her world. The battle of belles-lettres and of art has poor chance in the field with political turmoil that brings back the dark ages when violence was the only power.
Ninon had but left one discontented country to find another, her own, equally discontented and suffering under oppressive taxation; while across the Channel, in England, civil war was raging to the same watchwords, more fiercely than on the Continent, for all the evil might be less aggressive.
It had been well enough for a while for the crafty Italian prime-minister to try and keep the minds of the courtier and the more educated class of the people otherwise employed; but he had remained blind, or had chosen to seem so, to the fact that these were also Frenchmen, and not all, by a great many, mere butterflies and triflers.Balls and festivities did not bound the range of vision of many a nobly-born gentleman, nor of the statesmen and chiefs in Parliament; and while some sided in the dispute with the queen and Mazarin, there were as many to oppose. “À-bas Mazarin! À-bas la Fronde!” and the cries were not to be silenced—though nothing, it was conceived at the outset, would be easier. The Fronde—the term was but a jesting one, arising from the Parliament prohibiting under all sorts of condign punishment the schoolboy game of stone-slinging in the ditches under the walls of Paris, and then it was the witty Barillon improvised his couplet—
“A Frondy wind this morning arose,I hope it won’t bite poor Mazarin’s nose”;
“A Frondy wind this morning arose,I hope it won’t bite poor Mazarin’s nose”;
“A Frondy wind this morning arose,
I hope it won’t bite poor Mazarin’s nose”;
and from St Antoine to St Denis, from Montmartre to St Germain, before night that rhyme was on the tip of every tongue.
The rough discords, the coarse ugly voice of faction soon rendered Paris no place for the Graces. It had become dangerous for women who were not amazons of politics to walk out alone; and Ninon was forced to accept the escort of her cavaliers, among whom were two specially favoured—the young Marquis de Sévigné, son of the incomparable queen of Letter-writing, and of his father, the Maréchal who had worshipped, ten years before, at Ninon’s shrine, and the Marquis de Gersay, captain of the Queen’s Guards. For refusing to obey the issued order of arrest of the two Parliament counsellors, Blancménil and Broussel, de Gersay hadbeen deprived of his place, and disgraced. Paris was therefore neither any place for him, and Ninon and he found refuge together in his Brittany home, where they spent ten months together; at about the end of which time Ninon became the mother of a little son, and the sojourn in Brittany was one of happiness and tranquillity among the patient hard-working peasantry of the district surrounding the old manor-house. Only one cloud darkened Ninon’s content, and her dismay was not unnaturally considerable; for her lovely hair had begun rapidly to come off, so entirely, as to force a wig upon her beautiful head, which the Nantes perruquier bungled so abominably, that the curls and chignon asserted their falseness glaringly enough to extract the sarcastic comments of a lady Ninon believed to be jealous of her, as one disappointed of becoming the wife of de Gersay. “You have very charming hair, madame,” said the lady; “it must have cost you at least six livres.” “Just so,” said Ninon; “but you must have paid more for yours, madame; since even still it is rather thin.”
The news reaching them from Paris remained disturbing. The queen and Mazarin had been forced to fly to St Germains with the little Louis, while Condé, returned victorious from Sens, laid siege with his whole army to Paris in the cause of the queen; but the unpopularity of Mazarin, amounting to bitter hatred, weakened the influence of the Court. A large number of the nobility joined the Fronde party, of whom de Retz was one of the foremost, while the once delicate and retiringDuchesse de Longueville was the inspiration and ardent leader of the Frondeurs. Where she was, de la Rochefoucauld could but follow, though his political views had in themselves no great depth. His mistress’s will was his; to gain her favour, he said, to please her beautiful eyes, he “made war upon kings: had need been, he would have made it on the gods.”
Amidst all the rancour and uproar was mixed a vast amount of frivolity and of mockery of serious warfare. The generals led soldiers, scented and lace and ribbon-bedecked, to parade; and the women looked on, and applauded or jeered at them, as the fancy took them.
“Brave de Bouillon’s got the gout,Oh, he is lion-brave no doubt,But when there’s a troop to put to rout,And Condé’s men he has to flout,Then brave de Bouillon’s got the gout.”
“Brave de Bouillon’s got the gout,Oh, he is lion-brave no doubt,But when there’s a troop to put to rout,And Condé’s men he has to flout,Then brave de Bouillon’s got the gout.”
“Brave de Bouillon’s got the gout,
Oh, he is lion-brave no doubt,
But when there’s a troop to put to rout,
And Condé’s men he has to flout,
Then brave de Bouillon’s got the gout.”
This favourite piece of Frondeur doggerel was for ever assailing the ears of Monseigneur le Duc de Bouillon, when Condé changed sides, influenced strongly by his sister, as well as by his own convictions. The anger of the queen at his secession was terrible. She spared no one who had been ever implicated in the Fronde side of the quarrel, and de Gersay was one of the first to be avenged upon. But warning came in time, and the contingent of musketeers despatched to arrest him, arrived too late at the old Brittany manor-house. Ninon and de Gersay had already fled to St Mâlo, where they set sail for England, of whose shoresthey were already well in sight, when the soldiers reached the château.
The imbroglio in Paris had now touched seething-point. The queen and Mazarin decided to blockade the city, and to obtain submission by reducing the inhabitants to starvation; but the firmness of President Molé and of the advocate Talon, strong in their principles of defence of the rights of all the community in the face of royal despotism, saved the situation. Mazarin sent to the Parliament alettre de cachetfor the imprisonment of the princes and leaders of the Fronde: the Parliament retorted by denouncing Mazarin as an enemy of the king and the State, and a disturber of the public peace, and ordered him to quit the country within a week’s time. For the unfortunate thousands, weary of the conflict, asking only for peace and quietness, it was misery and confusion confounded, and they were thankful when a truce was patched up. But it was a mockery, for while the Parliament retained its right to assemble, the queen retained her prime-minister, detested by most, mistrusted even by more.[4]
And meanwhile the dark clouds of anarchy and bitter contention brooding over France had blackened and burst over England into the storm of the tragedy of the 30th of January, which sawthe death of King Charles I. by the headsman’s axe at Whitehall.
Who that headsman was, and what of the real truth and trustworthy detail of the king’s execution, who shall say? Romance, in which reality may lie concealed, clings to that last scene, in which only it is certain that Charles Stuart bore himself for the king he was, and that while thousands of loyal subjects wept that day for the victim of Cromwell’s ambition, the regret in France was deep and far-reaching.
Ninon was in London, a refugee, at the time, and it is possible as one authority avers, that she was present with de Gersay, and obtained from His Majesty a lock of his hair as he stood upon the scaffold, and that at a later time she took this to the queen, Henrietta Maria. One has to bear in mind that the “Musketeer” heroes immortalised by Dumas, also stood beneath the scaffold on that sad occasion. And why not? Royalist sympathy in France with our Cromwell-ridden country was strong. That Anne of Austria felt little of it for her unhappy sister-in-law, is self-evident, since Henrietta, lodged in the Louvre with her children, found shelter indeed, but cold comfort enough otherwise, being found, at last, fireless and almost foodless; and it was only when their destitute condition was represented to Mazarin, that he instantly sent her a good sum of money and other required assistance.
Buckingham’s adored divinity, possibly, had all her accredited beauty, her portraits notwithstanding,but it is difficult to trace much milk of human kindness or warmth of heart in “Dame Anne” throughout her career. Her Spanish pride and dignity could have been scantily tempered with the high, generous characteristics of her compatriots. Had the troubles environing her engrossed her, the case might have seemed in a measure excusable; but in the face of the storm of the Frondy wind, or perhaps because of it, the balls and routs and love-intriguing, and the rest, were carried on in full rush: for that there was ever ample leisure.
About this time Scarron wrote hisMazarinade, and continued to be in love with his Françoise. She was desperately poor, and gained scanty subsistence by needlework, supplemented by what Scarron earned from the proceeds of his writing, which she carried in MS. for him to and fro the printers.The Mazarinadewas an immense success; but the author gained financially less than nothing from its publication; as it so offended the queen, that the pension she had granted him was withdrawn, and the marriage with Françoise his heart was set upon had to be delayed. She had, however, in the meantime, consented to take up her abode with him, and they were happy.
After some months’ sulking away in various places, the Court returned to Paris, having again patched up a sort of reconciliation, and on that occasion Condé found himself in the same coach with Mazarin. The drive could scarcely have been an enjoyable one, and the hollowentente cordialeonly gave the Frondeurs offence. It lasted a very littletime, for soon after, when Mazarin was attempting to arrange a marriage of one of his nieces with a close connexion of de Condé’s, the proud prince said furiously that at the best “they were only fit to be the wives of Mazarin’s valets. Go and tell him so,” added Condé; “and if he is angry, let his captain of the guards bring him by his beard to the Hôtel de Condé.”
The cardinal swallowed the insult and continued to offer high favours to Condé, who refused them all, and in a little time the fury of the dispute broke out again more fiercely than ever. Condé, strong in the service he had rendered his country, grew insupportably arrogant, and, not content with insulting Mazarin, was constantly offending the queen. This ended in the arrest of himself, his brother, the Prince de Conti, and the Duc de Longueville, and they were imprisoned at Havre. Madame de Longueville thereupon hastened to Normandy, where she tried to create an uprising for her party, but failing in this she allied herself with Turenne, then fighting for Spain. A new party was now formed, headed by the princes, and called the “Little Fronde”—and big and little joined force against Mazarin, and the cardinal, bending at last to the storm, went to Havre and set Condé and the other princes free. But this did not satisfy the demands of the Fronde, and he finally quitted France and took up his abode in Cologne, still contriving to pull the strings of the French Court party.
The following year he was back again, taking advantage of the quarrel within quarrel of theleaders of both parties. Memorable among these fearful frays was that encounter in the Faubourg St Antoine, when Mademoiselle de Montpensier, “La Grande Mademoiselle,” the brave daughter of the pusillanimous Gaston of Orléans, mounted to the towers of the Bastille, and ordered the troops of the king to fire upon the troops of Condé, now a leader of the Fronde. It was a splendid victory as far as it went; but it only strengthened the hatred against the cardinal. Anarchy and terror were at their height, and to be accused of Mazarinism was to come in fear of death. Yet, for the third time, and the triumphant last, Mazarin returned, to be welcomed by the fickle people, to remain at the head of the government till he died, after having the satisfaction of seeing his five nieces all brilliantly married, and supremely content with the result of his training of the young king, which was to prove so disastrous at a later time. It was a training of utter neglect of everything but the knowledge of his own importance, and that did not need impressing upon the proud, dominating nature of Louis XIV. Said Mazarin one day—“He has stuff in him to make four kings.”