Almost all French historians, from Voltaire to Cousin, (St. Aulaire being the chief exception,) speak lightly of the Wars of the Fronde.  “La Fronde n’est pas serieuse.”  Of course it was not.  If it had been serious, it would not have been French.  Of course, French insurrections, like French despotisms, have always been tempered by epigrams; of course, the people went out to the conflicts in ribbons and feathers; of course, over every battle there pelted down a shower of satire, like the rain at the Eglinton tournament.  More than two hundred pamphlets rattled on the head of Conde alone, and the collection of Mazarinades, preserved by the Cardinal himself, fills sixty-nine volumes in quarto.  From every field the first crop was glory, the second a bon-mot.  When the dagger of De Retz fell from his breast-pocket, it was “our good archbishop’s breviary”; and when his famous Corinthian troop was defeated in battle, it was “the First Epistle to the Corinthians.”  While, across the Channel, Charles Stuart was listening to his doom, Paris was gay in the midst of dangers, Madame de Longueville was receiving her gallants in mimic court at the Hotel de Ville, De Retz was wearing his sword-belt over his archbishop’s gown, the little hunchback Conti was generalissimo, and the starving people were pillaging Mazarin’s library, in joke, “to find something to gnaw upon.”  Outside the walls, the maids-of-honor were quarrelling over the straw beds which annihilated all the romance of martyrdom, and Conde, with five thousand men, was besieging five hundred thousand.  No matter, they all laughed through it, and through every succeeding turn of the kaleidoscope; and the “Anything may happen in France,” with which La Rochefoucauld jumped amicably into the carriage of his mortal enemy, was not only the first and best of his maxims, but the key-note of French history for all coming time.

But behind all this sport, as in all the annals of the nation, were mysteries and terrors and crimes.  It was the age of cabalistic ciphers, like that of De Retz, of which Guy Joli dreamed the solution; of inexplicable secrets, like the Man in the Iron Mask, whereof no solution was ever dreamed; of poisons, like that diamond-dust which in six hours transformed the fresh beauty of the Princess Royal into foul decay; of dungeons, like that cell at Vincennes which Madame de Rambouillet pronounced to be “worth its weight in arsenic.”  War or peace hung on the color of a ball-dress, and Madame de Chevreuse knew which party was coming uppermost, by observing whether the binding of Madame de Hautefort’s prayer-book was red or green.  Perhaps it was all a little theatrical, but the performers were all Rachels.