The coadjutor left the Palais-Royal “in what is called a rage;” and he was in a greater one in the evening, when his friends came and told him that he was being made fun of at the queen’s supper-table; that she was convinced that he had done all he could to increase the tumult; that he would be the first to be made a great example of; and that the Parliament was about to be interdicted.  Paul de Gondi had not waited for their information to think of revolt.  “I did not reflect as to what I could do,” says he, “for I was quite certain of that; I reflected only as to what I ought to do, and I was perplexed.”  The jests and the threats of the court appeared to him to be sufficient justification.  “What effectually stopped my scruples was the advantage I imagined I had in distinguishing myself from those of my profession by a state of life in which there was something of all professions.  In disorderly times, things lead to a confusion of species, and the vices of an archbishop may, in an infinity of conjunctures, be the virtues of a party leader.”  The coadjutor recalled his friends.  “We are not in such bad case as you supposed, gentlemen,” he said to them; “there is an intention of crushing the public; it is for me to defend it from oppression; to-morrow before midday I shall be master of Paris.”

For some time past the coadjutor had been laboring to make himself popular in Paris; the general excitement was only waiting to break out, and when the chancellor’s carriage appeared in the streets in the morning, on the way to the Palace of Justice, the people, secretly worked upon during the night, all at once took up arms again.  The chancellor had scarcely time to seek refuge in the Hotel de Luynes; the mob rushed in after him, pillaging and destroying the furniture, whilst the chancellor, flying for refuge into a small chamber, and believing his last hour had come, was confessing to his brother, the Bishop of Meaux.  He was not discovered, and the crowd moved off in another direction.  “It was like a sudden and violent conflagration lighted up from the Pont Neuf over the whole city.  Everybody without exception took up arms.  Children of five and six years of age were seen dagger in hand; and the mothers themselves carried them.  In less than two hours there were in Paris more than two hundred barricades, bordered with flags and all the arms that the League had left entire.  Everybody cried, ‘Hurrah! for the king!’ but echo answered, ‘None of your Mazarin!’”

The coadjutor kept himself shut up at home, protesting his powerlessness; the Parliament had met at an early hour; the Palace of Justice was surrounded by an immense crowd, shouting, “Broussel!  Broussel!” The Parliament resolved to go in a body and demand of the queen the release of their members arrested the day before.  “We set out in full court,” says the premier president Mole, “without sending, as the custom is, to ask the queen to appoint a time, the ushers in front, with their square caps and a-foot:  from this spot as far as the Trahoir cross we found the people in arms and barricades thrown up at every hundred paces.” [Memoires de Matthieu Mole, iii. p. 255.]