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