the king.  “This year we lost Barcelona, Catalonia, and Casale, the key of Italy,” says Cardinal de Retz.  We saw Brisach in revolt, on the point of falling once more into the hands of the house of Austria.  We saw the flags and standards of Spain fluttering on the Pont Neuf, the yellow scarfs of Lorraine appeared in Paris as freely as the isabels and the blues.”  Dissension, ambition, and poltroonery were delivering France over to the foreigner.

The evil passions of men, under the control of God, help sometimes to destroy and sometimes to preserve them.  The interests of the Spaniards and of the Prince of Conde were not identical.  He desired to become the master of France, and to command in the king’s name; the enemy were laboring to humiliate France and to prolong the war indefinitely:  The arch-duke recalled Count Fuendalsagna to Dunkerque; and Turenne, withstanding the terrors of the court, which would fain have fled first into Normandy and then to Lyons, prevailed upon the queen to establish herself at Pontoise, whilst the army occupied Compiegne.  At every point cutting off the passage of the Duke of Lorraine, who had been re-enforced by a body of Spaniards, Turenne held the enemy in check for three weeks, and prevented them from marching on Paris.  All parties began to tire of hostilities.

Cardinal Mazarin took his line, and loudly demanded of the king permission to withdraw, in order, by his departure, to restore peace to the kingdom.  The queen refused.  “There is no consideration shown,” she said, “for my son’s honor and my own; we will not suffer him to go away.”  But the cardinal insisted.  Prudent and far-sighted as he was, he knew that to depart was the only way of remaining.  He departed on the 19th of August, but without leaving the frontier:  he took up his quarters at Bouillon.  The queen had summoned the Parliament to her at Pontoise.  A small number of magistrates responded to her summons, enough, however, to give the queen the right to proclaim rebellious the Parliament remaining at Paris.  Chancellor Srguier made his escape, in order to go and rejoin the court.  Nobody really believed in the cardinal’s withdrawal; men are fond of yielding to appear ances in order to excuse in their own eyes a change in their own purposes.  Disorder went on increasing in Paris; the great lords, in their discontent, were quarrelling one with another; the Prince of Conde struck M. de Rieux, who returned the blow; the Duke of Nemours was killed in a duel by M. de Beaufort; the burgesses were growing weary of so much anarchy; a public display of feeling in favor of peace took place on the 24th of September in the garden of the Palais-Royal; those present stuck in their hats pieces of white paper in opposition to the Frondeurs’ tufts of straw.  People fought in the streets on behalf of these tokens.  For some weeks past Cardinal de Retz had remained inactive, and his friends pressed him to move.  “You see quite well,”