his resignation.  The clergy of Paris were highly indignant; Cardinal de Retz was removed to the castle of Nantes, whence he managed to make his escape in August, 1653; for nine years he lived abroad, in Spain, Italy, and Germany, everywhere mingling in the affairs of Europe, engaged in intrigue, and not without influence; when at last he returned to France, in 1662, he resigned the archbishopric of Paris, and established himself in the principality of Commercy, which belonged to him, occupied up to the day of his death in paying his debts, doing good to his friends and servants, writing his memoirs, and making his peace with God.  This was in those days a solicitude which never left the most worldly:  the Prince of Conti had died very devout, and Madame de Longueville had just expired at the Carmelites’, after twenty-five years’ penance, when Cardinal de Retz died on the 24th of August, 1679.  At the time of his arrest, it was a common saying of the people in the street that together with “Cardinal de Retz it would have been a very good thing to imprison Cardinal Mazarin as well, in order to teach them of the clergy not to meddle for the future in the things of this world.”  Language which was unjust to the grand government of Cardinal Richelieu, unjust even to Cardinal Mazarin.  The latter was returning with greater power than ever at the moment when Cardinal de Retz, losing forever the hope of supplanting him in power, was beginning that life of imprisonment and exile which was ultimately to give him time to put retirement and repentance between himself and death.

Cardinal Mazarin had once more entered France, but he had not returned to Paris.  The Prince of Conde, soured by the ill-success of the Fronde and demented by illimitable pride, had not been ashamed to accept the title of generalissimo of the Spanish armies; Turenne had succeeded in hurling him back into Luxembourg, and it was in front of Bar, besieged, that Mazarin, with a body of four thousand men, joined the French army; Bar was taken, and the campaign of 1652, disastrous at nearly every point, had just finished with this success, when the cardinal re-entered Paris at the end of January, 1653.  Six months later, at the end of July, the insurrection in Guienne was becoming extinguished by a series of private conventions; the king’s armies were entering Bordeaux; the revolted princes received their pardon, waiting, meanwhile, for the Prince of Conti to marry, as he did next year, Mdlle.  Martinozzi, one of Mazarin’s nieces; Madame de Longueville retired to Moulin’s into the convent where her aunt, Madame de Montmorency, had for the last twenty years been mourning for her husband; Conde was the only rebel left, more dangerous, for France, than all the hostile armies he commanded.  Cardinal Mazarin was henceforth all-powerful; whatever may have been the nature of the ties which united him to the queen, he had proved their fidelity and strength too fully to always avoid the temptation of