I have worked rather hard all day; I wish you good night, and am going to bed.’  Ten days afterwards, on the 23d of June, 1658, the garrison of Dunkerque was exhausted; the aged governor, the Marquis of Leyden, had been mortally wounded in a sortie; the place surrendered, and, the next day but one, Louis XIV. entered it, but merely to hand it over at once to the English.  ’Though the court and the army are in despair at the notion of letting go what he calls a rather nice morsel,’ wrote Lockhart, the day before, to Secretary Thurloe, ’nevertheless the cardinal is staunch to his promises, and seems as well satisfied at giving up this place to his Highness as I am to take it.  The king, also, is extremely polite and obliging, and he has in his soul more honesty than I had supposed.’”

The surrender of Dunkerque was soon followed by that of Gravelines and several other towns; the great blow against the Spanish arms had been struck; negotiations were beginning; tranquillity reigned everywhere in France; the Parliament had caused no talk since the 20th of March, 1655, when, they having refused to enregister certain financial edicts, for want of liberty of suffrage, the king, setting out from the castle of Vincennes, “had arrived early at the Palace of Justice, in scarlet jacket and gray hat, attended by all his court in the same costume, as if he were going to hunt the stag, which was unwonted up to that day.  When he was in his bed of justice, he prohibited the Parliament from assembling, and, after having said a word or two, he rose and went out, without listening to any address.” [Memoires de Montglat, t. ii.] The sovereign courts had learned to improve upon the old maxim of Matthew Mole:  “I am going to court; I shall tell the truth; after which the king must be obeyed.”  Not a tongue wagged, and obedience at length was rendered to Cardinal Mazarin as it had but lately been to Cardinal Richelieu.

The court was taking its diversion.  “There were plenty of fine comedies and ballets going on.  The king, who danced very well, liked them extremely,” says Mdlle. de Montpensier, at that time exiled from Paris; “all this did not affect me at all; I thought that I should see enough of it on my return; but my ladies were different, and nothing could equal their vexation at not being in all these gayeties.”  It was still worse when announcement was made of the arrival of Queen Christina of Sweden, that celebrated princess, who had reigned from the time she was six years old, and had lately abdicated, in 1654, in favor of her cousin, Charles Gustavus, in order to regain her liberty, she said, but perhaps, also, because she found herself confronted by the ever-increasing opposition of the grandees of her kingdom, hostile to the foreign fashions favored by the queen, as well as to the design that was attributed to her of becoming converted to Catholicism.  When Christina arrived at Paris, in 1656, she had already accomplished her abjuration at Brussels, without assigning her motives for it to anybody.  “Those who talk of them know nothing about them,” she would say; “and she who knows something about them has never talked of them.”  There was great curiosity at Paris to see this queen.  The king sent the Duke of Guise to meet her, and he wrote to one of his friends as follows: