Being informed soon after that the Chancellor was going to the Palace with all the pomp of magistracy, and that two companies of Swiss Guards approached the suburbs, I gave my orders in two words, which were executed in two minutes.  Miron ordered the citizens to take arms, and Argenteuil, disguised as a mason, with a rule in his hand, charged the Swiss in flank, killed twenty or thirty, dispersed the rest, and took one of their colours.  The Chancellor, hemmed in on every side, narrowly escaped with his life to the Hotel d’O, which the people broke open, rushed in with fury, and, as God would have it, fell immediately to plundering, so that they forgot to force open a little chamber where both the Chancellor and his brother, the Bishop of Meaux, to whom he was confessing, lay concealed.  The news of this occurrence ran like wild-fire through the whole city.  Men and women were immediately up in arms, and mothers even put daggers into the hands of their children.  In less than two hours there were erected above two hundred barricades, adorned with all the standards and colours that the League had left entire.  All the cry was, “God bless the King!” sometimes, “God bless the Coadjutor!” and the echo was, “No Mazarin!”

The Queen sent her commands to me to use my interest to appease the tumult.  I answered the messenger, very coolly, that I had forfeited my credit with the people on account of yesterday’s transactions, and that I did not dare to go abroad.  The messenger had heard the cry of “God bless the Coadjutor!” and would fain have persuaded me that I was the favourite of the people, but I strove as much to convince him of the contrary.

The Court minions of the two last centuries knew not what they did when they reduced that effectual regard which kings ought to have for their subjects into mere style and form; for there are, as you see, certain conjunctures in which, by a necessary consequence, subjects make a mere form also of the real obedience which they owe to their sovereigns.

The Parliament hearing the cries of the people for Broussel, after having ordered a decree against Cominges, lieutenant of the Queen’s Guards, who had arrested him, made it death for all who took the like commissions for the future, and decreed that an information should be drawn up against those who had given that advice, as disturbers of the public peace.  Then the Parliament went in a body, in their robes, to the Queen, with the First President at their head, and amid the acclamations of the people, who opened all their barricades to let them pass.  The First President represented to the Queen, with becoming freedom, that the royal word had been prostituted a thousand times over by scandalous and even childish evasions, defeating resolutions most useful and necessary for the State.  He strongly exaggerated the mighty danger of the State from the city being all in arms; but the Queen, who feared nothing because she knew little, flew into a passion