“Was anything,” said the Queen, “ever so strange and unaccountable?  Can you not possibly serve me without being the enemy of him in whom I most confide?”

I told her it must needs be so.  “Madame,” I said, “I humbly beseech your Majesty to let me tell you that, as long as the place of Prime Minister is not filled up, the Prince will increase in power on pretence that it is kept vacant to receive the Cardinal by a speedy restoration.”

“You see,” said her Majesty, “how the Prince treats me; he has insulted me ever since I disowned my two traitors,—­Servien and Lionne.”  I took the opportunity while she was flushed with anger to make my court to her by saying that before two days were at an end the Prince should affront her no longer.  But the tenderness she had for her beloved Cardinal made her unwilling to consent that I should continue to exclaim against his Eminence in Parliament, where one was obliged to handle him very roughly almost every quarter of an hour.  She bade me remember that it was the Cardinal who had solicited my nomination.  I answered that I was highly obliged to his Eminence upon that score, and that I was ready to give him proofs of my acknowledgment in anything wherein my honour was not concerned, but that I should be a double-dealer if I promised to contribute to his reestablishment.  Then she said, “Go! you are a very devil.  See Madame Palatine, and let me hear from you the night before you go to the Parliament.”

I do not think I was in the wrong to refuse her offer.  We must never jest with proffered service; for if it be real, we can never embrace it too much; but if false, we can never keep at too great a distance.  I lamented to the public the sad condition of our affairs, which had obliged me to leave my dear retirement, where, after so much disturbance and confusion, I hoped to enjoy comfortable rest; that we were falling into a worse condition than we were in before, because the State suffered more by the daily negotiations carried on with Mazarin than it had done by his administrations; and that the Queen was still buoyed up with hopes of his reestablishment.

The Prince de Conde having inflamed the Parliament, to make himself more formidable to the Queen and Court, some new scenes were opened every day.  At one time they sent to the provinces to inform against the Cardinal; at another time they made search after his effects at Paris.

I went one day with four hundred men in my company to the Parliament House, where the Prince de Conde inveighed against the exportation of money out of the kingdom by the Cardinal’s banker.  But afterwards I absented myself for awhile from Parliament, which made me suspected of being less an enemy to the Cardinal, and I was pelted with a dozen or fifteen libels in the space of a fortnight, by a fellow whose nose had been slit for writing a lampoon against a lady of quality.  I composed a short but general answer to all, entitled “An Apology for the Ancient and True Fronde.”  There was a strong paper war between the old and new Fronde for three or four months, but afterwards they united in the attack on Mazarin.  There were about sixty volumes of tracts written during the civil war, but I am sure that there are not a hundred sheets worth reading.