The Court did not approve of Mademoiselle's democratic popularity. When she arrived at the Tuileries she was imprisoned in her room; but as the whole Court was imprisoned, and as no one dared to cross his threshold, she was not inclined to murmur. Upon the whole the situation pleased her. She watched the pale, frightened faces of the courtiers with secret joy. Until then the Court had taken the people's threats for jests, but the barricades had opened their eyes to the danger of their position; the mob was at the palace gates, and no one knew how soon it would be in the palace! Mademoiselle was in high spirits. Standing at her open window, she watched the people; they were massed upon the quays eating and drinking by the light of little bonfires; many of them stretched out upon the ground where they could watch her and slept there until morning. The night was calm, but Mademoiselle said of the day which followed it: Early in the morning I was awakened by the Long Roll; the troops were starting to take back the Tour-de-Nesle, which some of the wretches had captured. I sprang from my bed and looked out of my window; it was not long before they came back; some of them were wounded, and I was seized with great fear and pity. The canaille crowded the rue des Tuileries; the men carried swords, and they did it so awkwardly that Mademoiselle laughed at them. The courtiers were prisoners; all the streets were barricaded with wine-butts filled with earth and with manure. Given time, skilled workmen could not have raised a more effective obstacle; it was good work, well done, and as a symbol of the strength and the intention of the people it was redoubtable. [Illustration: THE TOWER OF NESLE FROM A CONTEMPORARY PRINT] The barricades of the Fronde, floating the old banners of the League, had evoked the past and touched the revolutionary current in the abandoned souls of the Parisians. Retz claimed that his hand fired the powder, and to do him justice, though his Memoirs make a great deal of the part that he played in the Fronde, they tell less than the truth. He might have said without boasting that he held Paris in the hollow of his hand. He had worked hard to acquire the power by which he bent the people to his will. Vincent de Paul had been his tutor, and Retz had been an unworthy pupil; he had remembered but one of Père Vincent's many lessons of brotherly love. His mind had seized the warning: "Know that the people is a Being, to be considered; not an inanimate object to be ignored," and from that simple precept he had deduced utilitarian conclusions fitted for his personal service, and drawn from them a plan for his own conduct. The principle of man's humanity had given him his idea. He had based his system on the susceptibility of men to the influence of intelligent suggestion, and by the judicious warmth of his sympathy he had surrounded himself with just such elements as his plan required.